Word: romeo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...Romeo and Juliet is unique in Shakespeare's output for containing, in the Chorus' Prologue, the playwright's own view of the overall import of the sad outcome, which he attributes to evil destiny and the parents' feud. Romeo and Juliet themselves are not tragic figures in the classical sense. It is the parents who exhibit a "tragic flaw," and thus are made to suffer through the needless loss of their children...
Shakespeare failed to carry through as he did in Henry V, where the Chorus frames all five acts. And since the prologues in Romeo are both formal sonnets, Kahn has compensated by fleshing out the scheme through having the Chorus speak Sonnets 116 and 55 later on, as further commentary on the play. At other times, the strawhatted, bespectacled Chorus (the reliable Philip Kerr) wanders in and out, or leans against a column reading a newspaper--a silent observer of Verona life. A felicitous solution...
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...