Shakespeare and Film Genre in the Branagh Generation

The remarkable 1990s spate of films based on Shakespearean material designed for mass consumption was not unprecedented. After the lackluster box office performances of such big-budget studio era star vehicles as the Warner Bros.’s 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and MGM’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet , Shakespeare’s challenging early modern idiom gained the reputation of being box office poison. As the classical studio system itself began to decline, however, experimental filmmaking became more common, and one such cinematic experiment proved to be a ten-year cycle of films beginning in the early 1950s that at times disguised their origins through free adaptations of Shakespeare’s plots in exploring the potentialities of such popular film genres as the western, the sci-fi film, and the musical. What distinguishes the 1990s resurgence is its reversal of the 1950s experiment, characterized by the creative employment of contemporary Hollywood film genres with proven mass appeal to translate Shakespeare’s language together with his plots from the stage to the screen. The pioneer in this approach was Kenneth Branagh, whose six Shakespeare films all gathered artistic energy by embracing Hollywood genres as divergent as the war film and the movie musical. In mingling Shakespeare’s high culture status with “low” Hollywood forms, Branagh was soon vigorously emulated by filmmakers as diverse as Baz Luhrmann, Richard Loncraine, Adrian Noble, and Michael Hoffman. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.