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1 results

  • 17 - Kenneth Branagh: Mainstreaming Shakespeare in Movie Theatres

  • from Part IV - Directors
  • Edited by Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen
    Published online:
    11 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020, pp 224-236

  • Summary

    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.