Reading Shakespeare in the Movies Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning

Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning analyzes the unacknowledged, covert presence of Shakespearean themes, structures, characters, and symbolism in selected films. Writers and directors who forge an unconscious, unintentional connection to Shakespeare’s work create non-adaptations, cinema that is unexpectedly similar to certain Shakespeare plays while remaining independent as art. These films can illuminate core semantic issues in those plays in ways that direct adaptations cannot. Eric S. Mallin explores how Shakespeare illuminates these movies, analyzing the ways that The Godfather, Memento, Titanic, Birdman, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre take on new life in dialogue with the famous playwright. In addition to challenging our ideas about adaptation, Mallin works to inspire new awareness of the meanings of Shakespearean stories in the contemporary world.

1. Shakespeare in the Movies: Meaning-Making in the Non-Adaptation.- 2. Out of Joint: Memento as Contemporary Hamlet.- 3. Titanic’s Doomed Lovers as Shakespearean Avatars.- 4. Disturbing Dreams and Transcendence in Birdman and The Tempest.- 5. The Violence of Meat: Titus Andronicus, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Fate of the Animal.- 6. Epilogue: Three Billboards and Modulations of Shakespearean Revenge.

Eric S. Mallin is Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Godless Shakespeare (2007) and Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (1996). He has received several teaching awards including the President's Associates' and the Texs Exes' honors. He specializes in Shakespeare, cinema, and the nexus of sexuality and religion in the English Renaissance.