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.

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.

Kenneth Branagh acted in and directed more Shakespeare plays than any other filmmaker before him; yet he also defied what was expected from a Shakespearean actor-director. First, he used the codes of Hollywood cinema to make the plays entertaining and available to a younger, more popular audience. Second, he not only adapted Shakespeare but also ventured into directing Hollywood blockbusters, as well as more intimate projects on stage and screen, injecting Shakespearean echoes into a new range of productions. Through his taste for popular, mainstream movies, his bold self-made trajectory that carried him repeatedly in and out of the ‘Establishment’, Branagh has contributed to redefining relations between Shakespeare and Hollywood, between the art house and the multiplex, and between theatre and cinema. Through his ceaselessly renewed ‘vaulting ambition’ of bringing Shakespeare to the people, Branagh has constructed over the years the ideologically complex persona of a working-class Shakespearean entrepreneur.

In 4.6, Edgar, who pretends to be Poor Tom, guides his blind father Gloucester towards Dover. Gloucester has asked to be led to the top of a cliff so that he can end his days. But the cliff is only an illusion created verbally by Edgar who wants to protect his father’s life. This scene uses the power of the Elizabethan stage to become a moment of pure theatre, calling for a bare stage to retain all its ambiguities. The aim of this contribution is to show how cinema and television can sometimes maintain, and even foster, the scene’s paradoxes of a non-space. The chapter interrogates the possibilities offered by the screen to reflect the complex dramatic and metadramatic tensions in several film productions of King Lear that use Shakespeare’s playtext. These screen productions, emerging from different media and production contexts, all present different strategies to represent the ‘cliff’ scene. From Richard Eyre’s 1998 film, to films made for television and video release, to feature films (Peter Brook’s in 1971), they all attempt, through textual cuts, framing and/or editing, to circumvent the problem posed by a scene that seems to encapsulate the very essence of the bare Elizabethan stage.