Abstract

            This study focuses on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, highlighting how the plays intertwine love and lust rather than presenting them as separate moral concepts. These emotions are depicted as active, shaping both individual character and the social environment around them. Incorporating insights from adaptation theory and media studies, as well as feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial approaches, the paper examines how passion functions not merely as private feeling but also as a force embedded in cultural and political frameworks. Close readings of the plays reveal love in Verona appears as youthful, sacramental, and defiant, while desire in Alexandria is entangled with power, performance, and empire. The analysis extends to modern media adaptations, from film, theatre, and graphic novels to fashion campaigns and digital platforms, demonstrating how love and lust are continually re-scripted to reflect contemporary anxieties and aesthetics. The paper argues that Shakespeare’s lovers function as cultural laboratories, where intimacy intersects with politics, gender, and authority, and that their enduring relevance lies in their mutability: love and lust remain volatile energies, perpetually reshaped by culture and media, and capable of challenging how we imagine desire, agency, and risk.