Roundtable

Speaking of Shakespeare
With Film Historian
Samuel Crowl

Wednesday, April 26
6:30 PM

How do we account for the fact that a 453-year-old has-been continues to inspire award-winning screenplays and film adaptations? Can it be that his most prescient contemporary was right to describe him as a playwright who was "not of an age, but for all time"? These are the questions that inspire Samuel Crowl, a distinguished critic who has taught at Ohio University since 1970. Professor Crowl's many books include Shakespeare Observed: Studies in Performance on Stage and Screen (1992), Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (2002), Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (2008), and Screen Adaptations: Hamlet (2014). His insights have also graced such influential collections as Teaching Shakespeare Today (1993), Shakespeare and the Moving Image (1993), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (2000), and Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (2001). Among the works he'll discuss with John Andrews is Chimes at Midnight, a 1966 adaptation of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 in which Orson Welles plays Falstaff, Sir John Gielgud plays the title character, and Keith Baxter plays Prince Hal. Professor Crowl's 1980 article in Shakespeare Quarterly, during a decade when Mr. Andrews edited that journal, helped establish a previously unheralded film as a modern classic.