Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Orson Welles is an isolated figure, driven by his unrelenting passion: 'this heart within me burns'. After the precocious brilliance of Citizen Kane at the age of twenty-five, some critics have regarded his journey through the world as one of decline punctuated by failure. The compulsive nature of his vision has proved disconcerting and he has gathered an unseemly gaggle of detractors. The cinema industry with its priorities so firmly asserted by Hollywood’s premium upon financial success has tended to regard him as something of a wild and unpredictable grey-beard loon. Whilst there have been some critics who have sensitively praised Welles as the supreme auteur for his success in combining the roles of screenwriter, actor and director, they are possibly outnumbered by those who have an insatiable enthusiasm for fusing life and art. All too frequently the characters of Welles and Falstaff are yoked: 'In dramatising the simultaneous betrayal and self destruction of Falstaff, one can see Welles exploring a career of squandered talent and rejection.' Similarly, a jeering obsession with his weight was accompanied by accusations of sloth and contempt for his appearance in commercials. His self-exile from America may have been driven as much by pragmatism as pique, but the evidence that he was appreciated so much more in Europe, as 'a wise madman, a solitude surrounded by humanity', than at home, does contribute to the sense of his being a prophet without honour in his own land.

Compared with screen versions of the tragedies and histories, there have been few distinguished films based on the comedies. Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) may be the only film in this genre to be acclaimed for its pioneering cinematography, and Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) are the only three to have achieved popular (if not necessarily critical) success: the first for its use of actors (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) who were the co-supremes of their age, the second for cameo performances by photogenic stars, high spirits and picturesque settings, and the third for fine cinematography and superb performances from Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino. Shakespeare’s comedies create relationships with their theatre audiences for which very few directors have managed to find cinematic equivalents, and it is not surprising that some of the comedies (The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Two Gentlemen of Verona) have not been filmed in sound and in English for the cinema (although a couple have been the basis of adaptations).

In the year 2000, King Lear walked into the Namibian desert. In 2002, his Fool was murdered in Liverpool’s post-industrial docks. Meanwhile Richard III clawed his way to the top of East Los Angeles’s drugs gangs, the Macbeths took over a fast-food restaurant, Othello became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and Hamlet learned to trust her uncle. Shakespeare, that is, provided the narrative spine for the Dogme experimental film The King is Alive (dir. Kristian Levring, Denmark, 2002), the bleak British social allegory My Kingdom (dir. Don Boyd, UK, 2002), the Hollywood exploitation movie The Street King (dir. James Gavin Bedford, USA, 2002), the comedy Scotland PA (dir. Billy Morrissette, USA, 2001), Geoffrey Sax and Andrew Davies’s t.v. Othello (2001) exploring contemporary race and gender problems, and the teen thriller The Glass House (dir. Daniel Sackheim, USA, 2001). Diverse in form, technique, audience and achievement, these updatings represented a practice as old and intriguing as Shakespearean cinema itself. In 1911 the British trade press welcomed the Danish silent film Desdemona, where a jealous modern actor murders his wife on-stage during a performance of Othello. The producers were congratulated for understanding the public, for providing not 'unadulterated Shakespeare' but 'a good modern play with a plot not too deep but just deep enough for mental exercise without effort, while interest and excitement are sustained throughout'. There were 'countless hordes to whom the Bard’s plays do not appeal in the remotest degree', but making a film 'so to speak, around the tragedy of Othello' should suit and satisfy and perhaps improve this mass audience.

The release of Kenneth Branagh’s film of Henry V in 1989 sparked a revival of creative and commercial interest in Shakespeare as a source for films, which had been dormant since the box-office failure of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth in 1971. The surprising critical and financial success of Branagh’s Henry V has proved to be as influential in the history of Shakespeare on film as was the equally unanticipated success almost fifty years earlier of Laurence Olivier’s film of the play released in 1944. Olivier’s Henry V led to a steady stream of international Shakespeare films over the next two decades by such directors as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev, Franco Zeffirelli and Peter Brook. Branagh’s 1989 film helped to create the most intense explosion of English language Shakespeare films in the century. The 1990s saw the release of ten major Shakespeare films as well as several interesting Shakespearean offshoots, including Branagh’s own In the Bleak Midwinter. Branagh has now surpassed Olivier, Welles and Zeffirelli, to become the only director to have produced five Shakespeare films, though an examination of his films will reveal that Branagh has moulded his own cinematic style from elements present in the work of his distinguished predecessors. Popular film culture, represented at one extreme by James Cagney and at the other by Orson Welles, lies deep in the soul of Branagh’s creative sensibility. Branagh watchers have long recognised that he generates much of his artistic power - as an actor and director - from his unique stance as an outsider to mainstream English theatrical culture.

In fashioning their theatrical raw material into screenplays the makers of Shakespearean films have adopted strategies as diverse as the impulses behind their various projects. The wish to convey faithfully some of the perceived qualities of the chosen play has led to the adoption or rejection in varying degrees of the original’s dramatic structure, language and character relationships. The Introduction to this Companion has already suggested some ways in which commercial considerations might not only influence the way a Shakespeare film is promoted, but stipulate outlines to which characterisation and narrative may conform. The example, for better or worse, of what has already been sold successfully is reflected in the affinities with film genre that Harry Keyishian discusses below (chapter 4). As Geoffrey O'Brien observed in February 1997 - when another flurry of new Shakespeare films had just been released - 'singular opportunities have been created, not to recapitulate, but to invent'. In the study of film techniques a broad distinction can be made between films in which story-telling is effected by the montage of images, and which foreground the means by which this is done; and others which conceal the art which places dramatic scenes before the camera with an illusion of unobstructed and privileged access for the audience. Identified in particular with Hollywood before the 1960s, this latter style of 'continuity editing' came to be accepted as a norm of mainstream cinema.

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. 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. His next step was a production of Othello at the Pushkin Theatre: the play was performed during 1943-4 in Novosibirsk, where the Leningrad company had been evacuated during the war. In 1949 Kozintsev was offered the chance to stage King Lear at the famous Kamerny Teatr in Moscow, run by Alexandr Tairov, but this proposal coincided with the gloomy period of recurrent witchhunts in the USSR, and the Kamerny, with its innovative aesthetics, was de jure renamed but de facto closed down by the authorities. The most important event in the history of Kozintsev’s interpretations of Shakespeare was his Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre in 1954. The performance was one of the two first productions of the play on the Soviet stage in the post-Stalin years.

Videotapes or DVDs, whether they represent a Shakespeare film, a made-for-television production or a transfer of a theatrical version, have become the means by which most academics and students study a Shakespeare play. To anyone interested in performances of Hamlet for instance, the RSC shops and catalogues now offer, alongside the expected videos of Olivier's, Zeffirelli’s or Branagh’s films, videos of live stage performances, from Tony Richardson’s 1969 production of the play with Nicol Williamson, to John Gielgud’s 1964 New York mise-en-scène with Richard Burton. Until 2005 when the BBC Shakespeare series was finally re-issued on DVD, the catalogue of available videos of the play included few versions actually designed for the small screen, but the would-be viewer could always fall back on the half-hour-long cartoons provided by The Animated Tales, a very successful series of videos (complete with study guides), geared to the needs of teenagers confronted with a Shakespeare play on their exam syllabus. This series, which recalls Charles and Mary Lamb’s similar enterprise of popularisation of Shakespeare’s Tales for a public of readers, has so far been translated into thirty-seven languages. Even such a rapid survey is sufficient to indicate that Shakespeare multimedia is alive and well. Thanks largely to the vogue of new technologies and of video and DVD recordings, it is gradually taking over a good part of the Shakespeare industry, which now rests upon a very active educational market.

The celluloid fortunes of Shakespeare’s tragedies of love mirror their stage history. Most popular of the three tragedies, Romeo and Juliet has the richest stage history. Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy of love invites an exploration of social issues, survives transpositions of time and place, accommodates multicultural casting and, of course, dramatises the timeless conflict between generations. Although there are numerous important productions of Othello - and memorable portrayals of Othello and his adversary, the script presents greater challenges than does Romeo and Juliet. Contemporary audiences expect, for example, a black actor in the title role and find the racist and sexist language offensive. In the late twentieth century Shakespeare’s study of jealousy in The Winter’s Tale was staged more often than Othello. Least popular of the three tragedies of love, Antony and Cleopatra is also the most demanding to stage or film. Film directors, like their theatrical counterparts, face the challenge of translating English Renaissance play-scripts to a new medium and for a contemporary audience. A particular challenge of the tragedies of love is the limited number of crowd-pulling scenes of bliss and fulfilment, or as in the case of Shakespeare’s mature Othello and Desdemona and to a lesser extent with the adulterous Antony and Cleopatra, face-to-face confrontation and conflict. One focus of this study will be an examination of ways in which film directors open out the plays to provide scenes for the tragic lovers, who would otherwise spend little time with each other.

As we mark the opening of the second century of Shakespeare films, we might also mark out new directions for their study. Chief among them is an approach to Shakespeare films in the context of a rigorous historicising and politicising of media configurations, and a theoretical model capable of generating new approaches based upon them. The model suggested here would not be new to historians: to explore the effects upon Shakespearean actors and productions of critical junctures in media history, when the use of emerging, competing and dormant technologies reflects situations of crisis, defence, reciprocal influence, commercial interdependency and realignments among various branches of the entertainment industry. Such an approach, based on the assumption that no Shakespeare film can be studied apart from changes in other media, opens up research into productions and performances that were caught on the cusp of what we typically refer to as technological change. The phrase 'critical junctures' here replaces 'technological change' both to avoid implications of technological autonomy or determinism and to emphasise the reintroduction of technologies as a strategic and competitive practice, inseparable from specific political, economic and social interests. For the sake of brevity, these media configurations will be approached through the experiences of Shakespearean actors and directors as they succeeded or failed to adapt to them.

The romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) wittily puts the dramatist into the world of show business. Shakespeare’s relationship with the theatre manager, Henslowe - and through him with 'the money' - is the occasion for a multitude of jokes referring to the entertainment industry of late sixteenth-century London in terms of its equivalent four hundred years later. In one moment of crisis Henslowe is even on the point of giving birth to a great cliché. 'The show must …' he starts, and Shakespeare completes the phrase by urging him impatiently to 'Go on.' The moment passes, unnoticed by either of them. The tension between the artist and the marketplace has always been a good source of humour in drama and fiction and on film, and by situating a parody of it in Shakespeare’s time, the film probably makes it seem less harmful than it really is. The story is usually told in terms of the crassness of the producers and the crushed idealism of the 'creative' department. To quote Pauline Kael, 'There’s a natural war in Hollywood between the business men and the artists. It’s based on drives that may go deeper than politics or religion: on the need for status, and warring dreams.'

Reginald Scot’s 1584 treatise The Discovery of Witchcraft has a section entitled 'To cut off one’s head, and lay it in a platter, which the jugglers call the decollation of John the Baptist'. Scot explains how the Elizabethan playhouses worked this particular conjuring trick by means of a stage-device that looked like a pillory, and which showed one actor’s head as if it belonged to another body. Other contemporary documents describe many similar illusions, which seem to have been common on the stage as well as on street-corners. Opinion was divided about their value: Ben Jonson despised their vulgarity in the Induction to Bartholemew Fair, some denounced them as witchcraft, others felt that 'if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God’s holy name, then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural'. It would be a mistake therefore to assume that members of Shakespeare’s audience automatically suspected that such 'jugglers' were in league with the devil, even though several contemporary plays, from Doctor Faustus to Friar Bacon to Volpone exploit that idea - for fear, for laughs, for satire. The inherent theatricality of Shakespeare’s plays (disbelief only partially suspended) means there is room for lots of stage-tricks in the midst of the ordinary pretences of his theatre (costumes, stage-voices, boys as women). Both depend on illusion, but there is also a complex relationship, often a necessary conflict, between the representation of the mundane and the marvellous.

Olivier made his three Shakespeare films as the result of multiple promptings. Despite uneasiness about his own Orlando in the As You Like It film directed by Paul Czinner in 1936, he became interested in exploring the potential of the cinema for the presentation of Shakespeare’s plays and he managed never to abandon the theatricality implicit in the plays in the films he directed. He was conscious, too, of the different and wider cinema audience to which he would be bringing Shakespeare, and which in the 1940s still retained 'its slight preponderance of women, its heavy working class bias and its very strong “youth” bias'. In the case of his first film, Henry V, there was, of course, also the persuasive power of the wartime Ministry of Information, anxious to promote a film which would boost national morale. This chapter will approach the films in the first instance through the diverse opinions of critics, in particular those of their first reviewers. All Olivier’s films are remarkable for their constant oscillation between the cinematic and the theatrical, and their fusion of the two distinctly different dramatic languages. Not only does this arise from the unconscious instincts of Olivier the film maker, an indication of his claim to be an auteur, but there is, too, a conscious shifting between the elements of the two media.

Film historians have tended, naturally enough, to think of movies based on Shakespeare’s works as forming a distinct genre. Such films use his words, characters and plots; they are part of performance history of his plays; their rich language stands apart from standard Hollywood dialogue; and they were, at least back in the days of the studio system, perceived as 'prestige' works, distinct from the standard mass-market film product. It has often seemed, in Geoffrey O'Brien’s words, as if 'there are regular movies, and then there are Shakespeare movies'. Recent Shakespeare films have so openly and conspicuously embraced traditional film forms that the distinction has become quite obviously untenable. But even Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, who applaud this development, speak of a past era of 'direct' or 'straight Shakespeare', a model they associate with the efforts of Olivier and Welles (and whose last gasp they identify as Stuart Burge’s 1970 Julius Caesar), which has been succeeded by a period they celebrate, in which the playwright couples creatively with popular culture. In fact, however, it is doubtful there ever has been such a thing as 'direct' Shakespeare (even in his own day the same playtext might be produced in very different circumstances, outdoors, indoors, on the road and abroad); and, I would argue, even the films that Boose and Burt so designate cannot be understood outside of Hollywood genres.