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Describes playing Touchstone as a comic hero in the Shakespeare Institute Players' production of As You Like It directed by Beth Roznowski.
Examines a pivotal scene from Kenneth Lonergan's film Margaret (2011), which focuses on Gloucester's "flies to wanton boys" speech from King Lear (4.1.37-38). Argues that Lonergan's dramatization of a classroom discussion of these lines embodies in miniature the process of cinematic adaptation of a Shakespeare play.
Asserts that Derek Jarman's Tempest (q.v.) employs several elements of the mise-en-scène (costumes, lighting, setting, and casting) to suggest that the entire action is the stuff of Prospero's dreams, revealing that he is a subtly manipulative figure who is unable to relinquish his power, even in his dream. Concludes that the film ultimately "marries two conceptions of the text--that Prospero might be both forgiving and self-serving--through the use of the inventive dream framework."
Points out that although earlier films of Hamlet that address the theme of surveillance are set in past eras, Michael Almereyda's and Gregory Doran's versions (q.v.) feature contemporary settings, with numerous employments of modern surveillance devices. Finds that in each film, Hamlet is both watched by surveillance cameras and performs surveillance with cameras of his own, which foregrounds the claim that surveillance can "find where truth is hid," but also emphasizes the "failure of surveillance to reveal coherence, wholeness, and truth."
Questions Jonathan Culler's claim that "the apostrophe is the fundamental trope of lyric poems," seeking to discover "whether lyric poems of the English Renaissance are as amenable to his account as those of the romantic and modern poets he discusses," and, if not, asking "what can the different uses of apostrophe in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems tell us about them and their rhetorical practices?" Includes discussion of Sonnets 18 and 19.
Draws on Shakespeare to analyze economically-inflected representations of female chastity on the early modern stage. In bringing together marxist and materialist feminist perspectives with New Economic theory, finds theatrical chastity holds a central place in mediating new models of capitalist masculinity.
Includes an examination of how such playwrights as Shakespeare "stage a vision of their modern world that questions the linear temporality attributed to historical formations of race."
Devotes a chapter to examining the way Renaissance literary description in Rape of Lucrece responds to the increasing awareness of historical material in the period, illustrating how ekphrasis reveals the increasing tension between empirical knowledge of the historical world and artistic form represented in imaginative literature.
Contends that Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948) is an allegory that condemns the manipulation of the consciousness of the American public during the anticommunist era, when religious fundamentalism and political ideology became synonymous. Asserts that the film portrays Macbeth as a tragic figure caught between God and Satan, representing the forces of right-wing anticommunists and left-wing "anti-American" radicals, and that an interpolated character, the Holy Man, bears a striking resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who played a central role in the anticommunist movement.
By questioning the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, finds that Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (q.v.) inadvertently yet profoundly explores the concept of authorship itself by adhering to a non-performative model of authorship so absolute that it removes the human body from the action of composition. Concludes that the film's representation of Edward de Vere functions as a surrogate for the revisionist historian, demonstrating how the desire to refashion the past exists as a desperately theatricalized act.