The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

Critical analyses of Australian adaptations, which celebrate adaptation as a specific creative (and critical) practice, are relatively rare, but ‘literature to screen’ discussions of various sorts have been a common feature of Australian scholarship since the 1980s. Increasingly diverse adaptation choices made by Australian film and television industries since then reflect shifting assumptions about the status of literary texts in relation to screen culture, changing practices and platforms for funding, consumption and marketing, as well as an increased demand for adaptation as a category in its own right. This chapter starts from the premise that studying Australian adaptations teaches us something about narrative journeys, national culture and Australian studies in an era of wider on-demand access to productions old and new through commercial streaming services. The chapter provides a snapshot of select Australian adaptations over the last thirty years, identifying tendencies which raise important questions about the impact of adaptation in relation to the ways contemporary Australian culture is valued and assessed. It concludes that studying Australian adaptations in the streaming era affords a nuanced and challenging perspective of changing Australian self-definition, and the multiple cultural and educational uses to which Australian adaptations are put.

The Public Morality Council (PMC), formed in 1899 by the Anglican Bishop of London, was between 1945 and 1965 the most powerful moral vigilante organisation in Britain. This chapter provides the first detailed study of its modus operandi, exploring its ecumenical governance, the role of Christian and Jewish leaders in diverting morality complaints to it for investigation and the manner of its surveillance (both overt and covert) of theatre plays, variety shows, films, radio and television programmes. The chapter explains the influential function of its long-time secretary, Methodist preacher George Tomlinson, the most important vigilante in the nation. It shows how its operations peaked in the 1950s, and reveals its sense of high influence with, on the one hand, regulators (such as the Lord Chamberlain, the British Board of Film Censors, the Home Office and London County Council) and with on the other hand industry bodies (such as theatre owners, film makers, importers and distributors). Its day-to-day operations and the intensity of its power in London and with government agencies are described.

In 4.6, Edgar, who pretends to be Poor Tom, guides his blind father Gloucester towards Dover. Gloucester has asked to be led to the top of a cliff so that he can end his days. But the cliff is only an illusion created verbally by Edgar who wants to protect his father’s life. This scene uses the power of the Elizabethan stage to become a moment of pure theatre, calling for a bare stage to retain all its ambiguities. The aim of this contribution is to show how cinema and television can sometimes maintain, and even foster, the scene’s paradoxes of a non-space. The chapter interrogates the possibilities offered by the screen to reflect the complex dramatic and metadramatic tensions in several film productions of King Lear that use Shakespeare’s playtext. These screen productions, emerging from different media and production contexts, all present different strategies to represent the ‘cliff’ scene. From Richard Eyre’s 1998 film, to films made for television and video release, to feature films (Peter Brook’s in 1971), they all attempt, through textual cuts, framing and/or editing, to circumvent the problem posed by a scene that seems to encapsulate the very essence of the bare Elizabethan stage.

Godard’s extraordinary, demanding and unremittingly brilliant film, largely mocked and reviled, too often ignored, increasingly inaccessible can act as a kind of metafilmic analogy for the activity in the rest of this volume: its status not as a film of King Lear but as a film about the fragmentary possibility of making – or perhaps more accurately, not making – a film of King Lear, creating for itself a remarkably complex status as critical commentary on the materiality of what it is itself in the process of (not) creating. The chapter offers some brief comments on its commenting as a way to begin to think back over, as well as forward and beyond, the accomplishments of this volume.

It might come as a surprise that the American Western adaptation of King Lear should be the product of European collaboration between British Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart and German director Uli Edel. This contribution tries to show how the adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into King of Texas (2002) is influenced by the problematic relation both to its source, to the chosen setting of the young Republic of Texas and to the cinematographic genre of the Western that the adaptation belongs to. Combining methodologies of source studies and of the theory of adaptation, the chapterexamines the numerous questions that the film raises on three fronts: that of authorship, as the genesis of the film reveals an authorial instability that makes the usual tension between source and target authors even more complex; that of the adaptation itself, namely the transposition of a seventeenth-century play text to a twenty-first-century film whose plot is set in a nineteenth-century Texas; and finally that of the interpretation that replaces or displaces the questioning of royalty and nobility and of the social issues related to birth with new issues of race that find themselves grafted onto the play.

The introductionoffers an overview of the various destinies of King Lear on screen, providing a reflection on the filmic objects themselves but also, through a review of the state of the art, on the ways they have been received by academia. The introductionjustifies the organization of the volume in four sections (Surviving Lear; Lear en Abyme; The Genres of Lear; Lear on the Loose), contextualizing the subsequent chapters and precisely pointing to their original contributions in the field. The concept of ‘dislocation’ is used to explore the ways in which the Lear films have worked on crisis, vagrancy, geographical displacement, migration (both in their following of the characters’ wanderings but also in their placing the play in other cultural environments) and on fragmentation (with dramatic motifs being dismantled and appropriated in ‘free’ adaptations). By revisiting ‘canonical’ versions,translations and free retellings in the Anglophone zones but also those beyond the US/UK axis, as well as ‘mirror’ metanarrative films, their genres and receptions through time, the introduction announces chapters that take part in the ceaseless investigation of what King Lear means and the way its ‘Learness’ continues to circulate and inform our contemporary cultures and especially to mirror the predicaments of today’s ‘unaccommodated’ men and women.

The chapter studies three remarkable films of King Lear created in England, Russia and Japan by three directors of international stature: Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa. The films are all set in the past and all are culturally specific. Because the Fool’s role is so central to the substance and structure of Shakespeare’s play, investigating – using a mixture of thick description, cultural appropriation and cinematic formalism – how these three directors reimaged the Fool to speak out from their particular cultures to a global audience provides insight into the ways each reinvents Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy for the screen.