Without exception, existing studies of cinematic Shakespeare adaptations conform to the long-established paradigm of the descriptive history. Even comprehensive studies of segments of this vast and diverse grouping of films (by Robert H. Ball, Jeremy Sams, Mark T. Burnett, Luke McKernan, et al.) focus on readily available screening prints of films with nary an acknowledgement of the textual uncertainties of films subject to editorial intervention and the vicissitudes of material history; lost, damaged, fragmentary or censored films barely creep within range of critical radars, and even when they do seem only to merit passing consideration. As a consequence, historical accounts of Shakespearean film production are skewed in the direction of conformity, and the dominant perspectives – chronological narrative, intermittent contributions to adaptation studies and episodes in genre history – rely on the assumption of a relatively stable canon of Shakespeare films (that can on occasion be supplemented by rediscoveries). The present work explodes this mythology and explores the underlying assumptions behind the mask of critical convenience. No less significantly, it martials the research of ten years into a coherent, cumulative, chapter-by-chapter argument that proposes methodologies that will not only herald a comprehensive revision of the Shakespeare film canon, but also establish a standard methodology that redirects attention to "hidden" aspects of even the most widely discussed of these texts, thereby making significant methodological contributions to a number of emerging fields of study.

A valedictory public donation by a celluloid-loving collector includes, unbeknownst to him, the earliest extant feature-length film made in the United States. A digitization of a catalogue of archival holdings leads to the chance discovery of a fragment of the earliest known adaptation of Shakespeare onto a celluloid-based medium. An amateur literary sleuth compares an understudied Renaissance manuscript to verbal echoes in Shakespeare's plays and so establishes a pattern of quotations in the playwright's History cycles. Narratologist Gérard Genette proposes approaches to texts that supplement an existing version (i.e. paratexts) which begins to be taken up by individual Shakespeare scholars almost two generations after the event. The microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg proposes the simultaneous application of a constellation of critical methodologies to the detailed analysis of discrete phenomena. A computer-assisted breakthrough in statistical modelling revolutionizes our understanding of Shakespeare's texts and working practices, even offering the strongest available proof that manuscript pages long believed to be his are not only part of a canon but in his own hand.

A catalogue such as this may seem like a random collection of events, but in fact they are profoundly interconnected. Quite simply, a revolution has taken place in Shakespeare studies with overwhelming consequences to debates about canonicity and canon formation, one that has yet to come to film studies as systematically and consequentially. On its own account, the historical study of documentation has advanced greatly in the latter field (vide the activities of the DOMITOR group of film historians and the collective enterprise of such established journals as Film History and Film and History and such newer ones as The Journal of Visual Culture and The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies). But until recently film historians and those who restore, preserve and exhibit films occupied separate realms, the former grounded in the humanities and the latter in the natural sciences. Adaptations of Shakespeare...