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![The Hollow Crown - Richard II [2012]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/09/richard-2.png)
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Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare, your favorite source for wholly unqualified Shakespeare analysis. This week we're watching the first episode of The Hollow Crown, the BBC golden-age-of-television version of the Henriad, starting with Richard II. A Hurried Synopsis I think it would be
![Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead [1990] + Hamlet 2 [2008] + The Lion King 1½ [2004]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/rosencrantz.png)
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Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare, the blog series where I avoid talking about Shakespeare. This week we watched a series of non-Shakespearean works built off Shakespearean ones. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a Tom Stoppard movie about two side characters from Hamlet — I haven't
![Renaissance Man [1994] + Grand Theft Hamlet [2024]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/renaissance-gta.png)
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Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, the blog series where I have beef with the Wikipedia list of Shakespeare adaptations. This week we watched Renaissance Man, the Penny Marshall-directed / Danny Devito-starring Dead Poets Society-like that according to some rando who elected to be loudly wrong on
![Hamlet [2000] + The Lion King 2 [1998]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/hamlet-2000.png)
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Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, the blog series where I watch Shakespeare adaptations and talk about them. This week we watched Hamlet, the Ethan Hawke / Julia Stiles / Liev Schreiber / Kyle MacLachlan-starring version directed by Michael Almereyda. The movie changes the setting of the play from Denmark to
![Let the Devil Wear Black [1999] + The Lion King [1994]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/let-the-devil-wear-black.png)
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Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. It's been a rough past five weeks. I haven't found a lot to be complimentary about in the movies I've chosen. That changes this week. Despite being closest in adaptational lineage to China Girl (by which I
![Hamlet [1996]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/hamlet96.png)
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Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, a blog series where I complain about movies I sort-of enjoyed. This week we watched Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet, an adaptation whose stated goal was to scarcely budge from the stage-and-page unabridged version and took four hours plus
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A couple months ago I had the opportunity to be on WAYO 104.3's program "Graphic Ear"; the producer, Jacob, recently cleaned up + uploaded the show. Thanks Jacob! You can listen below on via their mixcloud: Blog, Local Interest
![King Lear [1999]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/07/blessed-lear.png)
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Given the past three adaptations all failing to help me really understand the play — the 2018 version too preoccupied with catering to those who have seen & know it, the 1987 version doing whatever it wanted (mostly not The Play), and Kurosawa's 1985 version being so drastically transformed,
![King Lear [1987]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/07/lear-87.png)
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From wikipedia, quoting David Sterritt: The film deliberately does not use conventional Hollywood filmmaking techniques which make a film 'watchable', but instead seeks to alienate and baffle its audience in the manner of Bertolt Brecht [4] In this manner I consider it a remarkable success; I was alienated
![Ran [1985]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/07/ran-1.png)
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Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare. This week we are covering Akira Kurosawa's Ran. I feel like these are skidding off the increasingly smooth surface of my wrinkleless brain, like the incident of the story is being articulated poorly and all I've got to grab
![King Lear [2018]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/07/king-lear-2018.png)
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Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we watched the 2018 BBC/Amazon adaptation of King Lear. I'll be frank, this was a disappointment. I think it was under-adapted for the screen, and at a technical level muddy and aspired-to-workmanlike. It was a
![A Midsummer Night's Dream [2017]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/06/0906e901-2ada-4eb8-b183-44cd02248c1e/content/images/size/w600/2026/06/midsummer2.png)
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Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. It is somehow another month where I am making apologies for how weird week four's movie was. This was a very colorful adaptation that keeps the play dialogue, to its own detriment. I'm not sure what the ideal would