Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In recent years, Shakespearean performance studies have benefited from a lively dialogue with film theory and gender studies, resulting in fascinating analyses of the representation of the female body on stage and screen. The same theoretical frameworks can be employed for a consideration of the male body. Both playtexts under discussion here, Henry V and Titus Andronicus , are concerned with warfare and involve a crisis of masculinity which coincides with a crisis in bodily integrity. Representing the warrior-hero seems, for Shakespeare, to entail a testing of his masculinity to the point at which it risks being fractured, showing a vulnerability of the body culturally associated with femininity. Kenneth Branagh's and Julie Taymor's transposition of the plays into film – a medium which frequently uses the “abnormal body” as a means of “defining … the normal body” ( Davis 1995 : 151) – works to amplify the playtexts' concern with the martial male body's precariousness. Through analysis of key scenes in which masculinity is challenged and/or reaffirmed, I want to establish how these contemporary directors, both of whom had experience staging or performing their respective plays in the theater, make use of the opportunities offered by the film medium to explore these Shakespearean crises of masculinity. What is the impact of the directors' own backgrounds on their treatment of ... log in or subscribe to read full text