This week is my last class for the Winter term of Northwestern University's continuing education classes. This term I have been taking Shakespeare in Films of the 90s.
Today I signed up for the spring term. I will be taking a class called:
Media
History: Power, Protest, and Passion
Spring 2025
Jon Marshall, Associate Professor, The Medill School
of Journalism
Beyond our own observations and conversations, much of what
we know – or think we know – about the world comes through the media, which has
a long and colorful history. Ever since a Boston bookstore owner boldly decided
to print a newspaper critical of the colonial government, the press in America
has challenged authority and provided information essential to democracy and
our daily lives. The story of U.S. journalism is filled with acts of great
courage and skill along with examples of greed, partisanship, bigotry, and sensationalism.
This nine-week course will explore the politics, economics, technology,
demographic trends, and individual personalities that have shaped U.S.
journalism over time so that we can better understand our current tumultuous
media environment.
But first my last class of Shakespeare:
Mar. 13 Shakespeare in Love
Our grand finale is a tour through John Madden’s Oscar-winning witty film, which fictionalized Shakespeare’s early career and revealed the supposed “real-life” origins of Romeo and Juliet. This film imagines what Renaissance authorship was like in the brutal commercial world of the London theater industry. Chock full of “in the know” references to contemporary playwrights, 1590s London, and the rigidity of the Renaissance social hierarchy, this film strikingly views Shakespeare’s theater through the lens of the Hollywood entertainment industry, complete with egos and crass commercial bargains. This hit included a stellar cast––Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Colin Firth, and Judy Dench–– with writing credit to Tom Stoppard. As background, this lecture will discuss longstanding debates about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, which reveals struggles to square reverence for the world’s most famous literary icon with sketchy human biographies from the past. We’ll see how Shakespeare In Love invites audiences to consider the main topic of our course: art’s relationship to economic realities, media, and popular culture.
my favorite films for discussion topics during this course - were the above- and
Twelfth Night
What would happen if you put a cross-dressed character in the world of Downtown Abbey? Trevor Nunn’s 1996 Twelfth Night did exactly this, framing Shakespeare’s festive story of separated twins and gender fluidity as a 19th-century realist period piece, complete with unruly servants and lovestruck aristocrats. Featuring distinguished British stage and film actors such as Nigel Hawthorne, Imogen Stubbes, Helena Bonham Carter, and Ben Kingsley, Nunn makes music a tool for exploring the hilarious unpredictability of desire. We’ll end our discussion by contrasting Nunn’s engagement of 1990s gender and sexuality issues with the National Theater’s 2017 production, which added one additional layer of gender twisting through unusual casting.
Midsummer Night's Dream
What happens when fantasy and love come into conflict with socially approved notions of marriage and decorum? In a world of unreality, how do you know who you really are? Directors for centuries have looked to one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies to explore these questions. Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film version puts Shakespeare’s story of magic and fairy worlds into an 1890s Italian town, where technologies like record players and bicycles are changing ways of life. The ensemble cast is full-on Hollywood, featuring Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, and Christian Bale. In this lecture, we will think about this film’s exploration of gender roles, love, authoritarian rule, marriage, and identity by comparing it with other versions (for instance, by Peter Hall and Julie Taymor). How does the unreality of relationships read differently in the 1990s?
Hamlet (Ethan Hawk version)
Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet puts the title character (Ethan Hawke) in a Manhattan Blockbuster video store, where he recites the famed “to be or not to be” soliloquy framed by wistful gazes at movies featuring action heroes. Almereyda uses Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy to comment on modern urban life among the sleek but corrupt world of the elite, where corporations rule and everyone grapples with new media technologies. What role can art have in this chaotic space? Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Bill Murray, Julia Stiles, and Sam Shepard, this very contemporary view of how the GenX generation might understand what’s rotten in the state of Denmark was the third “Hamlet” movie to appear in the 90s. To appreciate Almereyda’s version, we will compare it to Zeffirelli’s 1991 “action” version starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, as well as Branagh’s four-hour, Oscar-nominated (but limited-release) 1996 epic.
Richard III (Ian McKellan version)
What would history look like if England had been taken over by Hitler? In 1995, director Richard Loncraine staged this alternative-history by situating Shakespeare’s Richard III in glamorous 1930s England, complete with crooning singers, glamorous outfits, blasé elites who ignore fascism, and a cynical, disabled villain who kills his way to the top. Loncraine cast Hollywood A-list actors (Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr.) as American interlopers in a hopelessly broken royal family played by Kristen Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Nigel Hawthorne, and Jim Broadbent––with the amazing Ian McKellen in the title role. In this lecture, we’ll learn more about Tudor dynastic politics to understand how Shakespeare generated his own version of popular history on stage. Then we’ll think about how Loncraine uses McKellen’s charisma and a campy over-the-top style to counter the realism of other contemporary Shakespearean movies.
so we had some great films to discuss and there were a number of others - these were the ones I marked to go back to for further review in the future.
As I said- overall I have liked the class very much but the teacher not so much - good content but not great presentation (a weird sibilant S that I found quite distracting)
so last class - one of my favorites and then next class a timely subject matter...
