Overview of scripts, and the ways in which scripts spread across geographical space and through time. Various scripts’ biographies are overviewed, showing the diversity of possible scripts in early medieval Europe: their longevity and functionality

Surveying Shakespeare adaptations in Classical Hollywood from the failure of Sam Taylors Taming of the Shrew in 1929 to the final triumph of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar in 1953, this chapter looks at how Hollywood film endeavoured to become the ‘new Shakespeare’ while Shakespeare film adaptation gained the reputation for being, as Louis B. Mayer famously declared, ‘box office poison’. Focusing on the marketing of Hollywood Shakespeare adaptations, the chapter reveals how in their eagerness to please everyone, promoters of these films reveal some of the underpinning strategies for adapting Shakespeare in Classical Hollywood. ‘Exploitation’ and ‘showmanship’ (terms used in film marketing in Classical Hollywood) offer an approach to film adaptation that focuses on the consumer rather than the author, the adaptation not as interpretation but as product, not as something to be revered, but as something to be sold.

This article seeks to make sense of the theological debates within Jewish feminism which were focused on identifying the core theological problem for achieving gender justice, and on inquiring about the importance of halakhah for Jewish feminist life. The article claims that quite interestingly, and although the Orthodox tendency was and remains to emphasize halakhah and minimize theology, Orthodox feminists dealt mainly with theology while a Reform feminist dealt with halakhah. All in all, fifty years into the process it can be said that all currents of Jewish feminism accept the primacy of theology over halakhah. Even those who believe that halakhah has a place in Jewish feminism understand that halakhic change that stands alone and is not anchored in a complete theological doctrine is impossible.

Does the idea that a text might express God’s will make any sense in the modern world? Modern Jewish theology, in part under the impetus of modern biblical criticism, has overwhelmingly moved toward a view of God as beyond speech, and of the Torah, correspondingly, as the record of various human beings’ attempts to figure out what God might want of them, rather than a divine intervention into human affairs. If any human/divine encounter lies behind the Torah, it is thought, that encounter can be conceived only as a silent, ineffable I-Thou moment. The Torah cannot literally be God’s word; that is at best a rough metaphor.

This essay attempts to bring out the motivations for the above view and then, wholly, to upend it — from a perspective as committed to the accuracy of modern Biblical criticism, and to a progressive understanding of God and halacha, as that of those who uphold it. Maimonides says that we should see every verse and every letter of the Torah as “contain[ing] within it wisdom and wonders to whomever the Lord has granted the wisdom to discern it” — as, in a robust sense, divine. “In Defense of Verbal Revelation” recuperates a modern, progressive version of Maimonides’ view.

The chapter discusses The Hollow Crown, a two-season television series, produced by Sam Mendes and broadcast on BBC2 in 2012 and 2016, placed in the context of earlier adaptations of the history plays. It argues that the series exemplifies a number of the central controversies surrounding contemporary Shakespeare adaptation, including political agendas, screen and stage traditions of acting and textual interpretation, together with the changing awareness of the viewing public of Shakespeare as a (high or pop) cultural phenomenon. The series also illustrates diverse responses to a number of critical debates, from the representation of female, non-English or non-British voices and accents, colour-blind or colour-conscious casting, set against the demands of historical realism expected from the contemporary screen. In this way, it offers a perfect case study for the Shakespearean history play on British television in the twenty-first century.

Kenneth Branagh acted in and directed more Shakespeare plays than any other filmmaker before him; yet he also defied what was expected from a Shakespearean actor-director. First, he used the codes of Hollywood cinema to make the plays entertaining and available to a younger, more popular audience. Second, he not only adapted Shakespeare but also ventured into directing Hollywood blockbusters, as well as more intimate projects on stage and screen, injecting Shakespearean echoes into a new range of productions. Through his taste for popular, mainstream movies, his bold self-made trajectory that carried him repeatedly in and out of the ‘Establishment’, Branagh has contributed to redefining relations between Shakespeare and Hollywood, between the art house and the multiplex, and between theatre and cinema. Through his ceaselessly renewed ‘vaulting ambition’ of bringing Shakespeare to the people, Branagh has constructed over the years the ideologically complex persona of a working-class Shakespearean entrepreneur.

This chapter explores Zeffirelli’s three Shakespearean films, The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990), well known for the visual banquets they constitute, the memorable soundscapes they feature and their stimulating casting choices. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that, as designer and director, Zeffirelli has managed to combine movement and fixity, so that these films can be regarded as living monuments. Far from being mere visual decoration, the designs that are at the heart of Zeffirelli’s films are infused with life and reinvigorate the vision of the plays. Analysing ‘household stuff’ coming to life in The Taming of the Shrew, the battle of energies in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet’s labyrinth of fury, the chapter shows how the architecture and design of the films make them monuments. There is a lot of art in this matter. There is a lot of life in these monuments.

This chapter situates Franz Rosenzweig’s unique and influential contributions to Jewish theology in his Christian historicist and philosophical context of modern European civilization. Doing so allows us to best understand his theological contributions with the interdependent two-fold Jewish exilic tradition of interpreting the Torah as an engaged, dialectical response from the dual perspectives of the living Scriptural authority of their respective communities of faith and the non-Jewish and increasingly secular contexts in which they found themselves. The chapter unfolds as an interpretation that is based on Rosenzweig’s introduction of a novel methodological speech-act philosophy that he calls New Thinking which takes shape in the midrashic form of a messianic aesthetics. Simon claims that this approach enables Rosenzweig to set out a normative guide of teaching-as-practice throughout the entirety of The Star of Redemption, in order to bring the structures of the inter-related processes of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption into functional and dynamic ethical relations.

In this essay I survey the development of the Kabbalistic Godhead; exploring sources from the Hebrew Bible, through rabbinic literature and medieval Jewish philosophy, and culminating in thirteen century kabbalah and the Zohar. Following this discussion, I discuss primary theological elements incorporated within this conception, such as the understanding of the ten sefirot, which comprise the Godhead, the mystical understanding of the Tetragrammaton as correlating to the divine essence, God’s identification with the Torah and commandments, and the feminine element of the Godhead. This examination of the configuration of the Godhead and its various elements naturally leads to a discussion of the “complex unity” of God. In this examination I discuss the relation of different divine persona within the Godhead, the evil or demonic element of the Godhead, and lastly the differing conceptions of the Godhead as a kataphatic or apophatic entity. Finally, I examine the phenomenon of mystical union between the human being and the Godhead.

This chapter explores representations of fantasy and romance in Anglo-American screen productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. It is particularly concerned with how filmmakers of these plays make the fantastical and the romantic believable yet sufficiently otherworldly. Films of A Midsummer Night’s Dream discussed include those by directors Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (1935), Peter Hall (1968), Adrian Noble (1996), and Michael Hoffman (1999). Each uses numerous elements from the cinematic toolbox to create plausible versions of Shakespeare’s faerie world. Films of The Tempest considered include those by Derek Jarman (1979) and Julie Taymor (2010). Airy spirit that he is, Ariel in The Tempest is kin to the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thus directors of The Tempest are faced with similar challenges of crafting verisimilitude as their counterparts face working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; each meets those challenges with their idiosyncratic aplomb that does justice to Shakespeare.

This essay advocates that “theology” as “God-talk” is endemic to Jewish discourse throughout the ages. Jewish theology is a dialectic between prescriptive halakhah or law on one side, and descriptive aggadah or narration on the other side. While the term “theology” itself is usually taken to mean human talk about God, Jewish “theology” as the explication of God’s revealed word (dvar Adonai) means, as Abraham Joshua Heschel (the foremost 20th century Jewish theologian) put it, “God’s anthropology.” Thus Jewish theology is the explication of what Jews have accepted as revealed truth, namely, what God wants humans to know of God’s concern for them as evidenced in history, and what God wants humans to do in response to God’s concern for them.

This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to say anything positive about God. The usual reason for answering yes is that God must be a person to be a perfect being. I investigate this claim by defining personhood in terms of knowledge and will. After looking at the theologies of Maimonides, Kant, and Cohen, I conclude that while we can say positive things about God, we must sacrifice a certain amount of conceptual rigor to do so.

On the nature of linguistic skillsets in the later Middle Ages as critical to understanding the appearance of particular vernacular and Latin texts – often incorporated in manuscripts as additions or glosses – and categorized by scholars in ways that do not fully recognize the broad spectrum of linguistic possibility and permeability in this period.

The chapter considers several directions through the field of Shakespeare and world cinema while acknowledging that no one interpretive method can do justice to the variety of filmic engagements with the dramatist’s work across the globe. Accordingly, this chapter looks at films from Africa, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Slovakia, Spain and Thailand in terms of a range of approaches the auteur approach, regional perspectives, time-bound moments of production and reception, the woman practitioner, and the place of particular plays in the adaptive process. It attends to the adaptations of auteurs such as Vishal Bhardwaj, Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa and, at the same time, introduces readers to diverse adaptations of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, thereby making visible the methodological challenges and joys necessarily entailed in any encounter with world Shakespeare.