'Hamlet' and World Cinema

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen's University Belfast and Director of the Sir Kenneth Branagh Archive. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture (1997), Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (2002), Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (2nd edition, 2012) and Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge, 2012). His co-edited publications include Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (2000), Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (2006) and Filming and Performing Renaissance History (2011).

''Hamlet' and World Cinema is a remarkable book. In fact, there's nothing quite like it in the literature of Shakespeare on film. Burnett provides detailed cultural readings of thirty Hamlet films, each revealing something rich and strange about the country of origin and the moment of creation. His scholarship is astonishing as his analyses incorporate knowledge of each culture's history, politics, myths, film and stage traditions, language, as well as its appropriation of Shakespeare. He has a profound understanding of the myriad purposes Hamlet serves in these films as aesthetic object, political critique, cultural icon, or colonial intruder. The volume is not just a homage to Shakespeare's enduring impact on world cultures, but to the art of film itself.' Samuel Crowl, Ohio University

• 1. Hamlet, cinema and the histories of Western Europe; 2. Thematising place: Hamlet, cinema and Africa; 3. Hamlet and the moment of Brazilian cinema; 4. Pairing the cinematic Prince: Hamlet, China and Japan; 5. Hamlet and Indian cinemas: regional paradigms; 6. Gendering borders: Hamlet and the cinemas of Turkey and Iran; 7. Materialising Hamlet in the cinemas of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe.