After Juliet: The Play

The Play

A tense truce holds between the Capulets and the Montagues after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Benvolio, Romeo's best friend, is in love with Rosaline, Juliet's cousin; but Rosaline is bent on revenge.

The Place:
This could be Verona. Or it could be Edinburgh. Or Dublin. Or London.
Or New York.

The Time:
It could be 1500; 1900; 2000; or 3000.

Or Tuebingen 2002?

The Author

Born in Glasgow, Sharman Macdonald became an actress on graduation from Edinburgh University but gave it up in order to write. Her first play, When I Was A Girl I Used to Scream and Shout, won her the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright of 1984 and ran in London for one year. Her other plays include When We Were Women, The Winter Guest (which was also made into a film), Borders of Paradise and Sea Urchins. Wild Flowers, a filmscript, was made for Channel Four. She has also written two novels, The Beast and Night, Night.

Romeo and Juliet ought to be ignored. It is an early work by a playwright who clearly had not yet mastered his tools. The play has a predictable plot, even if you are new to it. Its full title is The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and that really gives the game away: Of course they'll meet, of course they'll fall in love, and of course they'll end up dead.
And that really is all they do: as characters, even Juliet and Romeo hardly deserve that name, particularly in the first acts. They act and talk conventionally, down to speaking in sonnets. As for the rest of the cast, they are a sorry lot, stock figures to a man and woman: the funny nurse, the meddling friar, the heavy fathers and the rambunctious youths. All of them could just as well appear in another play, as indeed they all do somewhere.

Then there is the play's humour. Consider the following exchange, the first nine lines of the play and by no means the worst:

Enter Samson and Gregory, of the house of Capulet, with swords and bucklers

SAMSON: Gregory, on my word, we'll not carry coals.
GREGORY: No, for then we should be colliers.
SAMSON: I mean an we be in choler, we'll draw.
GREGORY: Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.
SAMSON: I strike quickly, being moved.
GREGORY: But thou art not quickly moved to strike.
SAMSON: A dog of the house of Montague moves me.
GREGORY: To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand, therefore if thou art moved, thou runn'st away.

Great stuff, no doubt, back in 1595, and it helped you to forget about the plague, but such stand-up comedy has a sell-by date, and that is long past.

I could go on and complain about misapplied Aristotelian ideas, about Shakespeare's obsession with symmetry that already didn't work in The Comedy of Errors, about the unforgivable reliance on chance to get the plot creaking to its denouement, about...

"No more", as Philip the Bastard says in Shakespeare's King John, another play that isn't quite up to scratch. For that exactly is the point: Why is King John all but forgotten today, why do only specialists still care about The Two Noble Kinsmen; why does Baz Luhrmann not turn Pericles into a Hollywood blockbuster movie?

The answer is more complex than the criticism I outlined allows, and yet it takes in all I said before (apart from the question of humour: That needs to be sorted out by a director and actors with little respect for what Shakespeare wrote.) Romeo and Juliet presents a simple story that does not require historical or dynastic corroboration: boy meets girl. The boy and the girl and all the others are types, not characters, because that is appropriate for such a simple story. And the symmetry and the coincidences that kill off all semblance of probability similarly reinforce the story character of the play: people do not behave like that in reality, but in stories they do, indeed they must.

For that's what Romeo and Juliet is about: It is a myth, a story pure and simple, a play that is nothing but a play, and thus it becomes a metaplay, a commentary upon itself and upon the way we read, write and see love. That is its true appeal, and that alone will ensure that the play survives. Myths travel well, and they keep well, too. There are sentimental film versions of Romeo and Juliet and there are hip film versions (at least they seem so today), there are stagings that seek to present an "authentic" interpretation (utter nonsense, of course), and there are modernizations that beggar belief. One recent production not too far from the Brechtbau took place almost entirely on a vertical wall of wood, everybody climbing up and down with crampons, knives and ropes. I have seen the play with actors barely out of childhood and with those in their thirties; set in banana republics and in a Buddhist world - it doesn't matter, in a way, because the myth is indestructible.
The only promising option, if you are really bent on overcoming the play, is to rewrite it completely, and to excise the myth. That is what you are about to witness - that, or its survival in yet another guise...

Peter Paul Schnierer