This book examines Shakespeare’s afterlives in European cinema. It offers a series of comparative studies analysing Shakespeare films in light of common myths perceived to constitute European identity. With the Second World War as a starting point, the book focuses on how Shakespeare is mobilized in films that address the moments in recent European history when those myths came under most intense scrutiny: the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, the post-Fordist transition to a consumerist society, the fragmentation of the Yugoslav Federation, the European debt crisis, and the contemporary increase in xenophobic attitudes giving rise to the resurgence of the far right.

From forgotten adaptations such as Jiří Weiss’s Romeo, Juliet and Darkness, to canonical films like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the book examines European filmic Shakespeare as a transnational and intermedial category by considering not just adaptations but also films that allude to, reference or evoke the playwright. As such, it constitutes the first sustained critical account of Shakespeare’s place in European cinema.

Inma Sánchez García is Lecturer in Intermediality Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she convenes and teaches courses on Shakespeare, film adaptation, and intermediality. She holds a PhD from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle and completed earlier studies at the University of Murcia and the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals in early modern English studies, including SEDERI, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and Shakespeare Jahrbuch. She has also contributed chapters to Teaching Shakespeare in Film and the Arts Today, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare, and Thinking Intermediality: Identity, Ethics and Aesthetics. Her current research explores two distinct but interrelated strands: Shakespeare’s afterlives in contemporary queer cinema and Shakespeare’s reception across media in Spain and Europe. She is a member of two collaborative research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: ‘Shakespeare, Activism and the Arts in the 21st Century’ (SHAKE-ART21) and ‘The Reception of Shakespeare’s Works in Spanish and European Culture III’ (SHAKCULT3).