SHAKESPEARE & FILM
Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing
The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda
The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875
Patrick J. Cook
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films. Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story. Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film. “Patrick Cook’s Cinematic Hamlet combines the anthropologist’s thick description with the latest in film theory from Bordwell, Carroll, McGinn, Sharff, Thompson and Thomson to produce challenging and provocative assessments of four major Hamlet films by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda. Cook has new and interesting cinematic ideas to share about all of these films, especially Almereyda’s Hamlet, where his chapter is impishly longer than his already exhaustive treatment of Branagh’s four-hour film of the play. Cook provides a fresh new voice in the ever expanding field of Shakespeare on Film.” —Samuel Crowl, author of Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era
MARCH ___________ 272 pages 6x9 hc $55.00s 978-0-8214-1944-1
Patrick J. Cook is an associate professor of English at George Washington University. He is the author of Milton, Spenser, and the Epic Tradition.
___________ 12 | w w w. o h i o s w a l l o w. c o m
In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on “drawingroom books” as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book’s visual/verbal form mediated “high” and popular art as well as book and periodical publication.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Cinematic Hamlet
A composite text produced by many makers, the poetic gift book was designed for domestic space and a female audience; its mode of publication marks a significant moment in the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. With rigorous attention to the gift book’s aesthetic and ideological features, Kooistra analyzes the contributions of poets, artists, engravers, publishers, and readers and shows how its material form moved poetry into popular culture. Drawing on archival and periodical research, she offers new readings of Eliza Cook, Adelaide Procter, and Jean Ingelow and shows the transatlantic reach of their verses. Boldly resituating Tennyson’s works within the gift-book economy he dominated, Kooistra demonstrates how the conditions of corporate authorship shaped the production and reception of the laureate’s verses at the peak of his popularity. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing changes the map of poetry’s place—in all its senses—in Victorian everyday life and consumer culture. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is a professor of English at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is the author of Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History and The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books. Her coedited works include The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts and The 1890s Online (www.1890s.ca).
___________ MAY OF RELATED INTEREST
Pictorial Victorians The Inscription of Values in Word and Image by Julia Thomas
312 pages illustrated 6x9 hc $59.95s 978-0-8214-1964-9
___________ O H I O U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S | 13