SOURCE: Boose, Lynda E. and Richard Burt. “Totally Clueless?: Shakespeare goes Hollywood in the 1990s.” In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, pp. 8-22. London: Routledge, 1997.

In the following essay, Boose and Burt discuss Hollywood's influence in the popularization of Shakespearean drama in the late 1990s, noting the changes wrought by filmmakers in an attempt to appeal to contemporary audiences.

A short sequence in the 1995 summer film comedy Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling) offers what might be considered a mini-allegory of Shakespeare's circulation within the popular culture of the 1990s. Based on Jane Austen's Emma, the film narrates the coming of age of “Cher,” a Beverly Hills high school ingenue and media-savvy teen queen who reformulates the pleasures of discourse into side-by-side telephone conversations conducted on mobile telephones. In the manipulation of cultural capital as a...