Lexington Books
Pages: 288
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-4985-6374-1 • Hardback • April 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4985-6376-5 • Paperback • July 2021 • $44.99 • (£35.00)
978-1-4985-6375-8 • eBook • April 2019 • $42.50 • (£35.00)
Magdalena Cieślak is assistant professor of English at the University of Łódź.
Part I: Doing It “Straight”
Chapter 1—Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice
Chapter 2—Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It
Chapter 3—Julie Taymor’s The Tempest
Chapter 4—Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing
Part II: BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told—Retelling Shakespeare for Political Correctness
Chapter 5—BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told Much Ado About Nothing, dir. Brian Percival
Chapter 6—BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told The Taming of the Shrew, dir. David Richards
Chapter 7— BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Ed Fraiman
Conclusion: Girl Power or Will Power?
Epilogue: Bridget Jones’s Baby
The field of academic research on Shakespeare and screen adaptations has been rapidly expanding over the past decades, and Cieślak’s interdisciplinary study provides a welcome critical addition. . . In a highly topical book, also considering the ongoing #MeToo debate, the author explores the tensions and negotiations between early modern attitudes towards gender and the way twenty-first century adaptations relate to those issues in terms of current gender politics. . . . With all the insightful analysis in her timely book, Cieślak has hopefully also provided an impetus for further research in this highly topical field.
— Sederi Yearbook
Magdalena Cieslak’s Screening Gender offers insightful readings of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and their representation in twenty-first-century film. In a comprehensive survey, she identifies the early modern constructions of gender, marriage, and female sexuality embedded in Shakespeare’s texts and illuminates the ways they are replicated and sometimes interrogated in cinematic adaptations.— Virginia Mason Vaughan, Clark University