Where there's a Will…Shakespeare on Film

To coincide with the BFI Southbank season on Shakespeare and the launch of our updated Shakespeare: 16+ guide, the BFI National Library was proud to display a wide selection of research material from our collections.

"For the first time in my life I have rendered my own dreams of doing this play with no restrictions on my imagination." (Max Reinhardt on filming his stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream)

Shakespeare on film

 "The history of screen Shakespeare is almost as long as that of cinema itself.  For early film-makers working in a disreputable industry, Shakespeare offered familiar plots, iconic images (a balcony scene, a trial, a graveyard), and respectability. Sound brought new challenges and quarrels; "loyalty" to the text became an issue, as did class, nationality and cultural ownership. From 1935 to 1937, major studios backed competing Shakespearean spectaculars. In 1944 Laurence Olivier 's Henry V was part of the war effort [and] his films became symbols of national tradition and creativity.  Orson Welles turned Shakespeare into pure - visually astonishing - cinema.  Despite the conscious differences, Welles' and Olivier's works have much in common.  They were the last great actor-managers and they established Shakespearean cinema as a genre. In the 1960s a new generation fought over that inheritance: Franco Zeffirelli, Peter Brook, Tony Richardson, Roman Polanski..."

To read the full essay by Tony Howard, University of Warwick lecturer and author of Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction, see page 1 of our Shakespeare: 16+ guide.

Books

There are well over 200 titles on Shakespeare adaptation within the Library's collection.  To encourage and aid the study of Shakespeare we aim to display most of them, and to include a diverse range of titles such as:

• 100 Shakespeare films, by Daniel Rosenthal, published by the BFI in April 2007
• The Playboy interviews: the directors, by Stephen Randall (M Press, 2006). "The Falstaff story is the best in Shakespeare - not the best play, but the best story.  The richness of the triangle between the father and Falstaff and the son is without parallel; it's a complete Shakespearean creation." Orson Welles, interviewed by Kenneth Tynan in March 1967
• The art of The Lion King, by Christopher Finch (Hyperion, 1994). Disney's reworking of Hamlet.
• Early stages, by John Gielgud (Falcon Press, 1953). "Romeo and Juliet was an exciting play, with its street fights (resulting in casualties several times a week) and its murders and poisonings and lamentations, but it was extraordinary restful after the chaos of the studio at Hammersmith where we were making Secret Agent."
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, edited by Břetislav Hodek (1960). The text generally follows the text of the Fisher quarto of 1600 and is illustrated with pictures from the animated film by Jiří Trnka, Sen Noci Svatojanské (1959)

Special Collections

From pressbooks and scripts to correspondence and music cue sheets, there is a great variety of primary source material for researchers. 

Download a selective listing (PDF, 164kb)

Othello (1952), Small pressbook

"The mighty story of the tragic Moor" is one of the suggested 'catchlines' for promoting the film.

As You Like It (1936), Large and Small pressbooks

Starring Elizabeth Bergner and Laurence Olivier the film did not receive favourable reviews, despite Ms Bergner having appeared as Rosalind "more than 600 times on the Continent".

For more information on how to access the collection please contact Special Collections in advance of your visit.