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The representation of motherhood and the feminine in Fiennes's Coriolanus has until recently been unduly overlooked. The present investigation provides an analysis of key aspects and crucial scenes of the film, in which the Shakespearean issues of femininity and motherhood are represented, reinforced, metaphorised and/or questioned. This paper argues that the significance of the female dimension is expanded in the cinematic version of the play and recoded in terms manageable and relevant to a new-millennium audience. This amplification of the feminine, and of motherhood in particular, partly redresses the gender balance in the film and figuratively represents what Coriolanus tries to escape but cannot avoid in his blind quest for impenetrable, self-sufficient masculinity, which is revealed as a destructive myth nurtured by the destructive mother culture of contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 'staging' of Shakespeare's 'shrew,' Katherina, on Facebook. The different individual responses to the character present in the social network are analysed and categorised to determine specific reception modes and highlight the role of the new medium in the popular reception of Shakespeare's plays. This paper aims not to describe the consequences of the use of Shakespeare for the Net (the 'ennobling' of Web 2.0, thanks to the authority of the 'Bard') but to interpret this new kind of literary afterlife online by explaining the features of these unorthodox reworkings of Shakespeare's 'shrew' and by studying them in view of critical literature and in relation to other forms of popular adaptation. The conclusions show that the contemporary networking of Katherina Minola by ordinary people on Facebook mostly follows the same predominantly conservative line as the reception by the cultural élite of meaning makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]