Book contents
- Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet
- Series page
- Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction – From Canon to Queer: Romeo and Juliet on Screen
- Part I Revisiting the Canon
- Chapter 2 The Italian Job: Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the 1960s
- Chapter 3 The Anguish of Youth in Film Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet
- Chapter 4 Aquatic and Celestial Space in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
- Chapter 5 Coming to Grips with Shakespeare’s Tragedy in a Film Musical: Re-assessing Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961)
- Part II Extending Genre
- Part III Serial and Queer Romeo and Juliets
- Index
- References
Chapter 4 - Aquatic and Celestial Space in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
from Part I - Revisiting the Canon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2023
Book contents
- Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet
- Series page
- Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction – From Canon to Queer: Romeo and Juliet on Screen
- Part I Revisiting the Canon
- Chapter 2 The Italian Job: Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the 1960s
- Chapter 3 The Anguish of Youth in Film Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet
- Chapter 4 Aquatic and Celestial Space in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
- Chapter 5 Coming to Grips with Shakespeare’s Tragedy in a Film Musical: Re-assessing Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961)
- Part II Extending Genre
- Part III Serial and Queer Romeo and Juliets
- Index
- References
Summary
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).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet , pp. 62 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
References
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