"Frame My Face to All Occasions": Shakespeare's Richard III on Screen

“Film has kept turning to most of Shakespeare's work throughout the entire history of the medium. With a renewed boom of Shakespeare on screen in the 1990s, academic awareness of, and interest in this phenomenon has increased drastically and now faces an enormous range of different filmic references to Shakespeare and his work, all classified as 'Skakespearean film'. This book concentrates on one play, Richard III, and explores the possible variants and different types of Skakespearean film by surveying in what different ways and formats Richard III has appeared on screen. While the play has always enjoyed great popularity in performance, especially for its leading part, it is also very complex and has been considered difficult for its references to history, its political entanglements and its strong suggestions of a prevailing moral order of divine retribution. It is the objective of this study to find out how cinema and television as media designed for mass appeal deal with this play.“ -- author.