Shakespeare's movie mothers: Maternal representation in films of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', 'Richard III', 'Romeo and Juliet' (William Shakespeare)

Shakespeare's Movie Mothers: Maternal Representation in Films of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet , has two main purposes in examining representations of the mothers' roles in cinema and television films: one to articulate the fluidity of influences between stage and cinema performances of Shakespeare's plays; the other to help redress an imbalance in current Shakespeare film criticism that focuses on the male roles at the expense of the female ones.; Chapters 1 and 2 focus on a single scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Oberon's quarrel over the changeling Indian boy, is used to trace the varied ways directors in both the nineteenth-century theater and twentieth-century films create the extra-textual presence of the Indian boy and how this changes Titania's role. MSD films include Vitagraph's silent version; an animated one; and those by directors Reinhardt and Dieterle; Kemp and Coronado; Kemp-Welch; Hall; Moshinsky; Lapine and Ardolino; and Hoffman. Chapter 3 considers fluctuations in the women's roles in Richard III, not only the cutting or inclusion of Queen Margaret, but the varying degrees of authority and articulate rage allowed or denied Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York, plus the extra-textual presence of Jane Shore in films by Benson, Olivier, Howell, Pacino, Loncraine and McKellen. The fourth and final chapter explores how four films of Romeo and Juliet—by Cukor, Castellani, Zeffirelli, and Luhrmann—manipulate cinematic conventions to make Lady Capulet and Juliet's Nurse conform with contemporary images of mothers.