'Hamlet' and World Cinema

Reveals a rich cinematic history, discussing Hamlet films from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

Mark Thornton Burnett (Author)

9781107135505, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2019

294 pages, 25 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.63 kg

'The book 'makes a case for Hamlet as the world's most frequently filmed text' and shows how transpositions of the play to Brazilian book review 185 favelas, a compound in northern Ghana, and Tang Dynasty China (to name justthree) have illuminated the politics of race, gender, and class in these settings … 'Hamlet' and World Cinema privilege specific plays, allowing them to display the multiplicity these works have come to represent …' Sally Barnden, Shakespeare Bulletin

'Hamlet' and World Cinema reveals a rich history of cinematic production extending across the globe. Making a case for Hamlet as the world's most frequently filmed text, and using specially commissioned interviews with cast, directors and screenwriters, it discusses films from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The book argues that the play has been taken up by filmmakers world-wide to allegorise the energies, instabilities, traumas and expectations that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, it rejects the Anglophone focus which has dominated criticism up to now and explores instead the multiple constituencies that have claimed Shakespeare's most celebrated work as their own. 'Hamlet' and World Cinema uncovers a vital part of the adaptation story. This book facilitates a fresh understanding of Shakespeare's cinematic significance and newly highlights Hamlet's political and aesthetic instrumentality in a vast range of local and global contexts.

1. Hamlet, cinema and the histories of Western Europe
2. Thematising place: Hamlet, cinema and Africa
3. Hamlet and the moment of Brazilian cinema
4. Pairing the cinematic Prince: Hamlet, China and Japan
5. Hamlet and Indian cinemas: regional paradigms
6. Gendering borders: Hamlet and the cinemas of Turkey and Iran
7. Materialising Hamlet in the cinemas of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Films, cinema [APF], Film, TV & radio [AP]