Fifteen Eighty Four

The wait is over! We are very excited to announce the publication of the latest edited volume in the Cambridge University Press Shakespeare on Screen series, focusing on Romeo and Juliet! (Previous volumes in the series include Shakespeare on Screen: Othello; Shakespeare on Screen: The Tempest and Late Romances; and Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear.) This newest addition, with both a print version and an online resource with additional essays, provides a comprehensive exploration of Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy of young love. With chapters contributed by a range of international scholars, the volume considers how the play has been adapted in a wide variety of screen media, encompassing cinema, tv series and web formats. The volume will facilitate ongoing research, teaching and scholarship in the expanding field of Shakespeare on screen studies, drawing from contemporary adaptation theory and considering various hypertexts across the adaptation spectrum from canonical versions to appropriations, loose adaptations and citations.

The volume presents readers with a range of critical and theoretical lenses from which to approach the play on screen, encompassing: new perspectives on canonical adaptations, such as those of Franco Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann and Wise and Robbin’s West Side Story; explorations of the play in dialogue with new genre territories, such as the Western, animation, the zombie film, and Bollywood; adaptations in various media such as serial television and web-series; together with new directions in queer Romeo and Juliets. This diversity of intercultural and intermedial engagements, with consideration of adaptations beyond the Anglo-American sphere, and beyond mainstream cinema, points to the continuing relevance and endless reinterpretations of a play that is arguably one of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies.

The volume continues the series’ work to bring together both established scholars in the field together with new voices. Chapters in the volume have been contributed by: Samuel Crowl, Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Victoria Bladen, Pascale Drouet, Douglas M. Lanier, Benjamin Broadribb, Magdalena Cieślak, Melissa Croteau, Koel Chatterjee, Kinga Földvary, Sarah Hatchuel, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Anthony Guy Patricia, Sujata Iyengar, Jennifer Flaherty, Sylvaine Bataille, Florence Cabaret, and Gaëlle Ginestet. These are accompanied by a detailed introduction by the editors and, as with previous volumes in the series, an extensive film-bibliography compiled by José Ramón Diaz Fernandez, providing readers with a detailed overview of the state of the field. We hope to inspire and invite new critical dialogues and debates through this volume’s consideration of a range of aesthetic, ideological, critical, and theoretical issues at the heart of contemporary adaptation studies. We are very grateful to Cambridge University Press for their ongoing support of this vital series and their assistance in bringing the volume to publication. We would also like to express our gratitude to all of the wonderful scholars who have contributed to this volume and who together help to create the dynamic, collegial, international cohort working on Shakespeare on screen studies in the world today.