Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. By Magdalena Cieślak

Abstract

Cieślak’s impressive, assiduously researched new monograph examining twenty-first-century on-screen portrayals of women in Shakespeare offers far more than insightful readings of seven prominent adaptations, though it certainly does that. A thorough compendium of the best in Shakespeare scholarship from the 1980s to the present, the book focuses on women in Shakespeare’s texts as performed on-screen and on-stage, particularly in the comedies and romances. In her introduction, Cieślak asserts, “comedies, with their focus on the agency of female characters, the narratives of their love interests, and the social function of marriage in securing a happy ending, force adaptors to carefully examine and interpret differences and incompatibilities between early modern gender constructs and contemporary cultural, social, and political contexts” (30). This outlines her book’s purpose: to identify, examine, and adjudicate the efficacy of the strategies screenwriters and directors have been using to adapt Shakespeare’s comedies to millennial sensibilities. It is a complex...