Kenneth Branagh acted in and directed more Shakespeare plays than any other filmmaker before him; yet he also defied what was expected from a Shakespearean actor-director. First, he used the codes of Hollywood cinema to make the plays entertaining and available to a younger, more popular audience. Second, he not only adapted Shakespeare but also ventured into directing Hollywood blockbusters, as well as more intimate projects on stage and screen, injecting Shakespearean echoes into a new range of productions. Through his taste for popular, mainstream movies, his bold self-made trajectory that carried him repeatedly in and out of the ‘Establishment’, Branagh has contributed to redefining relations between Shakespeare and Hollywood, between the art house and the multiplex, and between theatre and cinema. Through his ceaselessly renewed ‘vaulting ambition’ of bringing Shakespeare to the people, Branagh has constructed over the years the ideologically complex persona of a working-class Shakespearean entrepreneur.

Chapter Three focuses on Euripides’ Ion, wherein we find important depictions of both male and female solo dancing. I begin this chapter with a discussion of male dancing in late Archaic and Classical Greek thought, exploring how male choral leadership, especially as embodied by the god Apollo and the hero Theseus, offers a positive model for the male dancer as an authoritative but collaborative figure within his community. I then observe how Ion’s opening monody vacillates between images of male choral leadership and less lofty images of solo work song/dance, calling attention to the ambivalence of the titular character’s social status. I further demonstrate that a similar ambivalence surrounds Ion’s mother Creusa, who performs a monody of her own that draws upon the imagery of female chorality and choral leadership. Yet while Ion’s monody prefigures his transformation from Delphic servant to Athenian royalty, Creusa’s song reframes the assault that resulted in Ion’s birth as a more normative form of maidenly transition. In both cases, I suggest, Euripides uses dance to situate Ion and Creusa within their final roles while also highlighting the contradictions and conflicts that swirl around them.