Rating: 
Summary: Swinging Shag speare!
Review: I loved the hardcover edition of this book so much I just had to buy the paperback too, especially when I saw the new cover. While the hardcover version does it have its charm, the new cover is much sleeker. The large pink XXXXs really stand out! The new preface is really great. Burt discusses new films that were released after the publication of the hardcover like Shakespeare in Love and A Midsummer Night's Dream (the opera soundtrack). Burt also has brilliant readings of what he calls "Shakesploi flicks," Never Been Kissed and As You Liked It. Get this version now!
Rating:
Summary: Not only about Shakespeare porn!
Review: I ran across this book while reading an essay in Lingua Franca about Shakespeare porn. Burt lists a whole series of Shakepseare porns on his personal website and he discusses many of them in a long chapter to his book. From his website, which I found very intriguing, I see that he will be publishing an another article on the same topic. While all this makes for extremely interesting criticism (and college courses to), the book also discusses a wide range of what Burt calls "replays" of Shakespeare in mostly 1990s mass culure. Burt is also the editor of a book I will buy called Shakespeare After Mass Media. Burt documents the many positive academic reviews and the extensive media coverage Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares has received on his website. After reading this excellent book, I can see why it has such a high profile and why Burt's work is getting so much positive attention.
Rating:
Summary: Unspeakably good book!!!
Review: I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in Shakespeare's reception in contemporarzy culture. This is an accessible and very hip read.
Rating:
Summary: Pioneering book
Review: In his wonderful and fascinating book Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares, Richard Burt, the leading scholar of Shakespeare and film studies, pioneers research into the manifold ways Shakespeare enters into American popular culture. Concentrating mostly on film but attending as well to television sit-coms, Burt offers penetrating insight into everything from mainstream adaptations of Shakespeare to "low" spin-offs in which Shakespeare's language almost entirely disappears. Burt explores both what film and mass media have done to Shakespeare and also what Shakespeare enables our culture to do trhough film and other electronic media. Readers intersted in this book will be happy to know that Burt has since edited a related collection entitled Shakespeare After Mass Media and has co-edited Shakespeare, the Movie II.
Rating:
Summary: Pioneering book
Review: In the least scathing word I can think of, Richard Burt is inimitable. On to the bash. Come on, someone has to stand up to the plate and do it! He represents and produces the academic filth and corruption that have come to characterize this modern world. He is a bottomless black hole who uses his pretentious charm and intelligence (and devilish good looks) as forces to draw in impressionable young people to his vile inner recesses. His outer core is his classroom teaching world, where he pretends to know more than he does, and when he knows he's wrong, he doesn't dare admit it for fear of losing his pathetic reputation. And his innermost core is represented by a website entitled Naughtyprofessor.com. He's like one of those little sucker fish attached to the underbellies of larger fish, trying in vain to extract some salient substance - but he fails every time. Give it up, Burt. That aside, let's talk about the book. Although there is some legitimate research behind this book of his, where is the scholarship? Not once in this disaster of a book does he make fully accessible any of the concepts he presumes to know about. References to film and literature are well organized, but his writing doesn't show anything, any grander synthesis of ideas - it is merely an exercise is being pretentious and self-serving. Queer thoery is a fascinating subject, but Burt's frequent dry humor is very demeaning to it and waters it down a great deal. Stick to teaching, Professor Burt (as scary as that sounds to me), forget writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Merely Telling, Not Showing
Review: In the least scathing word I can think of, Richard Burt is inimitable. On to the bash. Come on, someone has to stand up to the plate and do it! He represents and produces the academic filth and corruption that have come to characterize this modern world. He is a bottomless black hole who uses his pretentious charm and intelligence (and devilish good looks) as forces to draw in impressionable young people to his vile inner recesses. His outer core is his classroom teaching world, where he pretends to know more than he does, and when he knows he's wrong, he doesn't dare admit it for fear of losing his pathetic reputation. And his innermost core is represented by a website entitled Naughtyprofessor.com. He's like one of those little sucker fish attached to the underbellies of larger fish, trying in vain to extract some salient substance - but he fails every time. Give it up, Burt. That aside, let's talk about the book. Although there is some legitimate research behind this book of his, where is the scholarship? Not once in this disaster of a book does he make fully accessible any of the concepts he presumes to know about. References to film and literature are well organized, but his writing doesn't show anything, any grander synthesis of ideas - it is merely an exercise is being pretentious and self-serving. Queer thoery is a fascinating subject, but Burt's frequent dry humor is very demeaning to it and waters it down a great deal. Stick to teaching, Professor Burt (as scary as that sounds to me), forget writing.
Rating: 
Summary: How Shakespeare and Popular Culture Can Intersect
Review: No one in the world knows more about Shakespeare on the fringes than Richard Burt. He has collected myriad specimens for his curiosity cabinet and stands ready to share them in an interesting and meaningful way. As a keen student of Shakespeare and popular culture, he stands in the vanguard of a growing movement to erase older demarcations between high and low art.
Rating:
Summary: Witty and moving analysis of Shakespeare's fate in media
Review: One doesn't usually expect to find oneself laughing when reading a book of criticism written by an academic, much less a book on Shakespeare. But Burt's book is frequently just that, funny to the point of making me laugh out loud. Burt has a refreshingly off-beat sense of humor, and the materials he has discovered--such as an adult movie version of Hamlet--aer themselves often hilarious as well, though not always intentionally so. But far from being just a laugh riot, the book is also a serious, critically sophisticated analysis of Shakespeare's fate incontemporary mass media, where much of hte lnagugae is cut or confined to well-known quotations. Burt's final chapter on films about teaching Shakespeare is quite moving, and Burt has the courage to raise difficult questions without pretending he is able to answer them. He is right to think that the questions are more important than the answers. Burt is to be congratulated for writing his book in a clear and engaging prose style without sacrificing the complexity of his thought.
Rating:
Summary: Witty and moving analysis of Shakespeare's fate in media
Review: One doesn't usually expect to find oneself laughing when reading a book of criticism written by an academic, much less a book on Shakespeare. But Burt's book is frequently just that, funny to the point of making me laugh out loud. Burt has a refreshingly off-beat sense of humor, and the materials he has discovered--such as an adult movie version of Hamlet--aer themselves often hilarious as well, though not always intentionally so. But far from being just a laugh riot, the book is also a serious, critically sophisticated analysis of Shakespeare's fate incontemporary mass media, where much of hte lnagugae is cut or confined to well-known quotations. Burt's final chapter on films about teaching Shakespeare is quite moving, and Burt has the courage to raise difficult questions without pretending he is able to answer them. He is right to think that the questions are more important than the answers. Burt is to be congratulated for writing his book in a clear and engaging prose style without sacrificing the complexity of his thought.
Rating:
Summary: Accessible and profound work of cultural criticism
Review: One of the many strengths of Burt's truly excellent book is that it not only discusses Shakespeare adaptations but uses Shakespeare, or of ShaXXXspeares, to discuss post-war American popular culture. Burt's theory of the loser as critic has ramifications for all criticism, not just Shakespeare. This is a profound, original, and engaging book.
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