Shakespeare film adaptations

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 119 You don’t need a ticket to see the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s most recent production of Hamlet. You don’t even need to leave your house. All you need is a virtual reality device. Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 113 Olivia Hussey was just fifteen when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in Romeo and Juliet. When the film was released in October 1968, it catapulted Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the young actor playing Romeo, to global stardom. For…

With Herbert Beerbohm Tree as the king, the four-minute silent movie “King John” (1899) is often called “the first Shakespeare film,” as Michael Anderegg explains. Watch the surviving one-minute fragment and learn more about its theatrical star.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 89 There was a time when Orson Welles was one of America’s biggest celebrities.  In 1938, he made national headlines when the radio show he produced did a version of The War of the Worlds that was…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 65 When we think of Shakespeare in the American West, Hollywood immediately comes to mind, but this podcast episode also takes us back to the California Gold Rush and the Americans who brought Shakespeare with them when…

“The Bard Goes West” showcases two ways that Hollywood adapts Shakespeare: staying fairly true to the play, and using the plots but not his language.

Can you imagine Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra transposed to rural India, where Antony becomes a cock fighter and Cleopatra a medicine woman? Or what about a Hamlet in the Himalayas, with the title character seeking forgiveness and reconciliation instead of revenge? Mark…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 42 Shakespeare, of course, is not just performed in English, and his work is not just acted on stage. Foreign-language adaptations of Shakespeare on film have a tradition that goes back as long as talking pictures have…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 26 For most of us, “seeing Shakespeare” means experiencing live actors in a theater. But for more than 100 years, Shakespeare’s words, plots, settings and characters have also been brought to life on film.   Shakespeare on film…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 12 Though the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet is a perennial favorite, the world around the play has changed in the four centuries since it was first performed. Shifting attitudes about taboo love and marriage,…