ENG200.001 -- Introduction to Literary Study

Prof. Eileen Joy

Spring 2005

EXERCISE #3 (5 points)

Figure 1. poster for Scotland, PA, Billy Morrissette's film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth

adaptation (noun): 1. The action or process of adapting, fitting, or suiting one thing to another. 2. The process of modifying a thing so as to suit new conditions: as, the modification of a piece of music to suit a different instrument or different purpose; the alteration of a dramatic composition to suit a different audience.

For your third exercise, you are going to write a set of "director's notes" for a film adaptation of a "classic" dramatic work that is either included in our anthology, or that you know really well from a text you have read in another class or on your own. By "classic," I mean to imply a dramatic work that is so well-known and so often performed that just about everyone is familiar with that work in some fashion. Such works include Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, etc. Imagine that it is your job to "update" this classic play within a contemporary context. What sort of setting do you want? Which actors would you cast in the major roles? [Money is no object in the movie theater of the mind, and you can even hire dead people if you like.] In what ways would you stage certain pivotal scenes in order to be both faithful to the original, but to also make those scenes more relevant to a contemporary audience? How might you change certain aspects of the characters so that they, too, are both faithful to the original, but also more contemporary? You will want to explain not only HOW you would adapt the original to a contemporary context, but also WHY you made the choices you did. Strive for creativity. Go crazy.

As preparation for this exercise, I strongly recommend that you watch at least one (if not more) "modern" film adaptation of a classic dramatic works. The author who has been reinvented on film the most number of times and for which videos and DVDs are readily available, is Shakespeare. I recommend the following:

Forbidden Planet (science-fiction version of The Tempest--no kidding)

Hamlet (starring Ethan Hawke, dir. Michael Almereyeda)

King of Texas (King Lear; starring Patrick Stewart)

Looking for Richard (Richard III; starring Al Pacino)

A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy (A Midsummer's Night Dream, dir. Woody Allen)

My Own Private Idaho (Henry IV, Part II)

"O" (Othello)

Ran (King Lear; dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japanese)

Richard III (starring Ian McKellan)

Prospero's Books (The Tempest; dir. Peter Greenaway)

Scotland, PA (Macbeth)

A Thousand Acres (King Lear)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (dir. Tom Stoppard)

10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew)

Throne of Blood (Macbeth; dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japanese)

West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet)

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (starring Leonardo DiCaprio, dir. Baz Luhrmann)

2 pages (TYPED and double-spaced) will suffice.