What IS a "Shakespeare Film," Anyway?

Abstract

The title of this essay should be self-explanatory, intending to answer a basic question made difficult only by the fussiness and peculiarity of theory. The approach is historic, filmographic, and bibliographic, since the essay surveys early films (some of them clearly adaptations, some of them merely “derivatives”) and reviews the earlier scholarship of Robert Hamilton Ball, Jack J. Jorgens in the United States, and Roger Manvell in Britain. A discussion follows of some of the later scholarship that has proliferated over the past fifty years—in particular those approaches that have expressed special interest in Shakespeare “derivatives” and films that might be considered “almost” Shakespeare.