Based on Shakespeare: Twenty-First Century American Film Adaptations of Shakespeare

Abstract

This dissertation investigates turn-of-the-century American Shakespeare films and how they adapt Shakespeare's plays to American contexts. I argue that these films have not only borrowed plots and characters from Shakespeare's plays, they have also drawn out key issues and brought them to the foreground to articulate American contexts in contemporary culture. For instance, issues about gender, race, and class addressed in the plays remain reflected in the films through the figure of the modern American Amazon, the venue of a high school basketball court, and the tragic arc of a character's rise from fry-cook to restaurant entrepreneur. All of these translations into contemporary culture escalate in the diegesis of the films, speaking to American social tensions. Whereas individual studies of these turn-of-the-century films exist in current scholarship, a sustained discussion of how these films speak to American situations as a whole is absent. All of the films in my study translate Shakespeare to contemporary culture not only because the playwright's plots and characters adapt well, but because the plays themselves speak to American cultural contexts, adapting Shakespeare from multiple viewpoints as a means to appropriate the playwright for their own timely agendas.