https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=146 There have been many film versions of Shakespeare plays, but almost none of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries – until, that is, three independent film directors at the turn of the twenty-first century created versions of non-Shakespearean Jacobean tragedies: Marcus Thompson's Middleton's Changeling (1998), Mike Figgis's Hotel (2002) and Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2003). I argue that these films embody a conscious turn away from the governing aesthetic of Shakespeare films in the late twentieth century – attacked by a character in Hotel as “the Merchant Ivory version: sweet, pungent smell of rose meadows, Earl Grey, and a wet saddle on the back of a horse, that sort of thing” – offering an alternative version of spectacle – postmodern, tasteless, excessive – which nonetheless, despite the self-consciously radical stance adopted by the directors, paradoxically re-entrenches the polarised understanding of the differences between Shakespeare and Jacobean drama established in early twentieth-century criticism and reinscribes a longstanding misrepresentation of the Jacobean as “decadent”. Shakespeare en devenir N°2 — 2008 fr jeu., 28 janv. 2010 15:35:48 +0100 jeu., 28 janv. 2010 15:35:48 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=146 0