Sometimes, it’s good to be the queen. Just ask Helen Mirren. Mirren has been a hot property since being named 2006’s Best Actress for her portrayal of HRH Elizabeth II. Now the British actress will star in a new Shakespearean film, though not necessarily the one you might expect. Mirren will star as Prospera in Julie Taymor’s big-screen adaptation of The Tempest. According to the press surrounding the project, the text of the play itself will remain largely intact despite the cross-gender casting of Mirren.

Taymor has tackled Shakespeare before; in fact, her first film was 1999’s Titus, based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Still, the director who wowed the theatrical world in the 1980’s and 1990’s (with, among other things, a production of The Tempest) has yet to make a truly big splash in film. Her films have been strictly art house affairs, yielding wildly mixed results critically and commercially. Will The Tempest be the project that changes all of this? While it’s too early to tell, the biggest factor will be how her film makes the casting of Mirren work for the play itself. How does the play change if its outcast protagonist is a woman? There’s no question the actress has the chops for it, but Taymor’s guidance will be crucial in order for this Tempest to be interpreted as an artistic choice rather than just a showcase for Mirren’s virtuosity. Taymor has proven she’s an adept visual artist, now she just needs to imbue her films with heart and genuine human connections.

If you think about Shakespeare and the law, the first reference that might come to mind is a pound of flesh, what it’s worth, and the decidedly non-PC questions that go along with it. Then again, you might not think about Shakespeare and the law at all. I know I certainly didn’t until I read about the publication of a book entitled, rather unsurprisingly, Shakespeare and the Law.

The book, which will be published within the next year, is an examination of law in Shakespeare’s plays: how it is established, how it is followed, and most importantly, how it is disobeyed. Rather than simply use the plays as evidence for statements about law in Elizabethan England, the book will draw parallels to examples from current politics and popular culture. Essentially, this book will catalogue how notable figures in our current era compare to the fictional ones penned by Shakespeare four hundred years ago. Particular emphasis will be given to Titus Andronicus, particularly in light of the many laws transgressed during the course of the play. The author has lectured on the play many times and hails it as one of The Bard’s most complex works in light of the many social, legal and moral questions raised in the play. In a pop culture market that has been over-saturated by the legal world for upwards of a decade, Shakespeare and the Law manages to be timely but tying a somewhat exhausted zeitgeist to ages-old classic literature.

A recent item about Colorado Shakespeare covered a new musical production of The Three Musketeers while also noting a muscialization of Titus Andronicus (complete with the obligatory exclamation points) that was produced a few seasons ago. The question with such adaptation is obviously, well, why. In one camp, the argument is that these classics, while great, have been done a million times, so artists need to find new ways of producing them. Opposing that view is the notion that these stories became classics without orchestrations, so why add them? Titus Andronicus seems an odd choice, but then again, its legendary “baking” scene might lend the play to a kind of Sweeney Todd interpretation.

In truth, there is very little theatre up to the turn of the twentieth century that didn’t incorporate some kind of music. Furthermore, many of the most famous scenes in Shakespeare involve music. Ophelia’s mad scenes are presented in music form. The fool in Twelfth Night similarly uses music to convey story and character. Whether it is accurate or not, people associate music with drama, whether in the context of theatre or not. Still, productions must carefully navigate the line between dramatic and silly. The songs mentioned above are brief; what would happen if there were twenty more of them? Would we cry if Ophelia sang a farewell/suicide/love song entitled “Water Under the Bridge” or laugh?

Titus Andronicus is rearing its bloody head again, this time in a production in Illinois. A recent write-up on the show mentioned that the production will (natch) lean heavily on the grisly, gory elements of the story. It is unsurprising, as the play tends to yield interpretations in the Hostel vein. What was also interesting about the article was its mentioning of a film called Theatre of Blood, a horror film from 1973 starring Vincent Price.

The connection? The film features a mad, bad actor who dispatches critics one by one to get his revenge. What makes the murders novel is that each is based on a scene from Shakespeare, including one from Titus Andronicus (I’ll spare you the gross details. Let’s just say, be careful what you eat). In addition to recreating the stage scenes in order to kill his victims, Price also gets to recite some of the great soliloquies from the plays.

Aside from the obvious jabs at critics, Theatre of Blood is also oddly Shakespearean in its own right. In particular, it parallels the often operatic level of excess employed in performing Titus Andronicus. In the play and in the film, people don’t just die, they are devoured (literally, in some cases). Yet amidst all of the beheadings and disemboweling, there is poetry. It is what Shakespeare does best: mixing together high art and low art so seamlessly that you cannot tell the difference between the two.

A review of a current production of Titus Andronicus compares the play to slasher films, but differentiates it by noting the lack of complexity and sophistication in the latter. Titus Andronicus frequently inspires gore-laden productions, so this assessment is not totally surprising, however, what about reverse argument? What, if anything, is Shakespearean about slasher films? Are they in any way comparable?

Revenge plays a key role in both the tragedies of Shakespeare and slasher movies. Hamlet must avenge his father’s murder, while Coriolanus seeks revenge against the society that he believes rejected him. In horror filmdom, Freddy Krueger goes after the children of Elm Street as payback for their parents murdering him. Jason, who became the face of 1980’s horror, actually became the killer from the second Friday the 13th film onward. One of his primary motivations is revenge for his mother (who is the killer in the first film).

Like Shakespeare’s plays, the horror films eventually learned to expand their market by mixing genres. Shakespeare’s late-career works are alternately described as romances and tragicomedies in an attempt to categorize their melding of different genres. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master plays with some potent executions added to the mix (a far cry from the more serious, shadowy figure depicted in the first installment).

Most importantly, both Shakespeare’s plays and horror movies ask us to identify with characters who aren’t particularly likeable or honorable. Macbeth and Lady M. are terrible people, but the play hinges on our investment in their undoing. Horror films, particularly in their heyday two decades ago, asked us not only to like but to root for demented, undead sociopaths. Ultimately, both allow audiences to take a trip to the dark side.

Dinner parties are always bad news. There’s the inevitable mixing of people who don’t really know each other. The air is full of fake-ity fake laughter and conversational banalities. The food can be extremely variable depending on who is hosting. Liquor, which may start the evening as a salvational icebreaker, too often encourages embarrassing revelations and sloppy behavior. Given their disaster-prone nature, dinner parties are trying socially, but terrific theatrically. Thus, it is understandable why a new production of Titus Andronicus has adopted the dinner party motif as the central conceit for its production.

If you are familiar with this less famous Shakespearean tragedy, you know it has a reputation for violence. You might therefore wonder what exactly Tamora might serve at a dinner party. Rest assured, the fete is merely an excuse for a play-within-a-play setup where in the dinner guests get carried away acting out the story of Titus Andronicus. As always happens in these ultra-meta setups, people start taking their roles a little to seriously and the line between play and reality becomes obscured.

While some might say this concept seems incongruous with the grisly play, I am refreshed to see a production use opposites to reinforce themes. Too often, an audience is bludgeoned with undercurrents and metaphors that were already well stated in the play (witness the near ubiquitous staging of Hamlet’s bedroom scene with his mother as an incestuous rape). In this case, the dark proceedings are highlighted because the production places it in a traditionally lightweight setting. Sad endings may be expected in tragedies, but really good productions make them seem like a surprise.

In a recent recap of the best theatre of 2007 in the Boston area, the writer noted a production of Titus Andronicus and complimented it for its lack of explicit gore. For those familiar with Julie Taymor’s stage version (which she later adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange), this reference makes sense. Along with Macbeth, Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s plays that frequently gets a bloody interpretation on stage. Do blood and gore have a place in Shakespearean production? Some critics are bound to find it gratuitous while others will justify it as a realization of the dark worlds Shakespeare depicted in his plays.

Imagine this scenario: the finale of Romeo and Juliet. The young hero has poisoned himself. Suddenly, he collapses to the ground convulsing. He vomits repeatedly all over the stage, gags and chokes before finally succumbing. Juliet then awakens to this messy scene and plunges the dagger into her chest. A massive arterial spray bursts from her chest and sprays the catacomb before she too collapses. Are you grossed out yet? Most would find such an interpretation repulsive because it would rob the denouement of its poetic beauty. Others might say that such pretty deaths are unrealistic and might defend this kind of display. Violence in Shakespeare is not an easy issue to resolve because it ultimately comes down to each audience members expectations about what fully realized Shakespeare should look like. Finally, are there some plays where we will be more tolerant of blood and gore than others? If so, we must ask ourselves from where does this double standard emerge?