Re-visualizing Shakespeare through Marginal Characters on Screen and Stage

This chapter explores the marginal characters (whom are less known) in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and the two Shakespearean films, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), and the recent new Disney + film Rosaline (Oct. 2022). (The working paper draft was presented by oral in The 15th Wenshan International Conference, featuring Imaging Across Time: Past, Present and Future of the Image.” National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan. Nov. 18, 2023. This chapter is expanded to write deeper and get polished.) Just like the marginal characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Film Director Tom Stoppard’s well-acclaimed film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) inspired from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I argue that the marginal characters in Shakespeare adaptation films enhance the richness of imaging Shakespeare and visualizing Shakespeare across time. The argument builds on a close analysis of the recent film Rosaline (Oct. 2022) directed by Karen Maine. This new film was released on the streaming media service Hulu in the U.S., Disney + internationally, and Star + in Latin America. The film Rosaline is adapted from Rebecca Serle’s young adult novel When You Were Mine, inspired from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Rosaline is the girl whom Romeo first intends to pursue for before he meets Juliet. In the latest movie Rosaline, Rosaline (starring by Kaitlyn Dever) in the beginning wants to get her ex-boyfriend Romeo back and refuses her father’s arrangement marriage with the handsome suitor Dario Penza. In the contemporary popular culture and modern colloquial English, Rosaline illuminates viewers to comprehend Shakespeare’s play and appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare’s complicated Old English text. I emphasize on applying Shakespearean research, theater studies, and film studies to exploring Rosaline to discover where those Shakespeare’s original lines are employed in this film and the differences between Shakespeare’s play and the adaptation film in terms of theme, plot, characters, thought, diction, melody, songs, and spectacle. This chapter suggests that Film Director Maine ingeniously uses the mise-en-scène to cinematically represent the screenplay written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. Director Maine’s film transforms Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo & Juliet into the modern romantic comedy Rosaline. The screenwriter interweaves the intertextuality of the essence scenes and poetry of Shakespeare’s drama to change and refresh our horizon by the contemporary humorous and insightful postfeminist interpretation.