Word: juliets
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...Bandello's novella, Juliet was 18 years old. In Brooke's poem, which was Shakespeare's immediate source, she became 16. The playwright, however, for reasons never convincingly argued, makes Juliet a couple weeks short of her fourteenth birthday, and underlines her age several times. Romeo is some years older, but still an immature teenager...
Ultimately, of course, any production succeeds or fails on the strength of its Romeo and its Juliet. Every director must confront a wellnigh insuperable difficulty: Shakespeare presents not just a tale of young love, but of adolescent love. The two lovers are teenagers, and they speak and act as teenagers; the dramatist left no doubt about this. Originally there was no special problem, since Juliet was played by a young boy, and great care was taken in the training of young performers generally...
Bernard Shaw once saw the two roles played by Esme Percy at 17 and Dorothy Minto at 14, and said the work "for the first time became endurable." And I found a reference to a Pasadena Playhouse production in 1937 with an unidentified Romeo of 16 and Juliet of 14. These players turn out to have been Robert Willey and Anita Denniston--thanks to the Harvard Theatre Collection, which (bless it!) happens to have a playbill of the show in its holdings. The record would seem to go to the celebrated Fay Templeton, who a century ago had played Puck...
...Juliet is the more acute problem of the two, but on rare occasions a teenage actress has conquered the role. The redoubtable Fanny Kemble began a long Shakespearean career with a triumphant debut as Juliet at 19. Adelaide Neilson made her debut in the part at 17 and became the most popular Juliet of the latter half of the 19th century. And in our own century Phyllis Neilson-Terry started playing the role at 18, to wide acclaim...
...current version is the third here at Stratford. The 1959 production's Juliet was Inga Swenson, who was then in her late twenties but did manage to seem consistently adolescent as well as unfailingly musical; her Romeo, however, was deficient. Six seasons later the situation was reversed: Terence Scammell was an absolutely gorgeous Romeo, with an inadequate Juliet. It is the 1965 combination that faces us again this summer...