Reviewed by: Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace Joshua B. Fisher Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. By Mark Thornton Burnett. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. 240. $79.95 (hardcover) In this engaging study, Burnett explores the complex interrelationships between globalization and Shakespeare films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On one level, the book contributes to the growing number of volumes surveying recent Shakespeare on film and television, including Judith Buchanan's Shakespeare on Film (2005), Kenneth Rothwell's A History of Shakespeare on Screen (2004), Samuel Crowl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (2003), as well as much earlier studies such as Jack Jorgen's seminal Shakespeare on Film (1977). Burnett cogently examines nearly two-dozen Shakespeare films ranging from mainstream Hollywood productions such as Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Oliver Parker's Othello (1995), Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), and Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice (2005) to relatively obscure (and sometimes hard to find) art house films such as Greg Lombardo's Macbeth in Manhattan (1999), Gavin Bedford's The Street King (2002), Roger Goldby's made for television Indian Dream (2003), and David LaChapelle's clothing commercial Romeo & Juliet (2005). Although it provides useful production information about a number of films made between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s, Burnett's book is much more than a survey of recent Shakespeare films. Firmly grounded within current theoretical work on globalization, the study is also a highly nuanced and richly theoretical examination of how recent Shakespeare films "self-consciously contemplate Shakespeare's status as an icon in relation to the global marketplace" (3). That is, it explores how the films are both shaped by and acutely responsive to "the dictates of world consumerism and late capitalist modalities of consumption" (3). In this regard, the book is much more openly theoretical than many recent book-length studies of Shakespeare on film and in-line with texts such as Lynda Boose and Richard Burt's Shakespeare, the Movie collections (1997; 2003) as well as Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (2002) and Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe's recent New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007). Incorporating timely theoretical work on globalization by Jan Aarte Scholte, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, Michael Walsh, Richard Langhorne, and others, Burnett makes a compelling [End Page 267] case for the ways in which Shakespeare films around the new millennium both reflect and refract the "enabling cultural dimensions of globalization." As such, the film productions considered here respond to their own locations within the global marketplace, self-consciously contemplating and thematizing such concerns as identity formation and hybridity, the interrelationship between the local and the global, national and religious affiliation, impersonation and performance, and the stakes of spiritual fulfillment. At the heart of Burnett's study lies the paradox of globalization, at once allowing for "bonding and interconnectivity" while "policies of integration…dislodge, divide, and even eradicate the indigenous" (2). Particularly strong are the chapters exploring this paradox as it materializes in relation to notions of identity formation both within the films and in the shaping of the films themselves. One such instance is Burnett's deft analysis of recent filmic productions of Hamlet and Macbeth to articulate how local and regionally rooted representations of identity provide sites of withdrawal from the self-effacing, "nowhere landscapes" that circumscribe the larger global picture. Discussing Stephen Cavanagh's Hamlet (2005), for example, Burnett charts how the film's setting in Londonderry, Northern Ireland registers an evocative narrative of historical and contemporary associations that invigorates "a richly determined local distinctiveness" while confronting Shakespeare's "global status as a transnational voice" (63). Other particularly illuminating chapters focus on racial identity and hybridity in the global economy (discussing Parker's Othello and Tim Blake Nelson's "O"), the stakes of filming The Merchant of Venice in the context of post-Holocaust memory and identity, and the implications of globalization as a "spur to spirituality" and renewed spiritual dimensions (discussing The King is Alive and Macbeth in Manhattan). These sections of the book showcase Burnett...