Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium

Breaking from traditional critiques of Shakespeare films based on either the aesthetics of the films or on a comparison between the film and source text, this new analysis of recent Shakespeare movies seeks to explain what makes such films commercial successes. Focusing particularly on three sub-genres—the teen Shakespeare film, the hybrid Shakespeare film, and the “faithful” adaptation—the author argues that the commercial success of the most popular films stems from blurring the line between the “traditional Shakespeare” and a more modern interpretation of the texts.