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The first ever Shakespeare film was made in 1899. 1899 is incredibly early in the history of the film industry. It's just 4 years after the pioneer screening that the Lumiere brothers did in that basement cafe in Paris. So very early on, the film industry is reaching

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for Shakespearean material. And then between 1899 and 1927 when the first commercial sound film is released, somewhere between 250 and 300 films on Shakespearean material are made. So that's, that's a really significant body of work. It's more than an eccentric sideline, it's more than a little

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cinematic experiment. Clearly something about the liaison between the film industry and Shakespeare worked and was thought worth pursuing. The question why people would do something as crazy sounding as making Shakespeare adaptations using a silent medium, which film was in the early days, is a good one.

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But if you imagine yourself back in that moment, so you're in the 1890s, film has just been invented as a new medium. You have very short films, so you've only got about half a minute or so when films first invented. That's as long as a film

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can be. For technical reasons. So if you imagine you're making all sorts of different films and you want to get audiences in, you want to pull them in. And you're competing with sort of theater and music hall and circus and sort of live acts. You're picking

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stories that are familiar to people are already popular. So you will do Dickens and you'll do Shakespeare and you'll do Alice in Wonderland and fairy stories that everybody knows. It's just part of the kind of cultural baggage that film adopts to make it more attractive and

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salable. There's a lot of things that you can use about Shakespeare apart from the words. And in fact, when you think about what we know about Shakespeare, very few of us know all of the plays all the way through in all their complexity, uh, you know,

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running times of 3 or 4 hours. What we generally know are little bits of Shakespeare, so we know famous scenes and we know some of the people, and we know a few quotes. This is effectively what makes it into the silent films, which tend to be

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short and very general. The really early Shakespeare films in 1899, 1900 and so on were just very brief little, in effect, visual quotations from a play, the dual scene or um the the death scenes. But by 1908, the film industry was really trying to tell a

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compressed version of a complete Shakespeare tale, and so they needed efficient ways of being able to do that in ways that would still be understandable for an audience. And one of the ways they did that was to pick little visual moments, sort of peak moments across

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the play that would be recognizable and that would be familiar to an audience, so. I mean there were moments that they absolutely couldn't do without that, you know, if you're making a version of Romeo and Juliet, you have to include the balcony scene, if you're making

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a version of Hamlet, you have to include that iconic moment of Hamlet with the skull. As time goes on, filmmakers realize that there are things that you can do with film are really fantastic. Um, and that differentiate them from the stage versions, which is, you know,

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the kind of premier product. And one of the great things they can do is go on location. You can go and film in real places, and it's one of the real attractions I think of a film like The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream. They can

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go to the wood and the forest and wander around, or they can look at the sea and the sort of great tempests and people chasing each other around idyllic meadows, you know, it's part of the attraction of of Shakespeare on film, so that's one fantastic thing

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that a film can do. But it always has another relationship with the stage, so you also get these fantastic and fantastical, Sets that you can do with film. It starts off very simply proce a march kind of thing with flat scenery and people performing in front

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of it. Other times you might get much more complicated scenery, like in the Tempest. They've combined a fantastic flat set or slightly three dimensional set of Prospero's cave. But through it, you've got something real, which is the sea. Which you can see, you know, waves coming

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up and then a stage prop ship. So there's a combined thing in kind of layers, which is fascinating. Often filmmakers would really take a pride in being able to to sort of outclass theater, to do what theater couldn't do with trick photography or special effects of

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various sorts. In the Vitograph, Midsummer Night's Dream, there's that delightful scene when Puck goes off in search of the magic curve, and he flies around a uh a globe. He in fact is a she played by Gladys Hewlett, who became quite a star and started receiving.

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Fan mail off the back of her, a very energetic, chirpy, impish performance as Puck in this film, and that having that spinning globe with with Puck flying over it was a celebration of something that cinema could do that theater couldn't. Shakespeare tends to encourage high production

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value, so things like costumes and sets and coloring the film, which you could do in the early days by literally painting on the film or a sort of process called stencil really brings these to life. I mean, the costumes you see with some of the Italian

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ones in particular from the 1900s are just sumptuous. So you've got beautiful sort of velvet and silk costumes with those very intense jewel-like colors, and they're really magnificent. The other thing that film. Of that time would do is to take you to the place. How fantastic

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to have the Merchant of Venice in Venice. And what are you gonna do? Rialto Bridge, gondola, water, you know, simple but very, very effective, and for people who have never been to these places and they could only see those flat stage sets, this is a real

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attraction and you get a lot of Merchant of Venice. Um, adaptations set in Venice with all the beautiful Italianate costumes, they're really lovely. Because these films were made a long time ago. It's tempting to think about them as remote and inaccessible, and that the actors in

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them are these figures marooned in time, playing to a world that's moved on without them and that can't understand them. But I don't think that's how we need to think about these figures and these films at all. I think that the films themselves are full of

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verve and vivacity and variety, and there are moments that are really touching and really funny and really beautiful in them. And it's just a wonderful thing that 100 years on and more, these films and these long gone actors can still be so interesting and give such

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delight.