Free Will: Orson Welles and the Remediation of American Shakespeare, 1930--1948

591 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Welles conceived his projects to educate spectators about Shakespeare and warn them against the coercive power of media itself. Later chapters focus on Welles' adaptation of particular plays for different media. In each case, I examine how Welles' remediation of Shakespeare amplifies the relevance of early modern material for interwar American audiences. Chapter Three recuperates Welles' 1936 Columbia Workshop adaptation of Hamlet , his first full-scale radio adaptation of Shakespeare. Chapter Four focuses on how Welles revised his Mercury stage success, Julius Caesar: Death of a Dictator, for other media, including radio and phonograph recording. Chapter Five revises previous views of Welles' most ambitious Shakespearean project, the Mercury Text Shakespeare series. Chapter Six offers a new sound-based perspective on Welles' first Shakespeare film, the troubled 1948 Macbeth for Republic pictures.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD