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.

The War is Coming. Oh, and I am Psychic.

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Back in November 2011 I reviewed a graphic novel called Romeo and Juliet: The War. I remember that I quite liked it.  It’s overly violent, and there’s a weirdly gratuitous nude scene that may have been inserted to appease the teenage boy demographic but completely ruled out the chance of me showing it to my kids, but overall I was happy with the effort. It looked very nice and stayed consistent with the world they’d built.

I even said:

You know what? I said that it looks like a movie. I think that if somebody tried to tell this version of the story as a movie, it could be pretty awesome.

Well, look what I found.  Romeo and Juliet: The War is coming in 2017. It’s one of those “only accessible with IMDB Pro” deals so I can’t get all the scoop. Maybe one of the readers out there can see it?  We definitely know it’s the same source material, though, because in the “People who liked this also liked…” section, I can see a Stan Lee movie :).

I’ll keep watching for more news about this one!

What does Juliet think about marriage?

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Juliet’s thoughts on marriage change during the play, so the answer to the question depends on whether we look in Act 1 Scene 3 or Act 2 Scene 2.

Juliet is first mentioned when Paris comes asking her father for Juliet’s hand in marriage. Her father tells Paris that her opinion counts, and that he will not force her to marry someone she does not love:

Capulet. But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,
My will to her consent is but a part;
An she agree, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent and fair according voice.

We next see Juliet with her mother, who is working her from a different angle:

Lady Capulet. Marry, that ‘marry’ is the very theme
I came to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet,
How stands your disposition to be married?

Juliet. It is an honour that I dream not of.

There is the short answer for anybody just looking to get the homework answer. What does Juliet think about marriage? It is an honour she dreams not of.

Romeo at Juliet's Balcony
Romeo at Juliet’s Balcony. Image via Wikimedia Commons

But wait! She hasn’t met Romeo yet. Act 2, Scene 2, otherwise known as the famous balcony scene:

Juliet. Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed.
If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow,
By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

This is Shakespearean for, “If you like it then you’d better put a ring on it.” Juliet has gone from “I’m not really interested in getting married” to “Just tell me the time and the place and I’ll be there.”

 

 

How did Cordelia die?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

It’s not uncommon for Shakespeare’s characters to die offstage, no matter how significant the character is. Unfortunately, this can make it difficult to understand how that character died. There’s a world of difference between seeing someone drink poison and someone running on stage to announce, “She’s dead, she drank poison!”

So it is with King Lear‘s Cordelia. Her death, and the way Shakespeare chooses to present it, is easily one of the most tragic scenes ever put on stage.

King Lear with Cordelia's dead body
Image via Wikimedia Commons

Edmund has captured Lear and Cordelia, but Lear doesn’t even seem to mind because he’s so happy to be with the daughter that he thought had left him forever. As they are taken away to prison, he says:

Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.

Edmund is challenged to a duel by a mysterious opponent who turns out to be his brother Edgar. Edmund is defeated and tries to make amends for the wrongs he has committed before he dies. He tells his guards:

Edmund. I pant for life. Some good I mean to do,
Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send
(Be brief in’t) to the castle; for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia.
Nay, send in time.

“My writ is on [their] lives” means that he has ordered their execution.  Quickly, messengers are dispatched to the prison to stop the order.

What happens next? Does the messenger arrive in time? No, this is a tragedy; we know that’s not the case. Does a messenger return and say, “Too late!”  No. That would be too easy. (This is exactly how the end of Romeo and Juliet plays out, with that glimmer of hope that Romeo will reach Juliet in time…)

King Lear enters, carrying the lifeless body of his daughter, and the audience sees for themselves that it is too late.

Lear. Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.

If the question is how exactly did Cordelia die, her father answers it while weeping over her body, conversing with her as if she is still with him:

Lear. A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have sav’d her; now she’s gone for ever!
Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha!
What is’t thou say’st, Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low- an excellent thing in woman.
I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.

That last line provides the detail – they were in the process of hanging Cordelia when he attempted to rescue her.

Review : Strange Magic

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When I first heard that Strange Magic, Lucasfilm’s new animated effort was “inspired by Midsummer Night’s Dream” I wanted to be excited. I really did. I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, however.

Good thing. Whoever started throwing around Shakespeare’s name in the marketing for Strange Magic seems to have had about a high school student’s knowledge of the subject, at best.  A C student.

The way I explained “inspired by Shakespeare” to my kids went a little something like this:

There are basically three different ways that a movie can use Shakespeare. I’m not talking about actual movie versions of Shakespeare plays, I mean original movies that say they’ve got something to do with Shakespeare. First are the movies that come right out and talk about Shakespeare and use his words. Like Gnomeo and Juliet. Then there’s movies that don’t use any of his words, but try to tell a modern version of one of his stories.  (10 Things I Hate About You is the classic example here, though my kids don’t know that movie.) Then there’s movies that just take a single idea that came from Shakespeare and throw the rest away, thinking that just because they’ve got a boy and a girl whose parents don’t like each other they can call it Romeo and Juliet, or just because a king gets killed by his evil brother you can call it Hamlet with lions.

Strange Magic sits firmly in this final group.  There’s a love potion and there’s fairies, therefore we can claim it’s got something to do with Shakespeare. No humans.  No war between a king and queen of the fairies. There’s an “imp” who I guess we’ll call Puck who runs around throwing the potion on people for fun, but entirely minor characters in a single montage, that has nothing to do with the story. There is no parallel at all for Helena/Hermia/Demetrius/Lysander that I could figure out.

In fact, as I also pointed out to my kids, this story has more in common with a completely different Shakespeare story, and I bet the creators didn’t even realize it.  The king of the fairies has two daughters – Marianne and Dawn. (Trivia for you – on the television show Gilligan’s Island, the character of Marianne was played by Dawn Wells).  Marianne, for reasons that are obvious in the first two minutes, has sworn off love for good. Dawn, the younger sister, is boy crazy. The king basically won’t let Dawn get married until Marianne does.

Ok, show of hands, sound familiar to anybody?  That’s right, it’s Taming of the Shrew.

But, again, that’s as far as it goes. The actual story is all over the place, and honestly a pretty shameful product from a name like Lucasfilm. More than once I felt it was the kind of thing that seemed like it was written in about a half a day, and felt like one of my middle daughter’s straight-to-video Barbie movies.  There’s a good forest and a scary dark forest, and along the border between the two is the only place that the primroses grow.  And primroses are used to make love potion, of course. But only the Sugar Plum Fairy can make love potion. But the evil Bog King, ruler of the dark forest, has captured her and ordered that all the primroses be cut down (the latter, by the way, is a plot point that has absolutely zero bearing on the plot as the hero finds a primrose petal as soon as he goes looking for one). So of course the meek little best friend of the younger sister, who is secretly in love with her, gets convinced by the other bad guy, who wants to marry the older sister in order to raise an army (something else that’s never really explained), that he (the shy one) should go get a love potion, and then it all just gets weird.

Oh, and it’s a musical. Of cover songs.  Like a big Glee episode. When someone gets hit with the love potion they apparently just start singing “Sugar pie, honey bunch” over and over again.

Skip Strange Magic. I can’t really find anything worth recommending. It looks nice, I’ll give it that. But even that is weird, as none of the characters have that “I wish I could get that in a stuffed animal or action figure” appeal. The fairies look so human that every time they sprout wings you think “Where did THOSE come from?” and the goblins are so shapeless and generic that there’s even a joke in the script that they can’t tell their own gender apart.

Stop Teasing Me, Middle School

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My daughter, I may have mentioned, is in middle school. At the beginning of the school year my wife copied down all the relevant events from the school calendar to our personal calendar. I noticed that next weekend it says, “Fall play : Shakespeare.”

What’s this now?


I hit the school web site for details.  I’ve mentioned in the past that my town has an excellent Shakespeare program at the high school, and is part of an invitation-only festival in Lennox, Mass every year.  So if they say they’re doing Shakespeare I’m not going to miss it. But alas, this is the middle school not the high school and all the calendar still says is, “Fall Play : Shakespeare”.

I tackle my daughter the next morning.  “Ummm, hello?  Fall play Shakespeare? Why do I not know about this?”

“I told you about it,” she says.  Liar!

“Pretty sure you didn’t,” I say.

“Romeo and Juliet? Remember?”

Then I remember. Back at the beginning of the year she told me that the eighth graders are doing something called “Romeo and Juliet Together and Alive At Last”.

“Ohhhhh!” I say, “That’s annoying. That’s not Shakespeare.”

So as not to miss out on any Shakespeare, however, I go googling for it. Turns out that Bardfilm beat me to it, and reviewed the story (the novel version, at least) on his blog.

I did get to read some of the script, and I agree with his assessment – the characters are eighth graders dealing with eighth grade issues, but they talk like second graders. I don’t plan on going to see the play. I hope that this is not “Shakespeare prep” for the kids before they get to high school.