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Part of
Romeo and Juliet in European Culture
Edited by Juan F. Cerdá, Dirk Delabastita and Keith Gregor
[Shakespeare in European Culture 1] 2017
► pp. 37–60

Chapter 2
Juliet’s balcony

The balcony scenes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet across cultures and media

| Freie Universität Berlin

This chapter traces the history of Juliet’s balcony from its beginnings in Shakespeare’s text to the present times across European and non-European cultures and follows its transformations across the media of print, theatre, visual arts, tourism, cinema, advertising, music and ballet. The story that emerges is one of a rise and fall: the balcony, not even mentioned in Shakespeare’s text, within the next to two centuries becomes the centre of the play in theatrical performances and the central icon of Romeo’s and Juliet’s romantic love. Paradoxically, it will continue to function as such worldwide even when, in the late nineteenth century, artists begin to turn against the conventional symbolic equation and to defamiliarise, erase or dismantle the balcony.

Keywords: intermedial and intercultural dialogue, transposition, canonisation, myth, liminality, commodification, romantic love, Liebestod
Article outline
  • Cuban gambit and material culture
  • Text and tourism
  • Liminality and centrality
  • Art history
  • Cinema
  • Music, opera and ballet
  • The balcony vanishing
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sec.1.03pfi
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