"Till we can clear these ambiguities". Romeo and Juliet al cinema

The thesis focuses on the story of film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet and is structured in three parts. The first chapter of the thesis offers a brief reading of Shakespeare’s work through the different and sometimes even contrasting views of some prominent scholars about some of the play’s central subjects like, for instance, fate or Petrarchan love. The second section examines the concept of Shakespearean film and consider some issues concerning the passage from the stage script to the screenplay. The third and final part of the study contemplates a historical and critical story of film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, from the silent movie era to the most recent productions, analysing in particular those films regarded as the most pertinent to the Shakesperean text. The thesis is completed by two appendixes: the first one illustrates the pictorial quotations in Renato Castellani’s film, while the second one is the filmography, as complete as possible, of film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: it includes not only the so called ‘faithful’ versions but also films which considerably depart from the ‘letter’ of the original text.