20 Movies Based on Shakespeare Plays

20 Movies Based on Shakespeare Plays 20 Movies Based on Shakespeare Plays 20 Movies Based on Shakespeare Plays By Maeve Maddox For me, April is Shakespeare’s month. Ill be writing several Shakespeare-related posts this month, starting with Shakespeare in the movies. According to tradition, William Shakespeare was born and died on Saint George’s Day, April 23. I find it poignant that one of his characters, Cassius, also dies on his birthday: This day I breathed first: time is come round, And where I did begin, there shall I end; Julius Caesar V, iii A popular academic pastime has beenand continues to bearguing that someone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays because the â€Å"real† Shakespeare was too uneducated and homebound to have come up with such language, geographical references, and classical allusions. It’s one of the oldest conspiracy theories in existence. The official Shakespeare canon includes 16 comedies, 10 histories, 12 tragedies, 154 sonnets, and five longer poems. Writers have been mining the Shakespearean canon for 420 years and show no signs of exhausting it. Movie makers have been at it for 111 years. The first known film to make use of a Shakespeare play was a British production made in 1899. Only a two-minute scene survives, showing Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree acting the death scene of King John from the play of the same name. Hollywood has produced at least 250 films based on the plays or on characters or plots from the plays. Of Hamlet alone, close to 100 movie and TV adaptations have been made since 1907. Not just English-speaking movie makers raid the canon. Ran, for example, is a Japanese movie that sets King Lear in feudal Japan and turns Lear’s daughters into sons. Here are some movie titles followed by the name of the Shakespeare play that inspired them: A Double Life (1947) Othello A Thousand Acres (1997) King Lear All Night Long (1962) Othello Catch My Soul (1974) Othello Forbidden Planet (1956) The Tempest King of Texas (2002) King Lear Kiss Me Kate (1948) The Taming of the Shrew Let the Devil Wear Black (1999) Hamlet Men of Respect (1991) Macbeth My Own Private Idaho (1991) Henry IV and Henry V plays Ran (1985) King Lear Romeo Must Die (2000) Romeo and Juliet Scotland, PA (2001) Macbeth She’s the Man (2006) Twelfth Night Strange Brew (1983) Hamlet The Boys from Syracuse (1940) Comedy of Errors Tower of London (1939) Richard III Were the World Mine (2008) A Midsummer’s Night Dream West Side Story (1961) Romeo and Juliet Yellow Sky (1943) The Tempest Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Fiction Writing category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:16 Substitutes for â€Å"Because† or â€Å"Because Of†7 Tips for Writing a Film ReviewForming the Comparative of One-syllable Adjectives