Book review: Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition by Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell

Abstract

discussed in Part I that convert their adapted source from tragic to comic endings, Lost and Delirious features an adaptation of Twelfth Night in which the Viola character reaches ‘a tragic denouement’ (p. 198). Once again, Földváry shows here how genre changes in line with societal concerns while retaining its basic concepts, in this case, setting and coming-of-age narratives. It is noticeable, however, in this postmodern era, how such cultural change is assimilated more quickly into these popular films than was the case with the ‘classic’ genres previously discussed. Földváry also notes the contradiction that postmodern genre adaptation incorporates in its desire to confront the cultural authority of Shakespeare while confirming it in the very act of adaptation. The Shakespeare adaptations in the recent revival of vampire and zombie movies discussed in this section, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (2009) and Warm Bodies (2013), exemplify this paradox. Földváry acknowledges the debt that these modern horror movies owe to their nineteenth-century antecedents, such as Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula (1897), and she might also have noted that the way Shakespeare’s work permeates these postmodern movies is akin to how it is appropriated in many nineteenth-century novels, making it questionable whether there truly is a radical difference in the way the Bard’s cultural capital is invoked in these two very different eras. The final genre Földváry chooses to discuss – the biopic – seems something of an outlier alongside these ‘teen pic’ forms but, all-in-all, this is a well-structured study that examines a wide variety of movies in some detail. It provides a useful reference for the genre, adaptation, and Shakespeare studies and is an entertaining addition to the discourse on screen Shakespeare.