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plays a year, and whenever it wants to do something ambitious like Antony and Cleopatra, the company has to balance it with an old war-horse like The Taming of the Shrew. And what spectators, when asked, remember from 1998’s very successful production of Shrew is the end of the performance, when Kate stripped to a spandex body suit and jumped onto the driver’s seat of Petruccio’s Harley-Davidson— a detail somehow unaccountably omitted from most of the editions of Shakespeare. In other words, even when Shakespeare’s plays are good box office, what makes them good box office is not exactly Shakespeare.

This is also relevant to the recent flurry of Shakespearean activity at another kind of box office. For the corporate accountants of Hollywood, every new Shakespeare film has some of the built-in safety of any other remake, particularly if it is a remake of one of the handful of best-known plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, or Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, most of the Shakespeare films released in the 1990s were art films with limited distribution. Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night, for instance, played on only one screen in the entire Boston metropolitan area; Branagh’s Hamlet, like his early Henry V, had to offer theaters willing to show it a monopoly, so that for several weeks they were guaranteed to be the only retailer in a city of more than a million people; Looking for Richard is still hard to find, even in video stores. Most Shakespeare films make a profit, not in theatrical release, but in video rentals and sales, particularly in the educational market; advertisements for such videos have become a routine component of the junk mail that crosses every Shakespeare teacher’s desk, every semester.

The chief exception to this dreary commercial history, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, confirms the intrinsic difficulty of selling Shakespeare to America. Ask yourself: were all those teenagers going to see Shakespeare, or going to see Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio? Contrast the marketing of Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet with the marketing of Franco Zeffirelli’s, a generation earlier. Zeffirelli’s romantic leads were complete unknowns; Luhrmann’s were already teen idols, and Luhrmann himself best known for directing music videos, also aimed primarily at a teen market; indeed, Luhrmann’s was the first Shakespeare film to present a rock soundtrack “filled with popular songs containing lyrics” (Guenther forthcoming). In the movie, the words of the Butthole Surfers overlap with the Bard’s; in the marketplace, the soundtrack stayed on the charts long after the movie closed. Luhrmann marketed his Shakespeare to

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