Shakespeare and British World War Two Film

Garrett Sullivan offers a new approach to cinematic adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare at a watershed moment in British history.

Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (Author)

9781108842648, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2022

250 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.453 kg

'There is … much to enjoy here, not least the book's methodological contributions to the study of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation.' Emma Smith, Times Literary Supplement

During World War Two, many British writers and thinkers turned to Shakespeare in order to articulate the values for which their nation was fighting. Yet the cinema presented moviegoers with a more multifaceted Shakespeare, one who signalled division as well as unity. Shakespeare and British World War Two Film models a synchronic approach to adaptation that, by situating the Shakespeare movie within histories of film and society, avoids the familiar impasse in which the playwright's works are the beginning, middle and end of critical study. Through close analysis of works by Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Jennings, and the partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, among others, this study demonstrates how Shakespeare served as a powerful imaginative resource for filmmakers seeking to think through some of the most pressing issues and problems that beset wartime British society.

1. 'Hamlet's a loser, Leslie!': Pimpernel Smith, Hamlet and film propaganda
2. 'What we all have in common': Fires Were Started, Macbeth and the people's war
3. The Black-White Gentleman: The Man in Grey, Othello and the melodrama of Anglo-West Indian relations
4. 'Bottom's not a gangster!': A Matter of Life and Death, A Midsummer Night's Dream and post-war Anglo-American relations.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Films, cinema [APF]