ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's characters speak his lines in English in Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet, but this was not the director's original plan. World-wide, film directors who have appropriated Shakespeare's Hamlet and updated it to the twentieth century have frequently resorted to the fairly obvious device of substituting the corporate world for the court of Denmark. Shakespeare's comedies are far less frequently appropriated on screen than his tragedies. The rehearsing and staging of excerpts from the plays constitute a peculiar subcategory within the vast body of material represented by references to Shakespeare on screen. Not many producers are willing to finance a "faithful" adaptation of a Shakespearean play, one that preserves as much as possible of the original text and severely limits the freedom of the director to alter the plot by introducing new material. In 1959, Jiri Trnka, a Czech puppeteer, completed his stop-motion animation version of Shakespeare's comedy, Sen Noci Svatojanske, such as, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
