This book is a masterpiece of scholarship and analysis, not to mention lucid prose that distinguishes the argument, which centers upon three plays by Shakespeare—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, and Romeo and Juliet—and selected cinematic adaptations. The films chosen for comparative analysis with the respective plays are Max Reinhardt's Dream (1935), Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), and three renditions of Romeo and Juliet by George Cukor (1936), Renato Castellani (1954), and Franco Zeffirelli (1968).

More than any other study of Shakespeare on film, this book exploits archival records: documents from studios, internal memos concerning a director's initial and evolving ideas for production, budgets, notes of meetings, daily production reports, musical scores, cutting notes, responses to previews, scripts and their revisions, and even publicity materials that promote, or “pitch,” the film to audiences. Such promotion includes not merely print publicity but also still photos of a particular scene or character. Afterward, reviews by film critics and accounts of a film's influence on later screenwriters, producers, and directors are added to the archival records, thereby contributing to ongoing reception history.

Unifying the book is the concept of “dreams.” Much as our own dreams foreshorten time and space, Russell Jackson contends that films are dreams more fully realized: a blend of realism and fantasy, of visual and emotional elements, and, paradoxically, of dynamic space and spatial time. Such admixture creates dreamlike reality that challenges Coleridge's axiom: that one's interaction with an art form is informed by the willing suspension of disbelief. Jackson contends, on the other hand, that the dreamlike quality of cinema conveys verisimilitude so effectively that a viewer must exercise considerable effort to disengage from the illusion.

Using this theoretical framework and relying on archival records, Jackson comprehensively charts the transitional stages, some planned and others improvised, by which the dreamlike reality of Shakespearean films is created. But the word “dreamlike” has dual significance: both the dreaming or imaginative exercise by which a film comes into being and the dreaming engendered in an audience while it experiences a film. Whereas both of these “dreamlike” processes are often theoretically discussed and critically debated, commentators rarely use comprehensive and detailed archival documentation to elaborate their insights. In addition, Jackson enriches his insights in another significant way. He traces how the director of a Shakespearean play in the theater transposes but adapts many of his same interpretive emphases to the cinematic medium. And when the director has a history of directing the same play many times onstage, then the archival records of the theatrical productions bring into focus the distinguishing features of the version in film.

An exemplary instance of theatrical history impinging on cinematic direction involves Max Reinhardt's Dream (1935), a film that reflects the director's long-standing and diverse experience in staging the play, beginning in Berlin (1905) and continuing for three decades across Europe and eventually into the Hollywood Bowl. With codirector William Dieterle, Reinhardt gave cinematic embodiment to his recurring dream and experience of imagining Shakespeare's play. Jackson documents reviews of various stage productions, all stressing “atmosphere and aesthetic effect” and “the importance of the forest.” Accordingly, in analyzing the film, Russell highlights how these features are adapted on-screen. Citing, among other documents, typescripts, shooting scripts, and the like, Russell dwells on the dreamlike elements of the scenes involving the fairies and the atmosphere in the forest. From various documents, Jackson reconstructs the process whereby Reinhardt imagined, then created on-screen, a pastoral atmosphere rich with fantasy. This process, moreover, reflected many changes in interpretation, all documented scrupulously by Jackson's reference to archival records concerning costume, scenery, special effects, and the like.

When approached from a similar perspective, whereby film blends fantasy and reality, Olivier's Henry V (1944) integrates the immediate danger of World War II with the escapism of entering an earlier era of British history, the fifteenth century. In effect, Olivier imagines history within history, a renowned military campaign undertaken under dubious circumstances by Henry V but staged in the unfolding and immediate history of World War II. Beginning as a film documentary, which uses the cinematic medium as videography of a recreated theatrical performance of the play in Shakespeare's era, Olivier's Henry V then erupts into a celebration of the twentieth-century cinematic medium and its creative potential. Chauvinism, heroism, individual morale and cultural esprit, the fantasy of the French princess wooed and won by a British king, the idyllic atmosphere of the countryside, and the despoliation of war all come into play, so that British viewers, in particular, recall the proximate reality of war in progress while escaping into a world that combines fantasy and reality 500 years earlier.

Choosing Romeo and Juliet as the single play to examine in multiple cinematic versions (by Cukor, Castellani, and Zeffirelli), Jackson researches and interprets archival documents as the means to access how and why each director imagined Renaissance Italy in a dreamlike manner. The casting of characters (adult or adolescent lovers), stylized acting, fight choreography, iconic sets (for instance, the masquers’ ball where Romeo and Juliet first meet), pastoral scenes, musical scores, omissions or alterations in the text of the play, and the enactment of the lovers’ suicides are significant points of comparison and contrast for Jackson's always insightful and often brilliant analysis.

No review can do justice to the excellence of this book, which must be studied firsthand by teachers and scholars of Shakespeare on film, not to mention prospective directors of the plays onstage or on the screen. The single most important contribution of this book is its exposition of the symbiotic and sympathetic connection between creators of an art form and viewers of it.