Although ‘film’ remains in common usage as a generic term, digital technology has made it inaccurate when applied to work no longer shot, edited or distributed on chemically coated celluloid. The ‘photochemical era’ has ended, and rapid developments in the distribution and consumption of audio-visual products have reduced distinctions between what is viewed in the home and what is seen in public. This Companion takes as its remit feature-length productions, both those commonly perceived as ‘delivering’ the plays, and those that appropriate them as the starting-point for work that makes no such claim. These are all to some degree adaptations, but some are more adapted than others: consequently the first group of chapters focuses on the various ways in which screen versions of Shakespeare’s works have figured in a changing media environment.

This chapter considers the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in adaptations of two plays in which they are an integral element, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Complex characterization is in danger of being short-circuited by unconscious bias, pulling audiences back to racial stereotypes, dehumanizing Shylock and Othello despite the efforts of well-intentioned filmmakers. In The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitism and its consequences in recent and current politics unavoidably complicate a play whose romantic elements are already made uneasy by issues of patriarchal control and materialism. In Othello the challenges of representing ‘the Moor’ himself are not simply resolved by casting an actor of colour in the role. Productions also have to deal with the manner in which agency is wrested from the titular hero by a villain who can seem to have taken charge of way the audience perceives the action.

The title of Thomas Cartelli’s Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment calls for some clarification, which is provided in due course. Cartelli addresses the question of exactly what it is in which our ‘faith’ must be ‘awaked’ for Shakespeare’s plays ‘to engage their receivers/audiences with the kind of “nervous novelty” they presumably brought to the Elizabethan stage when Shakespeare himself took old matter and remixed it into new theatrical blends’ (17).

However sophisticated or assertive a director or designer may be, it is the actor and his or her body that carry the ultimate authority in most kinds of theatre, especially in ‘live’ performance. ‘Liveness’ is a category debated in a number of the works reviewed this year, and evidence from the archive is always both invaluable and to be questioned. Nevertheless, the power of the actor to ‘fix’ posthumously an image of a character, assisted in this case by the photographer’s camera, is asserted in Angus McBean’s photograph of Richard Burton as Prince Henry in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s 1951 production of Henry IV, Part Two, which forms the front cover of Shakespeare by McBean, edited by Adrian Woodhouse.