Category: Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet remains popular due to its tragic love story, relatable characters, and universal themes of love, fate, and the clash between youth and age. Its enduring popularity is also attributed to its poetic language and captivating storytelling, as well as its numerous adaptations and cultural references. The play has been adapted countless times in film, theatre, and literature and continues to be studied and performed worldwide, making it one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works.

Browse the text of Romeo and Juliet entire play here.

This Is Gonna Get Ugly

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

For my day job we have a very large email marketing business.  It’s normal conversation to talk about what others are doing, so when I got the following subject line in an email I laughed and showed it to my coworkers:

Make someone ugly cry. Adobe can help.

What I wrong as a comment was, “I know what they meant, but that’s the worst subject line I’ve ever seen.”  It sounds like Adobe’s offering to help you chase ugly kids around the playground and make them cry.

A couple days after that post, a coworker calls me over and says, “You posted something the other day and I’ve been meaning to ask you about it…I don’t get it?  You wrote, I know what they mean … but I don’t.  I don’t know what they mean? Is it like the optical illusion with the old woman and the young woman and I can only see the old woman?”

So I told him, “Claire Danes in the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo+Juliet.”Clare Danes cry faceTurns out there’s actually several blogs and tumblrs dedicated to her cry face in particular, and she’s even been asked about it in interviews 🙂

Romeo and Juliet Die in a Gunfight

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure how much Shakespeare we’re going to get in this one, but the coming action film starring Kaya Scoldelario and Josh Hutcherson is being billed that way:

The Mark Gordon Company has set Kaya Scodelario (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales), Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games), Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse) and Helen Hunt (As Good as It Gets) to star in the action romance Die in a Gunfight, a modern update on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

More specifically the film, “will see Hutcherson and Scodelario as two star-crossed lovers Ben and Mary. Set against a backdrop of corporate espionage, revenge, and a long-standing feud between their families.”

If we hold this one to the same standard as Lion King, I wonder how well it would fare?  I’ve often said that the only way we can call “brother kills brother and son takes revenge” a Hamlet story is if we count all “lovers can’t be together because their groups hate each other” a Romeo and Juliet story.

Maybe we need to come up with a metric for how much Shakespeare something has to have in it before they get to use the name?

Let’s predict, shall we?  This will be fun.  For us to consider this a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet it should ideally have …

  • Two warring families (or other social groups) who hate each other just because.  They always have.  Maybe there’s backstory, maybe not, we don’t need one.
  • One representative from each family, who would like to see the families reconcile so they can be together.
  • A best friend / confidant for each.
  • One representative on each side (a Mercutio and a Tybalt) who are quite fine with them continuing to try to kill each other, thank you.
  • Some sort of time element driving the plot, such as Juliet’s marriage to Paris.  Something to keep it moving.
  • A Friar Laurence character to come up with a crazy “this’ll never work, but it’s our only hope!” plan.

You’ll notice I did not say “They have to end up dead.”  I’m actually quite ok with flipping to a happier ending, because if you don’t then you really do just rule out the possibility of any Disney or kid-friendly adaptations.

What do you think?  Something I missed? Something I put on my list that you can live without?

Is Romeo and Juliet an Anti-Irish Rant?

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

There’s not much Shakespeare content in Neal Stephenson’s The Rise And Fall of D.O.D.O, much to my dismay. But there is a bit that’s new to me and worthy of discussion.  The story is a time travel one, and when our hero is transported back to Elizabethan England to hang out with an Irish prostitute, he wants to talk about Shakespeare. He notices that Romeo and Juliet is currently playing.

“It’s a shite play,” she responds, “Just a court sponsored rant against the Irish.”

She then cites her evidence:

  • the “villain” is a Catholic friar, and “everybody knows” Catholic is code for Irish.
  • his meddling is the cause of all suffering and the reason why the play is  tragedy and not a comedy
  • the friar’s name is Lawrence, obviously named for St. Labhras, who was martyred by a poison of his own concoction.

Is this a well known conspiracy theory, or did Stephenson make it up?  He’s got other examples, less specific – the one about the “terrible drunk Irish character staggering about the stage wailing about how all the Irish are villains and bastards and knaves” or the “English king who went to conquer Ireland, and he said the Irish live like venom.”

So, did Shakespeare hate the Irish?

 

Fragments of Shakespeare

~ kj ~ Leave a comment

Bardfilm here!

I recently saw Baby Driver, and it had a tiny fragment of Shakespeare in it. Over at Bardfilm, I write a lot about Shakespeare and film, but sometimes the references are so tiny that they don’t merit a full write-up. But now that I’ve seized control of Shakespeare Geek, I can throw up something here quickly.

Yes, that was poorly phrased, but I’ll let it go.

In Baby Driver, one of the bad guys is searching for one of the good guys, and says, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

So it’s the usual confusion of what wherefore actually means—it persists even though SG and I dealt with it in one of our Shakespeare Knock-Knock Jokes (for which, c.v.). In this case, though, I think it’s meant to be a marker of just how uncultured the bad guy is. It helps contribute to what makes him a bad guy. Not only is he a villain and a cad, he doesn’t even know what wherefore means!

Safe for Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

On the common message board at work I posted quick thoughts on the local Romeo and Juliet this weekend, where I called it (among other things), “safe.”

“I’m curious what exactly a safe production of Romeo and Juliet is,” said a coworker in person.  “Do they not die in the end?”  Laughter from random overhearing coworkers.

“Nope, they definitely still die.”

“Is there still an implied teenage sex scene?”

“Yup, definitely has that.”

“And they still murder people?”

“Yes, yes they do.”

“And you call that safe? As a parent?”

“Fair point.  My kids definitely gave me the, ‘Seriously, Daddy?’ look when Mercutio was writhing and grinding on the floor a few times. But everybody knows the story, it’s not like anything was a surprise.  By safe I meant it was a traditional, expected interpretation.  At no point did I think, “Whoa, hey, that’s different! I’ve never seen that particular interpretation of that moment before!”

“Ohhhh,” said he, “You meant it wasn’t avant-garde.”

So I immediately sent him this picture from Slings & Arrows as the first thing that comes to mind when somebody mentions an avant-garde Romeo and Juliet: