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fandomhigh_ooc2008-10-06 08:40 am
withoutverona) wrote in fandomhigh_ooc2008-10-06 08:40 am
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Spotlight on: Romeo + Juliet
So. Romeo + Juliet. Tights, "two households both alike in dignity," "what light through yonder window breaks," "wherefore art thou Romeo," "ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man," more tights, people getting married at 13 WTF, blah blah blah everybody is all star-crossed and dies at the end but somehow it's still a romantic classic.
Like many of you, I read it in ninth grade and didn't really get it. About all I remember is Mrs. Shank threatening us with death or detention if we made a big deal out of the bedroom scene in the Franco Zefirelli version that we watched in class.
Which is, if you ask me, sort of a shame. Because the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version made me realize how alive this story must have felt to its first audiences, how full of sex and death and love, and that turned me into a Shakespeare convert.
The play dates to 1594ish (Shakespeare's plays don't come with copyright dates, but this is the consensus) and was likely first performed at the Theatre, in London, before Shakespeare and Lord Chamberlain's Men built and moved to The Globe. It was first published in an incomplete and error-filled "bad quarto" in 1597, which was followed by a much better one in 1599. Most modern versions are based on the 1599 quarto, with addendums and changes from other printings.
Shakespeare pinched the plot from a 1562 poem by Arthur Brooke called "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet", which itself got the story from several earlier Italian and French sources. I've read bits of the Brooke poem and it is very long and very boring, so serious props to Shakespeare for getting through it at all. In turning the poem into a play, Shakespeare compressed the timeline (most of a year for Brooke, four days for Shakespeare), gave Mercutio a personality, changed Romeus's name to make it easier to use in verse, and reworked the opening to play up the conflict and introduce the major characters more quickly, among other changes. In short, he made it sexy.
The plot revolves around two wealthy families, the Montagues and the Capulets, who have been fighting for no particular reason for as long as anyone can remember. There are some hints in the text that part of it is that the Montagues are established, while the Capulets are social climbers, and that's something that was played up in the movie. For the most part, though, it's just part of the order of things; Montagues hate Capulets, and vice versa.
The simmering feud breaks into a new round of street fighting, and the prince of the city (a police captain, in the film) lays down the law: No more violence or I'll execute the lot of you. It's against this background that we meet Romeo, who was not at the fight. He's opted to spend his morning mooning over his One True Love, Rosaline, instead. His cousin, Benvolio, talks to him, learning that Rosaline's turned down Romeo's overtures in favor of life as a nun.
Meanwhile, across town, Juliet is getting some big news: Her parents have decided to marry her off to some rich dork called Paris, a count in the play and the governor's son in the movie. She's kind of okay with it -- mostly, it seems, for lack of other options. Juliet's father is throwing a party that night for her to meet Paris, and Romeo and Benvolio intercept an invitation and decide to crash because Rosaline is invited. (She's a Capulet. Romeo has a fetish for girls he can't have, apparently.) We pick up with them as they're about to enter the party, and in this scene we meet Romeo's best friend Mercutio, who basically tells Romeo to quit being an emo twerp. In the movie, he also feeds Romeo some ecstasy.
Juliet and Romeo meet at the party, sparks fly, and they start spouting sonnets at each other -- no, seriously -- before they both have to leave. On their way out, each learns the other's identity, but their fates are sealed. Cue Romeo sneaking back in to moon at Juliet's window. They declare their love and agree to marry.
The next morning, Romeo talks to his mentor Friar Laurence, who questions the haste but agrees to marry the pair in hopes it'll get the Montagues and the Capulets to make nice. Hours after that, they're at the church, pledging their eternal devotion.
.... yeah.
Anyhow, this might have even gone well, except Juliet has this cousin, Tybalt. Tybalt is a jerk, and Tybalt is pissed off at Romeo for crashing the party. Tybalt wants to duel Romeo. Tybalt finds Mercutio instead, who says: I don't think so, beyotch. Romeo arrives and tries to talk Tybalt out of the fight, but that just gets Mercutio to fight in his place. Mercutio is killed, and, in sorrow and rage, Romeo kills Tybalt. The prince shows up, as do the Capulets, and Romeo is banished.
Juliet is, to put it mildly, Not Happy when she hears all of this, but her love for her new husband wins out, and she and Romeo enjoy a wedding night before he leaves the next morning for Mantua, with a plan to publicize their marriage and then come home.
And even this might have worked, except Juliet's dear daddy has decided to move up her marriage to Paris. Like, to tomorrow. She goes to Friar Laurence to see if she can get out of it, and the best plan he can come up with is for her to fake her own death. (And this is where I start hating the good Friar.) She goes through with it and drinks the potion, but word doesn't get to Romeo in time, so he believes she really is dead. Having lost both wife and home, he buys poison and goes back to Verona to kill himself at her side. He does; she wakes up, finds him, and kills herself with his dagger. The families arrive and begin to reconcile, though there's a hint they're competing even in who can be most grief-stricken. And that's where the play ends.
There's still all kinds of critical debate around the play, especially as to how it's meant -- is it a tragedy, or is it more of a morality tale where the lovers get what's coming to them for being rash? That depends on how you think Shakespeare felt about Romeo and Juliet. I tend to think he was sympathetic. (This is a guy who knocked up an older woman and had to get married at 18; he has to have known how intense teenage passion was.) I also really like a theory I picked up somewhere that to some extent his version is a parody of Italian romances, which the English audiences of the time saw as extreme. Hence things like Juliet being 13, which would have been seen as shockingly young even in 1594.
The story was one of Shakespeare's most popular, and was regularly staged for the next four hundred years, often with a revised ending so the lovers could live. It was filmed several times, with the most popular English-language movie versions being those from 1936 and 1968, as well as the adaptation West Side Story in 1961.
In 1995, Baz Luhrmann, an Australian director who had made all of one movie, Strictly Ballroom, decided to make a fresh adaptation. If you have the special edition of the DVD, there's some footage of him talking about the pitch meeting, for which his agent suggested he try and sell the story as if no one had ever heard it before. He did, and, after some boggling, the studio agreed to give him a couple thousand dollars to make a test reel.
Bits of that footage are also on the DVD, and they show Leonardo DiCaprio, who had already been cast, acting opposite local Australian actors in the fight scenes. It's raw and clearly done on the cheap, but you can see why it won over skeptics. Luhrmann's concept was to take the play and transplant it to a gang war in a 1990s beach town, using a frenetic visual style to match the play's rapid pace and keeping the original language.
In addition to the hypermodern setting, Luhrmann altered a few plot points. In the play, Romeo fights and kills Paris at Juliet's tomb; the film replaced that with his taking an anonymous bystander hostage, leaving Paris out of the endgame. In addition, the movie lets Juliet awaken before Romeo dies, adding to the tragedy: They both seemingly die thinking "If only..."
The biggest challenge for casting the film was finding a Juliet. They actually cast Natalie Portman, and then realized she was 14 and wee, DiCaprio was 21, and their sex scenes were playing like statutory rape. There's a laundry list on the Wiki page of actresses who were allegedly considered; eventually they settled on Claire Danes, who was also wee (16ish) but not so wee as to make Romeo look like a perv.
Neither of the leads had done Shakespeare before or has since to the best of my knowledge, and they both have a very contemporary feel -- but that worked with the revised setting. They both have a pensive quality that makes you believe they could act and think and speak as Shakespeare's characters do, which I'm not sure too many young actors could pull off. Claire Danes nails Juliet's innocence as well as her strength, and DiCaprio makes Romeo's mood swings and fury work even if he sometimes sounds a little uncertain about the text. And they both look damn pretty when they're crying, which is key.
But to be honest, enjoying the movie doesn't so much depend on enjoying the play. Or, like, understanding the play. You can almost watch the movie on mute and get the point. There's a surface level at which it is about pretty actors kissing and shooting at things on the beach with pop-alternative songs of the '90s in the background, and on that surface level it's great eye candy.
Critical reception to the film was mixed, with some critics enjoying the updated setting and fast pace while others saw it as a bastardization. It's still the highest-grossing Shakespeare film per Wiki.
Romeo Montague: Our hero, except for where he's more of a confused emo kid. Romeo's kind of a spoiled brat, always in and out of love, and spends half his time whining about something or other. (To be fair, the script gives him plenty to whine about, and the suggestion is made that he's not always like this.) It's a tribute to his generally pleasant nature that his friends put up with him. He's brave, impulsive, and spends most of the play trying to do the honorable thing -- it just keeps shifting on him.
Juliet Capulet: The heart of the play, and the main driver of the action. She is innocent but wants more for her life than an arranged marriage and her mother's life. (Her parents are both pretty awful -- her father is a bully and her mother is a trophy wife gone sour.) She's also both smarter and steadier than Romeo.
Mercutio: Romeo's best friend, sex on legs (and high heels), and gets all the best lines in the play. Will say more in a minute then he will stand to in a month, according to Romeo, but he clearly adores Romeo in a way it's hard not to read as sexual. He just doesn't have much patience for the constant emo.
Benvolio: Romeo's cousin. Good-natured and gentle, as his name would suggest, but is still enough of a product of his time and place to be more than capable of getting into a good street fight.
Tybalt: Juliet's cousin, the prince of cats and a hell of a duelist. As John Leguizamo plays him, he's angry, bitter, and not a guy whose wrong side you want to be on. He hates hell, all Montagues, and probably you.
Nurse: The one confidante Juliet gets, which highlights how young and sheltered she is. She's a bawdy and practical woman, and, in the play, prone to malapropisms.
Friar Laurence: He's a good man, likes plants and his students and God. He's just shite at giving advice when he decides to play the hero, and he's in waaaaay over his head on this one.
Balthasar: In the play, he's Romeo's personal servant and drives the plot after Romeo goes to Mantua by teling Romeo that Juliet is dead; there's not a good modern translation of the servant role, so the movie makes him a slightly younger friend who's hanging around for vague reasons. At FH, Romeo has said he works for the Montagues. I mention him here mostly because he was played by Jesse Bradford, aka Dick Grayson.
Because classics are generally classics for a reason -- the story is melodramatic but solid -- and the movie is gorgeous and inventive. Annoying Cardigans song aside, the soundtrack is fantastic; I'll post it in the music comm after I get home tonight.
The DVD is readily available, or you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. (Start with the clip I linked to, then find Part 2. And so on.)
And if you read all this, you deserve a cookie.
Apologies for lateness, and thanks to those of you who I flailed at and got to beta this at 11:30 last night; any mistakes that remain are entirely mine.
Like many of you, I read it in ninth grade and didn't really get it. About all I remember is Mrs. Shank threatening us with death or detention if we made a big deal out of the bedroom scene in the Franco Zefirelli version that we watched in class.
Which is, if you ask me, sort of a shame. Because the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version made me realize how alive this story must have felt to its first audiences, how full of sex and death and love, and that turned me into a Shakespeare convert.
The play dates to 1594ish (Shakespeare's plays don't come with copyright dates, but this is the consensus) and was likely first performed at the Theatre, in London, before Shakespeare and Lord Chamberlain's Men built and moved to The Globe. It was first published in an incomplete and error-filled "bad quarto" in 1597, which was followed by a much better one in 1599. Most modern versions are based on the 1599 quarto, with addendums and changes from other printings.
Shakespeare pinched the plot from a 1562 poem by Arthur Brooke called "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet", which itself got the story from several earlier Italian and French sources. I've read bits of the Brooke poem and it is very long and very boring, so serious props to Shakespeare for getting through it at all. In turning the poem into a play, Shakespeare compressed the timeline (most of a year for Brooke, four days for Shakespeare), gave Mercutio a personality, changed Romeus's name to make it easier to use in verse, and reworked the opening to play up the conflict and introduce the major characters more quickly, among other changes. In short, he made it sexy.
The plot revolves around two wealthy families, the Montagues and the Capulets, who have been fighting for no particular reason for as long as anyone can remember. There are some hints in the text that part of it is that the Montagues are established, while the Capulets are social climbers, and that's something that was played up in the movie. For the most part, though, it's just part of the order of things; Montagues hate Capulets, and vice versa.
The simmering feud breaks into a new round of street fighting, and the prince of the city (a police captain, in the film) lays down the law: No more violence or I'll execute the lot of you. It's against this background that we meet Romeo, who was not at the fight. He's opted to spend his morning mooning over his One True Love, Rosaline, instead. His cousin, Benvolio, talks to him, learning that Rosaline's turned down Romeo's overtures in favor of life as a nun.
Meanwhile, across town, Juliet is getting some big news: Her parents have decided to marry her off to some rich dork called Paris, a count in the play and the governor's son in the movie. She's kind of okay with it -- mostly, it seems, for lack of other options. Juliet's father is throwing a party that night for her to meet Paris, and Romeo and Benvolio intercept an invitation and decide to crash because Rosaline is invited. (She's a Capulet. Romeo has a fetish for girls he can't have, apparently.) We pick up with them as they're about to enter the party, and in this scene we meet Romeo's best friend Mercutio, who basically tells Romeo to quit being an emo twerp. In the movie, he also feeds Romeo some ecstasy.
Juliet and Romeo meet at the party, sparks fly, and they start spouting sonnets at each other -- no, seriously -- before they both have to leave. On their way out, each learns the other's identity, but their fates are sealed. Cue Romeo sneaking back in to moon at Juliet's window. They declare their love and agree to marry.
The next morning, Romeo talks to his mentor Friar Laurence, who questions the haste but agrees to marry the pair in hopes it'll get the Montagues and the Capulets to make nice. Hours after that, they're at the church, pledging their eternal devotion.
.... yeah.
Anyhow, this might have even gone well, except Juliet has this cousin, Tybalt. Tybalt is a jerk, and Tybalt is pissed off at Romeo for crashing the party. Tybalt wants to duel Romeo. Tybalt finds Mercutio instead, who says: I don't think so, beyotch. Romeo arrives and tries to talk Tybalt out of the fight, but that just gets Mercutio to fight in his place. Mercutio is killed, and, in sorrow and rage, Romeo kills Tybalt. The prince shows up, as do the Capulets, and Romeo is banished.
Juliet is, to put it mildly, Not Happy when she hears all of this, but her love for her new husband wins out, and she and Romeo enjoy a wedding night before he leaves the next morning for Mantua, with a plan to publicize their marriage and then come home.
And even this might have worked, except Juliet's dear daddy has decided to move up her marriage to Paris. Like, to tomorrow. She goes to Friar Laurence to see if she can get out of it, and the best plan he can come up with is for her to fake her own death. (And this is where I start hating the good Friar.) She goes through with it and drinks the potion, but word doesn't get to Romeo in time, so he believes she really is dead. Having lost both wife and home, he buys poison and goes back to Verona to kill himself at her side. He does; she wakes up, finds him, and kills herself with his dagger. The families arrive and begin to reconcile, though there's a hint they're competing even in who can be most grief-stricken. And that's where the play ends.
There's still all kinds of critical debate around the play, especially as to how it's meant -- is it a tragedy, or is it more of a morality tale where the lovers get what's coming to them for being rash? That depends on how you think Shakespeare felt about Romeo and Juliet. I tend to think he was sympathetic. (This is a guy who knocked up an older woman and had to get married at 18; he has to have known how intense teenage passion was.) I also really like a theory I picked up somewhere that to some extent his version is a parody of Italian romances, which the English audiences of the time saw as extreme. Hence things like Juliet being 13, which would have been seen as shockingly young even in 1594.
The story was one of Shakespeare's most popular, and was regularly staged for the next four hundred years, often with a revised ending so the lovers could live. It was filmed several times, with the most popular English-language movie versions being those from 1936 and 1968, as well as the adaptation West Side Story in 1961.
In 1995, Baz Luhrmann, an Australian director who had made all of one movie, Strictly Ballroom, decided to make a fresh adaptation. If you have the special edition of the DVD, there's some footage of him talking about the pitch meeting, for which his agent suggested he try and sell the story as if no one had ever heard it before. He did, and, after some boggling, the studio agreed to give him a couple thousand dollars to make a test reel.
Bits of that footage are also on the DVD, and they show Leonardo DiCaprio, who had already been cast, acting opposite local Australian actors in the fight scenes. It's raw and clearly done on the cheap, but you can see why it won over skeptics. Luhrmann's concept was to take the play and transplant it to a gang war in a 1990s beach town, using a frenetic visual style to match the play's rapid pace and keeping the original language.
In addition to the hypermodern setting, Luhrmann altered a few plot points. In the play, Romeo fights and kills Paris at Juliet's tomb; the film replaced that with his taking an anonymous bystander hostage, leaving Paris out of the endgame. In addition, the movie lets Juliet awaken before Romeo dies, adding to the tragedy: They both seemingly die thinking "If only..."
The biggest challenge for casting the film was finding a Juliet. They actually cast Natalie Portman, and then realized she was 14 and wee, DiCaprio was 21, and their sex scenes were playing like statutory rape. There's a laundry list on the Wiki page of actresses who were allegedly considered; eventually they settled on Claire Danes, who was also wee (16ish) but not so wee as to make Romeo look like a perv.
Neither of the leads had done Shakespeare before or has since to the best of my knowledge, and they both have a very contemporary feel -- but that worked with the revised setting. They both have a pensive quality that makes you believe they could act and think and speak as Shakespeare's characters do, which I'm not sure too many young actors could pull off. Claire Danes nails Juliet's innocence as well as her strength, and DiCaprio makes Romeo's mood swings and fury work even if he sometimes sounds a little uncertain about the text. And they both look damn pretty when they're crying, which is key.
But to be honest, enjoying the movie doesn't so much depend on enjoying the play. Or, like, understanding the play. You can almost watch the movie on mute and get the point. There's a surface level at which it is about pretty actors kissing and shooting at things on the beach with pop-alternative songs of the '90s in the background, and on that surface level it's great eye candy.
Critical reception to the film was mixed, with some critics enjoying the updated setting and fast pace while others saw it as a bastardization. It's still the highest-grossing Shakespeare film per Wiki.
Romeo Montague: Our hero, except for where he's more of a confused emo kid. Romeo's kind of a spoiled brat, always in and out of love, and spends half his time whining about something or other. (To be fair, the script gives him plenty to whine about, and the suggestion is made that he's not always like this.) It's a tribute to his generally pleasant nature that his friends put up with him. He's brave, impulsive, and spends most of the play trying to do the honorable thing -- it just keeps shifting on him.
Juliet Capulet: The heart of the play, and the main driver of the action. She is innocent but wants more for her life than an arranged marriage and her mother's life. (Her parents are both pretty awful -- her father is a bully and her mother is a trophy wife gone sour.) She's also both smarter and steadier than Romeo.
Mercutio: Romeo's best friend, sex on legs (and high heels), and gets all the best lines in the play. Will say more in a minute then he will stand to in a month, according to Romeo, but he clearly adores Romeo in a way it's hard not to read as sexual. He just doesn't have much patience for the constant emo.
Benvolio: Romeo's cousin. Good-natured and gentle, as his name would suggest, but is still enough of a product of his time and place to be more than capable of getting into a good street fight.
Tybalt: Juliet's cousin, the prince of cats and a hell of a duelist. As John Leguizamo plays him, he's angry, bitter, and not a guy whose wrong side you want to be on. He hates hell, all Montagues, and probably you.
Nurse: The one confidante Juliet gets, which highlights how young and sheltered she is. She's a bawdy and practical woman, and, in the play, prone to malapropisms.
Friar Laurence: He's a good man, likes plants and his students and God. He's just shite at giving advice when he decides to play the hero, and he's in waaaaay over his head on this one.
Balthasar: In the play, he's Romeo's personal servant and drives the plot after Romeo goes to Mantua by teling Romeo that Juliet is dead; there's not a good modern translation of the servant role, so the movie makes him a slightly younger friend who's hanging around for vague reasons. At FH, Romeo has said he works for the Montagues. I mention him here mostly because he was played by Jesse Bradford, aka Dick Grayson.
Because classics are generally classics for a reason -- the story is melodramatic but solid -- and the movie is gorgeous and inventive. Annoying Cardigans song aside, the soundtrack is fantastic; I'll post it in the music comm after I get home tonight.
The DVD is readily available, or you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. (Start with the clip I linked to, then find Part 2. And so on.)
And if you read all this, you deserve a cookie.
Apologies for lateness, and thanks to those of you who I flailed at and got to beta this at 11:30 last night; any mistakes that remain are entirely mine.
no subject
Which is wrong coming from this account, but I really don't care.
no subject
And yes, Harold Perrineau stole the movie.
no subject
/tl;dr
That being said, I'm somewhat of a Shakespeare purist and had bad feelings about the movie, but got free tickets and had a hot guy who wanted to go with me and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it :D
no subject
And I'm glad you ended up liking the movie, even if you're mostly a purist. (I tend to be more interested in adaptations and variations, but I don't think I saw it for that reason anyhow; I probably saw it because it was $2 at the campus theater and I liked Claire Danes. I didn't actually care about DiCaprio until, um, about ten months ago.)
no subject
I've already mentioned this to you, but for all that I enjoyed reading Shakespeare in junior high and high school, and made a point of understanding what all those flowery phrases meant, I never really made the connection between the dialogue and the tone and emotion that should accompany them until I saw this film. Which has only served to further my enjoyment of Shakespeare since. :)
I mean, it's a very startling sort of adaptation to people who hadn't ever thought of Shakespeare conceived in that way before, and for good reason. But I think it definitely achieved its purpose, because gods know teenaged product-of-the-twentieth-century me had no real freaking concept of where all these characters fit in in their society until the story got set in this context. (Yes, I know West Side Story tried to do something similar, but there are about a half dozen points of disconnect for me there, so the notion never quite clicked.)
no subject
I didn't get the immediacy from West Side Story either. All respect to it, I understand it was great at its time, but it was still past 30 years old when we were in high school, and it's a musical -- which, possibly unfairly, is a format I tend to see as inherently fluffy.