Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium (review)

For almost twenty years, critics of Shakespeare film adaptations have drawn on marketing materials—posters, trailers, websites, VHS and DVD covers, screenplays, ad campaigns—yet analyzing the marketing of Shakespearean films has, understandably, taken a back seat to exploring the relationships between cinematic representations and Shakespearean texts. In Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood, Emma French remedies this omission; she uses a blend of post-Gramscian materialism and postmodernism to develop a thorough assessment of promotional materials and strategies. Her work insists on a complex symbiotic exchange between art and commerce that usefully qualifies recent arguments identifying a growing divide between high and low culture.¹ Acknowledging recurring concerns attendant on producing cinematic Shakespeare, French argues that “a complex hybrid of veneration and irreverence arises out of such anxiety in the marketing of Shakespeare, the balance within which becomes crucial for commercial success” (1).

French’s study focuses specifically on Hollywood marketing strategies, so that she necessarily engages a wide range of materials that promote the films in theatrical release and thereafter. French dissects these resources as they combine both to honor and to mock Shakespeare in pursuit of audience and profit. Although the book intermittently attributes the commercial success or failure of particular films to the effectiveness of their marketing, French is generally cautious about marketing strategies and their effect on financial returns. Her book concentrates on how this hybrid marketing of Shakespeare develops and what it reveals about Shakespeare’s place in popular culture.

The central chapters address an eclectic range of topics: each is demonstrably significant to the overall project, although occasionally they seem disconnected from each other. Chapter 2 offers an intriguing examination of posters and trailers, persuasively analyzed as “complex cultural artefacts with a range of unstable and variable meanings dependent on context, audience and the historical moment at which they appear” (26–27). French not only scrutinizes the artistic structures of these marketing tools but also usefully compares them when devised for different cultural settings, including American, British, and European markets. This chapter makes the point that marketing campaigns, while distinct from the artistic concerns in directing or designing Shakespearean adaptations, possess their own artistry and convey important information about Shakespeare’s complex position in contemporary culture. Following this helpful investigation, subsequent chapters treat an auteur, a film genre, and an individual film.

Chapter 3 identifies Kenneth Branagh’s contributions as a seminal influence on this hybrid marketing. Starting from the familiar argument that “without Branagh’s timely commercial / artistic intervention, the 1990s Shakespeare-on-film phenomenon would not have happened,” French suggests that “this was as much a marketing and commercial intervention as it was an artistic one” (64). She argues that, beginning with the 1989 Henry V, Branagh introduced new strategies for marketing Shakespeare through his adoption of heritage-film marketing ploys, his skillful use of celebrity casting, and, most important, his initiation of the combination of homage and playfulness that dominates current Shakespearean film marketing. This chapter explores well-known territory, already treated in detail by Samuel Crowl, Sarah Hatchuel, and others.² As a result, it does not advance her argument as effectively as the material that precedes and follows it.

In chapter 4, French examines teen adaptations as a Hollywood marketing phenomenon, focusing on William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, 10 Things I Hate About You, O, Never Been Kissed, and Get Over It. This chapter offers the most developed and convincing arguments linking promotional strategies, film genre, and audience engagement. French reads teen Shakespeare adaptations in the context of directors’ conception of the influence of promotion, marketers’ identification of the target audience, and the complexity of that intended audience and its responses. In this chapter, French makes excellent sense of a particularly difficult category of Shakespearean adaptation by engaging with the problems of the teen market and Shakespeare’s ambiguous relationship to that...