Question is in the instruction part Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Question is in the instruction part - Essay Example In this essay we will consider the extent to which this statement is true, basing on the modern filming of Shakespeare's plays, with especial emphasis on Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann. Nowadays, Hollywood is experiencing a real 'boom' of using classical works with purely pragmatic aims - i.e. for transferring them to the modern environment, and these films are oriented predominantly at teenagers and young people. In Gil Junger's Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), the plot of Taming of the Shrew is used, with the names of main characters preserved, yet Shakespeare is not mentioned as a source text in the film's titles. Same as in Philip Spink's Ronnie and Julie (1997), here only the basic lines of the plot are preserved, and both films are just teenage comedies. It can easily be noticed that in new screen versions of Shakespearean plays, the characters are 'moving' in time and space; however they do not seem to lose their up-to-datedness, and it can be presumed that the playwright of the 16th century managed to depict the life situations and problems that are still topical nowadays, and that whereas the world around us has changed by means of technical and cultural progress, the human soul remained just the same as four hundred years ago. So, is the thesis of the 'progress of humanity' just a myth What is there beyond the urge of film directors to create new and new versions of the old works How do these new motion pictures influence our perception of Shakespeare, and, vice versa, how Shakespeare's image of a famous playwright influences our attitude to the ideas conveyed by the modern films based on his plots Let us try to penetrate into the world of Shakespearean characters that have been 'transferred' to the modern environment. B) William Shakespeare vs modern filming of his plays: is the playwright's image being 'exploited' 1. 'Shakespeare's boom' in cinematography: a concise overview In the 80-90s years of the last century, there has appeared a whole bulk of new films based on Shakespeare's plays. As a rule, they did not go beyond the limits of traditional interpretations: in 1989, an English actor Kenneth Branagh directed Henry V that won an Oscar, European Film Award and quite a few other awards; then success came to Branagh's films Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996) and As You Like It (2006). There have been multiple attempts of filming Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - i.e. Franco Zeffirelli, who is commonly acknowledged to be the author of the best screen version of Romeo and Juliet (1968) and who had also screened The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Otello (1986), presented his version of Hamlet in 1991 with Mel Gibson playing the main male part, however his film was evaluated as very boring. Not particularly new was Oliver Parker's Othello (1995) in terms of interpretation of Shakespearean plot and ideas. In 1991, Peter Greenaway came up with a quite original interpretation of Shakespeare's Tempest - Prospero's Books. Quite free is considered Branagh's