Category: Romeo and Juliet

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.

Browse the text of Romeo and Juliet entire play here.

Geeklet Studies Romeo & Juliet : The Tragic End

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

In sooth, I know exactly why I am so sad.

On Wednesday, April 6, my daughter told me, “We start Romeo and Juliet next week.”

It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for since she was five years old.

I’ve been keeping you all updated as best I can, from the stories I’ve gotten.  For just about two months I’ve heard about them studying Shakespeare’s life, the sonnets, writing their own sonnets, watching the movies, reading the modern translation, watching the movies, acting it out, watching the movies…

And then yesterday she tells me that the end of the year is upon them and they will not have time to finish the play.

I can’t even really get my head around how that happens.  They are right in the middle – Juliet has just been told that Romeo is banished.  And that is where they will stop.  Just like that, the teacher collected their books and put them back on the shelf. Done.  Interested students don’t even get to keep them for an extra week to read ahead.  He’s moved on to whatever else is left for the rest of the year, which apparently means grading papers.

I was lying awake in bed at 3am last night imagining all the different responses I might have to this.  Is it his fault? Is it just a curriculum thing where the 8th grade in this town says to squeeze in Shakespeare at the end of the year if you have time?    Nope — there are three “teams” of 8th grade students, and the other two finished it.  So, it’s just him.

Oh. Ok, then….ummm….did he just go into such a deep exploration of the text that they fell behind?  So that my kids’ understanding of the first half of the play exceeds the other classes?

Well, no.  I came home one day and my daughter told me they’d watched Gnomeo and Juliet.  You gotta be kidding me.  You couldn’t have squeezed in another act instead of watching that children’s movie that they’d all no doubt seen already since it came out six years ago?

I am very sad about this.  My daughter has been looking forward to it.  She’s at least one student – and probably not the only one – who went to school each morning thinking, “I hope we do Shakespeare today.”  I’m especially sad for any others who did not grow up in a house surrounded by Shakespeare, for whom this was their first experience, who came away thinking, “This is awesome, I want more of this.”  I can’t help those children. That’s his job.  And whether there’s one more of them out there or twenty of them, he’s failed them.

Next week is middle school graduation and there’s at least some possibility that I’ll get to speak with the man. I have no idea what I’ll say.

Who Are The Icons of Shakespeare?

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Who are the most visually defining characters in Shakespeare?  What I mean by that is, if you take away the words, and just present the person, what is the visual representation that makes people say, “Yup! I recognize that. That’s ________.”

The easy one, of course, is Hamlet.  Put a young looking guy in an all black, Elizabethan-looking outfit and have him holding a skull. Done.

But … what else? Or, rather, who else?

Juliet in the balcony is pretty iconic – but can she be, without the balcony? I suppose if you always pair Juliet with Romeo you can have two young Elizabethans, one holding a vial of poison, one holding a dagger.

Three witches around a cauldron scream “Macbeth!” to me, but they don’t actually show Macbeth the character. You could have Macduff holding Macbeth’s head, but that identifies the former, not the latter.

How about hunchback Richard III?

I’d love to put big fat Falstaff on the list.  I think that if we made a poster of Shakespeare characters and people knew that, and then started trying to recognize them, that you could spot Falstaff easily.  But what if Falstaff was the only character? Is there some way to portray his jolly old self that makes you immediately recognize him?

Look! I’m a Helicopter!

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I may have mentioned, one or two thousand times, that my daughter is finally learning Shakespeare in class.  Last week she had her first test.  Beforehand we went through the obligatory joking, me telling her to find some other place to live if she doesn’t ace it, her saying, “I know, I know…”  That sort of thing.

She has the test.  Texts me when she gets home from school, “That was the easiest thing ever.”

Gets her grade back on Friday – a 92%.  She is *livid*.  The school actually posts scores online ahead of time, before you ever get to see the exam, so she doesn’t know why she got a 92 or what she got wrong.  It’s Friday night, she and I are at the dress rehearsal for her dance recital, and she is standing there in full makeup and costume grilling me over the answers to the questions she can remember (e.g. whether “feathers heavier than lead” counts as an oxymoron) and basically planning all possible outcomes for what might have happened.  Stupid error on her part?  Fine. Stupid, but fine, her fault.  Question that she flat out gets wrong because she did not know the answer? Again, fine. Wouldn’t be happy about it, but wrong is wrong, and that’s how we learn what right is.

What she’s preparing for is the technicality, the matter of interpretation / opinion, the answer where it’s technically right but arguably not exactly what the teacher wanted.  She’s bracing herself for this outcome, and what she will do if that’s the case.  I suggested that she bite her thumb at the teacher.  She thought that was a great idea.  I said no, that’s not a great idea, don’t do that. As we followed the stage managers out onto dress rehearsal, she told me that if necessary she’s going to need me to bring the full force of the blog down upon him, to right any wrongs that may occur.

Well we got the test back.

Wrong answer #1:  “Which of the following things does Lord Capulet call Tybalt?” followed multiple choice answers like “saucy boy” and some others that I’m sure I would not have remembered.  She picked one.  Answer was actually “all of the above”.  Oh well.

Wrong answer #2: What city does the play take place in?  She wrote verona.  As in, without a capital V.  Got partial credit.  That’s just one of those “What are ya gonna do?” moments. It’s technically wrong.  I’d like to see how many kids didn’t actually write down Verona at all, for comparison, to see how important it is.  I wonder if she’d capitalized it but spelled it wrong (Varona?) whether it would have been a partial answer or not.

Wrong answer #3:  Here’s where it gets interesting.  The question was, who brings the invitation list to Romeo to read it?  She answered, “A Capulet servant who can’t read.”  The answer the teacher wanted?  “Clown.” (Which is ironic because when they read the play in class, that’s the role she played.)

Again, I can see why he wanted that answer.  But my daughter doesn’t understand why hers is wrong. The First Folio (I checked) does say “Enter Clown”, even though his actual lines are prefaced with “Ser” as in “Servant”.  My daughter asked me why he’s even called a clown, he doesn’t do anything funny.  I tried to explain the role of the clown as a specific thing, he’s not just some random clown wandering through the streets, how many of the plays have somebody in that exact role, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought about bringing up terms like “commedia dell’arte” but I thought I’d lose her, plus my understanding of that area isn’t strong.

All in all, not the worst showing.  2 out of 3 mistakes were just silly, and 1 falls into that bucket of “there’s lots of ways to answer this question and I didn’t pick the one the teacher wanted”.  The most important lesson, from where I sit, is that she takes her understanding of Shakespeare very seriously and wants to confirm at every opportunity that she does, in fact, know what she’s talking about.  I’m ok with that.

More Capulet-ish, Really

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I have been waiting a long time to have conversations about the text with my daughter, and I couldn’t be more excited now that it’s happening. Every day she brings me a question that makes me say, “I don’t know, I’ll research it.”

Today’s question?

Rosaline is a Capulet, isn’t she? She’s invited to the party, and on the list she is referenced as “my fair niece”.

So why, then, is it ok for Romeo to be head over heels madly in love with her, but when he finds out that Juliet is a Capulet, he says, “My life is my foe’s debt”?

The best answer that I could give my daughter – who was the messenger for other kids in her class – was that we’re talking about really extended families here, and “cousin” or “niece” didn’t necessarily mean like we mean it, you are the child of my mother’s brother or something.  Instead it meant something more along the lines of “kinsmen,” as in, “We are related by some combination, but you are not my child or my sibling. Therefore if you are of my generation I will call you cousin, if you are younger than me I will call you niece or nephew.”  By extension, Romeo’s problem with Juliet isn’t so much that she’s a Capulet at all, but that she’s the daughter of the head of the family (just like he is son of the head of the Montague family).

Which then led to the question (man, sometimes these kids are quick!), “Then what the heck is Tybalt?  He’s a cousin, right?  Why is Rosaline no big deal, but Tybalt is right in the middle of everything?”

Good question!  My best answer was that he was very close to the Lord and Lady Capulet, and grew up with Juliet, almost as if they were brother and sister.  Which is later explained after Tybalt’s death, so I think that there’s some textual evidence to back that up.

How’d I do?  Is there an easier or more accurate way to explain that?

Romeo and Juliet Homework Help Here!

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Bardfilm and I were joking this afternoon that my daughter, who is now studying Romeo and Juliet, is in the enviable (?) position of knowing more about the entire play than most of her classmates, setting her up to be the one they turn to for answers to all their questions.  So of course we started considering how she might abuse that power…

Romeo and Juliet Helpful (Not Really) Homework Answers

There’s a lost scene from the Quarto version of Romeo and Juliet where the Nurse tries to resuscitate Tybalt, which explains why she is called Nurse.

Mercutio is supposed to be on drugs during the “Queen Mab” speech. The 1996 Leonardo DiCaprio interpretation is one of the few that gets that correct. It’s not supposed to make any sense.

Friar Laurence was arrested for illegally trading in herbs.  That’s why the young lovers have to visit him in his cell.
Audiences so completely misunderstood the ending, assuming Friar Laurence was executed for his role in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, that Shakespeare inserted a cameo for him in Two Gentlemen of Verona, the play he’d written by popular demand to show off Valentine, Mercutio’s brother.
The Rolling Stones made the play relevant by turning Romeo’s  response to Juliet’s “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” into one of their biggest hits:  “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
A “thumb” is an Italian dessert on a stick—something like a popsicle gelato.  Eating one while pointing the stick at someone was considered very rude.
The planet Mercury was discovered in 1599, the same year Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. That’s where he got the name Mercutio.
“Wherefore” actually does mean “where”. Your English teacher is just messing with you.
Perhaps the most famous speech in the play comes near the end of Act V.  Romeo says, “Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start / And I bet and you exploded in my heart / And I forget, I forget.”
The “ancient grudge,” as explained in the original source material, refers to a time two generations prior when the patriarchs of both the Capulet and Montague families were wrestlers who battled frequently at fairs an exhibitions around Italy.
“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon” is a not-so-subtle jab at the actor who played Moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who was known backstage to have a serious attitude problem.
Mercutio and Valentine were supposed to be twin brothers, and the play a traditional farce. When the actors all got together and told Shakespeare, “No more twins!” he killed Mercutio out of spite and rewrote the second half.
This above all: you must have fun with it. Shakespeare doesn’t make life better by being stodgy and stuffy and difficult, a chore to approach with fear and trepidation. Don’t ever be afraid to get silly with it. Laugh at the parts you think are funny. Make up weird back stories for the minor characters. Rewrite your favorite song lyrics to fit the play. Drop a reference here and there and see who picks it up. When you read and understand and remember Shakespeare you have a special bond with millions of other people, across the world and throughout history, who read and understood and remember it, too. We do this for fun, and there’s always room for more to join the game.