Shakespeare Remains

No literary figure has proved so elusive as Shakespeare. How, Courtney Lehmann asks, can the controversies surrounding the Bard's authorship be resolved when his works precede the historical birth of that modern concept? And how is it that Shakespeare remains such a powerful presence today, years after poststructuralists hailed the "death of the author"? In her cogent book, Lehmann reexamines these issues through a new lens: film theory.

An alternative to literary models that either minimize or exalt the writer's creative role, film theory, in Lehmann's view, perceives authorship as a site of constitutive conflict, generating in the process the notion of the auteur. From this perspective, she offers close readings of Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet, of film adaptations by Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann, and Michael Almereyda, and of John Madden's Shakespeare in Love. In their respective historical contexts, these plays and films emerge as allegories of authorship, exploiting such strategies as appropriation, adaptation, projection, and

Illustrations

viii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction The Author Formerly Known as Shakespeare

1

(24)

Shakespeare Unauthorized Tragedy ``by the book'' in Romeo and Juliet

25

(30)

Authors, Players, and the Shakespearean Auteur-Function in A Midsummer Night's Dream

55

(34)

The Machine in the Ghost Hamlet's Cinematographic Kingdom

89

(41)

Strictly Shakespeare? Dead Letters, Ghostly Fathers, and the Cultural Pathology of Authorship in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

130

(31)

Dead Again? Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Auteurism

161

(29)

``'There Ain't No 'Mac' in the Union Jack'' Adaptation and (O)mission in Henry V

190

(23)

Shakespeare in Love Sex, Capitalism, and the Authorial Body-in-Pleasure

213

(21)

Conclusion Postmortem:

234

(5)

William Shakespeare

Bibliography

239

(16)

Index

255

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