Romeo and Juliet remains popular due to its tragic love story, relatable characters, and universal themes of love, fate, and the clash between youth and age. Its enduring popularity is also attributed to its poetic language and captivating storytelling, as well as its numerous adaptations and cultural references. The play has been adapted countless times in film, theatre, and literature and continues to be studied and performed worldwide, making it one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works.
So I saw this Entertainment Weekly article about 2o Classic Opening Lines in Books. For the curious, it stretches 20 pages for 20 lines, includes Harry Potter and does not include Orwell, Camus or Kafka. Of course there’s no Shakespeare, since it’s always up in the air whether someone counts his work among “books”.
So I thought we’d do our own. What were Shakespeare’s best opening lines? I suppose Richard III’s “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York” might be the most infamous, given how frequently it is misquoted.
I like Romeo and Juliet’s “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Not just because it’s one of the greatest story introductions ever, but because it contains an important clue that most modern adapters seem to forget : both alike in dignity. Everybody always wants to tell the story along racial or economic lines, putting a gigantic obstacle between the two young lovers and hitting the audience over the head with “Here’s why they can’t be together.” I don’t think by “ancient grudge” Shakespeare meant reparations for slavery. Who else has ideas?
I’m not talking about actors who memorize as part of their job, or geeks who memorize just by experiencing the same passages over and over again. I’m talking about the legions of school-age children who stop by, having been tasked with memorizing the balcony scene or a sonnet or even a passage of their choice, just for the sake of memorizing it.
As I work my way through Playing Shakespeare I’m becoming a convert to the “there are clues in the text about how Shakespeare wanted you to play it” school. Why is this word emphasized while this one is not? Why is there a comma here, or a line break? When do we breathe, and what does that mean? I wonder, outside of theatre school, does any teacher bother mentioning any of that to the students when assign the memorize assignment? Or, to the hapless pupil, is it all just a stream of words on the page?
What I fear is that even after memorizing a passage, if you asked most students what it means they’d say “I have no idea.” Maybe, hopefully, I’m wrong. But I know that I listen to my children learn how to read and it’s very important to work on the comprehension part, because it is not just a given. It is quite possible to read a stream of words and then come to the end with no understanding at all of what happened. I can totally see that happening with Shakespeare.
So instead, what if we made students act it out? What if instead of reciting the balcony scene just to prove you can, what if your homework was to actually become Romeo and deliver the speech as he did? To pay attention to the stresses and pauses, maybe not as deeply as a professional actor might, but enough to get an idea for how you might play the character? Maybe Romeo is still the overdramatic boy from the earlier scenes, tripping over himself to find the right phrase. Maybe he’s impatient (read: horny) that he can’t just be with Juliet right now. Maybe angry, that he’s fallen in love with his enemy? I don’t expect the performances would be anything to write home about. But I bet that if you gave those kids a quiz about what’s going on in that scene, the discussion would be far more interesting.
Thoughts? Where my teachers at? Am I projecting a memory from 20 years ago of how this stuff used to be taught, and nobody’s doing that anymore? Are we all about the performance now? Getting the words up and off the page?
Over the years I’ve seen many Shakespeare lists. Instead of linking to yet another one I thought it would be fun to combine several and come up with my own, the Shakespeare Geek Top 10. This is not my opinion, this is the mathematical analysis (according to my own algorithm :)) from a variety of places, some here and some elsewhere, that people have voted on a general “top 10” for Shakespeare’s plays.
How you define “best” is up to you and I fully expect that people use different scales all the time. That’s why I’m looking at it statistically – if most people pick Dream as the best play, then does it really matter why they think they picked it?
Ready?
#10. The Tempest. Maybe it’s the fascination with “Shakespeare’s last play”, maybe the fairy tale, happy ending nature of the story (I know it’s the latter that gets my vote), but I’m happy to see one of my favorites just make the top 10. #9. Julius Caesar. I appreciate that this is one of the great tragedies that most of us will read in high school, but I was surprised at the showing it made. I don’t understand. If the Twilight lady announced that she was filming a new version of Julius Caesar I’d bet you can hear the crickets chirp.
#8. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I know there are folks out there who will put Dream up against Hamlet as one of the best, and I have to concur. I’ve ranted at times that I get sick of seeing it, but really, as I called it the other week after seeing a production, it’s “pretty near perfect on the page.”
#7. Richard III. I’m not familiar enough with this one to have cast a vote on it. Tell me why you love it? Just the evilness of the title character, or something more?
#6. Henry V. Do we all love it because of the Crispin’s Day speech and the Muse of Fire, or is there more to it?
#5. Romeo and Juliet. Now we get into some of the more obvious ones, will there be any surprises in the top 5? Does Romeo and Juliet deserve a spot this high or is it just because we’re all so familiar with this high school favorite?
#4. Othello. I’ve seen many people speak of Othello as one of the great underrated tragedies, and I have to agree. When you really take the time to dig into it, it’s far better than the more shallow analysis might suggest.
#3. Macbeth. Glad to see the Scottish play fare so well, it’s one of my top choices.
…and the big question *still* not answered:
#1 King Lear and Hamlet
We have a statistical tie for the #1 spot with Hamlet and King Lear both getting the exact same score! (That just means I need more data, hint hint hint.)
Disclaimer : Only 7 of my top 10 made the final list, so I’m not skewing the results to my own personal choices.
I can’t say there are many surprises. If I pulled it out to a top 15 we’d start to see some of the popular comedies, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night … but at some point I run out of numbers to make a meaningful argument, too.
Disagree? Make your own top 10 and post it in the comments! I’d love to keep my statistics up to date and have a true and accurate top 10 list, as defined by the audience of Shakespeare geeks as a whole and not just one person’s personal opinion. I may have even added you already, if you’ve made a list. Who knows? 🙂
When I heard about a book called “Shakespeare And Modern Culture” I thought, “Cool, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I do here – the whole ‘Shakespeare is everywhere’ thing, video game commercials, Simpsons episodes, etc….” Then I saw it was written by Marjorie Garber, of “Shakespeare After All”, and I thought, “Uh oh.” I still can’t finish that one (a weakness I expect is my own, and not the author’s).
Turns out I’m right on both fronts. This is a real book that treats the subject seriously, considering not just examples of Shakespeare in modern culture (though it gives plenty), but looking at how opinions of Shakespeare have evolved over 400 years and how its integration with has changed. There’s one play per chapter, and while not all of the are covered, the big ones are all there. This is an excellent way to organize, as it gives the reader a chance to jump to their favorite and see how it’s been handled for the last few centuries.
I started with the Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, then skipped around past Merchant, Henry V (with lots of Obama references!) and Hamlet. How have attitudes toward The Tempest changed? Do we as a society identify more with Caliban, or Ariel? Is it really about slavery and colonization? Or what about Romeo? When and why did his name become synonymous not with someone who would die for true love, but more of a lothario, love-em-and-leave-em sort of individual? Where did the curse of Macbeth come from? What is it about Henry V that makes those particular speeches so darned quotable?
Far from a simple sampler of Shakespearean performance and critique over the last few centuries, this book keeps it all in perspective of the big picture. The question is constantly asked, Why? What is it about Shakespeare’s work that enables us to ask any question, and then find what appears to be evidence to support our case? Is it even a relevant question any more to ask what Shakespeare intended, or does each generation simply use the work as they need? How is it possible that everything else in the world has changed over 400 years, and yet we’re still going back to what Shakespeare gave us?
I still contend that Garber’s work is not quite as “approachable” as I’d like, and this time I have a good example. I once said that I could flip through Shakespeare After All and find a word on any random page that the average reader would have to go look up in a dictionary. Well, this book did it for me with the word ‘aubade’. I’d like to think I’m fairly well educated, and I’ve been around for a couple decades now, and never before this book had I seen that word (which turns out to mean “a poem or song about lovers separating at dawn”). I need a glossary more when Garber talks about Shakespeare than I do with Shakespeare!
In the end, Garber’s premise is fascinating and her research is top notch. She seems to get genuinely peeved when sources get their history wrong, which I find amusing. Her biggest problem with Shakespeare In Love is the idea that it was Romeo and Juliet that was Shakespeare’s breakout hit that put him on the map. And she completely dismisses the idea that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s “farewell” play. This is an author who clearly takes her subject seriously both because it is her profession, and because she has a true love of the source material.
This book isn’t for everybody. It’s not a light read. It’s hard enough to read Hamlet, it’s hard enough to read Joyce’s Ulysses – so where does that put the chapter dedicated to Stephen Daedalus’ interpretation of Hamlet? It’s confusing just *talking* about it, unless this is the kind of thing you live and breathe. But for those of us that do live and breathe it (or at least we had more time in the day to do so?) It’s quite the treasure.
Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars continues to be the most serendipitous book I’ve ever read. By that I mean that I’m never quite sure when I’ll turn the page into a new chapter and he’ll be talking about something I was just talking about two days ago. In this case it’s the “When I shall die” line (as opposed to “When he shall die”) that we talked about last month. Certainly it’s supposed to be “Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die, cut him out in little stars….” rather than the version Luhrman gives us, “When I shall die, cut him out in little stars….” After all, if he’s not dead, why are you cutting him up? Oddly, though, my googling showed that most Shakespeare versions do in fact have it as I, not he. Rosenbaum gets to this near the end of his book, speaking of a trip to Bermuda. He even points out that most editors do indeed go with the “he” version (which is apparently Fourth Quarto) because the “I” version makes no sense. And what Rosenbaum offers (not his own hypothesis, but rather one he heard, though I do not have the book handy to quote the original author) immediately makes sense to me, I’m just not sure if I love or hate it. He goes back to the more bawdy version of “die”, namely “orgasm”. He says that Juliet, a mere 13 yrs old and not married, is to put it bluntly thinking about wedding sex, and how good it’s going to be. You have to admit, if you make that little word translation, it still fits. Now you’ve got an anxious young girl, in love but also certainly in lust, waiting for that big moment when … ummm….hmm, how can we say this and keep it clean? Shall we say, when she gets to consummate her marriage? It’s going to be so good, she tells herself, that all she’ll see are stars, and her Romeo. (I’m not sure when all the rest of the world comes into it, though?) I love it because it works, pretty much. It’s somewhat crude, it’s the sort of thing you don’t talk about when you talk about the story like it’s the greatest love story ever told, but sex is certainly a part of that type of love, and it’s certainly believable that a virginal bride-to-be is contemplating what it will be like. (Now that I’ve seen that interpretation, other parts begin to fall into place – “I have bought the mansion of a love, but not possessed it, and though I am sold, not yet enjoyed”???) I hate it because it destroys what I consider to be one of the most romantic lines in the entire play. It’s an opportunity for Juliet to explain how much Romeo means to her. Normally it’s the guy spouting all the poetry and the “You’re my world” stuff. Sometimes it’s nice to hear it back the other way. What would Juliet do without Romeo? She would repaint the heavens in his image, and the rest of world would say, “Wow, yeah, we like that better. Who is that guy?” 🙂 Thoughts? Nobody mentioned the sex interpretation the first time we discussed that line, so I’m curious if it is a popular interpretation.
I’m not talking about actors who memorize as part of their job, or geeks who memorize just by experiencing the same passages over and over again. I’m talking about the legions of school-age children who stop by, having been tasked with memorizing the balcony scene or a sonnet or even a passage of their choice, just for the sake of memorizing it.