ARTicles vol.4 i.3: Will the Real Will Shakespeare Please Stand Up?

Since the dawn of cinema Romeo and Juliet has remained a directors’, actors’, and audience favorite. Unfortunately, the mainstream American stage history of the star-crossed lovers has not been as fruitful. New York and Boston have seen few major productions of the work in a major theatre over the past several decades. Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company produced the play in 1987 as part of its annual Shakespeare on the Common series directed by Steven Maler; the same year Circle in the Square Theatre presented the play under the direction of Theodore Mann in New York. Ten years later, Broadway dropped the curtain on its last telling of the tale, directed by Estelle Parsons. In 1999 Joe Calarco’s heavily adapted telling, Shakespeare’s R&J, featuring only four men playing all the parts (including Sean Dugan who just appeared as Andrei in A.R.T.’s Three Sisters), ran for a record 385 off-Broadway performances. And this past fall, Boston’s New Repertory Theatre christened its new theatre with a well-recieved production of the play.

Because of this dearth of professional productions, most people know Shakespeare’s most famous love story only through screen adaptations. Although the public feels it knows the play, in fact it has nothing more than a glimpse through the lens of film. Hollywood has cranked out over four hundred films based on Shakespeare’s plays, not counting early films that have long since crumbled to dust. In the 1990s alone fifty-five films were churned out. How did the bard seduce Hollywood? To begin, Shakespeare is the world’s most famous playwright, and his plays are not under copyright law, which appeals to bottom-line moguls. In contrast, directors and actors turn to Shakespeare for his stories. Although students go through high school with their teachers drilling them about Shakespeare’s language, in the movies, with cuts and additions, the language often disappears like ozone, leaving only a bare-bones plot. But Shakespeare’s plots never fail to entertain.

Understandably Hollywood has not kept its hands offRomeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s eternal play about love-sick youth. Over the past century directors have grappled with the challenge of turning Shakespeare’s poetic text into cinemagraphic rhetoric. One should not fret over the more bizarre adaptations, all is fair in art and business. Shakespeare, after all, stole the story, and even some lines, from previous sources – most obviously Luigi da Porto’s 1530 work entitled Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amantiand Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet(1562).

George Cukor’s 1936 version, featuring bravura performances, comes to us from the Golden Age of the studio era. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Norma Shearer for Juliet, and Leslie Howard as an eloquent Romeo. Because of their virtuosity with the poetry, audiences and critics easily forgot that they were fifteen years too old for their parts. Beginning as a young inamorata, Shearer grows into a tragic woman undone by fate and Howard’s English tongue luxuriates in Romeo’s text. Filled out by a superb cast, the film also includes a rapier-sharp Basil Rathbone as Tybalt (a jaunt that earned him a Supporting Actor Oscar nod); his Tybalt explodes with poison-tipped barbs and a blade to match. John Barrymore, one of our great Shakespeare actors, plays Mercutio, strutting energetically and dying gracefully in his only complete talkie of Shakespeare.

The film’s physical world differs greatly from the movies that had come before; instead of painted canvases and wooden props, Verona is a living, breathing entity. The film opens in the town square full of vendors and their wares; Cukor said he had wanted to “get the garlic and Mediterranean” onto the screen. Even though the visuals dazzle, Cukor’s legacy was giving the text its due; though cut, as every film adaptation must be, the text that made it to the screen is almost entirely Shakespeare’s, something one cannot say of the other major films of the work. In the last scene Cukor’s visual harmonization comes to full bloom; the director has an anguished Romeo storm the Capulet monument in the black of night with only his torch flickering. Prying his way into the crypt, he meets Paris, who forces him into mortal combat. Arriving at the side of Juliet, he delivers his lines with a somber tone; touching his lips to her mouth, he takes his life. Cukor allowed much of the dialogue to remain intact with only some deletions and no additions, and he has successfully captured the visual potential of film without mangling Shakespeare’s text. The film continues to enchant visually and verbally; Cukor’s cinematic version created the template for all important adaptations to come.

Some thirty years later, Franco Zeffirelli’s version would have the Oscar world abuzz again. Zeffirelli’s 1968 film came on the heels of his successful stage production. In both, Zeffirelli wanted to create an adaptation that would be accessible to modern audiences. To do so, he altered the text significantly, visual rhetoric took the place of Shakespeare’s words. Zeffirelli gambled by casting two unknown teenagers, 16-year-old Olivia Hussey and 17-year-old Leonard Whiting. Inexperience hampered both actors, but since both were ravishingly beautiful and full of youthful exuberance, audiences forgave their less than skilled performances. The value of this film is not the acting or the script but rather the atmosphere Zeffirelli created. Filmed against the backdrop of an Italy in the bloom of spring, in several cities of Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio, Zeffirelli worked his love of history and architecture into the film. Capulet’s home was built by Pope Pius II in 1460, Friar Lawrence’s church is the church of San Pietro, a national monument, and all the scenes of riots and duels are filmed in Gubbio, one of the great medieval cities of Italy.

Zeffirelli’s retelling appealed to a counter-culture in the throws of a sexual revolution. This auteur director’s vision comes through loud and clear in the death scene. Throughout his two-and-one-half hour banquet for the eye, the story unfolds in images. Romeo’s return to Verona to lie with his love’s dead body erupts in a cinematographic montage that carries the audience through to the end, breathless. Of all the major films, Zeffirelli’s mausoleum is the eeriest; complete with shadows, skeletons and the rotting corpse of Tybalt, the director creates a macabre sorrow. Bursting into this gloom, Romeo finds his Juliet laid out in mortal finery. Paris has been cut from the scene to focus on Romeo and the comatose Juliet. Lamenting (briefly), he ingests poison and collapses. Waking, Juliet sees her husband on the floor and sheds her earthly coils post haste. Cutting most of the text, Zeffirelli creates what he called a “solemn … dumb show”: two bodies carried through a desolate town square that slowly floods with mourners. Though the text has undergone an extreme makeover, the film remains a remarkable gem, beautifully filmed and masterfully directed. It remains the most popular film version of Romeo and Juliet.

Finally, we arrive at the most radical and current revision: Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, a portrait for the MTV generation with a rock soundtrack and jump-stop cinematography. Lurhmann sets his romance in a fictional Verona Beach, Florida, a gang-infested beach metropolis run-down from years of strife. His characters sport firearms and drugs, creating a hyper violent and frenzied sexual environment. This entropy drives a plethora of textual and plot changes. Much like Zeffirelli’s, this adaptation strives to be contemporary, hence the frantic pace.

This hysterical pitch builds and builds. Learning of his wife’s death, Romeo leaps into his sand-covered car, leaving nothing but a storm of sand in his wake. Blazing through the streets of Verona Beach with police cars swarming behind him, Romeo abandons his vehicle, runs on foot, weapon in hand, to the steps of the sepulcher. With police headlights trailing him, he opens the door to the vault and barricades himself inside. From the outside, the tomb looks like a neo-gothic church, inside it becomes a techno dance floor with neon lights; the only tomb we see is Juliet’s surrounded by an ocean of bright candles. Placing himself next to Juliet, Romeo lays down his gun, whispers goodbye and takes poison. But unlike every other major film, this Romeo’s performance has not ended. Taking a page from several 18th-century productions, Luhrmann gives his lovers one last gaze into each other’s eyes. As Romeo falls, Juliet wakes; Romeo dies quickly and Juliet, taking his gun, ends her life with a bullet through the brain. As morning breaks, two black ambulances cart away the bodies; an anchorwoman delivers the Prince’s final monologue on a small television. Little of Shakespeare’s text remains; critics and audiences responded with adoration or contempt, but Luhrmann’s version is hard to forget.

The coming A.R.T. production will give us once again the opportunity to experience Shakespeare’s play in the theatre, where it was born.

Christopher R. Hildebrand is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute.

4-3