Recently my life has been full of Shakespeare. I have started a Shakespeare reading group with some of my New Jersey friends, I saw an excellent production of Measure for Measure at the Globe Theatre in London this week, and I am in the middle of reading King John for my own pleasure. I have ambitions to read through the entire canon before I turn thirty, and at 25 am happy to say that I have read about twenty so far. Part of the fun of reading Shakespeare is then watching film adaptations of his work – from Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier to Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, many auteurs have used the bard as inspiration and directed their own versions of his plays. When I was last back in America, I made it a point to watch three of the most epic Shakespeare adaptations on my parents' big screen television, and feel comfortable in saying that each is in the canon of not just the greatest Shakespearean films, but some of the greatest films of all time. These were t
Malcolm Coates