English 135 - Shakespeare
Spring, 2005
Final Summary Assignment for Hamlet
The final summary assignment for the class involves the Hamlet films we will be discussing over the last few weeks of the class. I've divided you up (alphabetically) into four groups—A, B, C, and D: Group A will write on Olivier; Group B will write on Zefferelli; Group C will write on Branagh; Group D will write on Almereyda. You are responsible for writing a 3-5 page assignment composed of two parts:
Part 1 provides some background into the making of the particular film you're working on (who is the director? when was it made? what inspired its being made? were there particular influences—literary or cultural or other—that the director talks about? how successful was the film? and other similar sorts of questions)
Part 2 summarizes the views of three critics who weigh in on the film. Ideally, you will summarize three different kinds of criticism: you can look up regular movie reviews, more involved sorts of movie reviews (in places like the New Yorker, for instance), and big critical essays by academics (all of these films have inspired significant literary and film criticism). Your summaries should be about the length your previous summaries have been: a single, double-spaced page each.
Both parts of the assignment will take some research on your part, but please don't limit that research to the internet. If you do use the internet, please avoid the sort of thing that is typical of that venue: the opinions of someone sitting in their basement weighing in on their favorite movies. When it comes to the reviews that you choose to summarize, I need them to be reviews with genuine authority: reviews and essays by established and well-respected critics in established and well-respected publications. On 2-hour reserve for this course are a couple of books that might be quite helpful to you: Shakespeare: The Movie and Shakespeare: The Movie II. But there will be loads of stuff elsewhere and the reference librarians in Bailey-Howe would be more than happy to help you find all manner of things—please take advantage of their knowledge and their willingness to help.
The entire assignment should be 3-5 double-spaced pages long. Please attach a full bibliography to the assignment that carefully documents all the sources you used, and cite those sources properly inside the assignment. Here is the site to proper MLA documentation style. Please consult the site both for your bibliography and for proper citation style.
This
summary assignment, because of its complexity and the work required,
will be worth double what the other summaries have been worth. Please
make sure you see me if you have any questions at all.