Here I will be interested in points of resistance and incompatibility between Shakespeare and film genres, in particular the case of Romeo and Juliet and the Western. One might expect that Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s most bankable play, would be an obvious candidate for adaptation into a Western, one of cinema’s most popular genres. In theory, it is certainly possible to bend the play and the genre in each other’s direction. In practice, however, Romeo and Juliet has seemed difficult to adapt as a Western. Why this is so tells us something about the limits of Shakespeare’s adaptability within film genres.

Of Shakespeare’s plays, none is so commonly adapted and appropriated in forms targeted towards youth audiences as Romeo and Juliet. This chapter considers three film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet through the lens of each film’s engagement with youth, and through their use of setting, props, performance and cinematography to affect, and thereby, emphasize the anguish of (and in) youth. It will be argued that each film’s means of affecting anguish requires a connection to youth as a privileged time of allowable indulgence. Anguish emerges as simultaneously pleasurable in its existential engagement, and painful in its tragic realism, and the effect is a privileging of anguish over the catharsis that conventionally concludes tragedy, leaving anguish and youth sustained indefinitely.

The structure of Shakespearean drama does not fit easily into the novel-like episodic sequence of the television series. It is therefore no wonder that none of the serialized adaptations of Romeo and Juliet seem to have survived the first season of their broadcast. Nonetheless, the two series examined here, Star-Crossed (created by Meredith Averill for CW, 2014) and Still Star-Crossed (created by Heather Mitchell for ABC, 2017) are worthy of critical attention for a number of reasons. They appear to take radically different paths in appropriating the famously ill-fated romance to contemporary television screens, both in terms of genre and setting, language and style, and also in the way they intend to open up the play’s dramatic structure into a potentially endless sequence of episodes.

This chapter offers an analysis of Private Romeo, director Alan Brown’s 2012 film production of the play. Set in a boys’ military high school, Private Romeo appropriates Romeo and Juliet to tell the story of two young men falling in love with one another. But, where Romeo and Juliet is a tale of tragedy, Private Romeo is very much a tale of male same-sex love’s triumph. Indeed, the happy ending of Private Romeo can be considered the film’s queerest aspect of all. Hence, as far as queer is understood in its most ‘simplistic’ sense as a challenge to all things heteronormative, Private Romeo shows how Romeo and Juliet can be thoroughly queered as opposed to merely incorporating ‘gay’ elements into otherwise ‘straight’ productions. At the same time, some critics might be troubled by Private Romeo’s representation of queerness because that queerness is wholly inflected by assimilationist capitulations. Its depiction of same-sex marriage as an ideal, inevitable outcome can be interpreted as an imposition of the kind of conformity that merely apes heteronormative conventions. Hence the need to both queer and unqueer Private Romeo.

This chapter will explore Zeffirelli’s film in the context of the 1960s by briefly looking back at his stage production and then forward to the film’s seminal influence on significant stage and film productions in the 1980s, 1990s and new millennium. These will include Ron Daniels’s spirited 1980 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film and Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s 2016 London staging with Richard Madden, Lily James and Derek Jacobi.

This chapter uses a transmedia approach to compare three international web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeu and Romeu (Brazil, 2016), Rome and Juliet (USA, 2017), and Romil and Jugal (India, 2018/2019), arguing that these shows use transmedia conventions to foreground how they re-write the Shakespearean text. All three shows included at least one protagonist with aspirations to succeed in the performing arts, and included lines from that play as set pieces. All three altered Shakespeare’s tragic ending to conclude with young people who feel supported within their sexuality and with previously hostile families reconciled. But the shows also added additional identity markers – whether of caste, language, social class, able-bodiedness, region or career aspirations – to the conflicts faced by their youthful protagonists, and some of these identity markers overshadowed the romantic plot to such an extent that none of these endings is 'happy' in a traditional or fairy-tale sense. I conclude that the transmedia characteristics of these shows make these adaptations ‘queer’.

This chapter analyses the film Ram-Leela using rasa theory, examining the dramatic ways in which the film evokes emotion – for example, through the use of colour, cinematography and music – and conveys meaning through direct and indirect references to Hindu mythological figures and narratives. Rasa theory, and its religious referents, are especially efficacious for approaching Ram-Leela as its title, which literally names the two main characters Ram (Romeo) and Leela (Juliet), is also the name of one of the most significant sacred celebrations in India’s Hindu calendar, Ramlila, an annual autumn festival during which plays are performed that present the life of the god Rama from his birth. Many scholars have discussed the key importance of the story of King Rama and his wife Sita in the narratives featured in Bollywood cinema. Ram-Leela plays with these conventions, participating vividly in the impassioned expression of emotion called for in rasa theory, performing far outside the boundaries of realism, whilst also departing in significant, telling ways from both the narrative of the Ramayana and that of Romeo and Juliet.

This chapter presents an academic re-assessment of Gnomeo & Juliet, acknowledging its status as a Shakespearean adaptation for young children whilst also moving beyond this superficial evaluation. Whilst Asbury has his version of Shakespeare’s ‘star-cross’d lovers’ survive and unite their rival factions – a choice which clearly makes the story more palatable for children – the film earns this happy ending. It does so both through its echoes of and engagement with Shakespearean comedy (particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and through its intertextuality with cinematic history, British culture and heritage and the Shakespearean canon. Asbury astutely makes his film appeal equally to three distinct audiences: young children, adults and Shakespeare aficionados – emulating the critically and commercially successful approach of Pixar Animation Studios in creating animated cinema which simultaneously connects authentically with multiple discrete demographics.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

The present chapter seeks to provide a selective reference guide to the screen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet up to 2021. This chapter is divided into three sections listing films, television adaptations as well as derivatives and citations. In each section, adaptations are classified in chronological order followed by an alphabetical list of relevant critical studies, and a system of cross-references has been designed for those entries making reference to two or more adaptations.

In this chapter, I focus on the Bengali-language Arshinagar (2015) directed by Aparna Sen, and the Hindi-language Dhadak (2018) written and directed by Shashank Khaitan. Both films are adaptations of Romeo and Juliet that place the play within the context of current socio-political issues of communalism and honour killings in India.

Before mainly focussing on Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s musical to examine relevant correspondences with Shakespeare’s play (such as the sustained rhythm of physical confrontations, or the poetic stasis of pure love, or the hectic reactions induced by loss and despair, or other emotional archetypes), this chapter will examine former screen adaptations in relation with either music or singing or dancing (including George Cukor’s 1936 version, with Agnes de Mille as a choreographer; André Cayatte’s 1949 Les Amants de Vérone, with Isabelle Aubret as a singer and Renato Castellani’s 1954 version, with Roman Vlad as a composer), so as to consider how and when emotional intensity is added to the play-text, and how West Side Story takes after and also increases such emotional intensity, as it wonderfully combines its screenplay with songs, symphonic orchestra, melodic and rhythmic variations, the dramatic device of leitmotifs and choreography.

This chapter explores the aesthetic, narrative and ideological stakes of the balcony scene in Candy Candy. Oscillating between an eminently traditional representation and a questioning of social and aesthetic conventions, the scene punctuates the narrative progression and is the object of a double repetition: whilst several episodes show the actors’ auditions and then their preparation before the premiere, the characters of Terry and Candy ceaselessly replay the balcony scene, which constitutes a structuring motif of the anime. It also becomes the locus where gender identities are shaped and troubled, but also where theatre and life unfold in a game of mirrors. Candy and Terry’s love story actually never goes beyond the phase of the balcony scene, a sequence that they keep repeating in endless variations that call for decoding.

This chapter analyses Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2009) and David Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet (2005) as screen works that appropriate Shakespeare not through the play-text of Romeo and Juliet but instead through its screen history of networked hypertexts. I argue that both films decentre Shakespeare as a source by appropriating Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), rather than the play-text, as a key hypotext. Both Levine and Lachapelle’s works can be discussed from various perspectives of adaptation studies. They are, for example, good examples of genre films – Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet, a six-minute film advertising H&M denim jeans, is a commercial advertisement in the form of a music video, whilst Warm Bodies is a romzomcom.

In Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 screen adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, water is a significant visual element: the lovers meet through the medium of a fish tank; they float in the Hollywood pool like cosmic bodies for the balcony scene; and in death their fluid union is re-visited. This chapter argues that Luhrmann draws from the language of the play-text to conflate celestial and aquatic space in innovative ways in his screen iconography, and that these metaphorical spaces that intersect love and death, are further enhanced through the paratexts of the accompanying film soundtrack, which has had its own successful afterlife trajectory (released through Capitol Records as two separate volumes, 1996 and 1997, and re-released in 2007 for the tenth anniversary).

I will explore how web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet challenge and revise the famous (and infamous) narrative of the star-crossed lovers. Participating in a new model for Shakespeare on screen, these series change the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, expanding the number and variety of the female characters, adapting Shakespeare to address issues of gender, sexuality and love in the digital age. The young women who create web-series such as Any Other Rosie, Any Other Vlog, Jules and Monty and Rome and Juliet shift the viewer’s focus away from Juliet and her complicated legacy.

Chapter 6 concentrates on the Iraq War (2003–11) and a resurging critical interest in just war theory, reflected also in the design and reception of Shakespearean productions. Global public protests preceded the coalition invasion, led by the United States and Britain, of Iraq in March 2003, and the arts, including theatre, provided platforms for voicing this opposition. Chapter 6 adopts just war theory as its organizing principle: the first part considers the justification of conflict (jus ad bellum) as it is critiqued in Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003); the second part examines the violation of just conduct during conflict (jus in bello) as explored within Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) and Sulayman Al Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (2007); the final part considers the end of conflict (jus post bellum), the relevance of the term ‘post-war’, and the erasure of Western wartime responsibility through an analysis of Monadhil Daood’s Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad (2012). This chapter argues that these productions, similar to contemporary Iraq War literature, are sceptical of conflict resolution and closure, but that other production and reception conditions shift their interpretative currency through structures of arts sponsorship and the political and cultural views brought to the theatre, all of which qualify the labelling of these productions as ‘anti-war’.

In this chapter I describe in some detail the earliest signs of puberty and emerging adulthood. But perhaps more pointedly, I describe how toward the end of my high school years at Dr. Hesabi, a certain degree of impatience and vague anxiety was settling in me, for which I had no explanation, or even full consciousness. I always thought I needed to be somewhere else than where I was. The more books I read and the more movies I watched, the farther I moved away from our neighborhood and my family and friends. I was with them and continued to be what I was. But a sudden distance had started to settle in me between where and what I was and where and what I thought I should be. The age of puberty was creeping up on me, and the distance between where and what I was and where and what I thought I should be had by now become palpable. I was always a stellar student and continued to do my assignments like a robot. But my agitations came from somewhere else. I was reading like termites eating through books and buildings, drawn to both Russian and American literature as much as to Persian. I had no taste or patience for European literature – French, English, or German. Russian literature was a major staple of the Iranian literary scene since the early twentieth century, but after World War II, American literature had become as compelling. Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck were being actively translated into Persian. These recollections become the premise of how I marked the last few years of my childhood and my sudden entry into adulthood.

This chapter considers the conceptual function of the echo as a metaphor for processes of intertextual dialogue and transformation. When thinking about the character that Shakespeare’s texts assume in Beckett’s works, instead of terms like adaptation, quotation or association, it is the notion of echo that aptly describes Beckett’s ways of engaging with his predecessor and materializing this engagement in the theatrical performance. This chapter regards the echo both as a principle of composition and an immanent figuration that is realized in the theatrical performance. Matter and materiality, stones and bones in Beckett’s works very often become a metonymy for the text itself in that they expose its opacity and resistance, and, at the same time, render it immortal as a kind of petrified lacuna. The chapter considers Beckett’s use of the materiality of stones and bones and reads Happy Days with Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline and Hamlet.

Crucially, the Prison Shakespeare field of research has become an exciting hub for discussion about a presumed intrinsic virtuosity of Shakespeare plays against the background of what might best be termed as “new character criticism” in Shakespeare studies as well as a battlefield between the supporters and the opponents of prisons as effective in achieving their stated objective of keeping society safe. This discussion has profoundly influenced and continues to influence the different trends of thought about the quality of the “transformation” Shakespeare carries out in prison. Can Shakespeare’s theatre be regarded as a salvific one when most of the characters in his plays are villains? The chapter focuses on Italian director and actor Armando Punzo’s pioneeristic practice of theatre in prison and his interpretation of “transformation” in an extra-moral sense.