The Bard Is no Longer what it Used to Be (or not to Be): Reinterpreting Postmodern Discourses in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000)

‘Being true’ to Shakespeare constitutes a highly fallacious consideration in our post-modern cosmovision, as the notion of the text itself is no longer a stable solid category but a space where a wide range of writings intermingle and blend. Thus, both Baz Luhrmann and Michael Almereyda deauthorise Shakespeare and appropriate the Bard’s texts—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet—in order to construct post-modern multifaceted products that fuse contemporary cinematic devices with the editorial intention of transposing the adapted work’s universality in order to be understood and digested by the post-popular and glo-cali-zed 21st century culture.