Eight things you might not know about Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the last word in tragic romance. It has been staged countless times and adapted for other artforms including film, TV and ballet.
For Radio 4’s In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg and three expert guests delve further into the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets and into the doomed love of the titular “star-crossed lovers”.
Here are eight things you might not know about the goings-on in fair Verona!
Romeo and Juliet
1. The play begins with a spoiler!
Romeo and Juliet starts with a sonnet that gives the plot away. The prologue, which begins Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, takes the audience through all of the tragic blows of the play, but entreats them to find out exactly how such a tragic state could arise.
“Although the play is teetering on the edge of comedy,” says Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford, “it also does foreclose that right at the beginning, by giving us the outline that only the death of the lovers can heal the feud… so what is of interest is the exquisite passion and pathos of how this happens, rather than an uncertainty about what is going to happen.”
2. Romeo and Juliet was born from epic poems
Shakespeare’s primary source for the play was an epic poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written in 1562 by the English poet Arthur Brooke. Brooke based his poem on a French translation of work by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello. Brooke’s version is a moralistic one, with the intention of dissuading readers from disobeying their parents.
That鈥檚 an astonishingly 鈥榤anic Monday鈥� in Verona for Romeo!
Before Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s big hit was the poem Venus and Adonis, about the love goddess and her unrequited love for a handsome man who would rather go hunting! It’s an erotic comedy with a tragic outcome. Shakespeare had not really written tragedy before Romeo and Juliet, so this poem was a testing ground.
3. The play condenses months of life events into just four days
As well as moving the moral compass of the Arthur Brooke version, Shakespeare’s play radically changes the timeline of it. “Brooke tells his story in quite a leisurely fashion, unfolding over about nine months. Shakespeare telescopes the action into four days," explains Paul Prescott, Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California Merced. "This gives the play the feeling of restlessness that it should have in performance. It should feel like it's rushing by you, and a lot is going to happen in those four days."
"If you take just Monday, for example, Romeo will do a few things for the first time in his life. He'll get married. He'll kill someone. He'll get banished. He'll sort of attempt suicide. And then at some point on Monday night, he presumably loses his virginity. That’s an astonishingly ‘manic Monday’ in Verona for Romeo!”
4. The Montagues and Capulets could be fighting over nothing
We know that the Montagues and Capulets have a longstanding feud but we don’t really find out why. One half-clue comes when the Prince of Verona breaks up the fight in Act I, Scene 1. “Three civil brawls bred of an airy word,” is how the Prince describes the feud. From that we know the extent of the “previous”, and that the disagreement was over something “airy”. Prof Paul Prescott breaks this down, weighing up that while airy means empty, all words are essentially composed of air. “If that word was so empty, how did it manage to fill Verona with such violence and hatred?”
5. The violence in the play was there for the young male theatregoers
Though Romeo and Juliet is a love story, it’s punctuated with violence. “Passion and aggression are two sides of the same coin,” Prof Emma Smith points out, adding: “I think the passion of the lovers is seen itself to be a form of violence, even though it is an antidote to the violence all around them.”
The toxic air has also been put down to the fascination of the time with combat; several manuals on duelling were published at this time, for example.
However, the reason could be as simple as crowd-pleasing. “Shakespeare was writing history plays before Romeo and Juliet,” Emma reminds us, “and the big theatrical draw of the history play for the largely young male audiences who go to the theatre is fighting – a lot of fighting.”
6. The death of Mercutio turns the play from comedy to tragedy
Romeo’s friend Mercutio is one of the main departures Shakespeare made from his sources for the play. He provides comic relief right up until the point at which he dies at the hands of Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, with his last words including the pun: “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”
Romeo is slightly ridiculous in the early scenes of the play
When Mercutio is killed, comedy in the play dies with him. His curse of “a plague o' both your houses!”, aimed at the Montagues and the Capulets, ends up coming to pass and defining the play as a tragedy.
7. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet are “twin plays”
We don’t know the precise order in which Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the shared themes and parallels between them bond them as almost “twin plays”. Dreams feature prominently in both, but the key link is the young couples – Romeo and Juliet and Hermia and Lysander – trying to be together despite parental disapproval.
“They speak about themselves in very similar terms to Romeo and Juliet,” notes Helen Hackett, Professor of English Literature at University College London, of Hermia and Lysander. “Hermia says, If then true lovers have been ever crossed/It stands as an edict in destiny, which of course, makes us think of Romeo and Juliet, the ‘star-crossed lovers’.”
Another set of doomed lovers – Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe – appear in a play within a play, with their story ineptly told by the troupe of mechanicals. Ovid was very likely used as a source for Romeo and Juliet too, and so this suggests Shakespeare could be sending up his own work!
8. Romeo and Juliet created a language of love
In synthesising various poems and adding his own sorcery with sonnets, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet becomes an embodiment of romance. Two worlds collide: a rather lost, brooding Romeo yearning for a meaningful bolt from the blue, and Juliet, his love at first sight, who Prof Helen Hackett describes as a “very desiring type of heroine”.
The combination is electric. Romeo feels like the sonnet clichés have become real, and their sonnets to each other become what Helen Hackett calls “a kind of love duet”, adding that we get the sense of “a mutual love, a reciprocal love which is equally warm and important for both of them”.
