Franco Zeffirelli's contribution to the Shakespeare on screen canon continues to receive considerable commentary even though his last film of Shakespeare, Hamlet, was made as long ago as 1990. Zeffirelli has made three films of Shakespeare's plays: The Taming of the Shrew (1966), Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Hamlet (1990). While each film clearly appropriates a particular cultural moment, they are stylistically similar in so far as they share an unmistakable operatic conception; it has been repeatedly observed that they make as much use of colour, movement and music as they do of Shakespeare's lines. Opera, for Zeffirelli, is the complete form: it combines dance, drama, poetry, music and the visual arts. His films of Shakespeare, similarly, unashamedly aim to appeal to all the senses. Their appeal is largely sensual rather than cerebral and in this the director achieves his ambition, in defiance of his critics, to make Shakespeare, as he says, even more popular.

In many respects, Zeffirelli’s screen interpretations of Shakespeare owe as much to travelogues as they do to the playtexts. Zeffirelli has no qualms about imposing his own tastes on to Shakespeare’s texts. Shakespeare is, for Zeffirelli, ‘a frustrated traveller’ with a desire to take his audience on a sight-seeing tour of Italy; and his union of Shakespeare with Italian Renaissance culture earned him the nickname, ‘Shakespirelli’. This ‘Italianisation’ of Shakespeare is precisely what happens in the films of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, where the attention to visual detail often detracts from the spoken word.