This thesis offers a timely reappraisal of authorship in Shakespeare film adaptations. It analyses the films of nine auteur-directors, breaking new ground by using an interdisciplinary framework (drawn from literary, film and cultural studies) to resituate the auteur at the confluence of commerce. and cultural politics. Contesting still-normative paradigms that hold the auteur as either self-detelmining creativity or casualty of industry, I maintain that auteur Shakespeare is a plurally constituted, restlessly changing phenomenon whose every instance is constihlted by and through a unique meshing of material, social and intertextual processes. Chapter One surveys the histories of auteurist and Shakespeare on film criticism, drawing on each to argue for the necessity of an approach attentive to the auteur's roles both inside and outside cinema. Chapter Two demonstrates precisely the need for such a dual focus insofar as it assesses the persistent influence on the reception of Welles's Shakespeare films of a mythologised auteur persona. Chapter Three adopts a Bourdieu-inflected perspective on Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's Shakespearean undertakings, uncovering in them aspirations towards legitimacy. Chapter Four conceptualises Franco Zeffirelli's work as middlebrow auteur cinema - ideologically safe and commercially orientated. Chapter Five, by contrast, suggests that Derek Jarman's films exemplify auteur Shakespeare's counter-hegemonic possibilities. Chapter Six also focuses on dissident articulations: it posits Julie Taymor's oeuvre as a feminist counter-point (though, finally, a problematic one) to auteur cinema's androcentrism. Chapter Seven uses close reading to delineate Akira Kurosawa's and Grigori Kozintsev's affiliations to art cinema. The final chapter examines Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptations in light of transnational theory, positing forms of exchange as a crucial interpretive concern. These analyses yield important evidence of Shakespeare's multidimensional significance to various filmic culhlres and subcultures. In tum, they newly illuminate the essential part that commercial and political formations have played in reauthoring past and present incarnations of auteur and Shakespeare.