Shakespeare and Popcorn

Two of the films, Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet, retain Shakespeare's original dialogue. While portrayed as 21st century college students, businessmen and gang-bangers, the characters spend the entirety of the films performing their lines as Shakespeare had originally written them (save for occasions where lines or scenes are simply left out, such as in the alterations to Hamlet where Hamlet does not discover his father's ghost while with Horatio and the others--he is instead told of the ghost by them and left to meet the spirit alone in his quarters), which, surprisingly, comes off quite successfully in most instances.

Where this proves least successful is where, in Romeo & Juliet, the dialogue adds a note of comedy and/or absurdity not suitable to the original work. In Act 1, Scene 1, the exchange between Abraham and Samson, joined by Gregory, Benvolio and Tybalt and leading to the brawl between them is much more serious in the original work. Understanding the cultural context of the time, and how offensive the biting of one's thumb is to an Italian, the scene gravely sets up the conflict between the houses Capulet and Montague. In the film, however, Samson's pink hair, Abraham's Latin ethnicity and Verona's obvious placement in Los Angeles, as opposed to Italy, causes the cultural context to be lost and makes the verbal exchange--at a gas station--almost absurd.

An equal difficulty for both of these films, in keeping Shakespeare's dialogue, is the business of sword fighting. In contemporary America, people don't walk around carrying swords and dueling with each other whenever they get the urge. Both movies solve this by replacing swords and daggers with various modern firearms. Again, Hamlet pulls this off most successfully.

In Hamlet, the director and/or screenwriter simply left out most all lines directly addressing the term "dagger" or "sword" when such an item was physically present and obviously a gun. The one place where the film abandons this is... [continues]

Read full essay