Award Date

5-1-2014

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Committee Member

Evelyn Gajowski

Second Committee Member

Vincent Perez

Third Committee Member

Ed Nagelhout

Fourth Committee Member

Arthur L. Little

Fifth Committee Member

Ralph Buechler

Number of Pages

273

Abstract

This is an analysis of representations of male homoeroticism in Anglophone Shakespeare film. Using the strategies made available by close reading, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and presentism, critical attention is directed to a corpus of fourteen movies, ranging from Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's 1936 production ofA Midsummer Night's DreamPrivate Romeo, Alan Brown's 2011 homoerotic appropriation ofRomeo and Juliet. The overall purpose of the project is both to map and to interpret how Anglophone filmmakers have dealt with - or not dealt with, as the case may be - the male homoerotic elements Shakespeare wove into the textual fabric (the characters, the language, the plots) of a fair number of his plays, includingA Midsummer Night's Dream,The Merchant of Venice,Twelfth Night,Othello, andRomeo and Juliet. Such an endeavor is timely because it is one that the larger discipline of Shakespeare film studies has yet to address comprehensively despite the fact that a significant body of "male homoerotic moments" is now evident in Anglophone Shakespeare cinema as a whole.

Keywords

English literature--Film adaptations; Film adaptations; Gay erotic drama; Motion pictures; Queer theory; Shakespeare; William; --1564-1616

Disciplines

Film and Media Studies | Literature in English, British Isles

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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