While never the most popular work among latter-day Shakespeare adapters, Coriolanus has rested as the sinister soldier in the background, bursting forth when needed. In Hitler's Germany, the play served as educational propaganda preaching military bravery and heroism in the face of questionable democracy. Post-war, it became the tool for Brecht to write about Marxism. By the late '80s, it helped presage the rise of leather-clad Tarantino tough men: Papp's festival saw Christopher Walken as Coriolanus strutting across the stage in a black t-shirt and long leather jacket. Today, Fiennes naturally frames the title character as the modern military hero who cannot deal with a government that pays mind to civilian protestors and commoners. As Manohla Dargis puts it, "the rule of the mob, the political hypocrisies, and the grinding of war's engine transcend any age."

But the magic of Coriolanus is that Fiennes understands Coriolanus as both a military hero and a problematic figure of masculinity. Coriolanus is a fractured icon—the result of a mother fiercely passionate about military honor—so focused on his duty that he has no tact, warmth, or ability to function outside of combat. His machismo makes him a machine, a Shakespearian Terminator going to battle with no concern for societal norms. Shakespeare's creation here smoothly fits in with the modern world and its many crises—about war, about men and women, about governments and people.

As Fiennes's Coriolanus shows, the key to making modernizations of Shakespeare successful is finding the right balance between reverence for the original text and attention to its present-day implications. Ian McKellan's spin on the bard's iconic villain in Richard III, for example, thrived because it mixed reality and fiction to solve the problem of explaining English royalty's complicated lineage to a 1995 audience. By framing England as a fascist state in 1930s Europe, Richard's rise to power is contextualized within a recognizable era. Our knowledge of Hitler, Mussolini, and WWII become gateways into England's messy aristocratic past. The film is also evocative and more than slightly campy. McKellan's eyes gleam as he plays Richard and talks to the camera, allowing the bloody quest to be equal parts political history and tantalizing, deadly mischievousness. The actor recognizes the subtle moments of wit within the dense, historical text.

This unabashed quality, which Fiennes works into a testosterone-fueled lather and which spurs McKellan to pick out Shakespeare's pulp, is never stronger than in Julie Taymor's gore-riddled Titus. Tapping into a 16th century obsession with bloody revenge plays—not all that different from today's horror films—Shakespeare had crafted a story rife with sex, murder, and sick vengeance. The Tony-winning Taymor delights in the over-the-top theatrics of the text and runs wild with opulent imagery in a surreal setting that makes use of objects from different decades and centuries. This is apt because the timelessness of Titus Andronicus is more about how it takes advantage of the weaknesses and desires of its audience than about any character's quest. The allure of sex, secrets, and revenge drives the play; it's about an escalation that heads into ridiculousness, from Lavinia's torture to Titus's very Hannibal-Lecter-esque finale (it's certainly no mistake that Anthony Hopkins himself plays Titus).