Introduction: "'To think o' th' teen that I have turned you to': The Scholarly Consideration of Teen Shakespeare Films."

Amid a violent gang war, set to contemporary music, that plagues a modern urban metropolis, two teenage lovers negotiate between their rebellious friends, relatives, and various failed authority figures in a doomed attempt to carve out a safe haven for their love. Such a description fits the film that scholars most often credit with initiating the boom in Shakespearean screen adaptations for the teen market: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996),¹ but it also matches another movie released decades earlier: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story (1961). This coincidence should remind us that, although an explosion of cinematic versions of Shakespeare aimed at youthful viewers occurred in the late 1990s, the teen Shakespeare phenomenon stretches back even before 1968, when Franco Zeffirelli proved that a Romeo and Juliet film starring real teenagers could draw thousands of young people willingly into movie theaters to view a rendition of a play that many of them had encountered for the first time most unwillingly in a high school classroom.

What did not occur until the late 1990s was a willingness on the part of Shakespeare critics to take teen Shakespeare adaptations seriously as an object of study. While Zeffirelli's film, which employed Shakespeare's language almost entirely, quickly achieved canonical status, other movies produced during the intervening years that made use of Shakespeare's storylines and characters (but not the poetry) attracted little critical attention. As Douglas Lanier writes,

Until fairly recently, most of the film adaptations of Shakespeare . . . have dwelt in the critical netherworld of "Shakespeareana," that dark space reserved for the illegitimate, fake, scandalous, or unfaithful versions of the Shakespearean script, the realm of the bastard, deformed, or wayward children of the Bard. Even a cursory glance over the labels often used for such films—"unfaithful adaptations," "spin-offs," "derivatives," "travesties," "revisions," and "Schlockspeare"—reveals how routinely and sometimes unconsciously they are clouded with pejorative connotations from the very start of discussion.

("On the Virtues" 132)

The merit of teen Shakespeare adaptations has come under attack most frequently based on the unavoidable "dumbing-down" of Shakespeare's plays that is said to occur when these intricate theatrical texts are translated into cinematic or televisual products meant to be consumed by young viewers ill-equipped to appreciate the thematic and linguistic complexity of the originals. As Carolyn Jess-Cooke points out, "there has been a tendency in recent films to update and strip down Shakespeare's language, replace the title, boil down the plot and ultimately use the Shakespeare play as a stamp of cultural legitimacy rather than a faithfully-rendered early-modern text" (88). Clearly, if faithfulness to Shakespeare's verbal ingenuity is the sole criterion by which such films are to be judged, they will inevitably be found wanting.

However, since the turn of the century, a growing number of Shakespeare scholars have come to appreciate Shakespearean teen films for their employment of other, non-linguistic forms of complexity. Lanier, for example, counters the charge that pop culture versions of Shakespeare are inherently simplistic by noting their potential to create complicated visual effects:

The value placed on verbal complexity, for example, is associated with reverence for Shakespeare's language. By its nature this value does not accord well with pop culture, where complexities are often conveyed non-verbally, through image or performance, particularly so with film and TV, which are certainly capable of a visual sophistication that rivals Shakespeare's semantic density.

(Shakespeare 99)

In the present volume, Gregory M. Colón Semenza takes up this line of reasoning in his article, "Teens, Shakespeare, and the Dumbing Down Cliché: The Case of The Animated Tales." Semenza observes the way in which critics of The Animated Tales (1992–94) have tended to focus attention on the "cuts" made in the process of rendering thirteen of Shakespeare's plays as twenty-six-minute films targeted at 10–15 year olds. Much of this scholarship, penned by literary critics trained at reading written texts, posits that less of Shakespeare's...