Because of Romeo and Juliet’s widespread familiarity, companies who produce it seek to find a particular viewpoint for their version of the story. This was true when Shakespeare wrote the play. He took an Italian story, kept the original character and place names, but gave it his own unique twist with English poetry and values. Shakespeare enthusiasts, who see the play regularly produced at Shakespeare festivals around the world, will have seen the play performed in a variety of historical periods and formats. The play fits quite neatly into just about any culture and historic period because love, hatred, parental control, and suicide are universal human issues and therefore timeless.

This 2010 production is the IRT’s fourth production of the play in 25 years; it is a very popular play with both our student and adult audiences. In developing the conceptual approach of this production, we wanted to speak to both students and adults with vibrancy and clarity. Another goal is to relate the play to the place in which we will produce it: that is, a large and diverse Midwestern city.

The production we have fashioned for you strives to create a world in which the issues of the play are instantly recognizeable—a place where two families might hate each other so much that their children choose to die rather than attempt to defy that hatred. We wanted to create a specifically American production, and in America, race is easily the single most divisive issue. A European production might have chosen religious differences; an African production might have chosen to focus on tribal divides. But race has divided American culture since the nation was colonized, and sadly, even with the election of a bi-racial president, continues to do so today.

Consequently, in our production the Capulet family is African American, and the Montague family is Caucasian. The issues that separate Romeo and Juliet become very apparent in this perspective. In order to show this racial divide at its most poignant and volatile, the production’s time frame is the years immediately following World War II: American black men, even those who had distinguished themselves on foreign fields of battle, returned to find an America that still too often closed the doors of opportunity to them. They had been called on to risk their lives just as white soldiers had, but daily life on the home front did not always mirror that equality. Racial tensions in cities grew, and thus, “ancient grudge breaks to new mutiny.”

There are other elements of the post-World War II culture that drew us to this period. It was a society in which girls were still considered a commodity in marriage; where parents still exercised strong authority over children; where good manners, family background, and proper attire were highly valued; where school and neighborhood integration were still battlegrounds; where male-female roles were clearly defined; and where the clergy had the unquestioned right to intervene in all issues. All the actions of Romeo and Juliet could easily take place in such a world.

In his childhood memoir, Colored People, renowned African American scholar and race commentator Henry Louis Gates Jr. captures vividly his own first experience of integrated life in the mid-1950s:

… race was like an item of apparel that fitted us all tight, like one of Mama’s girdles or the garters that supported her hose. Nobody ever talked about race, but it was in the lines drawn around socializing. Look, but don’t touch. Don’t even think about asking that white girl to dance. Obey that rule and everything will be fine. We’ll all get along. Colored go with colored; white with white. . . . But never cross the line of race and gender. You couldn’t even think about that. Which is probably why we thought about it all the time.

Romeo takes one look at Juliet and falls in love so completely that nothing can prevent him from pursuing her. He can’t help but cross that color line. And within minutes, he finds that love reciprocated. Name, family, heritage, tradition cannot stop them. Nor can Jim Crow laws, or laws against miscegenation, or hundreds of years of American history of racial separation.

Love triumphs, if only for a minute.

TO LEARN MORE
Visit this website:

http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/

romeoandjuliet001.html

Check out these books:
Understanding Romeo and Juliet:
A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources,
and Historical Documents
Twentieth Century Interpretations
of Romeo and Juliet
edited by Douglas Cole

Shakespeare in Sable:
A History of Black Shakespearean Actors
by Errol Hill

Evoking Shakespeare
by Peter Brook

Clues to Acting Shakespeare
by Wesley Van Tassel

Daily warm-ups: Shakespeare
by Dale Donovan & Ginger Shapiro

Watch these movies:
My Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet for a New Generation
Liberty Heights
A Raisin in the Sun
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Hairspray

In Shakespeare’s day, playgoing was enormously popular for all classes of people, and new theatres were springing up across London. None was more popular than Shakespeare’s home theatre. The Globe functioned in many ways as a metaphor for contemporary concepts of society, civilization, and the universe at large. The name of the theatre itself—the Globe—suggested that the events portrayed on its stage were symbolic of events happening in the world. The building’s shape, an octagon, suggested the round shape of the world itself.

The Globe was located on the south bank of the River Thames in a disreputable part of London. Built in 1599, the wood-and-plaster building held more than 2,000 spectators, and popular plays often sold out. The public entered through a narrow door located at the base of a small tower. Inside, the building was open to the sky, and performances took place in the afternoon sun.

The audience surrounding the stage was arranged to reflect society at large. Standing on the ground around the stage itself, in the area known as the Pit, were the penny groundlings—those of the lowest classes who paid the least for admittance. Three surrounding levels of balconies rose above them, with correspondingly rising admission prices; Elizabethan society, from top to bottom, was clearly divided and arranged for all to see. Thus an audience member at the Globe could not help but feel his or her place in the world order.

The stage itself jutted out into the center of the yard. On each side of the stage, two tall columns, known as the Pillars of Hercules, were carved and brightly painted. Underneath the roof, the “heavens” were painted sky blue and decorated with starry signs of the Zodiac. Tucked under that ceiling was a small balcony where the theatre’s musicians played “the Music of the Spheres.” At the rear of the stage, on each side, were doors to the backstage area, known as the tiring house, through which the players made their entrances and exits. Between the doors, a brightly painted curtain hid a small alcove, the “discovery” area; above was an often-used balcony.

There was very little scenery. Most of the company’s expense went into costumes. Audiences loved noise and spectacle, so the plays had lots of action and violence. Thunder was created by rolling a cannonball across the wooden floor above the stage. Ghosts and other spirits could be raised from below the stage through trap doors or lowered from the “heavens” by a small crane.

At the center of the Globe was the actor. Men played all the parts, since it was against the law for women to act on the stage; young teenage boys played the female roles. The groundlings crowded close to the stage, and the actor-audience relationship was an intimate one.

Shakespeare wrote for an audience who was largely illiterate; most people obtained their news, religious instruction, and entertainment by ear. Without modern stage and lighting effects, location, time, and atmosphere, as well as emotions and ideas, had to be communicated through dialogue.

Shakespeare’s plays were very popular, appealing to a wide spectrum of society. Yet his use of language clearly shows that he expected his audience to understand and appreciate puns, paradoxes, and nuances of meaning, complex metaphors, and innovative vocabulary. It may be a bit more challenging in our highly visual age to tune in our ears, but theatregoers of all ages still thrill to Shakespeare’s eloquent exploration of the human condition.

Learn more:

Shakespeare’s Globe

Suggested Reading:

William Shakespeare & the Globe
written & illustrated by Aliki

Eyewitness: Shakespeare
by Peter Chrisp

The Usborne World of Shakespeare
by Anna Claybourne and Rebecca Treays

Reduced Shakespeare:
the complete Guide for the Attention-Impaired
by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor

Although William Shakespeare is generally considered the greatest dramatist in the English language, few facts are known about his life. Only a handful of legal documents verify his existence. Tradition has it that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small market town, on April 23, 1564. His father was a glove maker who became High Bailiff of Stratford, a position similar to our mayor.

As the son of a leading citizen and public official, Shakespeare would have gone to school as soon as he learned to read and write. The Stratford grammar school was excellent compared to similar schools in bigger towns. School was in session year round, and students attended for nine hours a day. The curriculum was limited, consisting almost entirely of Latin: grammar, reading, writing, and recitation. By the time Shakespeare was a youth, many traveling theatre companies of significance had visited Stratford, so it is fair to guess that Shakespeare had seen some of them and admired their art.

At age 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior; they had three children, Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. Little is known of Shakespeare’s life at this time. It is clear that by the early 1590s, however, Shakespeare was a part of the theatrical scene in London, although we know nothing of the circumstances by which he left Stratford and his family to become an actor and playwright in the city. By 1594 Shakespeare was established at the center of theatrical activity, for he is recorded as a shareholder in the Globe Theatre.

Over the next fifteen years, Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, several narrative poems, and more than 150 sonnets. He became the most popular playwright in London’s highly competitive theatrical world. He was granted a coat of arms, thus officially making him a gentleman, and he bought sizeable pieces of real estate in and around Stratford with his earnings. His plays exhibit not only a fine sense of poetry and stagecraft, but also an excellent awareness of the tempestuous political and literary atmosphere in which he lived. Shakespeare used his plays metaphorically to suggest how, in a changing society, order could be made out of chaos.

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616—his 52nd birthday— and was buried in the church chancel in Stratford. A tribute to his genius occurred in 1623, when two of his fellow actors and a London printer published a collected edition of his plays. This kind of publication was rare in its day, as plays were valued for their commercial appeal on the stage, with little thought of them as literature to be preserved. No doubt some of the texts were reconstructed from memory or from a stage manager’s promptbook. In any case the First Folio, as this collection has come to be called, is a document of great historic and literary importance, for it preserved for posterity some of the greatest writing in the English language, allowing us to study and perform Shakespeare’s plays more than 400 years later and for generations to come.

Learn more:

Folger Shakespeare Library
The NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities Initiative
Mr. William Shakespeare on the Internet
Shakespeare Online

Since Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596, nearly every generation has had a cherished production of this play. In recent decades, Franco Zeffirelli’s lush film Romeo and Juliet (1968), starring teenage actors, made Shakespeare come to life for millions of young adults in the turbulent sixties. In 1996, Baz Luhrmann’s kinetic Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, used the rapid-cutting film techniques of music video to capture the play for the MTV generation. An adaptation of the play, the musical West Side Story (stage 1957, film 1961) caught the imagination of a generation in its portrayal of the feuding Capulets and Montagues as rival street gangs in New York City.

The original Italian story of Romeo and Juliet dates back to medieval times and was already well known to Shakespeare’s audiences before the playwright gave it his own twists and turns. After a confrontation between the rival families of Montague and Capulet, Romeo, the heir to the Montague family, meets his cousin Benvolio and confesses his love for Rosaline. Benvolio and Mercutio convince Romeo to crash a party at the Capulet house, where he meets and falls in love with a girl. He soon learns that she is Juliet, the daughter of his family’s greatest enemy, the Capulets. As he leaves the party with his friends, he overhears Juliet profess her love for him. The scene in which they share words of love and plan to marry is one of the most famous in literature.

The next afternoon, with the help of Juliet’s nurse (or nanny), Romeo and Juliet are secretly married by Friar Laurence, Romeo’s friend and advisor, who believes that he might heal the war between the two families by uniting their children. After the wedding, Romeo encounters Juliet’s temperamental cousin Tybalt, who attempts to provoke him into a fight. When Romeo refuses, Mercutio takes Tybalt’s challenge himself. As Romeo attempts to part them, Mercutio is accidentally killed. Romeo, in grief and anger at the loss of his lifelong friend, kills Tybalt. As the angry families blame each other for this new violence, Romeo is banished from the city forever.

Retreating to Friar Laurence’s rooms, Romeo learns of his sentence and weeps at the idea of life without Juliet. The Friar arranges for Romeo to live in a nearby city until he can arrange to reunite the couple.

Meanwhile, in grief over the loss of Tybalt, Juliet’s parents decide to marry her to Paris. When she refuses, her father threatens to disown her. She goes for counsel to Friar Lawrence who devises yet another plan to aid the young lovers: Juliet is to take a drug which will put her it a death-like trance for 24 hours, at which point Romeo will rescue her and take her away with him.

Juliet carries out the Friar’s plan, and her family, believing her dead, places her body in the family mausoleum. But the Friar’s message to Romeo does not arrive; instead, Romeo hears what everyone believes, that Juliet is dead. This confusion leads inevitably to the play’s tragic conclusion.

TO LEARN MORE:
absoluteshakespeare.com

RECOMMENDED MOVIES:
Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet
West Side Story

Why do we study the plays of William Shakespeare? He lived and died almost 400 years ago. He wrote about kings and queens and other people far from our own time. His use of poetry is strange to our ears, and his vocabulary is full of words we don’t understand and can’t pronounce. How could Shakespeare possibly be relevant to our lives today?

To answer these questions, you only need to look at the way Shakespeare’s work has woven its way into the fabric of our world. He has shaped the English language in countless ways, coining words and phrases we still use today. His works are quoted in everything from scientific journals to presidential speeches. His plays are produced around the world, more than those of any other playwright who ever lived. There are many theatre companies for whom Shakespeare is their central and defining focus. Every year, more movies are made based on his works; the Internet Movie Database lists 120 just since 2000. Writers and other artists have long been inspired by his works. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet with street gangs in New York City. O is Othello at a prep school. She’s the Man is Twelfth Night in a locker room. Operas, ballets, symphonies, paintings, and sculptures are based on his plays. All theatre artists strive to measure their skills against Shakespeare’s works, both on stage and on film.

The characters Shakespeare created may live in exotic places and have fancy titles attached to their names, but they are deeply human characters who experience love, grief, joy, jealousy, and pain, and who wrestle with questions of ethics, morality, and justice, just as we do today. Some of the words he used may have faded from our language over the years, but a minimum of effort to understand these terms yields a maximum of benefit, for Shakespeare’s understanding of the human condition is extraordinary. To quote Hamlet himself, Shakespeare’s plays “hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”