ABSTRACT
Students often come to the Shakespeare classroom familiar with films like Romeo + Juliet, 10 Things I Hate About You, and She’s the Man. This chapter examines these popular Shakespearean film adaptations as well as Never Been Kissed , Get Over It!, and Carlo Carlei’s Romeo and Julietin terms of two crucial priorities of Girls’ Studies: education and sexual health. This lens highlights deep anxieties about teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections driving these films, and illustrates how the teen Shakespeare film “boom” was premised on the construction of girlhood as singular, provisional, and exclusionary. Shakespeare’s cultural authority operates in the films as a means of articulating and alleviating an older generation’s fears regarding the sexual activities of girls.
