Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

W. Shakespeare on the stage and in the movies. 
The remarkable 1990s spate of films based on Shakespearean material
designed for mass consumption was not unprecedented. After the lackluster box of f ice 
performa nces of such big-budget studio era star vehicles a s the Warner Bros.’s 1935 A 
Midsummer Night’s Dream and MGM’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s challenging 
early modern idiom gained the repu-tation of being box office poison. As the classical studio 
system itself began to decline, however, experimental filmmaking became more common, and 
one such cinematic experiment proved to be a ten-year cycle of films begin-ning in the early 
1950s that at times disguised their origins through free adaptations of Shakespeare’s plots in 

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exploring the potentialities of such popular film genres as the western, the sci-fi film, and the 
musical. What distinguishes the 1990s resurgence is its reversal of the 1950s experiment, 
characterized by the creative employment of contemporary Hollywood film genres with proven 
mass appeal to translate Shakespeare’slanguage together with his plots from the stage to the 
screen. The pioneer in this approach was Kenneth Branagh, whose six Shakespeare films all 
gathered artistic energy by embracing Hollywood genres as divergent as the war film and the 
movie musical. In mingling Shakespeare’s high culture sta-tus with “low” Hollywood forms, 
Branagh was soon vigorously emulated Samuel Crowl by filmmakers as diverse as Baz 
Luhrmann, Richard Loncraine, Adrian Noble, and Michael Hoffman. 
Film genres, from the western to those associated with the noir, have played a powerful 
role in Shakespeare’s translation from stage to screen. Directors have seized upon film genres as 
a way of appropriat-ing Shakespeare for a mass audience. Such genres are attractive because 
they provide a familiar film grammar and rhetoric to material associated with an elite culture 
associated with the world of theater. Shakespeare is brought to movie audiences in genres they 
understand and to which they respond; unfamiliar material is welded to familiar forms and given 
a home in popular culture. Shakespeare began as a writer of box office hits who captivated a 
large, polyglot audience who flocked to the South Bank of the
Thames to be entertained on an Elizabethan afternoon. Working from the popular genres of his 
own time and place, he appealed to familiar conven-tions through which he communicated a 
unique vision to large assemblies. In the 1990s, Kenneth Branagh and his contemporaries 
rediscovered the power of popular genres—this time plucked from the world of film—to bring 
Shakespeare once again to a mass audience.