There have been several multilingual productions of Romeo and Juliet since the late 1980s, with the Capulets and the Montagues speaking two different languages, the Prince possibly a third. In this paper such productions in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and Ukraine (and one in Canada for comparison) are discussed in view of the problems and opportunities multilingualism can create. Conflicts tend to be better motivated and harder to resolve, the philosophy of the productions tends to vary between political commitment and theatrical experiment, and language as the basis of theatrical communication is devalued.
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.
Although Romeo and Juliet was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to find its way onto the German stage, it was invariably in versions that were far from Shakespeare’s original. Published translations aspired to reflect the original more completely but Shakespeare’s supposed lapses in taste, his constant breach of neoclassical form, and his mixing of tragedy and comedy, along with German translators’ failure to understand the basic principles of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, often led to misunderstandings and misapprehensions. Critics and theorists of the Sturm und Drang developed a comprehensive view of Shakespeare as a heroic genius, but it would take well over a century before their vision could be represented on the German stage.
Eighteenth-century France did not get to see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, the basic plot was familiar through two contradictory influences: Boccaccio’s happy-ending Filocolo (cf. the lost play of Chevalier de Chastellux, successfully performed at Château de la Chevrette for an elite society in 1770, and Comte de Ségur’s opera in 1793), and Bandello’s tragic novella after Dante’s Purgatory (cf. a drama by d’Ozicourt, obviously a nom-de-plume, published in 1771). In 1772 Jean-François Ducis presented his version of Romeo and Juliet, the first to be indebted to Shakespeare, albeit through Pierre-Antoine de La Place’s patchy summary. It had a long run at the Comédie-Française, but saw few performances until 1827, the year Harriet Smithson successfully took the part of Juliet at the Odéon to Charles Kemble’s Roméo, announcing Romanticism on stage.
Though the Italian sources of Romeo and Juliet had already been adapted by Golden Age dramatists in the seventeenth century, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Shakespeare’s version of the story began to appear on the Spanish stage. These plays, which drew heavily on the neoclassical reappraisal of Shakespeare in France and other non-Anglophone countries, have been neglected and underrated, as well as being subject to various kinds of error and confusion. Focusing on Dionisio Solís’s Julia y Romeo (1803), Manuel García Suelto’s Romeo y Julieta (1817) and the libretto for an undated operatic version, this chapter studies their relation to their most immediate sources – German in the first case, French in the second and third –, as well as the adaptations and rewritings effected to bring them into line with contemporary Spanish tastes and expectations. Rather than dismiss them as inferior or unrecognisable versions of Shakespeare, the chapter acknowledges their status as the only form of “Shakespeare” performable at the time, together with their contribution, both direct and indirect, to making Shakespeare known and to the reception and dissemination of Romeo and Juliet as one of the most widely translated plays in Spain.
Ram and Jael (Salkinson 1878), the earliest Hebrew version of Romeo and Juliet, is a highly domesticating translation containing numerous Jewish cultural elements. This is attributable to the fact that the translation formed part of an ideologically loaded Jewish Enlightenment initiative to establish a European-style literary canon in Hebrew and reflecting Jewish values at a time when the language was still almost solely a written medium prior to its late nineteenth-century re-vernacularisation in Palestine. This chapter discusses the unusual sociolinguistic background to Ram and Jael and analyses its main Judaising features, which include the treatment of non-Jewish names; holidays and rituals; establishments; oaths and expressions; mythological figures; and foreign languages, as well as the insertion of biblical verses.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was first performed on the Italian stage in the late 1860s when actor Ernesto Rossi successfully adapted the play and debuted as Romeo at the Teatro Re in Milan in 1869. Despite its belated appearance, this drama may be taken as a fit example of the growing interest in the Bard’s works which, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, animated the Italian national cultural panorama. Indeed, starting from 1818, many playwrights, among whom Luigi Scevola, Giuseppe Morosini, Angelica Palli, and especially Cesare Della Valle, whose Giulietta e Romeo (1826) held the stage for several decades and was “ousted” only by Rossi’s Shakespeare, produced original plays centred on the Veronese subject. These dramatic renderings were often related or compared to the Shakespearean tragedy by contemporary critics. They, however, they introduced a different conceptualization of the Veronese plot that would also influence Ernesto Rossi’s later Shakespearean staging. In fact, these early nineteenth-century lovers offer no problematic meditation on the nature of their individuality, nor do they fight for the assertion of their own choices in front of adverse fate and families. They are transported into a whirl of sudden passion and precipitous events which they accept and to which they passively succumb. This raises interesting questions on the theatrical and cultural reception of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in nineteenth-century Italy.
This chapter traces the history, past and present, of Romeo and Juliet in Sweden, by looking at a few memorable productions, translations and adaptations. In addition, it seeks to give some tentative answers to the questions why, after a first period of popularity, the play was comparatively rarely performed for over a hundred years, and why it then subsequently recovered its popularity on Swedish stages.
Borrowing from two iconic stories, Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, this chapter acknowledges that adaptation lies at the centre of the play today as much as it did in the mid-1590s. It argues that stage productions approach it in a manner similar to Shakespeare’s, who took a story familiar to his contemporaries and “repeat[ed] it but without replication” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 173). Making the case for a broader study on the region, my chapter begins with a flashback to the story’s arrival in the eastern part of Europe and fast-forwards to its current state of affairs, offering a “note” on Romania. In doing so, it argues that the popularity of Romeo and Juliet in the West has been matched by that in the rest of Europe, where it has proliferated in a plurality of, often, co-existing forms.
This paper surveys the reception of Romeo and Juliet in Franco’s Spain by showing the evolution of the tragedy on the Spanish stages. Thanks to the censorship material kept at the Archivo General de la Administración, I have carried out an analysis of different productions that reveals that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is not a stable entity but a web of translations, adaptations and appropriations reflecting the political, social and cultural forces at work at the time. Besides, this work brings to light how the performance of the play evolved from a poetic and chaste love story during the first years of the dictatorship to a more sexual and tasteless comedy framed in the context of the destape (unveiling) period, thus entering the realm of lowbrow culture and becoming a Shakespop product.
Between 1947 and 2000, the Royal Shakespeare Company alone staged fifteen productions of Romeo and Juliet. To date (2015), three more mises en scène at the RSC can be counted: Nancy Meckler’s (2006), Neil Bartlett’s (2008), Rupert Goold’s (2010). Goold’s staging was touted by Michael Billington “as exciting a revival since Zeffirelli stunned us with his verismo in 1960.” Russell Jackson, in examining aspects of Romeo and Juliet across a half-century of RSC productions, organises his commentary into the following sections: “Fair Verona,” “Two Households,” “Ghostly Sire, Gallant Spirit,” “Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Towards Catastrophe.” An attempt will be made to (re)read Goold’s production in parallel fashion, highlighting points of contact mostly with other RSC stagings of the play.
The Avignon Off and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival have a favourite Shakespearean play: Romeo and Juliet. Between 2011 and 2014, the play was staged fourteen times at the Edinburgh Fringe and thirteen times at the Avignon Off. This success can be attributed to its status as a well-known love story, its popularity and its emblematic scenes. Across the abundance of productions, two opposed trends can be identified: whereas many of the productions at the Edinburgh Fringe are staged by amateur groups, at the Avignon Off it is professional companies who tend to re-write the play or use it as a point of departure. This chapter seeks to address how Romeo and Juliet allows for different approaches at these two alternative festivals and, at the same time, it looks for reasons that explain the popularity of the play in twenty-first-century popular culture.
Since 1948, over 20 different postage stamps inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have been issued all over the world. The issue of these stamps contributes to “officially” making Shakespeare a part of the issuing countries. The philatelic commemoration of Shakespeare’s play through the issue of postage stamps devoted to it is thus a culturally significant act. The aim of this chapter is to examine how postage stamps, with all the political, cultural and economic implications these documents entail, portray Romeo and Juliet and to what extent the reading of the play that these stamps convey is consistent with Shakespeare’s text.
This chapter explores several iterations of Romeo and Juliet in (European) digital cultures. Europe is placed in brackets here to capture how, in a digital context, boundaries may and may not apply, but also to complicate critical debate surrounding European Shakespeares. To what extent might we encounter a distinctly European Romeo and Juliet in digital cultures? Our field must think critically about the kind of European narratives, mythographies and values that are mobilised through Shakespeares in Europe. Travel and surfing are deployed as metaphors in order to track Europe’s Romeo and Juliets, with the resulting findings in the digital Wunderkabinett regarded as a function of both human selection and algorithmically determined search. While the focus is primarily on YouTube, what emerges is a deep sense of Romeo and Juliet’s convergence with popular culture, news stories and contemporary discourse about integration within Europe. In digital cultures, the chapter suggests, Romeo and Juliet is a metalanguage for conflict, boundaries and difference.
There have been several multilingual productions of Romeo and Juliet since the late 1980s, with the Capulets and the Montagues speaking two different languages, the Prince possibly a third. In this paper such productions in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and Ukraine (and one in Canada for comparison) are discussed in view of the problems and opportunities multilingualism can create. Conflicts tend to be better motivated and harder to resolve, the philosophy of the productions tends to vary between political commitment and theatrical experiment, and language as the basis of theatrical communication is devalued.
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.
Although Romeo and Juliet was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to find its way onto the German stage, it was invariably in versions that were far from Shakespeare’s original. Published translations aspired to reflect the original more completely but Shakespeare’s supposed lapses in taste, his constant breach of neoclassical form, and his mixing of tragedy and comedy, along with German translators’ failure to understand the basic principles of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, often led to misunderstandings and misapprehensions. Critics and theorists of the Sturm und Drang developed a comprehensive view of Shakespeare as a heroic genius, but it would take well over a century before their vision could be represented on the German stage.
Eighteenth-century France did not get to see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, the basic plot was familiar through two contradictory influences: Boccaccio’s happy-ending Filocolo (cf. the lost play of Chevalier de Chastellux, successfully performed at Château de la Chevrette for an elite society in 1770, and Comte de Ségur’s opera in 1793), and Bandello’s tragic novella after Dante’s Purgatory (cf. a drama by d’Ozicourt, obviously a nom-de-plume, published in 1771). In 1772 Jean-François Ducis presented his version of Romeo and Juliet, the first to be indebted to Shakespeare, albeit through Pierre-Antoine de La Place’s patchy summary. It had a long run at the Comédie-Française, but saw few performances until 1827, the year Harriet Smithson successfully took the part of Juliet at the Odéon to Charles Kemble’s Roméo, announcing Romanticism on stage.
Though the Italian sources of Romeo and Juliet had already been adapted by Golden Age dramatists in the seventeenth century, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Shakespeare’s version of the story began to appear on the Spanish stage. These plays, which drew heavily on the neoclassical reappraisal of Shakespeare in France and other non-Anglophone countries, have been neglected and underrated, as well as being subject to various kinds of error and confusion. Focusing on Dionisio Solís’s Julia y Romeo (1803), Manuel García Suelto’s Romeo y Julieta (1817) and the libretto for an undated operatic version, this chapter studies their relation to their most immediate sources – German in the first case, French in the second and third –, as well as the adaptations and rewritings effected to bring them into line with contemporary Spanish tastes and expectations. Rather than dismiss them as inferior or unrecognisable versions of Shakespeare, the chapter acknowledges their status as the only form of “Shakespeare” performable at the time, together with their contribution, both direct and indirect, to making Shakespeare known and to the reception and dissemination of Romeo and Juliet as one of the most widely translated plays in Spain.
Ram and Jael (Salkinson 1878), the earliest Hebrew version of Romeo and Juliet, is a highly domesticating translation containing numerous Jewish cultural elements. This is attributable to the fact that the translation formed part of an ideologically loaded Jewish Enlightenment initiative to establish a European-style literary canon in Hebrew and reflecting Jewish values at a time when the language was still almost solely a written medium prior to its late nineteenth-century re-vernacularisation in Palestine. This chapter discusses the unusual sociolinguistic background to Ram and Jael and analyses its main Judaising features, which include the treatment of non-Jewish names; holidays and rituals; establishments; oaths and expressions; mythological figures; and foreign languages, as well as the insertion of biblical verses.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was first performed on the Italian stage in the late 1860s when actor Ernesto Rossi successfully adapted the play and debuted as Romeo at the Teatro Re in Milan in 1869. Despite its belated appearance, this drama may be taken as a fit example of the growing interest in the Bard’s works which, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, animated the Italian national cultural panorama. Indeed, starting from 1818, many playwrights, among whom Luigi Scevola, Giuseppe Morosini, Angelica Palli, and especially Cesare Della Valle, whose Giulietta e Romeo (1826) held the stage for several decades and was “ousted” only by Rossi’s Shakespeare, produced original plays centred on the Veronese subject. These dramatic renderings were often related or compared to the Shakespearean tragedy by contemporary critics. They, however, they introduced a different conceptualization of the Veronese plot that would also influence Ernesto Rossi’s later Shakespearean staging. In fact, these early nineteenth-century lovers offer no problematic meditation on the nature of their individuality, nor do they fight for the assertion of their own choices in front of adverse fate and families. They are transported into a whirl of sudden passion and precipitous events which they accept and to which they passively succumb. This raises interesting questions on the theatrical and cultural reception of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in nineteenth-century Italy.
This chapter traces the history, past and present, of Romeo and Juliet in Sweden, by looking at a few memorable productions, translations and adaptations. In addition, it seeks to give some tentative answers to the questions why, after a first period of popularity, the play was comparatively rarely performed for over a hundred years, and why it then subsequently recovered its popularity on Swedish stages.
Borrowing from two iconic stories, Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, this chapter acknowledges that adaptation lies at the centre of the play today as much as it did in the mid-1590s. It argues that stage productions approach it in a manner similar to Shakespeare’s, who took a story familiar to his contemporaries and “repeat[ed] it but without replication” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 173). Making the case for a broader study on the region, my chapter begins with a flashback to the story’s arrival in the eastern part of Europe and fast-forwards to its current state of affairs, offering a “note” on Romania. In doing so, it argues that the popularity of Romeo and Juliet in the West has been matched by that in the rest of Europe, where it has proliferated in a plurality of, often, co-existing forms.
This paper surveys the reception of Romeo and Juliet in Franco’s Spain by showing the evolution of the tragedy on the Spanish stages. Thanks to the censorship material kept at the Archivo General de la Administración, I have carried out an analysis of different productions that reveals that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is not a stable entity but a web of translations, adaptations and appropriations reflecting the political, social and cultural forces at work at the time. Besides, this work brings to light how the performance of the play evolved from a poetic and chaste love story during the first years of the dictatorship to a more sexual and tasteless comedy framed in the context of the destape (unveiling) period, thus entering the realm of lowbrow culture and becoming a Shakespop product.
Between 1947 and 2000, the Royal Shakespeare Company alone staged fifteen productions of Romeo and Juliet. To date (2015), three more mises en scène at the RSC can be counted: Nancy Meckler’s (2006), Neil Bartlett’s (2008), Rupert Goold’s (2010). Goold’s staging was touted by Michael Billington “as exciting a revival since Zeffirelli stunned us with his verismo in 1960.” Russell Jackson, in examining aspects of Romeo and Juliet across a half-century of RSC productions, organises his commentary into the following sections: “Fair Verona,” “Two Households,” “Ghostly Sire, Gallant Spirit,” “Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Towards Catastrophe.” An attempt will be made to (re)read Goold’s production in parallel fashion, highlighting points of contact mostly with other RSC stagings of the play.
The Avignon Off and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival have a favourite Shakespearean play: Romeo and Juliet. Between 2011 and 2014, the play was staged fourteen times at the Edinburgh Fringe and thirteen times at the Avignon Off. This success can be attributed to its status as a well-known love story, its popularity and its emblematic scenes. Across the abundance of productions, two opposed trends can be identified: whereas many of the productions at the Edinburgh Fringe are staged by amateur groups, at the Avignon Off it is professional companies who tend to re-write the play or use it as a point of departure. This chapter seeks to address how Romeo and Juliet allows for different approaches at these two alternative festivals and, at the same time, it looks for reasons that explain the popularity of the play in twenty-first-century popular culture.
Since 1948, over 20 different postage stamps inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have been issued all over the world. The issue of these stamps contributes to “officially” making Shakespeare a part of the issuing countries. The philatelic commemoration of Shakespeare’s play through the issue of postage stamps devoted to it is thus a culturally significant act. The aim of this chapter is to examine how postage stamps, with all the political, cultural and economic implications these documents entail, portray Romeo and Juliet and to what extent the reading of the play that these stamps convey is consistent with Shakespeare’s text.
This chapter explores several iterations of Romeo and Juliet in (European) digital cultures. Europe is placed in brackets here to capture how, in a digital context, boundaries may and may not apply, but also to complicate critical debate surrounding European Shakespeares. To what extent might we encounter a distinctly European Romeo and Juliet in digital cultures? Our field must think critically about the kind of European narratives, mythographies and values that are mobilised through Shakespeares in Europe. Travel and surfing are deployed as metaphors in order to track Europe’s Romeo and Juliets, with the resulting findings in the digital Wunderkabinett regarded as a function of both human selection and algorithmically determined search. While the focus is primarily on YouTube, what emerges is a deep sense of Romeo and Juliet’s convergence with popular culture, news stories and contemporary discourse about integration within Europe. In digital cultures, the chapter suggests, Romeo and Juliet is a metalanguage for conflict, boundaries and difference.