Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been a powerful stimulus to artists and practitioners in a variety of media. Film and television adaptations of individual Shakespeare plays have a long and continuing history but they now exist alongside films with a much looser and more creative relation to their Shakespearean source, growing numbers of adaptations of plays by his contemporaries, new forms of digital theatre, and experimental art works and installations. The visual impact of the original performances was considerable but has been generally thought of as subordinate to the verbal. This relationship is reversed in most modern mediations of the plays, forcing a reconsideration of what it is in them that matters most to us and whether actual physical co-presence is important or not in recreating the full emotional experience which the plays offered their original audiences. The essays collected here have a broad range of reference from Aeschylus to Zoom Theatre and are lavishly illustrated with stills from film and theatre productions as well as original art works, generating new thoughts on the different possible relationships between image and text.