 It earned United Artists a profit of $1.62 million.Previous efforts to put Shakespeare on the screen included Mary Pickford's 1929 "The Taming of the Shrew ;" Max Reinhardt's 1935 "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for Warner Bros; a British film adaptation of "As You Like It" starring Olivier and Elisabeth Bergner and scored by William Walton; and MGM's1936 "Romeo and Juliet," directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard.They had all misfired.