The first section groups essays concerned broadly with questions about media imperialism. Marguerite Hailey Rippy does a fine job in reading film versions of Othello (such as A Double Life, dir. George Cukor, 1947) and spin-offs from TV series (such as a 1983 episode of Cheers) as conjurations of an American cultural obsession with taboo images. She suggests ways in which the white American subject has been historically preoccupied with the black body as a site of fear, desire, and displacement, concluding that “performative complexity” in film is invariably traded for “stereotypical brutality”(26). The focus shifts in Lisa Hopkins’s piece, since she concentrates on Richard III (dir. Richard Loncraine, 1995) as an extended commentary on the Windsor royal family. Yet, Hopkins argues, it is enabled to adjudicate between both British and US styles of flimmaking and to summon a variety of culture-specific audience expectations. A felicitous movement ensues, with the next essay, in which Alfredo Michel Modenessi gives a dazzling reading of the postmodern markers in William Shakespeare’s “Romeo + Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996) in terms of its national and ethnic features, its Latin American setting, and its self-conscious mediation of US and Mexican border-crossings. Modenessi elegantly unravels Luhrmann’s method by way of pinpointing the film’s “purely spectacular” rehearsal of styles and ultimate avoidance of meaningful “ideological” engagement (73, 77).

The book’s second section exchanges the national for the individual, looking at the multiple filaments binding eroticism, commercialization, and marriage. Laurie Osborne voices the surprising but also persuasive proposal that the endemic discontinuities of Shakespeare films are the paradoxical preconditions for the formulation of characterological coherence. Her chief example is Twelfth Night (dir. Trevor Nunn, 1996), where the highs and lows of individual experience are indicated via cross-cutting and short takes, changes in tone, and dispersals of moods and moments. Complementary to Osborne’s chapter is Samuel Crowl’s illuminating exploration of Much Ado about Nothing (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1993), the uniqueness of which is established through intertextual reference and technically-anchored ‘filmic analysis. A typically refreshing observation is that the film’s use of the “screwball tradition” (112) allows it to retain the gendered complexities of its cinematic models. Extending the comedy/courtship connection, Courtney Lehmann turns to Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998), seeing the film as mediating the body of Shakespeare in order to advance a disquisition on the death of the author. The essay represents a notably polished and bravura performance.

The volume’s third section addresses the reception of Shakespeare in both cinema and classroom. An articulate interpretation by Douglas Larder links Swan Song(1992), A Midwinter Tale (1995), and Hamlet (1996), all by Kenneth Branagh as examples of this director’s absorption in ideals of family and communitas. The arrangement allows Lanier to contend that popular constructions of Shakespeare are invariably in conflict both with anxieties about the declining power of theater and with the pressures of mass modernity. Theatrical edifices give way to educational institutions in the two succeeding chapters. One, by Elizabeth A. Deitchman, is a clearly enunciated assessment of Shakespeare’s capacity for “making meaning’ (184) as this is embodied in Hamlet (dir, Franco Zeffirelli, 1991), The Last Action Hero (dir. John McTiernan, 1993), and Renaissance Man (dir. Penny Marshall, 1994), films that invite comparison because of their shared participation in American notions of democracy. The other, by Annalisa Castaldo, makes the arresting point that editorial issues—including textual variation and multiple authorship—can be pedagogically exemplified with reference to the hybrid origins and postmodern dimensions of Shakespeare films, despite the dramatist’s “aura of inevitability” and “monolithic stability” (187). Concluding the collection is Richard Burt’s animated and knowledgeable appraisal of the “teensploi” films from the late 1990s which deploy Shakespeare to justify a repressive attitude toward female intelligence and an unhelpful division of women into binary categories. Both the accompanying “dumbing down” (205) of Shakespeare and the promotion of his genius, which Burt describes as central contradictory procedures, emerge from the particular species of conservative feminism that his essay so expertly identifies.