In comparison with Max Reinhardt's and William Dieterle's eclectic and darkly (if fitfully) erotic romance and the stylised presentation of history within a history of Laurence Olivier's Henry V, each of the three films of Romeo and Juliet discussed here seems to offer simpler and more direct access to an ‘authentic’ recreation of a historical period. Unlike the films of Renato Castellani (1954) and Franco Zeffirelli (1968), MGM's 1936 version does not address its own society directly or attempt to engage with any of the problems facing young people in its own day. All three, however, evoke a vision of Renaissance Italy, either as an ideal world in which tragedy occurs despite its refinement or as a sophisticated and graceful but flawed society which – in the Italian neo-realist mentality of the 1950s or the romantic ‘youth culture’ of the 1960s – can be held responsible for the death of the lovers. In their distinct ways, all the films endow the Shakespearean source with the cultural aura of the Italian Renaissance and at the same time reverse the process to dignify Verona with Shakespeare. They also embody different notions of what the cinema is and what it should achieve, though only Castellani's film has its origins in a radical or considered critique of the medium. Each film in its own way raises questions regarding the relative value of cinematic realism and stylisation, and the value of familiar, recognisable behaviour in the context of an evocation of a more or less ideal past and heightened language.