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.

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).

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Othello, love collides with violent conflict, creating a range of challenges and opportunities for filmmakers and their visions of the plays. Key to the plays are questions of identity, and the borders between Shakespeare’s lovers have been interpreted in the twenty-first century in profoundly political ways, resonating with inter-racial, caste and ethnic conflict, honour killings, domestic violence and discourses of sexual politics and gender identity. This chapter surveys the range of Romeo and Juliet and Othello on screen, considering some of the lesser-known and recent adaptations alongside the landmark films. While not exhaustive, it illustrates the scope and range of possibilities the plays have offered to filmmakers from various cultures.

The Australian film The Eye of the Storm (2011), directed by Fred Schepisi, enters into complex intertextual dialogues with both the novel that it adapts, Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm (1973), and Shakespeare’s King Lear. This chapter explores the ‘Learness’ of Schepisi’s film, and the oscillating effect of both parallels and key departures. With a female Lear as the central protagonist, the film is part of an intriguing history of adaptations or appropriations that have explored gender in Lear. The Eye of the Storm also raises questions of postcoloniality and national identity. Furthermore, the film explores ideas of the harsh Australian landscape, the narrative culminating in a tropical storm that relocates the heath of Lear to northern Queensland. The film invites a range of questions on what appropriating Lear can mean in contemporary film, and how it can articulate suffering, complex relationships and the human condition. In this process, the medium of film itself plays a key role and the chapter considers the ways in which the medium itself, and filmic choices such as screen composition, camera angles, point of view and mise-en-scène, facilitate our engagement with the key characters, the concept of ‘Learness’ and the theme of human suffering.