Shakespeare in production

The New Historicism "contextualizes" the literature it examines. It sees literature as one aspect of the energies and anxieties characteristic of a given culture, neither independent nor superior to it. While some may quarrel with these premises, it is not necessary to agree with them, or even to be a New Historicist, in order to put their techniques to use.

Shakespeare in Production examines a number of plays in context. Included are the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, unpopular with critics of filmed Shakespeare, but very much a "photoplay" of its time; the opening sequences of filmed Hamlets which span more than seventy years; The Comedy of Errors on television, where production of this script is almost impossible; and the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, a "popular" film discussed in the context of comedy as genre.

"Whose history?" inevitably turns out to be that of the individual observer, for regardless of the criteria deployed, criticism is an intensely subjective activity, and is meant to be when it deals with drama. In this discussion of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, for example, the contemporary response to the film becomes the subject of the chapter.

For, although the film is much more than what is said about it, it is also less, in that the critical response is part of the overall creative activity involved in a Shakespeare production.