This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.West Side Story may not be written in iambic pentameter, but its passion and sincerity get to the heart of Romeo and Juliet better than any other adaptation. And while the young lovers are both sufficiently charming, it's George Chakiris' Bernardo (the Tybalt character) and Rita Moreno's Anita (the Nurse) who steal the show in Oscar-winning performances buoyed by some killer dancing.

While nobody speaks a word of Shakespeare, the movie has got the next best thing in Stephen Sondheim, who got one of his first major gigs writing the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's songs. Fair Verona becomes Manhattan in the 1950s, where rival gangs-the Jets and the Sharks-are embroiled in a bitter turf war, and former Jet Tony (Richard Beymer) romances the Sharks' leader's sister Maria ( Natalie Wood) from the bottom of a fire escape. It speaks to the brilliance of Shakespeare that when we reimagine his plays in strange new places, they work all the better-and it speaks to the perfection of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' West Side Story that it beat out all these lush Renaissance retellings for the top spot among Romeo and Juliet movies. It's not straight Shakespeare, but it's probably the most affectionate movie on this list-with a perfectly sad, sweet, and non-double-suicide ending. The script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, the latter of whom had previously reimagined Shakespeare with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, cleverly works in countless references to and devices from Shakespeare's plays, and incorporates much of the original text of Romeo and Juliet through the actors' rehearsals, which is performed as well as it is in any full-blown adaptation. When William Shakespeare ( Joseph Fiennes) has terrible writer's block and owes his theater a play, he finds his muse in the beautiful Viola de Lesseps ( Gwyneth Paltrow), a noblewoman who dreams of being onstage. John Madden's swoonily romantic Shakespeare in Love dramatizes the writing of Romeo and Juliet, rather than adapting the play itself, but intertwines the two narratives so deftly that we consider it an adaptation in its own right-and a wonderfully witty and original one at that.

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