The crucial difference is that where Romeo +& Juliet was a box-office hit, Hamlet ended up doing the backwaters of the arthouse circuit. Both films also star a popular twentysomething actor – Leonardo Di Caprio in Romeo +& Juliet, Ethan Hawke here. Like most of these modernised versions, you end up applauding the audacity of the modernisation – here Denmark is a corporation and its political in-squabblings are now the fight for the title of CEO Elsinore is now a hotel where Ophelia suicides in the lobby fountain and Shakespeare’s speeches are delivered by fax and cellphone, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s missive to the King of England is delivered on floppy disk. (l to r) Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) meets the ghost of his father (Sam Shepard) Like Luhrman, Michael Almereyda transplants Shakespeare into the modern world – although in both cases this is more like an alternate contemporary world where people happen to speak in Elizabethan prose. The most popular of these reinventions was Baz Luhrman’s Romeo +& Juliet (1996), which has much in common with Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet here. The year prior to this had also seen Hamlet modernised with Let the Devil Wear Black (1999).
The BBC even produced a tv series, ShakespeaRe-Told (2005), which redid a number of Shakespeare plays in modern setting and dialogue. Or else Peter Greenaway’s wholly eccentric take on The Tempest in Prospero’s Books (1991) as a kind of MTV-styled freewheeling mardi gras, and Branagh conducting Love’s Labor Lost as a musical. Not just minor period relocations like Branagh updating his Hamlet to a post-Napoleonic Denmark or A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) being moved from Ancient Greece to 19th Century Tuscany, but radical reinventions like placing The Taming of the Shrew in a high-school setting in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), retelling Othello on a high school basketball court in O (2000), retelling Romeo and Juliet with garden gnomes in Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), or Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), easily one of the best of the non-Branagh adaptations, which placed Titus Andronicus in an alternate world of sorts where Roman centurions rode motorcycles and played videogames. The most radical among these were those that restlessly played with the story’s setting. A host of Shakespeare adaptations followed suit.
In so doing, Branagh opened up a new cinematic Shakespeare – one that was inherently visual in nature, as opposed to merely being filmed stageplays one that made bold and exuberant use of the full screen canvas and one that cast name actors, often in parts that considerably challenged typecasting, in order to draw wider audiences in. The way was led by Kenneth Branagh with his bold, dynamic versions of Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996) and Love’s Labor Lost (2000). The 1990s/early 00s saw a revitalisation, almost a hunger, for Shakespeare adaptations.