A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2009. / Shakespeare portrayed women in his plays as people who should be valued. This is an opinion I held in the past, and one I still hold after intense reading of his works and that of authors such as Marlowe, Webster, Thomas Kyd and others. Shakespeare created his female characters out of a mixture of good and evil. When they interact with others, either the best or the worst in them is brought out: extreme evil in some cases and perfect goodness in others. I hope the reader will enjoy this study as much as I did, and that it will enhance their reading of Shakespeare‟s works and cultivate their interest in him. This study is intended to motivate other people to change their view that Shakespeare‟s works are inaccessible. Those who hold this view will come to know that anyone anywhere can read, understand and appreciate the works of this the greatest writer of all times. In his study Shakespeare’s World, Johanyak says, “I wrote [it] to help students appreciate the depth and breadth of Shakespeare‟s global awareness. Shakespeare was not only a London playwright, but a man of the world who dramatized his perceptions to create a lasting legacy of his times” (2004: ix).

The plays of William Shakespeare have long been considered a source of cultural and educational interest by both academics and filmmakers, and the practice of adapting Shakespeare’s works to film has existed for almost as long as film itself. The name “Shakespeare” evokes ideals of cultural legitimacy and importance, and Shakespeare film as a genre is always caught up in questions of fidelity and legitimacy. In adapting Shakespeare to the screen, filmmakers also adapt, whether deliberately or not, the various cultural beliefs that his work is steeped in. Early modern ideas about gender, race and class are reproduced in modern film through the adaptation of Shakespeare, often excused or unexamined in the name of fidelity. This thesis discusses Shakespeare’s three plays Hamlet, Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, all of which deal in some way with gender roles and the place and power of women, whether that power is sexual, political or verbal. I also examine three film adaptations of the plays: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, and Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You. All three films serve as examples of the way the misogyny present in Shakespeare’s works is reproduced and sometimes magnified through adaptation to the screen. The reproduction of early modern gender hierarchies is naturalised in a number of ways across the three films, including the use of star power, the invocation of Shakespeare as a cultural authority, and specific filmic techniques such as flashback and the cutting and editing of film and screenplay. I argue that in all three films, the faithful adaptation of Shakespearean ideas of gender comes at the expense of both the women characters and those women who make up the films’ audience.

For almost a century Shakespeare’s work has been viewed primarily under a supremacy of performance with an insistence that Shakespeare wrote his work to be staged, not read. This prevailing view has ensured that most responses in Shakespearean research fit within this line of enquiry. The recent argument that Shakespeare was a literary dramatist who wrote for readers—as well as audiences—has met with resistance. This thesis first exposes the very literate world Shakespeare lived in and his own perception of that world, which embraces a writer who wrote for readers. The material evidence of readers begins in Shakespeare’s own lifetime and grows steadily, evidenced by the editorial methods used to facilitate reading, the profusion of books specifically for readers of general interest, and the thousands of lay reading circles formed to enjoy and study the plays. Readers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries are shown to have spontaneously responded to the works as literature, as reading Shakespeare aloud within a family or social circle has a tenacious history. For three hundred years after Shakespeare’s death it was readers and Shakespeare reading groups who created and maintained Shakespeare’s legacy as a literary icon and national hero. The history of millions of lay readers reading aloud in community was engulfed by the transition of the texts into academia and performance criticism until by the 1940s Shakespeare reading groups were virtually non-existent. A new genre of editorial practice can support a re-emergence of community reading and point toward a greater acceptance of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist, enlarging the field of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism. A prototype of a Readers’ Edition of a Shakespearean play specifically edited and designed for reading aloud in groups is included with this thesis.