Re-Viewing "Shakespeare on Film"

This piece considers the pedagogy of "Shakespeare on Film" at a juncture when the scholarship and canon of Shakespeare films have dovetailed with institutional processes of globalization. Drawing on the experience of teaching "Shakespeare on Film" in the United States, Lebanon, and Turkey, I offer a backstage pedagogy that foregrounds four problems in the very design of such a course: the problem of beginnings, the problem of Shakespeare's conflation with prestige, the problem of the ostensible ubiquity of Shakespeare films, and the problem of colonial legacies' inextricability from "Shakespeare on Film"'s contemporary global iterations.