Shakespeare: The Screenplays

It's been said that if Shakespeare were alive today he'd be working in Hollywood. We will read five or six plays (including at least one representative of each of Shakespeare's genres: comedy, history, tragedy, romance) and then study film adaptations of them. The course is especially concerned with various approaches to the Shakespeare film: not just the straightforward adaptation, but also the Shakespeare spin-off ("10 Things"; "My Own Private Idaho"), the Shakespeare film as a star-turn (Helen Mirren as "Prospera" in Taymor's "Tempest"), and the Shakespeare film as an auteur-turn (Orson Welles's "Chimes at Midnight"; Polanski's "Macbeth").