Scott Lord Shakespeare in Silent Film: The Taming of the Shrew (D.W. Gri...

Robert Hamilton Ball, in his volume Shakespeare on Silent Films explains the increase of adaptations of Shakespeare's plays during 1908-1911. "By 1908, the story film had become general...Moreover, his variety of scenes fitted well with new conceptions of scenario structure, with cutting and editing." Ball notes that D.W. Griffith follows The Taming of the Shrew chronologically but only uses four or five scenes to explicate its central incidents. Ball points out that there are no explanatory intertitles used in the film, which could have been used in the exposition of plot, but that Shakespeare was also at liberty to use long passages of supplementary dialougue when writing plays. He offers a claim that there were ten Shakespearean films made in the United States alone during 1908 while noting that in regard to recent transnational studies of the recent historiography of silent film that "there were no doubt cross-influences from country to country." Only one of these adaptations were from the Kalem Studios, As You Like It and only one was produced by Biograph. The is scant information pertaining to the film Julius Caesar, produced that year by Lubin. The film adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew" filmed in Great Britain during 1911 by Frank R Benson starring Constance Benson is a lost film, of which there are no surviving copies. Actress Florence Lawrence had come to Biograph from Vitagraph, which had produced several adaptations of Shakespeare that year, and camerman Arthur Marvin was being trained by innovator Billy Bitzer. King Lear
Shakespeare in Denmark
Biograph Film Company