ROMEO AND JULIET –The One With the Balcony Scene!

Romeo and Juliet is, alongside Hamlet, probably the most well-known of all Shakespeare’s plays, and for many the most rewarding and touching and eternal of the lot. Even people who supposedly know nothing about Shakespeare know this one, or bits of it, and it has been performed and adapted and re-invented in so many ways that one would think the world would somehow tire of it. But it never does. It seems to be everlasting, and eternally and profoundly popular. Perhaps not so surprising, really –it is, after all, the greatest love story of them all.

Personally though I never cared much for the play before; I found it soppy and soggy and over-elaborately decorated when I first read it (as a callow youth, too worldly for my own good!), and several equally soppy, soggy productions and versions I saw seemed to confirm this grand view of mine. It was not the Shakespeare I was attracted to when I first started to discover him, and I felt little sense of identity with anyone in the play –indeed, most of the characters I found immensely annoying. It failed to grasp me or excite me, and knowing very little about life or love or anything really at the time, I was blandly indifferent to its romance and tragedy.

And now –older and wiser– I return to it and find everything is different. It is a play that blows me away with its urgency, its poetry, its beautiful construction, its vividness and life force, and I think all in all it is one of the most sublime and riveting of all Shakespeare’s creations. I was actually quite startled by just how much I now enjoyed it and reveled in it compared with my first encounter with the text. It is a perfect companion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which precedes it in the chronology I am following) and seems to spring from the same well of lightness and ease of writing as that play. Here, of course, the theme is ultimately more tragic, but there is a similar urgency and beauty of writing that seems to burst from the page as you read it. And the play needs to be read (or performed) with a similar kind of urgency, even though you frequently want to stop and examine a passage or a line more closely. I think that was how I read it before and why it didn’t work for me then: I was seeing all the technique of the writing but taking in nothing of the prosody of the text as a whole. It really has to be read aloud.

As for the story, I was struck by just how much scheming there is going on. Nothing is done straightforwardly. Everyone is ”arranging” or meddling in some way, even when they are trying to help, and this ultimately brings on the tragic conclusion to the tale. The wholesome, pure romance at the play’s heart is confronted with one barrier or obstruction after the other; the young couple of the title are pushed, manipulated and drawn from each other by the people around them, and yet their love for each other is so heartbreakingly earnest and determined and yet fragile. It is a play of youth, and understandably often resonates immensely with young people experiencing similar plights, agonies and frustrations to those expressed by the characters in the play. And Shakespeare seems very much on the side of the young characters here; he is fair to the adults, but the play does not really belong to them and nor do our sympathies. The nurse is, of course, comical and harmless and rather loveable, but Friar Laurence comes across as fascinatingly dubious, and there is a whole story in him that remains untold. As there also is in Mercutio –who has some of the play’s most memorable moments and stands out as one of the strongest ”friend” characters in all of Shakespeare.

I also felt much more accomodating to Romeo’s development as a character on reading the play anew. Previously, I had found him something of a shallow and fickle character in that he so quickly forgets his previous ”love” upon seeing Juliet for the first time. Now, I see that as an acknowledgment of him realizing that what may have seemed like love before was in fact merely infatuation, and that the meeting with Juliet is on a completely different level. Juliet, though initially ”greener” emerges as the more mature of the two, but there is such a touching sweetness to the urgency and yearning of their budding relationship that one really does feel that these two were meant for each other, and would have stayed with each other for always, had not they ended up such tragic victims of events. Yet because of their tragedy, harmony and peace is restored –a sharp lesson is learned by all; and rightly so.

There have been countless fine productions and film or television versions of the play, but those that have seemed always to work best (for me) are those which embrace the essential youthfulness of the story. The theme, being so universal, is immensely adaptable to many different settings, times and environments, but versions that cast against the youthfulness at the play's heart, are far more difficult to accept, no matter how talented the performers may be.


Favourite Line:

Romeo:
”Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”
(Act 2, Sc.1)

Character I would most like to play: Friar Laurence