The Life of Romeo and Juliet

It is hard to imagine life today without Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, embedded as it is in every aspect of modern “romantic” love and—by extension—gender relations, sexuality, friendship, identity, aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and psychology. It is a favorite text in early high-school classrooms, on the theory that it speaks to students who are close in age to the star-crossed lovers. Since its first performances in the 1590s, it has resonated endlessly in novels, operas, musicals, and film. How would this massively influential play have come across on the stage, with an all-male cast, in an open-air theatre, when actors had access only to their parts, and not the entire text? What secrets do its earliest printed editions reveal? How has the interpretation of it changed? We will address these questions and more as we study the play, its sources, its performance history, and its legacy in literature, music, art, and film, from post-Restoration adaptations to eighteenth-century editions and performances to modern and postmodern filmic and literary exploitations, such as the South African Gugu and Andile and the American West Side Story and Shakespeare in Love. Pre-1800