From A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Romeo and Juliet through Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet. The Levi’s 501 advertisement

Abstract

The article deals with advertising as entailing adaptation practices through which Shakespeare’s plays
might find a new and popularised identity, and a new means for the reception of Shakespeare’s plays by a large and
contemporary audience. The paper will provide an analysis of the Levi’s 501 2005 advertisement presented as an
adaptation of 3.1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The advertisement will be compared to the famous cinema
adaptation William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet by Baz Luhrmann (1996) to show how the latter influences the
construction and interpretation of the advertisement as an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet rather than of 3.1 of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, of which, however, the advertisement reproduces several lines. The study of the
advertisement will show the various adaptive strategies put into place. The article will delineate the presence of an
intertextual net which comprises the advertisement, the film, and the plays themselves, an intertextual net whose
various elements, if familiar to the audience, dialogue with each other to produce the connotative potential of the
advertising message.