This article discusses two Romeo and Juliet adaptations from Kerala, Annayum Rasoolum (dir. Rajeev Ravi, 2013) and Eeda (dir. B. Ajithkumar, 2018). Both films situate the lovers in a regional milieu which challenges notions of progress, as representations of political and religious contest suggest. Taking Ratheesh Radhakrishnan’s claim that the Malayalam film prioritises Keraliyatha or ‘Kerala-ness’

As Kenneth Branagh turns sixty, he finds himself honoured by the English theatrical world as the restored heir to its tradition of the actor-manager, having created a theatre and film career unlike any other. He is an actor-manager-film director who builds on the tradition he inherits from Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli even as he revises it. This overview of his career reveals

This article examines three Indian films based on King Lear through their reconfigured framing of the Fool: Gunasundari Katha (Tale of the Virtuous Woman, 1949, Telugu), Rui Ka Bojh (Weight of Cotton, 1997, Hindi), and Natsamrat (Actor King, 2016, Marathi). Though the nature and role of the Fool in the play is much debated, this essay argues that he is central and his treatment reflects the divergent

This article explores how the reader is addressed in the sexual scenes of the Spanish, French, and English versions of Amadis de Gaule. Anthony Munday’s translation (c. 1590) follows closely Nicolas Herberay des Essarts’s French text (1540), which he had translated from the Spanish Amadís de Gaula (1508) by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. It analyses how the narrator’s appeals to the reader change in

On 30 July 2019, Yerevan State Chamber Theatre’s unconventional version of Romeo and Juliet was performed at the annual Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Poland, after successfully premiering in Yerevan, Armenia, in 2017. Following the overwhelming success of the production with local and international audiences and critics, invitations from other European festivals followed. When the current

This article challenges central tenets of the Western reception of Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 screen adaptation of Hamlet. Adding new information derived from published and unpublished archival materials and insights from the film director’s son, it argues that Kozintsev’s intentions were more universal than contemporary political. It serves as a call for caution and for the reconsideration of certain

In King Lear, Shakespeare inventively and daringly employed the astonishingly precise features of the convention that governed soliloquies in late Renaissance drama. Plentiful, unambiguous, conspicuous, varied, and one-sided evidence demonstrates that soliloquies represented self-addressed speeches by characters as a matter of convention rather than either interior monologues or audience addresses

In recent adaptations by Justin Kurzel and Lucas de Man, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is less a play about a courageous warrior driven to murder his king out of ambition than about a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. This article links these interpretations of Macbeth’s motivation to Stephan Wolfert’s one-man show Cry Havoc!!, which also relates Shakespeare’s plays in general to combat-related