Shakespeare and British World War Two Film

Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Liberal Arts Professor of English, teaches at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998), Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (Cambridge University Press, 2012).  With Mary Floyd-Wilson, he co-edited Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (2007) and The Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England (2020). He co-edits, with Julie Sanders, the book series Early Modern Literary Geographies. He is a past trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.

• 1. 'Hamlet's a loser, Leslie!': Pimpernel Smith, Hamlet and film propaganda; 2. 'What we all have in common': Fires Were Started, Macbeth and the people's war; 3. The Black-White Gentleman: The Man in Grey, Othello and the melodrama of Anglo-West Indian relations; 4. 'Bottom's not a gangster!': A Matter of Life and Death, A Midsummer Night's Dream and post-war Anglo-American relations.

'Garrett Sullivan's brilliant study of Shakespeare in British film during the Second World War defines a new and exhilarating approach to examining the wide range of ways in which a particular social and cultural history and geography of Shakespeare in films – from adaptations to citations to offshoots – can be investigated. This is superb and innovative scholarship that has sent me rushing back to films I knew well and rushing off to watch others I had never even heard of.' Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame