From Titus Andronicus and Hamlet to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare leads willing readers and forces the unwilling to rethink and re-see their world through his kaleidoscope of narrative and poetic sources. A wide variety of filmmakers including Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa, Julie Taymor and Quentin Tarantino have tapped into the possibilities Shakespeare's work inspires. This study considers Shakespeare's impact on our experience of words and the images they conjure and considers how this leads to a greater understanding of Shakespeare and the possibilities of cinema and adaptation.