Romeo and Juliet

Luhrmann's film keeps Shakespeare's text and moves everything else. The dialogue is the play's, largely uncut in the scenes it keeps; the setting is Verona Beach, a contemporary Latin American coastal city of gang war, television news and Catholic iconography. The translation is worked through to the props: the swords are handguns with SWORD stamped on them as a brand name, so the word can stay in the dialogue. The Chorus becomes a news anchor. It is the clearest modern demonstration that the verse survives outside its period setting.

The film adapts the 1957 Broadway musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which moves Romeo and Juliet to the Upper West Side of New York. The feuding houses become two street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, Romeo and Juliet become Tony and Maria, and the balcony scene is played on a fire escape. Recorded as influence rather than adaptation because the names, setting and ending are all changed.

Zeffirelli's film is Shakespeare's play, cut heavily but played in the original language. Its break with the staging tradition of the time was to cast actors close to the characters' ages: Leonard Whiting was seventeen and Olivia Hussey fifteen, against a convention of established adult actors. The film's reputation rests on that decision, and the film has been re-examined since on the same ground.

New Moon is Meyer's Romeo and Juliet book and says so in the text. It opens with Friar Laurence's "These violent delights have violent ends", Bella and Edward watch the play together on her birthday, and Edward explains why he envies Romeo. The climax is the play's final act with the ending changed: Edward, believing Bella dead, goes to Volterra to die, and she reaches him in time.

The plot arrives from Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe by a traceable route: two lovers from neighbouring households forbidden to meet, a plan to escape by night, a misread sign, and a double suicide in which each dies believing the other already dead. Shakespeare's immediate source was Arthur Brooke's poem of 1562, which took the story from an Italian line of novellas that had been reworking the Ovidian tale for a century. He knew the original too, and staged it as the mechanicals' farce in A Midsummer Night's Dream at about the same time, which is a fair indication of how present it was to him.