莎士比亚电影始于1989，运用摄像机拍摄赫伯毕彭爵士所扮演的约翰王死去的那一幕。在Sarah Bernhardt的漫长的演艺生涯中，她扮演过多次哈姆雷特，她还为1900年的巴黎展览会拍摄了决斗场面。在无声电影的时代（1895－1929），上百部的莎士比亚电影在英格兰、法国、德国和美国制作完成。即使没有对话，对于这种新的媒介方面，莎士比亚也是受欢迎的。在有声音的半个世纪里，包括大多数给予很高评价的莎士比亚电影，在它们中---劳伦斯·奥列弗《哈姆雷特》和《亨利五世》，奥森·韦尔斯的《奥赛罗》和《午夜的钟琴》，Kurosawa的《血宝座》，Polanski的《麦克白》和Zeffirelli的《罗密欧和朱丽叶》。我们现在处在一个及其丰富多样的时期中，莎士比亚电影上起始于Kenneth Branagh的《亨利五世》在1989年开始发行，包括了像Richard Loncraine的《理查德三世》，Julie Taymor的《泰特斯》，Zeffirelli和Almereyda的哈姆雷特电影，Baz Luhrmann的威廉·莎士比亚的《罗米欧和朱丽叶》以及《恋爱中的莎士比亚》。莎士比亚电影现象提出了很多问题：关于改编、原作，“经典”的正文和形式的变化，莎士比亚在年轻人和流行文化中的地位，以及手稿、书籍和舞台表演向现代电影媒介和现代数字化形式的转变等文学和媒介的研究。
我们的大多数工作包含对“电影正文”的单独和群组分析，--即是，在电影里的具体的顺序，由录像带、DVD和莎士比亚电子档案库(http://shea.mit.edu)帮助下，并且借助于一些用录像注释的软件工具，它们是在麻省理工学院-微软公司电子校园行动下的麻省理工学院莎士比亚工程开发的。
我们将以电影自己的方式把它们作为艺术作品加以研究，并且努力理解它们的意义---文学的、戏剧的、表演的和影片的---通过所加入的观众和创作意义。以莎士比亚电影为例，我们将讨论故事如何穿过时间、文化和媒介，并且思考所得到的受益以及对这样迁移的局限。
课堂上将引导大家进行结构讨论，它也将被学生的陈述和导师的“小型演讲”所打断。学生们将引入讨论，准备片断和实例，并且笔头的主要工作将采取班级陈述和如同常规的短文那样的多媒体注释。
课程方法性偏见是对课文和电影的进一步“阅读”。在这门课中，你的洞察力将成为工作的一个主要部分而且也将是班级讨论大框架的基础。你需要仔细地阅读，仔细地观看、聆听电影，同时开发出将你的想法向全班转述的有效方法。
Filmed Shakespeare began in 1899, with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing the death scene from King John for the camera. Sarah Bernhardt, who had played Hamlet a number of times in her long career, filmed the duel scene for the Paris Exposition of 1900. In the era of silent film (1895-1929) several hundred Shakespeare films were made in England, France Germany and the United States, Even without the spoken word, Shakespeare was popular in the new medium. The first half-century of sound included many of the most highly regarded Shakespeare films, among them -- Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and Henry V, Orson Welles' Othello and Chimes at Midnight, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Polanski's Macbeth and Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. We are now in the midst of an extremely rich and varied period for Shakespeare on film which began with the release of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and includes such films as Richard Loncraine's Richard III, Julie Taymor's Titus, Zeffirelli and Almereyda's Hamlet films, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and Shakespeare in Love. The phenomenon of filmed Shakespeare raises many questions for literary and media studies about adaptation, authorship, the status of "classic" texts and their variant forms, the role of Shakespeare in youth and popular culture, and the transition from manuscript, book and stage to the modern medium of film and its recent digitally inflected forms.
Most of our work will involve individual and group analysis of the "film text" -- that is, of specific sequences in the films, aided by videotape, DVD, the Shakespeare Electronic Archive (http://shea.mit.edu) , and some of the software tools for video annoatation developed by the MIT Shakespeare Project under the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Initiative.
We will study the films as works of art in their own right, and try to understand the means -- literary, dramatic, performative, cinematic -- by which they engage audiences and create meaning. With Shakespeare film as example, we will discuss how stories cross time, culture and media, and reflect on the benefits as well as the limitations of such migration.
The class will be conducted as a structured discussion, punctuated by student presentations and "mini-lectures" by the instructor. Students will introduce discussions, prepare clips and examples, and the major "written" work will take the form of presentations to the class and multimedia annotations as well as conventional short essays.
The methodological bias of the class is close "reading" of both text and film. This is a class in which your insights will form a major part of the work and will be the basis of a large fraction of class discussion. You will need to read carefully, to watch and listen to the films carefully, and develop effective ways of conveying your ideas to the class.
