Queering the Shakespeare film : gender trouble gay spectatorship and male homoeroticism A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of A Midsummer Nights Dream Romeo and Juliet Othello Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice take centre stage in Queering the Shakespeare Film. This study critiques the various representations of the queer broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal the legitimate and the dominant particularly but not exclusively as regards sexual matters in the Shakespeare film. The movies chosen for analysis correspond deliberately with those Shakespeare plays that as written texts have been subjected to a great deal of productive study in a queer context since the beginnings of queer theory in the early 1990s. Thus the book extends the ongoing queer discussion of these written texts to their counterpart cinematic texts. Queering the Shakespeare Film is a much needed alternative and complementary critical history of the Shakespeare film genre. Bloomsbury Publishing