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Shakespeare on Film

Adaptation

As You Like ItSome of the very first experiments in filmmaking involved plays by Shakespeare, and his works have proved consistently popular with filmmakers throughout a century of cinema. Over 200 film versions of Shakespeare’s plays had been made by 1914 – mainly in Britain, France and America – with Shakespeare remaining a consistently popular choice for filmmakers. The plays are clearly rich texts for filmmakers, being repeatedly adapted for film with versions encompassing both mainstream and art house genres.

The plays were never intended to be read by a wide audience – they were written as texts for performance in a theatre: the advent of film introduced an entirely new way of presenting the plays to new audiences, with film as a distinct form in its own right and with its own language.