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Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. By SAMUEL CROWL. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Illus. Pp. xvi + 254. $34.95 cloth.
Samuel Crowl's illuminating study offers a much-needed critical discussion of the revival of Shakespeare on film over the course of the 1990s. Crowl offers sensitively-turned appreciations of fifteen Shakespeare films made between 1989 and 2001. Pulling together the multiple strands of the argument is the figure of Kenneth Branagh, who is enlisted both as a material influence on filmmakers and as a conceptual template for the volume as a whole. Branagh's endeavor to find a "congenial film style for Shakespeare" (12) has inspired a rush of related ventures in other media and genres. Elements such as international casting, for instance, which have done much to bring Shakespeare and the cineplex audience into a new proximity, are traced to Branagh's generative effects. This is one context engagingly investigated by Crowl; another is Hollywood itself, understood less as an institutional mechanism than as a "stylistic mode" (7). Alert to Hollywood's aesthetic requirements and production values, Crowl is also aware of issues such as financing and the involvement of particular corporate controls. Contextualization, indeed, is a notable feature of this work, with Crowl consistently providing historical-and theatrical-anchorage for his approach. In this sense Shakespeare at the Cineplex constitutes a major advance on another classic in the field-Jack Jorgens's Shakespeare on Film (1977)-since it is always fully informed of pressures and influences, conversations and intersections. Crowl problematizes Jorgens's tripartite categorization of...