Laura Keyes
History
Dr. White
October 14, 2015
All the Worlds a Cinema: a comparative look at Shakespeare’s plays and their film counterparts.
Shakespeare has been done so many different ways, by many different people. Some do modern adaptations, set in different towns, even completely changing the words, and those are just on the stage. There has also been many film adaptations. Some are good, such as Mel Gibson’s 1990 adaptation of Hamlet, and some are not as good, such as Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Three perfect examples of Shakespeare plays turned movies are Taymor’s 1999 film Titus, Loncraines’s 1995 Richard III, and Branagh’s Love Labour’s Lost from the 2000’s. All three of these plays are some of Shakespeare’s …show more content…
Taymor’s version is just as violent but for different reasons. Shakespeare’s play uses gore and violence to depict the extreme a human being would go for vengeance. Taymor seems to use blood for, what one can assume, a shock factor. While the play is the same story, the time periods are what change the meaning of both versions. Where the Shakespeare age was full of stories about revenge, the people of the time would have been much more interested in the gore, due to the education level. Titus was made in a time where the mass population was getting smarter, thus making the blood and guts more tasteless then anything, it made it more offensive then the original. Time did no justice to the savagery of Titus Andronicus and Taymor paid the …show more content…
Barely any of the original text remains in this version, most of the lines get replaced with popular music of 2000. This change to musical lines over the original script, takes too much away from the Shakespeare and makes it somewhat comical. Musical Shakespeare is an odd thing to contemplate and seems out of place once it’s all said and done. Shakespeare’s plays often had singing and dancing but not to the music of the time. The musical aspect helped with the comedy in the film but not the film itself, actually making it worse. The singing and dancing make the film seem forced; trying to drive the fact of
History
Dr. White
October 14, 2015
All the Worlds a Cinema: a comparative look at Shakespeare’s plays and their film counterparts.
Shakespeare has been done so many different ways, by many different people. Some do modern adaptations, set in different towns, even completely changing the words, and those are just on the stage. There has also been many film adaptations. Some are good, such as Mel Gibson’s 1990 adaptation of Hamlet, and some are not as good, such as Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Three perfect examples of Shakespeare plays turned movies are Taymor’s 1999 film Titus, Loncraines’s 1995 Richard III, and Branagh’s Love Labour’s Lost from the 2000’s. All three of these plays are some of Shakespeare’s …show more content…
Taymor’s version is just as violent but for different reasons. Shakespeare’s play uses gore and violence to depict the extreme a human being would go for vengeance. Taymor seems to use blood for, what one can assume, a shock factor. While the play is the same story, the time periods are what change the meaning of both versions. Where the Shakespeare age was full of stories about revenge, the people of the time would have been much more interested in the gore, due to the education level. Titus was made in a time where the mass population was getting smarter, thus making the blood and guts more tasteless then anything, it made it more offensive then the original. Time did no justice to the savagery of Titus Andronicus and Taymor paid the …show more content…
Barely any of the original text remains in this version, most of the lines get replaced with popular music of 2000. This change to musical lines over the original script, takes too much away from the Shakespeare and makes it somewhat comical. Musical Shakespeare is an odd thing to contemplate and seems out of place once it’s all said and done. Shakespeare’s plays often had singing and dancing but not to the music of the time. The musical aspect helped with the comedy in the film but not the film itself, actually making it worse. The singing and dancing make the film seem forced; trying to drive the fact of