Cultural Capital and the Canon in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet: Shakespeare vs. $hakespeare

Abstract

In their revolutionary 1967 album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles introduced a character who asked us to “lend [him our] ears while [he sang us] a song.”¹ His name was Billy Shears, and while John Lennon denied any 350-year connection to William Shakespeare, it seems difficult to dismiss the coincidence altogether.² Lennon’s intentions aside, the fact that a book exists, as well as multiple theories, about the influence of Shakespeare’s plays on the premier rock and roll band of the twentieth century says a great deal about the pervasive popularity of the playwright who lived to see commercial success in his own day and who has enjoyed an astronomically greater posthumous devotion through the place he occupies in the Western canon.