Tags
shakespeare 400: the 2016 bardathon challenge, shakespeare: adaptations, shakespeare: on screen, shakespearean genres: history
Compared to the comedies and tragedies, Shakespeare’s history plays haven’t been adapted for cinema much at all—by my count, there are only five sound-era Anglophone films! The BBC and ESC (English Shakespeare Company) have produced several more for the small screen, but with the exception of The Hollow Crown series (2012-ongoing), I shan’t talk about them here.
Since there are only five cinematic histories, I’m listing list them all, by production year.
Henry V (1944)
Directed by Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier, Renée Asherson, Robert Newton, Leslie Banks
Even though the film might seem out-dated today, this was the first critically and commercially successful Shakespeare film adaptation—ground-breaking stuff! If you look at the date, you’ll notice it was made during WWII. Yup, it was partially funded by the British government, and was actually intended as a propaganda film (I’ve written a bit about that here). 10% of the production budget went into shooting the epic Battle of Agincourt, which was the only sequence filmed on location (in the neutral Republic of Ireland, near Dublin).
