Kindle Notes & Highlights
Rebuilding the Globe Theatre In the meantime, the American film and theatre impresario Sam Wanamaker (1919-93) built a replica of the Globe Theatre, which despite being neither on an original site nor built to exact architectural specifications, begins to occupy the imagination of modern Bardolaters. The International Shakespeare Globe Centre is built on land adjacent to the Rose, but as the Rose was concreted over, work began on the Globe.
Cinematic and TV Adaptations Shakespearean cinema has proved as infinitely adaptable as Shakespearean theatre, perhaps more so. There have been musical adaptations, such as The Boys from Syracuse (The Comedy of Errors), Kiss Me Kate (The Taming of the Shrew), West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet) and Return to the Forbidden Planet (The Tempest). Shakespeare is often quoted at length and as part of the integrity of films: in My Own Private Idaho (Henry IV), Withnail and I (Hamlet) and Interview with the Vampire (Othello). The Complete Works features significantly in Star Wars IV. This is true on
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Shakespeare on a Global Scale Shakespearean cinema is global. The plays translate easily into other cultures – witness Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai film of King Lear. Again, it may be the lack of a dogmatic moral order that makes the material so flexible. In India too, for example, there is a rich Shakespearean tradition.
As in the West, the declamatory Shakespearean style of Indian acting remained well into the advent of the movies and shaped the Bollywood film industry.
Rulers too had few qualms about stating precisely their policies of control. In his Book of Sports (1618), James I declared that energetic games and festivals were one way of defusing popular unrest. Not much mystification there, then.
It is, incidentally, here that concern is first aired regarding the immorality of Measure for Measure (a play intimately driven by sexual urges). By the end of the 19th century it had become a “problem play”, a prime example of Victorian sexual mores. (Critics have also puzzled over whether Hamlet actually slept with Ophelia – to which an old actor-manager once replied, “In our company – always!”)
