Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: a Critical History
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q2xqz
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 9781350006584
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Wyver’s monograph is based on extensive archival research over five years. Researching a wide range of public and private sources, he tracked down the film and television productions with which the RSC (and previous Stratford companies) has been involved since 1910. The RSC's screen history remains fragmentary and scattered across Britain, the rest of Europe and North America, and documentation similarly had to be consulted in theatre, cinema and broadcasting archives. Archival research, textual analysis and historical poetics link a close reading of moving image sequences with production contexts, the history of the RSC, and broader social and political contexts.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Wyver’s monograph traces the adaptation history of the RSC from a first film made in 1910 through to the live cinema broadcasts that he produces for the company today. It is the first comprehensive study of a theatre company’s adaptation history, contextualising critical analysis of a wide range of moving image outputs with production histories of both the RSC and of broadcast and feature film partners. It aims both to understand how and why adaptations were made at specific historical moments and to locate those adaptations within broader debates about adaptation strategies, audiences, and ideas of culture and national identity.
The book is the product of extensive archival research over five years which involved tracking down film and television productions from a wide range of public and private sources. The RSC's screen history remains fragmentary and scattered across several countries, and documentation similarly had to be consulted in theatre, cinema and broadcasting archives.
One key contribution of the book is its consideration not only of films and television programmes but also other moving image traces of performance including single-camera archival documentation, extracts preserved in documentaries and review programmes, and the wide range of moving image paratexts that the company created for each new production.
Wyver’s research for the book has already had a significant impact within the RSC, drawing attention to its previously neglected moving image archive and prompting moves to collect this more carefully and to make it far more widely accessible for future research. It has been widely reviewed, including in Theatre Notebook, and Times Literary Supplement, and is cited in many published academic sources, including in Lowe’s book on screen adaptation, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Jackson ed.), and in journal articles such as those by Boddy, Huertas Martín, and Ingham.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
