Abstract
Considering the ever-growing armada of books on Shakespeare and film-witness Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells's Shakespeare and the Moving Image (1994), Lynda Boose and Richard Burt's Shakespeare: The Movie (1997), Robert Shaughnessy's Shakespeare on Film: A Casebook (1998), Kathy Howlett's Framing Shakespeare on Film (1999), Russell Jackson's Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (2000), and Samuel Crawl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex (2003)-it's easy to forget that when Holderness's essays were first published, they were greeted "at best [as] something of an irrelevance, and at worst a positively harmful influence on the study of Shakespeare as literature" (xi). In the second essay, "Shakespeare Rescheduled," co-written with Carol Banks, Holderness returns to the issue of state power, arguing that the BBC's sequencing of the history plays as epic were designed to channel "the viewer to accept implicitly a deliberate construction," which satisfied the "interests of the culturally and politically conservative" (44-45). If Holdemess is correct in stating that his early studies met "substantial [scholarly] resistance" (ix), the author set his own attitudes up as mirrors to his subject.