Macbeth on screen: Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski,Kurzel.

Abstract

This thesis analyses how four directors, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski and Justin Kurzel, have produced a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It starts with a general overview of the play, focusing on the characters and on Shakespeare’s sources and it attempts to reconstruct the general atmosphere in England in the 17th century. After a quick overview on the first stage adaptations in Chapter One, the thesis turns to analyse in detail the four movies. In Chapter Two it discusses Orson Welles’s adaptation of 1948 and his dreamlike representation of the story.The third chapter focuses on Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, also known as The Castle of The Spider’s Web, produced in Japan in 1957.The fourth and fifth chapters are dedicated respectively to Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation and to the latest screen version made by Justin Kurzel in 2015. A conclusion, in the end, shows how all the considerations made on all the different screen versions contribute to re-invent and reproduce the greatness of Shakespeare’s characters and that the appeal his stories have on audience demands for artists to develop always new forms of engagement with Shakespeare’s work.