Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Recent Shakespeare films, including Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Loncraine's Richard III (1995), and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), have presented a wide range of contemporary media on screen, reframing or “remediating” them as elements of cinema and thus creating a multi-leveled idiom that recalls Shakespeare's habit of drawing metaphors from book and manuscript production as well as from the theater. In the case of Almereyda's Hamlet , the media landscape is wide indeed – we hear recorded safety reminders in taxis, watch characters (including the ghost) on surveillance cameras, observe the use of miniature audio transmission devices (Ophelia wears a “wire” in the nunnery scene), see faxes, word processing documents, floppy discs, photographs (Ophelia's medium), recorded videocassettes, live news broadcast, a teleprompter, and, especially, amateur video. In this adaptation Hamlet is an amateur videographer, and The Mousetrap is not a play within a play, but, as the desktop-published flyer Hamlet sends Gertrude and Claudius to announce it proclaims, “A Film/Video by Hamlet.” Like other films in which remediation and Shakespearean adaptation join forces, Almereyda's Hamlet uses its complex array of media technologies, genres, and practices not merely to fill in the details of a contemporary setting in which media are ubiquitous, but in more ... log in or subscribe to read full text