New wave Shakespeare on screen /

One yearns for the brilliant, the fresh and stimulating, but not all new ideas are good ones. Books pretending to be "cutting edge" can be dull. The authors of the present title hope to escape that fate by evoking the nouvelle vague that revolutionized French cinema of the 1950s. But will (or should) Shakespeareans accept this comparison? Just in case, Cartelli (Muhlenberg College) and Rowe (Bryn Mawr College) also "integrate the new text-based and screen-based approaches in ways that will be accessible to teachers and students, as well as to scholars" (are these exclusive groups?). The book promises to fill a gap between "source texts" and a new "experimental strain of adaptation" that has come into being since Kenneth Branagh reinvented the Shakespeare film in 1989. Cartelli and Rowe get more interesting (or more subversive) as they move on to consider "adaptation as a cultural process." Convoluted discussions of films most students will see only if forced come later. Sometimes provocative, sometimes irritating, this book, like Hamlet's arrow, may have overshot its mark. But despite an atmosphere of sometimes clubby smugness, the book poses some useful questions. Summing Up: Optional. Large collections serving upper-division undergraduates and above. J. M. Welsh Salisbury University