I want to begin with an anecdote. When I proposed writing about Leonardo DiCaprio – and titling my essay, ‘Was This The Face that Launched a Thousand Clips’ – one colleague, taking me somewhat seriously, mentioned the best-selling Leo books, and another sent me a Hong Kong action comic in which ‘Leon’ single-handedly foils an evil gang and gets the girl. A third, addressing my penchant for reading Shakespearian and popular bodies, glanced at how the Shakespeare myth insists on the physical spectre of the Bard with the Forehead and at the delicious possibility that someone like DiCaprio might have played Cleopatra. A fourth was decidedly visceral: ‘The most watery Romeo in film history? His acting is appalling, his affect minimal, and his intelligence – well, why go on? I can understand why teenage girls fall all over themselves for him. But you? Tell me it isn't so’! Such concerns about my ‘low’ taste and possible adolescent regression point to the lack of critical distance and loss of rational control associated with an intense engagement with the popular; but then, such over-involvement and over-identification, traits traditionally ascribed to women, do mark the popular (and especially its emphasis on the body) as a feminine realm.

These fraught notions trope what I take to be the competing, contradictory horizons of reception surrounding Baz Luhrmann's 1996 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. How, I want to ask, does that film resonate within both ‘Shakespeare-culture’ and global popular culture?