More than two centuries ago Voltaire made a telling remark: 'All the arts are brothers, each one is a light to the other.' The career of Grigori Kozintsev (1905-73) as an interpreter of Shakespeare in Russian theatre, cinema and literary criticism is a striking illustration of this maxim.

Kozintsev’s road to his two Shakespeare films was long and not very easy. It passed through three channels, the first of which was the theatre – the director’s earliest passion. As early as 1923 the young Kozintsev was planning to perform Hamlet as a pantomime in the ‘Factory of the Eccentric Actor’ (FEKS), the experimental group he created with Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich, but this plan was not realised.1 Seventeen years later, already a well-known film director, he returned to Shakespeare on stage. In 1940 he wanted to perform Henry IV at one of the Leningrad theatres, but this, too, did not take place. It was a year later, in 1941, that Kozintsev achieved his first Shakespearean production, King Lear, at the Bolshoi Dramaticheski Teatr in Leningrad.