Shakespeare's Cinema of Love: A Study in Genre and Influence

This engaging and stimulating book argues that Shakespeare's plays significantly influenced movie genres in the twentieth century, particularly in films concerning love in the classic Hollywood period and also in the hybrid genres of Bollywood cinema. Shakespeare's 'green world' has a close functional equivalent in 'tinseltown' and on 'the silver screen', as do disguise, cross-dressing, 'errors' and 'shrew taming'. Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet continues to be an enduring, powerful source for romantic tragedy and melodrama on screen. The nature of such generic influence has not gained recognition because it is not always easy to recognise or describe; it occurs not only in explicitly referenced Shakespearean film adaptations but more broadly, and the kind of indebtedness is elusive and difficult to pin down.

This book traces generic links between Shakespeare's comedies of love and screen genres such as romantic comedy, 'screwball' comedy and musicals, as well as clarifying the use of common conventions defining the genres. The 'Romeo-and-Juliet genre' in movies has a chapter to itself. An extra contribution lies in an enhanced understanding of the way literary and dramatic genres interpenetrate with the history of cinema through complex avenues of cultural transmission and adaptation. More generally, we can see where our modern conceptions of love have come from and how Shakespearean assumptions have been assimilated into the most popular mass media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Speculative, challenging, informative and entertaining, the book will be of interest to enthusiasts of Shakespeare, cinema and the representation of love in narratives.