Films based on Shakespeare's plays are best considered in terms of their vision - that is, the imaginary world they create, and the way of seeing it that they offer the viewer rather than the degree of their faithfulness to a Shakespearian original. However, Shakespearian films often arise from the director's desire to do justice to what are perceived as the original's salient qualities - attempting to encompass each 'necessary question of the play' (to borrow Hamlet's term.) To an extent, the history of Shakespearian film-making is one of variations on this theme: shifting attitudes to the Shakespearian source material, varied objectives, and changing techniques.

Probably the first – and certainly the earliest surviving – 'Shakespeare film' is the brief glimpse of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as the dying King John exhibited in 1899. Within a decade, the narrative cinema rapidly grew in technical resource and cultural diversity. Shakespearian subjects served as a source of familiar scenes and characters and a well-accredited bank of cultural respectability on which the new medium might draw. Before the advent of fully synchronized sound, in the relatively ‘silent’ but in fact only speechless cinema, Shakespeare's plays provided the basis for more than 400 films. The more modest of these included the terse one-reelers (10–15 minutes in duration) made in New York between 1908 and 1912 by the Vitagraph company, or the short films made on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, featuring Frank Benson's company in scenes from a number of plays – of which only Richard III (1911) survives. More ambitious projects included the 59-minute British Hamlet (1913) featuring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson in the title role; Sven Gade's striking Hamlet, A Drama of Revenge (Germany, 1920) in which Asta Neilsen plays a prince who is in fact a woman; and the grandly designed Othello (Germany, 1922) directed by Dmitri Buchowetski with Emil Jannings (Iago) and Werner Krauss (Othello).