I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I like it when I learn new things about Shakespeare. Sometimes that’s the best part. But when it’s basic knowledge that I had *wrong*, well, then I feel stupid and I don’t like it.
Such as this week, when my daughter was going over the answers on her Romeo and Juliet final, and she said something about, “That’s the Prince reading Romeo’s suicide note.”
“Romeo didn’t leave a suicide note!” I replied.
“Yes…he did?” she responded, confused.
“Show me,” I told her.
Well would you look at that:
ROMEO
Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron.
Hold, take this letter; early in the morning
See thou deliver it to my lord and father.…
BALTHASAR
I brought my master news of Juliet’s death;
And then in post he came from Mantua
To this same place, to this same monument.
This letter he early bid me give his father,
And threatened me with death, going in the vault,
I departed not and left him there.PRINCE
Give me the letter; I will look on it.
I don’t know why my brain has left that part out. Do movies tend to snip that part? In all the times I’ve described the ending of this play I’ve said that Friar Laurence is left to tell the story. Which is true. But leaves out the actual documentation from one of the title characters! That’s like looking for the wedding scene because you saw it in the Baz Luhrman version.
I have to go hang my head in shame, I have lost geek cred today.
Don’t forget what the Prince says the letter says . . . just a few lines further down:
PRINCE This letter doth make good the friar’s words,
Their course of love, the tidings of her death:
And here he writes that he did buy a poison
Of a poor ‘pothecary, and therewithal
Came to this vault to die, and lie with Juliet.
If we didn’t have those lines, we wouldn’t actually know the contents of the letter. It otherwise could have been, “Hi, Dad. Weather not bad in Mantua. Need money. Tell Mom hi. —R.”
kj