Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Shakespeare, Madness, and Music : Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations, Paperback / softback Book

Shakespeare, Madness, and Music : Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Shakespeare's three political tragedies—Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear—have numerously been presented or adapted on film.

These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and expectation, political unrest, and, ultimately, truth, as excavated by characters so afflicted.

Music has long been associated with madness, and was often used as an audible symptom of a victim's disassociation from their surroundings and societal rules, as well as their loss of self-control. In Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations, Kendra Preston Leonard examines the use of music in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.

Whether discussing contemporary source materials, such as songs, verses, or rhymes specified by Shakespeare in his plays, or music composed specifically for a film and original to the director's or composer's interpretations, Leonard shows how the changing social and scholarly attitudes towards the plays, their characters, and the conditions that fall under the general catch-all of "madness" have led to a wide range of musical accompaniments, signifiers, and incarnations of the afflictions displayed by Shakespeare's characters. Focusing on the most widely distributed and viewed adaptations of these plays for the cinema, each chapter presents the musical treatment of individual Shakespearean characters afflicted with or feigning madness: Hamlet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, King Lear, and Edgar.

The book offers analysis and interpretation of the music used to underscore, belie, or otherwise inform or invoke the characters' states of mind, providing a fascinating indication of culture and society, as well as the thoughts and ideas of individual directors, composers, and actors.

A bibliography, index, and appendix listing Shakespeare's film adaptations help complete this fascinating volume.

Information

Other Formats

Save 12%

£48.00

£41.95

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information