This is a volume of essays presented at the Drew University Conference, "Shakespeare in Performance II." The title plays off the earlier volume of essays, Shakespeare in Performance: A Collection of Essays, deriving from the earlier 1999 conference at Drew University. Both conferences were convened and both volumes edited (very well) by Professor Frank Occhiogrosso.
The present volume contains ten essays, all of which have sufficient interest to make it regrettable that there is room here to comment in some detail on only about half of them.
Harry Keyishian's "Film as Performance: Cinematized Shakespeare" begins with a number of well chosen generalities about how films operate. I liked the emphasis on the cinematographer, who decides what is within the individual shot, and the editor, who decides how the individual shots are put together, "the director" here is ultimately a kind of short hand. Keyishian then proceeds to describe and interpret the specific choices in a number of scenes from Shakespeare films. There is a sound and insightful reading of the scene between Claudius and Laertes in four different renderings by Branagh, Zeffirelli, Almerayda - all working within fairly traditional means, though with considerably diverse emphases and results - and by Oliver, who chooses for camera movement that is here called "bravura." The essay also includes an extremely detailed exploration of one of Julie Taymor's "penny arcade horrors" from her Titus and some persuasive commentary on the death of Falstaff, as done by Branagh, Olivier, and Orsen Welles. My ultimate commendation for Keyishian's paper is that while reading it - and realizing that I had another nine essays to get through - I wished it were longer.
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