A new season of films celebrates how different directors have found a way to bring Shakespeare’s work forward, from Baz Luhrmann to Derek Jarman

What is the Shakespeare canon if not the ideal treasure trove of IP? Truancy laws mandate that students develop at the very least a passing familiarity with Romeo and Juliet, the highest-brow pop culture artifact nonetheless considered universally common knowledge, and the themes isolated in those lesson plans can be easily mapped onto present-day scenarios: the heedless forbidden passions of Romeo and Juliet, the topsy-turvy crushes of Twelfth Night, the power struggles of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear. Best of all, as far as Hollywood types are concerned, it’s all open-source mythology in the public domain, the sweet spot of brand recognition nobody has to pay for.

And yet since the decline of the studio system’s golden age, there hasn’t been much of an effort to make uppermost-tier blockbusters out of the stories themselves, the closest thing being Justin Kurzel’s distinctly post-Game of Thrones take on Macbeth. (Even that was treated as a niche-market British import as it underperformed at the US box office.) With the marked exception of dyed-in-the-wool classicist Kenneth Branagh, a man who spent many years under the impression he was put on this Earth to succeed Laurence Olivier until his prompt pivot to franchise hackdom, most artists consider it unsporting to take the Bard so literally. Some level of engagement – whether a superficial reskinning of plot points or a deeper revision of tone, structure, and significance – is needed to answer the question “why bother?”, fairly asked of texts done to death over several centuries. The obligation to revitalize has aged past artistic tradition to ossify into cliché, succinctly skewered in the Onion headline Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.