In Our Time - Romeo and Juliet

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Shakespeare's famous tragedy, written in the early 1590s after a series of histories and comedies. His audience already knew the story of the feuding Capulets and Montagues in Verona and the fate of the young lovers from their rival houses, but not how Shakespeare would tell it and, with his poetry and plotting, he created a work so powerful and timeless that his play has shaped the way we talk of love, especially young love, ever since.The image above is of Mrs Patrick Campbell ('Mrs Pat') as Juliet and Johnson Forbes-Robinson as Romeo in a scene from the 1895 production at the Lyceum Theatre, LondonWithHelen Hackett Professor of English Literature at University College LondonPaul Prescott Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California MercedAndEmma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

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I told you it was easy. Now, let's get back to the podcast. Hello, Romeo and Juliet marked a turning point in Shakespeare's career, a move from history and comedy towards tragedy, although it contains all three. His audience knew the story and how it would end, though not how he would tell it,

and it proceeds almost as a comedy might right up to the deaths of the two Starcrossed lovers. And with his poetry in plotting, Shakespeare created a work so powerful and timeless that his players shaped the way we talk of love, especially young love, ever since. With me to discuss Romeo and Juliet, are Helen Hackett, Professor of English Literature at University College London, Paul Prescott, Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California, Morset, and Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespearean Studies at Hartford College, University of Oxford. Emma Smith, what had Shakespeare written up to this point that might

have prepared him for this, if anything? Shakespeare's been writing the plays based on English history, the parts of Henry the 6th and the great tragedy of Richard the 3rd, but really he's been working on comedies, Temi of the Shrew, two gentlemen of Verona. Perhaps most importantly in preparing him for Romeo and Juliet is not a play at all, but the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, really probably Shakespeare's big hit before Romeo and Juliet. And that's a poem about the love of the goddess Venus for the unwilling Swain Adonis. It's all about female desire, putting female desire at the centre. And it's a poem which combines a sort of erotic comedy with a tragic outcome or a partly tragic outcome. But as you said, he has not really written tragedy at the

that he comes to Romeo and Juliet. How familiar would his first audiences have been with this story? Well, for us, Shakespeare seems to have invented young love and Romeo and Juliet's become the archetype. But of course, it's not the invention of that. There are all kinds of versions of this story going back into myth. Shakespeare uses a version of the Star-crossed lovers, the thwarted lovers from Ovid, his favourite sort of go-to classical author

in Midsummer Night's Dream around the same time. But there's also, as often with Shakespeare, a more immediate source. Throughout his career, he is looking to the fashionable, Italianate, fictional sources and their translations and to quarrying them for dramatic material. And he does that here. There are two versions of the Romeo and Juliet's story translated into English in the second half of the 16th century, probably both of which he consults, but most directly, a poem by Arthur Brooke

called The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which gives us a version of the story, the doom story of the lovers. But interestingly, framed in a much more moralistic way, Brooke tells the story of Romeus and Juliet, at least at the outset, to dissuade young lovers from behaving so impetuously and from disobeying their parents. And obviously we see that Shakespeare moves the moral centre in an entirely different direction from what he found in Arthur Brooks' poem. And he summarises the plot at the beginning, doesn't he?

Yeah, it's a great sort of spoiler alert. The sonnet that begins the play to households, both alike, in dignity, tells us the outline and makes it clear what's going to happen. So although the play is teetering on the edge of, or flirting with the possibility of comedy, 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. This is retreading the parameters of the story to set things up so that what can be of interest is the exquisite passion, pathos of how this happens rather than an uncertainty about what is going to happen. Thank you. Helen Hackett, the prologue is a sonnet. sonnets elsewhere in the play. What Shakespeare is setting up or subverting by reverting to the sonnet? I think he's signalling there that he's doing something that engages with the predominant

poetic fashion of the mid-1590s when he's writing this play, because the sonnet sequence is very much the dominant poetic form at this time. Most poets are churning out sonnet sequences. We actually think Shakespeare was probably writing some of his sonnets at this time as well. Shakespeare in his sonnets, he's already trying to do something different, but most sonnets of the time, they're very conventional. They involve a male lover who's pining for an unattainable, inaccessible, female beloved, and he uses very conventional language to do that. At the beginning of the play, we see Romeo very much performing that role of the sonnet lover and speaking that language. So he speaks about his lover's cold fire and sick health and so on, these kind of paradoxes are very much

how the sonnet lover speaks. So all of that kind of sonnet language is present in the the play, but also Shakespeare puts in other kinds of language of love. So Romeo is surrounded by his male friends who speak a lot of kind of laddish banter, which is full of lots of obscene jokes about sex. We've got Juliet's nurse who also speaks very earthly and very borderly about sex and women's sexual pleasure. And then actually, I think, coming in from Arthur Brook, from the source that Emma has talked about, the tragical history of Romeus and Juliet, although, as Emma said, that sets up the story in a moralising way. It says it's a kind of cautionary tale about unhonest desires and disobedience to parents and consorting with superstitious friars.

In the telling of it, Brooke actually, I think from his sources, from his Italian sources, presents the love of the young people rather kind of sensually and warmly, and particularly his Juliet, is a very desiring kind of heroine. She presses Romeo's palm with her tender palm as she waits for him to come to her at night, she speaks very ardently of her desire, and all of that carries over into Shakespeare's play. So I think he's, as well as the sonnet language, which he signals to us that he's engaging with, he's drawing in other kinds of languages of love, and out of them, he's going to forge a new language of love for the lovers, and particularly for Juliet, which combines the sensual

and the spiritual and really takes love poetry to a new level. When we first encounter Romeo, he's in love with Rosaline. What stops? this being just slightly ridiculous that, after a couple of lines or so, he switches to Juliet. Yes, I think he is slightly ridiculous in the early scenes of the play. He is kind of moping around

being the typical sonnet lover, the typical love melancholic. Mercutchey makes fun of him and says, cry but I and woe and pronounce but love and dove. We feel that there's something rather kind of posturing, a bit of a kind of pose that Romeo's adopting in the early scenes of the play.

At the same time, though, I think his melancholy sets him apart. He likes to take himself off to the Sycamore Grove, to be in solitude, to brood on his love. He's a serious young man. He perhaps takes himself a bit too seriously, and he's a little bit affected, but I think we have the sense of him searching for something.

He's looking for something meaningful in his life. He wants something to change. He wants something to happen. And so in a way he's kind of prepared for this bolt from the blue, which is going to be his encounter with Juliet which will be this immense experience of love at first sight which will transform both of them. What do you make of the intense hyperbolic language?

That Romeo uses. I think that Shakespeare is partly mocking them. There's a very subtle modulation after Romeo meets Juliet because actually he still uses the sonnet language. He talks about her as his saint, that kind of religious imagery is very much how a sonnet lover talks. She responds and calls him her pilgrim. He still in a way talks as a sonnet lover after he meets Juliet,

but there's a feeling that the sonic clichés have become real for him. They've turned into a real living, breathing woman. And the crucial difference is that Juliet returns his love. So when they meet, they speak a sonnet to each other. It's a kind of love duet. And whereas in a usual sonnet, you just have the male lover speaking alone with no return, no dialogue with the mistress who's just remote and inaccessible, Juliet speaks back to him

and so we have the sense of a mutual love or reciprocal love which is equally warm and important for both of them Thank you very much Paul Prescott there's something knock about about the very early scenes joking turns to violence, high poetry to low humour, it's restless

why do Shakespeare want to do that and how does it make it work? We've just been hearing from both Emma and Helen about Arthur Brooks' narrative poem that was the main source for the play and Brooke tells his story in of quite leisurely fashion it unfolds over about nine months. And one of the tricks that Shakespeare does is to telescope the action into four days. That gives that feeling of restlessness that this play 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 on Monday. 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, an astonishingly manic Monday in Verona for Romeo. And things happen at that kind of pace all the time in this play. Do we know early enough why the two sides are feuding?

Shakespeare is strategically vague about that. All we know is that it's been going on for a while, that it is an ancient grudge between the Montague's and the Capulets, and that it's erupted three times before the play starts, because when the Prince of Verona comes on to break up the brawl that happens in Act 1, scene one, he says, three civil brawes bred of an airy word by the old Capulet and Montague have thrice disturbed the quiet of our streets. So we know it's been going on for a while, we know it's kicked off three times.

I'm fascinated by that airy word that prince said started the brawls, because airy word sort of feels like another pun to me that the primary meaning of airy is empty, but then again, all words are airy, all words are composed of air. And if that word was so empty, how did it manage to fill Verona with such violence and hatred? And interestingly enough, it's an airy word that will trigger the tragedy. when Tibault says to Macucio later in the play accuses him, he says, Macuccio, thou dost consort with Romeo. Macuccio can't help but riff on the word consort, and a few seconds later he's dead. Does it matter that Romeo and Juliet is so young?

Juliet, we're told, is just about to reach her 14th birthday. Romeo is a bit older, we're not told his exact age, but does their youthful, extreme youthfulness matter? I think their youthfulness does matter a lot. it's interesting looking at the sources that Juliet just gets younger and younger in one of the sources she's 20, then Brooke makes her 16, and then Shakespeare, as you say, puts her at sort of Adrian Mollish 13 and 3 quarters or so. She's a bit older than 13 and 3 quarters. In fact, it's her birthday and a couple of weeks after the play begins. It's not clear why Shakespeare makes that change. Perhaps it increases her sense of powerlessness and vulnerability, and perhaps it therefore makes her courage and her strength. all the more impressive. But maybe equally he brought the character's age nearer to that of the boy player that he knew would be creating the role of Juliet for the first time.

I suppose either way, it heightens our sense of intergenerational gaps and thus the victimhood and the pathos of these young people struggling against the flawed world in which they happen to find themselves. Thank you, Emma. Romeo meets Juliet at a ball, and Rosaline is forgotten. recently. How do we know that Julian and he should be together forever? You've already heard from Helen about the really extraordinary way in which this sonnet is produced between the lovers as they meet. Four lines first from Romeo, perhaps a kind of quatrain that seems as if it's all about him,

or the classic pose of the sonnet lover that we've heard about. But then, as we also heard, you know, what's so fantastic is that Juliet speaks about. that prompt her to her own quatrain. There's a lovely report by the actor David Tennant when he performed the role of Romeo. Tennant says Romeo's met his intellectual match. Juliet is worthy of him and can meet him, can match him. We know that in Shakespeare's plays, wordplay, interlocking language,

is a kind of foreplay, can be intensely erotic. And that's what's happening before our eyes and before our ears when the couple meet at the ball. And of course it's cast about with these generational gaps that Paul just mentioned, that the ball is very beautifully set up, actually, in some ways very naturalistically set up. The older generation, the old men are sitting around going through their memories, and the young people are engaged in this extraordinary act of new self-creation.

It's a busy stage. But that sonnet, that shared linguistic space, creates this privacy, this intense privacy for Romeo and Juliet, which makes it clear to us that theirs is the story that's going to carry this play along. Helen, to come back to you, are we to think that Romeo and Juliet feel the same way towards each other? I think we are to think that they feel the same way. And that for both of them, it's a completely overpowering love, which is true and deep. but I think actually throughout the play, they continue to speak of it

in slightly different languages. As I've said, Romeo in a way continues to speak as a sonnet lover, although he sort of vivifies that language as if it's become true for him. But in the balcony scene, after the ball, when he goes, he climbs over the orchard wall

into the Capulets Garden and Juliet comes out on her balcony, so they're able to have this private conversation. And he says things like what light through yonder window breaks, one of the famous lines from the play. He's always looking at, up to idealising her beauty, her radiance. In that scene, he's actually physically, literally

positioned in a way that materialises that because he's down in the orchard with her up on the balcony below. He's gazing up at her venerating her, still a bit like a sonnet lover, venerating his saint-like mistress. Whereas Juliet, right from the off, right from this balcony scene, which is their second scene together after that brief first meeting, she speaks a much deeper, much more ardent language of desire. She says, my bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I give to thee, the more I have for both are infinite. We feel that she's experiencing this kind of oceanic wave of love and emotion, which she speaks in this very deep, fervent language of love, which I think Romeo never quite matches up to. I think

she does get a lot of the best poetry, a lot of the best lines in the play. Paul Prescott, is there any way of telling the audience where the power lies in these two families in Verona, Montague and Capulet, who has the freedom, who has control there? In Verona, the prince is the top of the tree, as it were, in terms of status. So he ostensibly has the power in that city, but apparently not that much agency to change anything. The prince breaks up the opening brawl, and he proclaims an edict that future brawls will be punishable by death. But that doesn't do anything. It doesn't prevent. the fight in which Tibald and Macusia will die. There are other people who imagine they have agency in Verona, the friar imagines he has agency and thinks he can sort everything out, but it doesn't anticipate a pandemic-inspired postal delay. So I'd say it's really the fathers in this play

who could change everything but choose not to. They could presumably end the feud at a stroke, but for whatever reason have chosen not to. And they've created a culture in Verona, in which whole households, servants and offspring, all of the people in the younger generation have been born into this polarised world in which you're either a Montague or a Capulet supporter.

And of course that completely infects the atmosphere on the streets and indeed in the bedrooms of Verona. Capulet's father is, I think, a particularly nasty piece of work. And he has this terrible tirade against Juliet in the third act when she dares to try and go against his will. and in that tirade against her, we feel the sort of full psychotic anger of patriarchy. And comedy is what happens when dads get out of the way and let young people have what they want. So when dads get in the way, as they do in this play, things are less likely to end well.

Emma, Emma Smith, it is a love story. So why is there so much violence? There are a couple of reasons for that. I mean, one is about emotional intensity. These violent delights have violent ends. The friar says, so passion and aggression are two sides of the same coin. They turn out to be the same thing. My only love sprung from my only hate.

And throughout, I think, the passion of the lovers is seen itself to be a form of violence, even as it is an antidote to the violence all around them. But there's also a structural point, as we've been. hearing violence is endemic in this split society. Tragic characters are often scapegoats or lightning rods for societal problems or societal splits and the violence that Verona is is allowing its younger generation to enact on each other becomes intensified on the bodies of Romeo and Juliet. Some readers of this play, some historians would say that the emphasis on violence is a very particular 1590s kind of interest.

We see published in Elizabethan London two or three manuals on dueling, a kind of foreign idea which has its own ethics and its own choreography and its own style. We started by saying Shakespeare's written these history plays before he comes to write Romeo and Juliet 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. That's what they go and want to see. And to some extent, that's still present in the mixture of emotions and scenes that we get in Romeo and Juliet. Helen, what are the strengths and weaknesses of Friar Lawrence? Friar Lawrence is a fascinatingly ambiguous character. Relating to what Paul is just talking about, about how the parents in the plays, particularly the fathers in the plays in the play, seem to fail in their moral authority. They don't fulfil the role that they're needed to fulfil.

So we look to other figures and we have friar Lawrence, who's a mentor to Romeo, we have the nurse, who's a mentor to Juliet. But they both fail to give moral and spiritual guidance as well. When we first meet friar Lawrence, he seems like he's going to be a voice of morality and wisdom. He has a solitary speech, a kind of choral speech where he says some quite wise-sounding things. But he also talks about herbs. He's gathering herbs and he talks about how they can be medicinal or poisonous. And immediately we have a sort of two-sided view of him, I think. He then goes on, of course, to marry the young lovers. As he does so, he warns them against rashness and hastiness, but he's participating in that himself in marrying them just the day after they've met. And of

course, that's something that creates a lot of the problems that follow in the play. He also then provides Juliet with the sleeping potion. Her parents insist, after Romeo has been banished for murdering Tybalt, Juliet's parents insist that she must marry in haste with Paris, a count and aristocrat they've got lined up to be her husband, so she's in a predicament. And Friar Lawrence provides a sleeping potion, the idea being that she will fall asleep for a period, she'll be taken to her ancestor's tomb as if dead, she'll be believed dead. And then Romeo will come there so that when she wakes, they'll be together and Romeo can rescue her and they can run away together. Of course, that all goes horribly wrong because the message doesn't get through to Romeo.

It was always a bit of a rash plot. Juliet, in the evening before her planned wedding, when she prepares to take the sleeping potion, she wonders if she can trust Friar Lawrence, or is it perhaps a poison? And he has a kind of evil twin in the play, who is the apothecary, who sells poison to Romeo. They sort of seem like mirror images of each other. So in lots of ways he seems suspicious. And his worst scene, of course, is right at the end of the play when we're in Juliet's tomb and she wakes to find Romeo dead beside her. And Friar Lawrence is actually there at that moment in that scene. And rather than helping her in any way, he actually runs away so as not to get into trouble. So he's deeply disappointing at that point. Of course, part of this is all

to do with the fact that Catholic friars would have been regarded with suspicion in Protestant England in the largely Protestant audience that Shakespeare was writing for. But I think it is also part of this larger picture of the older generation failing to offer guidance and authority in the play. And that then casts a spotlight

back onto the young lovers because it throws into relief, it intensifies Romeo and Juliet as the moral centre of the play and their love as the thing in the play that is true, that's pure, that's beautiful. It makes that very much the moral core of the play.

Another big part is the nurse, Juliet's nurse. Emma, would you like to take that on? She has a wonderful introduction to Juliette. She talks about the time when Juliette was weaned, and she talks, there's a sort of moving backstory about her own dead child. So she's a character who's more than just the jolly, bawdy, wife of Bath kind of a figure in the play. she too fails to provide that moral authority, or she too is taken along by the speed of the play, I think. And her advice that Juliet should just go ahead with this marriage to Paris, because Romeo has gone,

marks a sort of low point, both morally but also empathetically, I think, and means that Juliet turns instead to the friar and to this. crazy plan that if only she pretends to be dead, everything will be fine. Paul Prescott, can you place Macutio for the audience and what changes with his death? Yes, Macutio is one of the big changes that Shakespeare makes from his sources. Macuccio is only really a hint in Brook. Shakespeare massively expands him into this role of really Romeo's, one of Romeo's best friends. I'd suppose Benvolio would be the other one, very different kind of character. And at the first,

The centre of the play is this fateful moment. It's a terribly hot day. The mad blood is stirring in Verona and almost for a combination of the heat and boredom of fight kicks off between Tibald, Juliet's cousin, and Macucio. And Romeo tries to stop it, but Tibult kills Macuccio and a few seconds later. Romeo kills Tibult in revenge. And Macuio has really lit up the first half of this play with a kind of manic, charismatic energy. And there's something very very, very poignant about this joker figure actually having to face his own mortality. Although, interestingly enough, he does so through puns, and he says, ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man. So he's punning even as he's dying. But he departs with that famous wish, a plague on both your houses, curses both the Montague's and the Capulets. And that that plague curse both is and isn't metaphorical, because it is actually the plague that will prevent Romeo receiving a letter, the contents of which would have saved both his and Juliet's life. So Macuccio's curse will actually land.

And I think we also sense on an almost subliminal level that the death of Macuccio is the death of comedy in this play. Because things have been going okay until now. Romeo and Juliet have actually managed to marry, and there's a prospect that in the words of Westside story, there might be a place for them somewhere. and the death of Macusio is just like a portcullis slamming down and it will change everything. Emma, some of the lines are famous. Are they the best lines, you think? Can you highlight a few of them?

So when the play is first printed in 1597, it's called an excellent, conceited tragedy. And conceited means not vain there, but witty and well-phrased, beautifully phrased. we see contemporaries picking out lines from the play that they find beautiful or well-wrought. There are several manuscripts which take out the line that Romeo says about Julie, when he meets Juliet for the first time, she hangs upon the cheek of night as a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear, this very visual, very evocative image. And we also get repeated the phrase that love. goes toward love like schoolboys from their books,

one of the many similes in the play in which both the lovers compare their experience to the experience of childhood. That's their only frame of reference. And here we've got love being talked about like going to school. So really within a few years of the play being first performed and then first printed, it becomes, lines from it are circulating very, very widely.

They're in the first books of quotation, that are collected towards at the end of the 16th century, the play is being mocked in a Cambridge University skit around the same time. We even hear it being quoted in a sermon in the University of Oxford. What's not circulating is perhaps the line that has become most emblematic of this play, and indeed of Shakespeare, perhaps more generally, that much quoted and much abused line, Romeo, Wherefore out there, Romeo. Helen Hackett.

Can I move on to my favourite passage? And I've been burning to talk about it. It's in Juliette soliloquy when she's waiting for Romeo to come so they can spend their first night and what turns to be their only night together. And she speaks with great erotic force and power about her desire for this night and her desire for Romeo. And she says, give me my Romeo. And when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars.

And he will make the face of heaven so fine. that all the world will be in love with night. I think it's just a glorious passage. And one thing that's very interesting about it is she says, when I shall die, take Romeo and cut him out. And sometimes that's been amended in the past by editors who've taken that as being a mistake

that they think it would make more sense for her to say when he shall die. But actually the consensus now amongst most editors is that when I shall die is correct. And what she's doing there, she's using that Elizabethan euphemism that people may well be familiar with, which is that die is a term used for orgasm, for sexual ecstasy.

She's anticipating the sexual ecstasy she's going to feel in the night to come. And I think it's extraordinary, really, that Shakespeare takes this very young girl and makes us feel that her sexual feelings are something very elevated, very spiritual, very transcendent. Just before that, she has addressed night, she's personified night, as a sober suited matron all in black. And she says tonight, think true love acted, simple modesty. And I think through this very rapturous language that she gets,

Shakespeare enables her to express her love, which is at once very sexual. It's very sensual and physical, but it's also spiritual and transcendent fuse together. And I think this is the new radical love language that he's forging in this play. It goes along with the new language of love that he's trying to forge in his sonics.

and I think that's one of the very important achievements of the play for me. It's not unlike what's going on from other poets at the time as well. If we think of John Dunn and the kind of metaphysical poetry he's writing, which also presents sexual love as a transcendent spiritual experience, I think Juliet is accessing that. She's doing something similar in the way that she speaks about her love and desire as well, which is really something quite extraordinary. Paul, what makes the part of Romeo and Juliet so hard?

to perform. You speak as a person who has played, Romeo, so that gives you an extra clout in this answer. Oh, blimey. That was some time ago. Well, they're lovely parts to play, so I'd want to emphasise the joy of playing them first of all, but the challenges are there. Definitely, they're technical, they're emotional, and indeed they're cultural. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, the technical challenge is that between them, they carry the play. They speak about 40% of the play's lines between them, which is the same as Hamlet does in his point. play. Juliet was probably the longest female role in a single play that Shakespeare had attempted. And there is a technical challenge to do with voice control, breath, and knowing how to ladder a soliloquy,

particularly Juliet. So that's technical. The emotional, I've talked about, the wide arc of experience that these characters go through within 24, 36, 48 hours. And then cultural, all of the baggage we as audience members bring to the theatre or to the cinema. They've obviously, Romeo and Juliet have become icons of love. And that means that they're loaded with cultures that maybe in their less imaginative moments associate love with beauty, for example. So there are various things you've got to get right in the casting. And there are some great examples from theatre history of things of people not getting

the casting right, for example, casting someone over 50 years of age in the part of Romeo, which actually provoked more or less riots in Glasgow in the late 19th century. But in normal circumstances, these are enormously rewarding roles. Back to Helen. Can you say why you think midsummer nice dream, written about the same time, how that interacts? Yeah, it's fascinating. They're sister plays or twin plays in a way, a comedy and a tragedy that are dealing with a lot of the same themes. They're both very interested in dreams. In Romeo and Juliet, lots of.

characters have sort of premonitory dreams. When Romeo tells Mercutio that he's had a dream, Mercutio responds with the Queen Mab speech, which is all about the fairy queen and how she brings dreams into people's minds at night. And she seems very like a figure that strayed in from a midsummer night's dream. The whole speech is a kind of cadenza or showpiece that has nothing to do directly with the action of Romeo and Juliet. But I think the most important connection is that they're both concerned with young love, with young love which is trying to overcome obstinate. and particularly parental opposition. And we've got that in a Midsummer Night's dream

because we have Hermia and Lysander, where Hermia's father wants her to marry a different man and that's why they run away to the woods. They speak about themselves in very similar terms to Romeo and Juliet. So Hermia says, true lovers ever have been crossed, which of course makes us think of Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers. Lysander says, so quick, bright things come to confusion,

which could stand very well, I think. is a sort of very brief synopsis of Romeo and Juliet. And we have another pair of Romeo and Juliet-style lovers in a Midsummer Night's Dream, which is Pyrrimus and Thysbee, the two lovers who feature in the play within a play that's performed at the end of a Midsummer Night's Dream by the mechanicals for Duke Theseus and his court. They're also lovers who are divided by their families,

and like Romeo and Juliet, through a mistake and a mistiming, they end up killing each other. So we've got lots of reverberations back and forth, and I think Shakespeare's thinking a lot about the relation between comedy and tragedy through these stories. So Hermia and Lysander end happily through fairy magic and good luck. They get to marry, they get to be together. But they're sort of shadowed by Pyramus and Thysby who die tragically. And yet Pyrimus and Thisby's story becomes funny because it's so ineptly performed by the mechanicals.

It's called in the play a most lamentable comedy and very tragical mirth. And I think that's our experience of it. And then Romeo and Juliet, back in their own play, as Paul was saying, it starts out rather like a comedy, young lovers who are facing parental opposition who seem at first actually to be conquering it. And there's some hope, you know, they might get through to their happy ending, but of course they don't. And I think their tragic ending feels all the sharper, all the more painful and intense, because it's shadowed by this possibility of the comic ending that might otherwise have been possible. Do you think there was a self-conscious way in which Shakespeare was sending his own play up

by having the Pyramus and Thysby? It's possible. We don't know which play he wrote first. It would be quite nice to think that he wrote Romeo and Juliet first and then he was sort of parodying it or travesting it in a Midsummer Night's Dream. But it could equally have been the other way round that he wrote Midsummer Lightstream first and then thought that would actually make a good tragedy and then wrote Romeo and Juliet. I rather like to think that he might have been writing both plays at the same time, that he was sort of working on them and they were cross-fertilising because there's just so much dialogue back and forth between them.

What happens when productions are aimed squarely at a teenage audience? I think those productions emphasise the intensity of the adolescent passions that the play depicts. They very much focus on the ways in which parents, the older generation, can't understand what's happening and how it feels to be in this exciting and cruel period of life. So I think that there's a lot of emotional intensity is gained from those kinds of productions. Of course, one of the ironies of the play is that we never see, almost never see, actors of the age of the actual roles, particularly not a Juliet. Every film there has been of Romeo and Juliet has had trouble with

the casting of Juliet where it's been impossible or in politic to cast somebody as young as the director has hoped for. So there are ways that that youthful, particularly perhaps as ideas are changing about what is appropriate for young people, what's appropriate for young people to perform, maybe our ideas are shifting a little bit about that. And a production of the play which is less clearly or less firmly focused on young people as the primary audience, perhaps allows us a little bit more distance on this depiction of love. It is important to remember Paul began by saying, you know, what an extraordinary telescoping of time there is. But this is a really very, very hasty, very foolish sequence of events by one reading. And although the play doesn't encourage us, I think,

to really judge the lovers harshly. There are some moments where we're encouraged, I think, to step back from their own experience, and some productions are able to do that. Yes. Helen Hackett, there have been so many adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. Which of those work best few? Well, there are so many to talk about, of course. I think it's one of Shakespeare's most adapted plays,

and we could talk about Gouno's opera, Prokofiev's ballet. Of course, Westside's story, turning it into a Hollywood musical and having just recently been remade, are so many of them. I'm going to be rather unoriginal, I'm afraid, and say that my favorite adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is the 1996 film directed by Baz Lawman. Many people do choose that as their favourite Shakespeare film. And I think it's a really effective adaptation of the play. It's often been called Shakespeare for the MTV Generation and it has the sort of complete

sensory overload of pop video. It's really loud. It's really rash. It's visually quite garish, it's really arresting. And it's set in a sort of Latin American metropolis. We've got skyscrapers representing the Montague and Capulet families. They're now corporate brands with their names on these skyscrapers. We've got police helicopters constantly whirring overhead. We've got gigantic, religious statues towering over the city and a really intense sense of heat. And with that, the sense of simmering violence. And the action plays out against that. And I think it really works, because one thing in the text of the play is that the lyric poetry creates moments of stillness against that violence and chaos in which the lovers seem to exist in a kind of bubble of

their love. And I think the film really evokes that, of course, it has Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Dane's as the two lovers. They're both visually gorgeous. They fulfill that ideal of beauty that Paul was talking about. The camera is ravished by them, I think particularly by Leonardo DiCaprio. And they get lovely moments when they're sort of set apart. from everyone else and from this madness of the city and the violence, particularly when they first meet and they glimpse each other through a fish tank. It's a wonderfully imaginative visual idea. I think the production designer Catherine Martin,

who also happens to be Baz Luhrmann's wife, deserves a lot of credit for the look of the film. And I think that moment of them first glimpsing each other through a fish tank, they're slightly distorted, they look slightly otherworldly. It really encapsulates how they pass into almost, a different dimension when they fall in love. When they meet at the ball, when they speak their sonnet, Juliet is dressed as an angel. Romeo is dressed as her knight in shining armour.

It's a very knowing visualization of what could have become a very cliched moment. But I think because it does it in a slightly sort of tongue-in-cheek, knowing way, it's really effective. And lots of really witty, really clever touches to the film like that, which work wonderfully well, I think. I agree that Lerman's film is terrific. But I would want to contend that, West Side Story is at least as good a work of art as Romeo and Juliet.

And it certainly was a game changer in the cultural history of this play. Because I talked earlier about how we don't know why they're feuding in Shakespeare's original. Well, Bernstein and Sondheim and Et al, you know, provided a reason for this feud that it was ethnic. It was about turf wars in contemporary America. And I think adapters since then have been emboldened by West Side Story to, to fit the Montague and Capulets into a kind of contemporary template. And that has really changed the ways that this play has been interpreted and performed around the world.

And I think the new remake of West Side Story is tremendous and everyone should see it. Right, there we go. Finally, Emma? I think if I'd gone first or second, I might have chosen the same. But maybe I'll say that the balletic versions by Chikovsky and by Prokhovsky and by Prokhov, Kofiev, offer actually something really distinctive in terms of adaptation. That's to say they move this play away from those conceits and from that verbal play and from perhaps some over familiar lines into something more structural with a clearer shape to it, which is about the two feuding families and the way the two principles dance and make space for themselves and articulate their own desires in the face of the face of.

that feud. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you Helen Hackett, Emma Smith and Paul Prescott and to our pseudo-engineer Bob Nettles. Next week, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and his ideas on evolution as well as revolution. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say that you wish you'd said? Thinking about the legacy and the impact of this of this story on the world, I'd have liked to have said that to recognise what a powerful myth this provides this play. And for the many, many people who aren't blessed with loving parents, the idea of finding some kind of unconditional love outside the family unit is very powerful.

And I think that fantasy of disowning your family, of ditching your mates, of cutting loose with someone you feel a chemical charge, you know, someone you tessellate with on so many levels, is profoundly powerful. And I think it explains why there's a woman in Verona, as we speak, who receives letters from around the world addressed to Juliet. This myth has gone in deep and it's gone in hard. And it's now, you know, part of the mental furniture we carry around with us. Emma, Helen?

Because there's a quite intriguing theory that some people have floated about why it might be that Juliet is a fortnight short of her 14. birthday, which we're told insistently several times in the opening scenes of the play. And that comes back to what I was talking about earlier about the play's engagement with the sonnet tradition, because of course a sonnet is a love poem with 14 lines. And it sounds a bit fanciful, but I'm rather intrigued by the idea that, you know, Juliet, in a sense, is a sort of slightly incomplete sonnet who's going to be completed by her love for Romeo. It's perhaps as good as an explanation as it's otherwise rather mystifying why Shakespeare makes her as young as 14.

But I quite like playing with that idea and considering it. I love that idea. Shakespeare always uses the opening minutes of a play to tune us in to that play's particular wavelengths and sound worlds and thematic concerns. And Romeo and Juliet, it's fascinating because we've just been hearing about the prologue. It's a sonnet. It unfolds with the force of destiny and inevitability. It says, here's what happened.

nothing could be done, two children are dead, it's the language of tragedy. But then immediately the wavelength changes, and we have the language of the street, of the Montague servants, and they're speaking prose, and they're punning. And the fact that they're punning, I think, is very important. And the first few lines of Romeo and Juliet contain a battery of puns, much to the distress of anyone who's trying to teach it. But actually in performance, these puns come quickly and they're like lightning. and the pun is a kind of opposite or photo-negative of what the prologue has just been doing

because whereas the prologue is all about fatalism and destiny, a pun on the other hand is slippery. And a pun suggests that a world in which there are multiple opportunities and multiple meanings and that things might actually change. Anyone else? Anything to comment on adaptations or anything that they wish they'd said in the furrow itself? Yeah, one thing I'd have been interested to talk about probably is the end of the play. which doesn't quite pan out on the stage as it looks as it is in our memory or as it is in Baz Luhrman's film.

So Basleerman has this beautiful, private, very gaudy Kitch Chapel where the lovers encounter each other or just miss each other in these last moments. But Shakespeare's actually scripted a much, you know, a scene in the sort of charnel house, are seen in the tomb where, you know, Tibald is, is present, Paris, you know, these bodies are around, they come and break into the tomb, don't they? This is a, with a sort of mattock or something, you know, this is a very much less Liebstad in the Wagnerian term. This is a rather crowded sense that there was no privacy for the lovers. It's not, it's not really a possible. It was all a fantasy. It was a fantasy in a bubble for one night. And then after that,

you know, everybody else is crashing in. And sometimes I think the adaptations turn the ending into the ending that we would like them to have had. And it's quite interesting to go back to the play and see the way Shakespeare is less sentimental about that maybe than we often are. I think that way that the play ends that Emma has talked about, it ties in very much with what I would call the Gothic aesthetic of the play. It's a play which in itself is very Gothic, and I think it was a huge influence on Gothic literature later on in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Earlier on in the play, Juliette has actually anticipated what it will be like to wake in the tomb just before she takes the sleeping potion. She has a soliloquy where she imagines it, and it's very, very vivid, very lurid, actually, and very sensational, because she imagines herself waking in the tomb, surrounded by the bones of her ancestors,

surrounded by their ghosts and their stenest, and their stenches. She feels that she might run mad and that she would beat her own brains out with the bones of her ancestors. That kind of scene and also the really strong imagery running throughout the play of Juliet as the bride of death.

That's an image that keeps being repeated over and over again in different circumstances through the play. All of this, I think, feeds into the kind of aesthetic that will be relished very strongly in the 18th and 19th century in Gothic fiction and even feeds into horror fiction and horror film right up to the present day.

Yeah, you're right. And it must be, sorry, sorry, Paul, but that must be something to do with the age of the lovers as well. These are sort of threshold, rights of passage, anxieties. This is about, you know, the access of sexuality, which is such a gothic trope, isn't it, such a kind of sociological gothic trope? Sorry, Paul. That's so great. I mean, you both brilliantly described the sort of gothic ending of the play, but, I'd also add a kind of final political ending, as it were. I'm thinking about a production by Michael Bogdanov at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980s, and Bogdanov took a very jaundiced view of the men in this play, the old men. And in the play, as written, Montague and Capulet shake hands, in effect, and say, okay, well, the scraps over, and we're going to put up these golden statues to our lost children and everything will be dandy.

Now, Michael Bogdanov in his production took a very skeptical view of this detente at the end of the play, and he turned it into a press conference. The idea that was that Montague's and Capulets, this was just a cosmetic patch-up, and that really, and they were sticking up a couple of tawdry statues. They hadn't really got the message of the play at all. And Bogdanov left us with a very different ending, which was the not unfamiliar spectacle, really, of rich men who were content. to Stoke Division to boost their own status and wealth. So there's a kind of alternate political ending to this play. That's so interesting. Well, thank you all very much.

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