1Cambridge University Press has issued a new volume of the series Shakespeare on Screen, in which the editors (Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin) have decided to turn the spotlight on Romeo and Juliet. To enhance the attractiveness of Shakespeare’s tragedy, a superb image from Franco Zeffirelli’s film featuring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, framed by a slightly darker oblique zone on the right and a green strip on the left, has been chosen for the book cover. The 274-page volume contains 15 articles, interspersed with a series of black-and-white pictures. It ends with a selective reference guide to the screen adaptations of the play up to 2021, followed by a very well-designed index.

2Chapter I is an introductory stave for three voices showing that Shakespeare’s hypotext may be regarded as a source code (4) generating traditions for all sorts of screens, reappropriated as it is by new generations of creators who add “new intertexts to the text of the play” (13). It is clear and efficient, yet one may feel that the editors sometimes risk lifting the veil a bit too high and taking some of the wind from the sails of the articles to come. This introduction accounts for the wealth of adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedy now available, and it makes it clear that the word “screen” in the title could relevantly be converted to plural form.

3It comes across as extremely alarming that the story of lovers torn apart by opposed, trigger-happy clans should be increasingly relevant to our troubled contemporary world. Filmmakers, we understand, stand out as whistle-blowers.

4The last phase in the introduction is a challenging comparison between Romeo and David Lynch’s John Merrick, the main character in The Elephant Man. This audacious parallel between a beautiful young lover and a monster proves quite successful, and the playful suggestion that Lynch’s film should have been called Romeo (26) ends up sounding right, efficiently propelling the readers into the following articles. Unfortunately, this mind-teasing thread is left dangling.

5The first four articles propose to “revisit the canon” (31). The first one, titled “The Italian Job: Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the 1960’s”, places Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet back in the context of a period that, Samuel Crowl comments, “began in so much promise and ended in so much blood” (44). The author is so knowledgeable that one may feel he was there, peeping at the actors through a hole in the Cinecittà studios, and overhearing the secret conversations between the Italian filmmaker and Laurence Olivier. His article draws a tragic arc (46) spreading from the early sixties to the early seventies and coming full circle by stretching forward up to 2019 with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

6Delilah Bermudez Brataas informs the reader straightaway that Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet was the first film adaptation to use teenage actors. As her focus is on the representation of the “anguish of youth” (48), she considers both the age of the comedians and that of the various films’ addressees. The author contends that the secret to a successful adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Verona lies in the efficient rendition of this affliction. Fellowes’s film adaptation, she argues, failed where Zeffirelli and Luhrmann were successful insofar as he could not render the “intimacy and playfulness” (56) that are sure to move audiences. The displacement of focus from loss of youth to ecstatic acceptance precludes the spectators’ emotional involvement in their tragic fate.

7Victoria Bladen’s article (“Aquatic and Celestial Space in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)”) shifts the focus towards “the film’s cinematic visioning of the play’s celestial and aquatic metaphors” (62), that is, its capacity to turn Shakespeare’s poetry into a visual experience complemented by the film’s soundtrack. In a style that delightfully tends towards the poetic vein, the author accounts for the powerful, symbolical use of the “celestial sea” (75) in Luhrmann’s post-modernist adaptation. Both a promise of escape and a threat of dissolution, water is also a technical device that enables the Australian director to refashion eyesight and to endow it with extraordinary resilience.

8Pascale Drouet follows the winding backstreets that lead from Shakespeare’s early modern Verona to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s trash-heaped streets in New York City. “Coming to Grips with Shakespeare’s Tragedy in a Film Musical: Re-assessing Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961)” explains how the early modern tragedy could successfully be made into a film musical, which implies a double transformation made easier by, among other aspects, a subtle use of colours. Pascale Drouet demonstrates that the success of West Side Story owes much to previous films (especially Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet) that paved the way for it and helped preserve the “aesthetic filiation” (87). Its common features with Shakespeare’s play obviously outnumber the discrepancies.

9The second part of this volume, “Extending genre”, shows how resilient the story of the Verona lovers can be. Yet, in “Romeo and Juliet and the Western”, Douglas M. Lanier suggests that some limits may be assigned to this flexibility. The two major stumbling blocks are the incompatibility of the hypermasculine cowboy figure with Romeo–he “more often sacrifices love for heroic male solitude” (98)–and the conventional positive ending. The author demonstrates that Romeo and Juliet’s presence is “intermittent” in Westerns (107) and that “points of resistance or incongruence” (108) are involved. His conclusion is that “not every Shakespeare can find a welcome home with every film genre” (108).

10In “Pixarfication, Comedy and Earning the Happy Ending in Gnomeo & Juliet”, Benjamin Broadribb directs our attention to the secret lives of sentient garden gnomes who wish—Gnomeo at least—to rewrite or possibly to “Disneyfy” (112)—the ending of Shakespeare’s play. But this computer-animated film offers much more than mere Disneyfication of Romeo and Juliet, Broadribb contends. Like Duke Orsino’s doublet, it is made of “changeable taffeta” (Twelfth Night, II.4.74), and it sure-footedly touches adults’ hearts and minds, including those of cineliterate viewers and Elizabethan scholars (115). Not only does Gnomeo and Juliet play handy-dandy with two Shakespearean hypotexts–Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream–but it also repeatedly nods to the contemporary rom(antic)-com(edy) genre.

12Melissa Croteau demonstrates that the Shakespearean hypotext takes on a ghostly appearance in Bollywood adaptations too. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ram-Leela is no exception to the Indian rule that ranks cinema above literature (142). The author introduces her Western readers to the rasa theory that holds sway over Indian cinema, “eliciting powerful emotion from the audience” (144).

13Koel Chatterjee’s analysis of the Bengali language Arshinagar (Aparna Sen, 2015) and the Hindi language Dhadak (Shashank Khaitan, 2018) focuses on the way tragic endings made their way into what used to be the “Indian narrative tradition of ‘averted tragedies’” (159). In Arshinagar, Aparna Sen felt the need to use Romeo and Juliet as a means to curb the rise of Islamophobia in India. As it “explores the issues of caste honour killings in a brutally stark manner” (165), Dhadak trades on its cathartic effect.

14Part three of this volume is titled “Serial and Queer Romeo and Juliet.” In the first article about serial television, Kinga Földváry analyses the cause/s of the commercial failure of two recent releases, Star-Crossed and Still Star-Crossed, titles that prove deceptively similar insofar as they echo Shakespeare’s play from very distant places. The author calls upon Michel de Certeau’s concept of “textual poaching” to shed light on these specific connections (181) and suggests that the failure can be ascribed to the absence of truly tragic endings.

15Then Sarah Hatchuel and Ronan Ludot-Vlasak take us to Japan with their analysis of the balcony scene in the manga-based Japanese anime Candy Candy that, they argue, acts as “a distorting mirror and an echo chamber” (187). Treated in a kaleidoscopic way, the tragedy operates as a crucible for “transitory forms of gender reversal” (195).

16At the beginning of “The (un)queering of Romeo and Juliet on film,” Anthony Guy Patricia postulates that “it is when things (…) are at their most straight, their most heterosexual, that queer criticism (…) has the most potential for truly affective transformation” (199). The first real break from straight cinematic tradition was Alan Brown’s Private Romeo as adaptation gave way to appropriation (203). Brown even “quadruple queers” Romeo and Juliet, the author argues, not to mention the final, “queerest” (208) departure from the traditional tragic ending. This article interestingly ends with the conundrum of the “unqueering” effect of same-sex marriage.

17The last articles in this volume involve recent technological and ontological evolutions. Society has broken into a rapid gallop, and critics need to fashion new tools if they do not want to find themselves “limp[ing] after [it] in base imitation” (Richard II, 2.3). Such terms as vlog, queer time, prosumer, homonormative, OTT, DADT—used and defined by the authors—are now indispensable. Sujata Iyengar invites us to consider three web-series adaptations from the USA, Brazil and India that share common features and perpetuate conventions they are fond of transforming, thus activating “queer temporality” (216). The author’s postulate is that the streaming web-shows “disrupt both hetero- and homonormativity through their formal conventions” (218). The fifteenth and last article in this volume is about five Romeo and Juliet YouTube series introduced as “critical readings of the play by young women who re-write the characters to reflect their own values and lived experiences” (231). The creators use Shakespeare’s story to “engage more broadly,” Jennifer Flaherty contends, “with the concept of ‘Juliet’ and contemporary anxieties about unhealthy narratives of young women” (234). A shock may come from learning that romantic love stories are no longer marketable on the grounds that, as the Nurse says in Romeo and Juliet, “there are other things [than love] in life” (237).

18This volume makes it quite clear that criticism has not just turned the table on conventions. It has pushed the table to one side of the room so that a new dance can be performed by all. The study of the evolutions in cinematic representations of Romeo and Juliet testifies to the constant, universal need for this story of star-crossed lovers and to the capacity of filmmakers to appropriate and reinvent the canon. Shakespeare’s play-text proves a fecund source that can assume ever new shapes and fit into any culture all over the world. The latest vlogs even allow for the recent phenomenon of task-switching or pace-speeding. Cinematic productions seem to work the way one remembers a highly emotional dream: distortions occur and efforts to recall precise scenes are made, sometimes fixing them into tableaux or stretching their shapes into odd, new ones. This enlightening book makes it quite clear that Romeo and Juliet still haunts our imaginations and that the silhouettes of the young lovers—be they faithful, stretched, reversed, scorned or worshipped—remain forever our contemporaries.