100 Shakespeare Films

Shakespeare's plays have inspired British Oscar-winners and spaghetti Westerns, Bollywood thrillers, and Soviet epics. Covering twenty plays, Daniel Rosenthal's selection of 100 Shakespeare films spans a century of cinema, from a silentTempest(1907) to Kenneth Branagh'sAs You Like It(2006). Fifty of the films retain Shakespeare's language, among them Laurence Olivier'sHenry Vand Orson Welles'sOthello.Alongside these are forty genre adaptations using modernized dialogue and re-imagined characters: Macbeth as a gangster inJoe MacbethandMaqbool;Othello as a jazz pianist inAll Night Long.Rosenthal also assesses twenty-five foreign-language titles. Presented alphabetically by Shakespeare play, each chapter begins with a synopsis, and the film essays explore cinematography, design, dialogue, music, and performance.

Daniel Rosenthal was born in London in 1971. He is a freelance author, editor, journalist and lecturer. Previous publications include Shakespeare on Screen (2000) and Student Editions of David Mamet's Oleanna (2004) and Patrick Marber's Closer (2007).