Screening Early Modern Drama
Beyond Shakespeare

Pascale Aebischer provides the only comprehensive analysis of early modern drama on screen, expanding the scope of Shakespearean performance studies.

Pascale Aebischer (Author)

9781107024939, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 May 2013

288 pages, 20 b/w illus. 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.54 kg

'… an invaluable survey of the extent of stage and screen adaptations of early modern drama … The elegant prose of Screening Early Modern Drama builds a compelling and sensitive narrative.' Cahiers Élisabéthans

While film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays captured the popular imagination at the turn of the last century, independent filmmakers began to adapt the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The roots of their films in European avant-garde cinema and the plays' politically subversive, sexually transgressive and violent subject matter challenge Shakespeare's cultural dominance and the conventions of mainstream cinema. In Screening Early Modern Drama, Pascale Aebischer shows how director Derek Jarman constructed an alternative, dissident approach to filming literary heritage in his 'queer' Caravaggio and Edward II, providing models for subsequent filmmakers such as Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, Alex Cox and Sarah Harding. Aebischer explains how the advent of digital video has led to an explosion in low-budget screen versions of early modern drama. The only comprehensive analysis of early modern drama on screen to date, this groundbreaking study also includes an extensive annotated filmography listing forty-eight surviving adaptations.

Introduction: beyond Shakespeare: the contemporary Jacobean film
1. Derek Jarman's queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic: Caravaggio and Edward II
2. The preposterous contemporary Jacobean film: Peter Greenaway's Cook, heritage Shakespeare and sexual exploitation in Mike Figgis's Hotel
3. Third cinema, urban regeneration and heritage Shakespeare in Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy
4. Early modern performance and digital media: remediation and the evolving archival canon
5. Bend it like Nagra: mainstreaming The Changeling in Sarah Harding's Compulsion
Conclusion: early modern dramatists on twenty-first-century screens
Appendix 1. Chronological list of surviving film adaptations
Appendix 2. Annotated filmography: early modern drama on screen, 1926–2012.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Film theory & criticism [APFA], Films, cinema [APF]