1990년대 셰익스피어 영화화 작업과 문화적 의의

Abstract

The twentieth century's long fascination with Shakespeare as material for film ended with a big bang. Specially, the last decade(1989~2001) of the century witnessed the greatest explosion of Anglo-American films based on Shakespeare's plays in the hundred-year history of the genre. The long decade produced fifteen major Shakespeare films ranging from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V(1989) to Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet(1990) to Richard Loncraine's Richard III(1995) to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet(1996) to Julie Taymor's Titus(1999) to Michael Almereyda's Hamlet(2000) to Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost(2000) and an equal number of spin-offs from Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books(1991) to John Madden's Shakespeare in Love(1998) to Tim Blake Nelson's O(2001).It was Kenneth Branagh who has led the present globalization of Shakespeare on film and the popularization of Shakespearean cultures in the wake of Olivier's and Zeffirelli's cinematic works. In his films associated directly with Shakespeare language, Branagh appropriated major typical Hollywood film genres of diverse directors before him, by which he had great success in the revival of Shakespearean film genre. His other contemporary directors such as Edzard, Loncraine, Nunn, Hoffman repositioned skillfully and resolutely Shakespeare's original texts into the frame of the popular films. That reflects not only that their movies relied largely on the self-conscious recognition of the popular youth culture, but that Shakespeare is still working as an important cultural signifier of this age. The mechanical reproduction of Shakespeare necessarily brings the stability of his text as a canonical work into question. Different Shakespearean texts including Shakespeare on screen, CR-Roms, Internet materials, therefore, should be scrutinized for the full understanding of 20th century Shakespearean cultures.