I Am Juliet (12 page)

ROB

Jam lay in bloody puddles on the stage. Rob stood behind the curtain, waiting to go on. He would have to scrub the floor after the performance, as well as wash the jam and wine splodges from the costumes before he went to bed tonight.

His hand trembled on the curtain. Only a master actor could play this part. He was just a boy.

He could hear the audience muttering, the yell of an orange seller, the cracking of walnuts, the cries as friends greeted each other from the balconies. Nicholas strode across the stage as Romeo, plotting with Simon as Benvolio to sneak into the Capulets’ ball.

The actors exited past him, into the wings. Simon patted Rob’s cheek briefly as he passed. ‘It’s going well, lad. They liked the sword fight. You’ll be right.’

Rob tried to nod. His cheeks felt hot under the white lead paint. Only the beetroot gave his lips and cheeks colour. His wig itched. His thick velvet dress was heavy, the whalebone so stiff he hoped he wouldn’t trip. It stank too. A rat had made a nest in one of the costume trunks, and died when it was shut up.

His heart beat louder than a drum.

Lady Capulet: Nurse, where’s my daughter? Call her forth to me?

Nurse: Now, by my maidenhead
—
at twelve year old
—
I bade her come
.

He couldn’t do it. They’d throw walnut shells at him. The play would close. The players would tramp the roads, like pedlars.

Nurse: Where’s this girl? What, Juliet?

Terror bit him, gluing his silk slippers to the floor.

And suddenly she was there, or she was him, or he was her. It didn’t matter. Somehow his feet became her feet. She glided onto the stage, her face downcast, her eyes glancing obediently at her mother.

‘How now! Who calls?’ His voice. Her voice.

The audience were silent, their nutcrackers and oyster knives forgotten on their laps.

And all at once he understood what Simon had told him during his first week with the company: ‘Words are all very well, boy. But a true actor can bring the crowd
to tears without a word. That is our mystery, lad. The playwright puts down the words. But the audience that watches — they’re ours.’

You’re mine, Rob thought. For these few moments, every lady, gentleman, servant or apprentice here belongs to me. And to her as well.

For Juliet was with him.

Somewhere, sometime, there had been a girl. Perhaps her name was even Juliet. It was her strength that drew in those gazes. And she was here today, in the words that he would say, in his every gesture, and in their minds, pleading for love to triumph over enmity.

He stood there, silent in the heavy dress, as Nurse and Lady Capulet went on and on and on, word after word. But no one muttered that the speeches were too long. No one even cracked a walnut. It was as though the audience already knew the end, the fate of this slight girl who stood with eyes downcast.

And you will weep for me, Rob thought. Each one of you. Even you men, sitting straight as broomsticks so your neighbours don’t see your tears. Every day till you are dust, you will remember how you watched a young girl die in front of you, for love. There will be no actor in your memory, no theatre and no stage. Just the girl, the aching of her tears, the tears you shed for her, and for me.

She did not die. Cannot die, as long as actors tread the stage. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, she soars above your webs of hate. Today, and in your memory forevermore.

I am Juliet.

Once there was a girl called Juliet.

Or was there? She probably existed. Shakespeare’s play was based on other plays, which may also have been based on earlier works, and finally, perhaps, on a tale of what did happen to two young lovers, one called Juliet.

But even if every play was fiction, Juliet still lived. The story of a girl and boy in love despite their families’ enmity is a story as old as humankind. It will happen time and time again as long as we humans feel love and hatred.

That is why the play still speaks to us. Wherever there is hatred, irrational and irreconcilable, there will be lovers desperate to hold hands across the chasm created by their families or their cultures, Romeos and Juliets.

Perhaps, one day, there will be a time when hatred withers and only love is left.

THE JULIET JOURNEY

Three years ago, I spoke to a group of teenagers who were studying
Romeo and Juliet
at school. They hated it. ‘All those words,’ one of them said. Then they saw a movie version. They cried. They loved it.

Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed, with interludes of fighting, dancing, singing and performing bears. His plays are filled with jokes and puns we no longer understand. They weren’t written to be read, with no action to leaven the long speeches.

Nor were they written in stone. Each time the play was performed — the company put on a different play each day — bits were changed, by the owner, the manager or by the actors, as I have made small changes for this book, changing some of the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to ‘you’ and ‘your’ as Shakespeare would do if he were putting on the play today. The text of
Romeo and Juliet
only became ‘accepted’ when Shakespeare’s friends had his plays published after his death, in case they were forgotten.

The role of Juliet can be played in many ways. Mostly she is played as an innocent who has bad things happen to her. For most of the more than four hundred years since the play was written, women, and girls, have had little power over their own lives, or the world of men (women in Shakespeare’s time belonged to men — a husband could even legally sell his wife at the market,
though it seems to have been done rarely). But you can read her role differently. Juliet does the unthinkable for the time: she asks Romeo to marry her. She plots, she schemes; she has the courage to face almost death and a dark crypt, then real death, killing herself with a dagger.

Romeo and Juliet
is one of Shakespeare’s early plays, written when Queen Elizabeth I was alive. Did he create a strong heroine to please the Queen, just as he would create the evil Lady Macbeth and witches to delight her successor, King James I, who disliked powerful women? Or did Shakespeare himself dream of a girl with strength and love enough to end a feud, a girl like Juliet?

ALL THOSE WORDS

Why did Shakespeare muck up a good story with so many words?

An easy answer is that the words are beautiful. But for modern readers, many of them are just … well, too many. Why?

Shakespeare wrote what his audience would enjoy. So why didn’t he make his plays the equivalent of a modern movie — few words and lots of action? Well, partly he did. His plays were written to be acted. The directions ‘Fight’ or ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ don’t look like much
on the page. But a lot of the play’s stage time was taken up with dances, fights and lovemaking.

There is one other aspect that is strange to modern readers and theatre-goers: well-educated people in Shakespeare’s time were expected to speak wittily and poetically. Characters like the nurse or the servants could speak plainly, but not well-born girls like Juliet, or noble young men like Romeo. They were trained from an early age to speak ‘lots of words’, and very well indeed. Shakespeare’s main characters are well-born men and women, girls and boys. To be realistic, they had to use ‘all those words’.

This book cuts down those words, leaving only those spoken by Juliet or in Juliet’s presence, as the story is told from her point of view. Even those words have been cut back a little in places, or clarified — for example, speaking of a rope ladder rather than a ‘cord’. I don’t think Shakespeare would have minded these changes. He might even have muttered something about cutting the cloth to suit the man. Shakespeare did his best to bring in the punters. I suspect he was content for anyone to add anything to his plays, or subtract it, as long as it brought more pennies slipping into the money box at the front door.

I also suspect he would have been horrified to see his plays made compulsory reading for teenagers in the classroom, without speech and colour and movement, or
lighting and props. He wrote short sonnets to be read. A play was a performance piece.

Much of the dialogue in this book comes from the play. But Juliet lived in Shakespeare’s imagination, and his mind would have been full of images long before he put her story down on paper. For that reason, I have sometimes given Juliet lines from other works by Shakespeare. I also based Paris’s song to Juliet at the banquet on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets; but where Shakespeare says his mistress is ‘nothing like’ a range of clichés, I have Paris declaring that Juliet is, turning a poem of wit and beauty into the trite verse Shakespeare was parodying.

WHO WAS THE PLAY WRITTEN FOR?

Much has been written about how Shakespeare’s plays were performed ‘for the common man’. This isn’t quite true. For the cost of a penny, anyone could stand in the ‘pit’ in front of the stage. These ‘groundlings’ in the cheap seats might throw rotten apples, or worse, oyster shells, if they didn’t like the play. They had reason to complain. A penny back then — or two pennies, tuppence, if you wanted a seat; and possibly more for the higher boxes — was the equivalent of at least a hundred dollars or more now. Many could afford it, but they still
wanted value for money: the latest fighting techniques from Italy with sword and dagger; the latest dances in the banquet scenes; and, if possible, a dancing bear or other spectacles.

Romeo and Juliet
was never the equivalent of modern pop culture, appealing to people who didn’t love words. You could pay a farthing, or even a ‘mite’ (four farthings, or eight mites, to a penny), to see street mummery, or the dancing bear by itself; or pay nothing at all to see a cock fight, bear-baiting, dog fights, freak shows and other entertainment — even a hanging. ‘All those words’ were never meant to be easy for everyone to understand. They were meant to be measured, clever and beautiful. Most of all they were meant to be listened to, not read. A good actor gives the words balance and meaning. The actions on stage break up the long speeches.

TIME AND PLACE

Romeo and Juliet
takes place in Verona, Italy, in the 1300s — but it also took place in London of the 1590s, as well as in Shakespeare’s imagination and the imaginations of the actors who performed it, and they were very firmly located in Elizabethan England. This is where
I am Juliet
is set too.

Romeo and Juliet
represents English values of the time, even if there are a few foreign flourishes, like the names ‘Romeo’ and ‘Capulet’. Shakespeare knew little about Verona. I too know very little about Verona in the 1300s, or in these days either, but from the age of about ten I spent a large part of my imaginary life in Elizabethan England, and as an adult spent part of my professional life researching it.

Romeo and Juliet
was probably written somewhere around 1591 to 1595, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. By then, she was old for the times, and there was great uncertainty about who would reign after her, as she had never married and had no children. Nor had she named an heir.

Shakespeare’s world was a dark and dangerous one. Before Elizabeth I’s reign, England had been ripped apart by religious hatred. Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had declared England to be a Protestant country. On Henry’s death, his son, Edward VI, kept the Church of England as the official religion, with the King as head of the Church. When King Edward died young, his sister Mary I declared that England was again Roman Catholic. Holding to your religion could cost you your life, because you were guilty of treason if you did not keep to the faith declared by your King or Queen.

The country was torn by political and religious warfare and hatred, as well as by feuds that may have begun
with an insult, now long forgotten. In a time when men carried swords, rapiers, or at least a knife, even a small quarrel was often a deadly one.

This was also a land scarred by the bubonic plague, or Black Death, with one in three or four people dying in any outbreak. The theatres were shut during major outbreaks, and stayed shut for months or even years. Famines occurred as farm workers died, or merchants no longer brought goods to cities during bad plague years. In 1592, about the time
Romeo and Juliet
was written, perhaps ten per cent of the English population died of the plague in that single year.

Shakespeare’s England, and especially London, was a place of civil strife, with large numbers of unemployed, and bad harvests leading to starvation. There was no police force, so young men fought openly in the streets with swords, knives and rapiers. The most popular entertainment was bear-baiting — a dog pitted against a bear; or dog fights, where dogs ripped each other to death. Great crowds gathered to enjoy public hangings or floggings, or to throw muck at figures in the stocks. London was a town of inns and taverns; of drunken brawls; of a river that stank and narrow streets where chamber-pots were emptied.

It was a time of fear, uncertainty and horror. It was also a time of love and beauty, courage and duty, of great hope and pride and laughter. No time is simple, nor any
culture, and nor was Shakespeare’s. But it helps you understand the play if you know a little of the way he, and the audience he wrote for, lived.

It was also a time when a woman had no power. A girl or woman was, quite literally, owned by her father or her husband. But it was also a time ruled over by a woman, and Elizabeth I was loved possibly more than any other English monarch before and since. In 1588, a few years before
Romeo and Juliet
was written, Elizabeth was credited with saving England from the Spanish Armada.

Shakespeare’s theatre company regularly performed for the Queen. Possibly, she appreciated a play where a young girl — a virgin, like herself — took her destiny into her own hands: proposing marriage to Romeo, arranging the marriage, and refusing the plans of the male rulers, her father, her destined fiancé Paris and the Prince.
Romeo and Juliet
ends with Juliet — a young girl, and supposed to be powerless in Elizabethan times — triumphant, for she has kept the love she chose, even if it took her death to do it. The last words of the play are not ‘Romeo, and his Juliet’ but ‘Juliet, and her Romeo’.

THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY

Once, perhaps, there really were ‘two households, both alike in dignity’ with ‘ancient grudge’ breaking ‘to new
mutiny’. Shakespeare based his play on two earlier works: Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem
The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet
, which was in turn based on a French adaptation, by Pierre Boaistuau, of an Italian poem by Matteo Bandello; and a prose version,
Romeo and Juliet: the goodly Hystory of the true and constant Love between Rhomeo and Julietta
, that appeared in William Painter’s 1567 collection of stories,
The Palace of Pleasure
. Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
closely follows Brooke’s poem, but he added a lot of extra drama and more and richer characters — and, of course, those words that actor Rob Goughe in this book complains about, and students complain about when they have to study them.

The story itself is much older. Masuccio Salernitano wrote a story called
Mariotto and Ganozza
in 1476, which has a similar plot — the warring families, the young lovers, the secret marriage — although he ends with the hero being beheaded for murder and the heroine dying of grief. Luigi da Porto adapted this story in
Giulietta e Romeo
, published in 1530. Both authors claimed the story was true.

Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
was probably written sometime between 1591 and 1595. He may even have written several versions of it — quite likely if the initial performance was successful but he thought he could make it better still. As Shakespeare had his own theatre company, he had a large degree of freedom in what he
chose to have performed, and probably also used the opportunity to improve his plays.

The versions of his plays that we know today were only published after his death, paid for by his friends. Unless an earlier manuscript turns up — possible, but unlikely — we have no way of knowing how much he rewrote his plays each time they were revived and performed again. We do know that he wrote quickly and easily — the foreword to the collection of plays published after his death says that Shakespeare wrote so fast he never stopped to blot the page — but did he ever rewrite his first drafts?

It would be a rare writer who didn’t want to tinker with his work if he had the chance, and Shakespeare certainly had many chances to do so, especially when the London theatres were closed for so long during a severe outbreak of the plague. Although his theatre company may have performed out of London at that time, it’s also likely that Shakespeare went back to Stratford-upon-Avon, where his wife and two daughters lived, and his son Hamnet who died in 1596, and where Shakespeare eventually retired, and possibly reworked his plays. But that is supposition. We know very little about Shakespeare’s life, or about the way he worked, except for that line written by his friends.

Romeo and Juliet
was published in 1597, edited by John Danter. Another version was printed in 1599 by
Thomas Creede: this one was about eight hundred lines longer and far better, but it lacked many of the stage directions that appeared in the first text. It’s possible that the first edition was based on a copy of the play stolen by an actor, or even by Danter himself, taking notes as a member of the audience. But it’s also possible, even probable, that the first printed version was what had first been performed, and that Shakespeare kept revising the work. Later editions would therefore have been Shakespeare’s later drafts of the play.