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[MUSIC PLAYING] The first-ever Shakespeare film was made in 1899. 1899 is incredibly early in the history of the film industry. It's just four years after the pioneer

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screening that the Lumiere brothers did in that basement cafe in Paris. So very early on, the film industry is reaching for Shakespeare and material.

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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 a really significant body of work.

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It's more than an eccentric sideline. It's more than a little cinematic experiment. Clearly, something about the liaison between the film industry and Shakespeare worked and was thought worth pursuing.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] The question of why people would do something as crazy sounding as making Shakespeare adaptations using a silent medium, which film was in the early days,

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is a good one. But if you imagine yourself back in that moment, so you're in the 1890s. Film has just been invented as a new medium.

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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 can be for technical reasons. So if you imagine you're making all sorts of different films

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and you want to get audiences in-- you want to pull them in-- and you're competing with theatre and music hall and circus and live acts, you're picking stories that are familiar to people or already popular.

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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 cultural baggage

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that film adopts to make it more attractive and saleable. There's a lot of things that you can use about Shakespeare apart from the words. And in fact, when you think about what

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we know about Shakespeare, very few of us know all of the plays all of the way through in all their complexity, running times of three or four hours.

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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

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into the silent films, which tend to be short and very general. The really early Shakespeare films from 1899, 1900, and so on were just very brief, little

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in effect, visual quotations from a play, the duel scene or the death scene. But by 1908, the film industry was really trying to tell a compressed version

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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.

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And one of the ways they did that was to pick little visual moments, peak moments across the play that would be recognisable and that would be familiar to an audience.

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So there were moments that they absolutely couldn't do without that, if you're making a version of Romeo and Juliet, you have to include the balcony scene. If you're making a version of Hamlet,

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

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which is the premiere 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,

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of a film like The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream. They can go to the wood and the forest and wander around, or they can look at the sea and the great tempests, and people chasing each other around idyllic meadows.

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It's part of the attraction of Shakespeare on film. So that's one fantastic thing that a film can do. But it always has another relationship with the stage. So you also get these fantastic and fantastical sets

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that you can do with film. It starts off very simply proscenium arch kind of thing, with flat scenery and people performing in front of it. Other times you might get much more complicated scenery,

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like in The Tempest. They've combined a fantastic flat set or slightly three-dimensional sets of Prospero's cave. But through it, you've got something real,

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which is the sea, which you can see waves coming up and then a stage prop ship. So there's a combined thing in layers, which is fascinating. Often, filmmakers would really take a pride in being able to do

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outclass theatre, to do what theatre couldn't do with trick photography or special effects of various sorts. In the Vitagraph Midsummer Night's Dream, there's that delightful scene when Puck goes off

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in search of the magic herb, and he flies around a globe. He, in fact, is a she played by Gladys Hulette, who became quite a star and started receiving fan mail off the back of her very energetic, chirpy, impish

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performance as Puck in this film. And that having that spinning globe with Puck flying over it was a celebration of something that cinema could do that theatre couldn't.

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Shakespeare tends to encourage high production value, so things like costumes and sets and colouring the film, which you could do in the early days by literally painting on the film or a process called stencil,

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really brings these to life. I mean, the costumes you see with some of the Italian ones in particular from the 1900s are all just sumptuous. So you've got beautiful velvet and silk costumes with those

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very intense, jewel-like colours, and they're really magnificent. The other thing that film, of that time, would do is to take you to the place.

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How fantastic to have The Merchant of Venice in Venice? And what are you going to do-- Rialto Bridge, gondola, water. Simple, but very, very effective.

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And for people that had never been to these places, and they could only see those flat stage sets, this is a real attraction. And you get a lot of Merchant of Venice adaptations set

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in Venice, with all the beautiful Italianate costumes-- they're really lovely. Because these films are made a long time ago, it's tempting to think about them as remote and inaccessible,

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and that the actors in 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

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to think about these figures and these films at all. I think that the films themselves are full of verve and vivacity and variety, and there are moments that are really touching and really funny

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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 delight.

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