Friday, May 10, 2013

Shakespearean Advertisements

The Bard on Madison Avenue. A Few Selected Advertisements. Various Years. Various Sources. Various Products.
Bardfilm has addressed Shakespeare in advertising just a few times: Contrasting powerful and weak ads, pondering how the power of the St. Crispin's Day speech was harnessed to sell a computer gaming console, and imagining a Pepsodent ad connected to the Guthrie Theatre's production of Two Gentlemen of Verona.

But there's more!  Much more!

A student in my Modern Shakespearean Fiction class presented us with a few cell phone ads that use Romeo and Juliet to sell their products. One of those is listed below; I happened to track down a commercial for diapers and a commercial for a dating service that do the same.




What do you think of these uses of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet? Please add your voice to the comments below!
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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest