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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.