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Locating The Bard: Adaptation And Authority In Michael Radford's The Merchant Of Venice

Faculty Publications

Michael Radford’s adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (2004) starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons returns feature film Shakespeare to period setting and costuming after roughly a decade of radicalized adaptative strategies such as those of Baz Luhrmann, Michael Almereyda, and Julie Taymor, strategies that threatened to overshadow the Kenneth Branagh approach to Shakespeare’s textual and cultural authority. Radford underscores this return to “authentic” Shakespeare with a heavy directorial hand that begins the film with superimposed text recounting the sixteenth-century Venetian context of the original play setting. The watery landscape of Venice, the brothels and courtesans that entertain the Christian …