Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

We live in a screen era like never before: big screens, small screens, computer screens vie for our attention. My memory of the past years will be haunted by screen images that both capture and fail to capture the magnitude of world events: still images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison televised; beheadings broadcast on the Internet; devastating footage within Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 projected in packed movie halls; and, dwarfing everything in the sheer scale of inexplicable destruction, the moments when more than 226,000 souls were swept to their deaths by the Indian Ocean, captured on digital cameras and videotapes. Then, going on with my life amidst such unfathomable suffering and loss, I see Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice and turn back to Shakespeare on screen. The art of the camera is all about perspective, but it is difficult not to sound glib when invoking the word here, seeking a proper perspective to introduce this Companion within its historical moment. It would be easier just to bracket the world and get on to the excellent essays that follow, which demonstrate the rich variety of possible roads into the study and interpretation of Shakespeare on screen. Yet they too refuse the ease of bracketing history, of ignoring either their own critical location or that of the screen events they analyze. At a time when education is increasingly driven by the ... log in or subscribe to read full text