ABSTRACT
Relocations in the past are emphatically distinguished from heritage Shakespeare in period costume and setting, from attempts to revive some kind of Elizabethan or pseudo-Italian Renaissance past, like Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare on screen. Relocations in the present (meaning the original viewer’s present, continually receding into the past) include Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet as well as Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. In Almereyda’s Hamlet, contemporary reality is overwhelmingly present, ubiquitous, with its massive display of glass and concrete in the film’s architecture. A case in point is ShakespeaRe-Told (2005), which the BBC’s own educational site refers to as a set of four “updatings” of Shakespeare. With the BBC series’ viewers and reviewers, one is inclined, at first sight anyway, to second those who speak of these four adaptations as modernisations, as modern English and modern dress versions of Shakespeare. The BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told series splendidly concentrates on the contemporary, geographical, social and cultural fabric of Britain.
