This book explores how Grigorii Kozintsev's acclaimed cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's tragedies Hamlet and King Lear are not simply cultural appropriations but shed light on the political and religious subtexts of the plays themselves. Living under the tyranny of Soviet communism, Kozintsev (the director), Boris Pasternak (the translator) and Dmitri Shostakovich (the composer) were all too familiar with the political and artistic constraints placed on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Like Shakespeare, these Russian artists were forced to steer between defiance and compliance to avoid the violent fate of so many of their fellow artists during Stalin's Terror. Thomas's provocative book makes the phenomenon of "Global Shakespeares" not only topical but urgent in an age when the gulf between the "free" West and a dictatorial Eastern Europe has narrowed to expose the cruelty and violence at the heart of oppressive regimes across the globe, and the crucial role of the artist in resisting and exposing that tyranny.

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. He is the author of many books on medieval and early modern England and Europe, including Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (Palgrave, 2014) and Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rites (Palgrave, 2018).