Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare The Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, 3-10 November

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1 Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare The Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, 3-10 November The play. Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's early plays. It was written in 1595, the same year as A Midsummer Night's Dream, which has a similar plot structure of feuding families. The play has always divided critics, Dr Johnson described it as, 'one of the most pleasing of our author's performances' but the diarist, Samuel Pepys, wrote, 'the play of itself [is] the worst that ever I saw in my life'. In 1748 the leading actor/manager of his day, David Garrick, wrote his own version in which Juliet wakes up in time for a final reunion with Romeo before they both die. It was a big hit and it became the standard text for the next hundred years. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy but tragedies usually depend on the lead character's fatal flaw, such as Othello's jealousy or Macbeth's ambition. Romeo and Juliet die because they miss each other's messages; their deaths are inevitable - the Chorus tells the audience they will die in the opening speech and the characters themselves foresee their own deaths - but they are attributed to fate, not fault, which for some critics, and audiences, undermines the tragedy. The plot is based on Arthur Brooke's poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which was published in In Brooke's poem, Juliet has just turned sixteen, which an Elizabethan audience would regard as an appropriate age to think about marriage, but Shakespeare lowered it to thirteen in his play. It can be tempting to assume that standards were different in the 16th century and that child brides were normal. Lady Capulet says she was a mother at fourteen, so it wasn't unheard of, but Lord Capulet tells Paris in Act I, scene II, that Juliet is still too young to marry, and that he should, 'Let two more summers wither in their pride ere we may think her ripe to be a bride'. You might attribute Capulet's reluctance to marry off his daughter at thirteen to the reservations of an overprotective father but it could also reflect a more widely held, general view. The text. Like all Shakespeare's plays, there is no single authoritative source. There are various Quarto and Folio editions, all with differences between them due to editors' corrections and typographers' errors, followed by four hundred years of subsequent academic research to 'improve' the text. Most people think the latest, and longest, Folio edition is closest to what Shakespeare intended but some academics suspect that the first Quarto, which was reconstructed from records of page 1 of 5

2 performances, might be closer to what the Elizabethan audience actually saw. The best we can do in 2018 is to present a version we want to work with now so in our production at The Crescent Theatre we are using a cut text which will give us a running time within the 'two hours' traffic of our stage' the Chorus refers to in the prologue. Women in Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was first performed in the age of the all-male stage. Women could not perform legally on the English stage until 1660, forty-four years after Shakespeare died, so he never saw women play his female roles. Richard Burbage was the first Romeo, he would have been in his mid-to-late twenties when he played it, and the 15 year old boy actor, Robert Goffe, played Juliet. There is no record of who first played the Nurse but some academics think Shakespeare's older female characters might have been played by adult men rather than teenage boys. In her book, Feminism and Theatre, Sue-Ellen Case argues that the Elizabethan all-male stage reflected the status of women in Elizabethan society when women were confined to a largely domestic role, 'Real women were invisible in the offices of the Church, the majority of schools and standard theatrical performances'. Their absence from the public stage therefore reflected their absence from other aspects of public life. Women have equal rights now and they play an active role in politics, the arts, science, media and education. We therefore want to stage Shakespeare's plays in a way that reflects our world just as the Elizabethans staged them to reflect theirs. As a result, there is a move these days towards greater gender balance in performance, particularly in productions of the male-dominated classics. Michelle Terry, the artistic director at The Globe Theatre in London is committed to gender-balanced casting, the RSC's new production of Troilus and Cressida is gender-balanced and in recent years we have seen Maxine Peake and Michelle Terry play Hamlet, Glenda Jackson play King Lear, Harriet Walter play Brutus and Tamsin Greig play Malvolio. Our production at The Crescent Theatre is gender-balanced too, so all the casting choices stem from that. The premise for the production is that Juliet has been raised in an all-male environment in which her gender identity is rigidly defined and strictly policed, so I have cut Lady Capulet and the Nurse is male. On the other side of the Montague/Capulet divide, Romeo is surrounded by women who have greater freedom to define themselves, so Benvolio, Mercutio and Friar Laurence are all female. The Prince of Verona is female too, so the representatives of both church and state are played by women which, when we have a female Prime Minister and female bishops, is closer to the world we live in today. page 2 of 5

3 When Neil Bartlett directed Romeo and Juliet at the RSC in 2008 he said in an interview, 'We still tend to reward and value daughters when they 'behave', and reward and value boys when they misbehave'. Romeo is free to wander the streets of Verona and to switch his affections overnight from Rosaline to Juliet. In contrast, Juliet has to ask permission to go anywhere, even to confession, and she has her future husband chosen for her by her father. Their contrasting levels of personal freedom reflect Elizabethan gender roles which in our production we have interpreted as a factor in Juliet's longing for freedom and the attraction of Romeo and his cool female friends. Shakespeare's clowns. Shakespeare's theatre company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, had a resident clown who performed in all the plays. When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the clown was Will Kempe (also spelled Kemp, depending on which book you read) and he wrote the part of Lord Capulet's servant, Peter, for him. The First Quarto even calls Peter 'Will' at one point, so closely was Kempe identified with the role. We know Kempe definitely played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and he almost certainly also played Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He left The Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1599 and was replaced by Robert Armin who had a more melancholy clown persona, so Shakespeare wrote Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear for him. The Renaissance clown tradition is based on Italian commedia dell'arte, which is still an influence on comedy today. You can trace the performance styles of people like Charlie Chaplin back to commedia and on television, Fawlty Towers is pure commedia dell'arte. In English Renaissance drama, the clown has a different relationship with the audience from the rest of the actors and he was allowed some room for audience interaction within the performance. In his book, Shakespeare's Clown, David Wiles summarises the clown role like this, '1. The clown's part belongs to a male character of low social status. 2. The clown's part is written in colloquial prose. 3. The clown is free to separate himself from the role and plot structure of the play'. We have therefore observed these rules in this production and our clown, Thomas, has had fun in rehearsal developing his version of the role written for, and developed by, Will Kempe. Elizabethan love and sex. You can't talk about Romeo and Juliet without talking about love and sex. The early twentieth century philosopher and cultural historian, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895- page 3 of 5

4 ROMEO AND JULIET CRESCENT THEATRE EDUCATION PACK 1975) used the terms 'carnival' and 'carnivalesque' to describe the medieval festivals in which laws were briefly relaxed, authority set aside and hierarchies and the norms of social behaviour suspended. As Bakhtin points out in his book, Rabelais and his world, the carnivalesque runs throughout Shakespeare's plays, 'Shakespeare's drama has many outward carnivalesque aspects: images of the material body lower stratum, of ambivalent obscenities, and of popular banquet scenes'. You see elements of carnival most clearly in the comedies but Falstaff embodies the spirit of carnival in Henry IV parts 1 and 2. Whenever characters leave civilisation and go into a wild wood (A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It), onto a stormy heath (King Lear) or are shipwrecked (The Tempest) you get a similar sense of a return to an earlier, more primitive state where the normal rules of social status, gender identity and sexuality no longer apply. Romeo and Juliet contrasts the Renaissance idea of an idealised, romantic love, as exemplified by Romeo and Juliet, with something more carnal, physical and overtly sexual in Mercutio and, to an extent, the Nurse. In our production, Mercutio embodies the carnivalesque; she grabs the Nurse's crotch, she encourages Romeo to give up his romantic attachment to the unattainable Rosaline and find a sexual partner and in our production she kisses Juliet too, so there are no conventions she won't subvert or rules she won't break. Set design. The set for Romeo and Juliet is based on the principles of Edward Gordon Craig, an early twentieth century modernist theatre director and stage designer. Craig rejected naturalistic representation in favour of tall, undecorated surfaces which the lighting designer could transform from one scene to the next by changing the lighting states. Our set therefore consists of three white surfaces, the floor plus two vertical flats, which we will use to differentiate each scene and to create different moods for each scene. Edward Gordon Craig s set design for Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in A model of the set design for our production of Romeo and Juliet at The Crescent Theatre in page 4 of 5

5 Shakespeare in the modern world. Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in his own present day Verona so we have set it in ours. Verona is in northern Italy, the more affluent, industrial part of the country. It is also where a lot of the famous Italian fashion houses are; the action of the play takes place amongst an affluent well-dressed middle class, so we have reflected that in the costume design. The modern day setting means there are no swords. Our street fights are short, vicious and fought with Stanley knives, which news reports suggest are becoming common in gang fights as knives get more difficult to buy. The problem every director has with updating period drama is the ubiquitous mobile phone. Young, affluent, fashionable Italians would all be Instagramming themselves and Facetiming each other but the plot of Romeo and Juliet hinges on miscommunication so we've had to make it a phone-free zone. I also discovered that Mantua, where Romeo goes into exile, is only thirty miles from Verona, which is about the same distance as Birmingham is from Telford. You can make the journey now by bus or train in under an hour, which makes Romeo's exile there rather less of an issue today than it would have been then, so it is still a Renaissance play under its modern dress presentation. References and further reading. The text we are using in rehearsal is The Arden Shakespeare edition, edited by Brian Gibbons, published by Methuen Drama. The source I found most useful in understanding the carnivalesque and Shakespeare is the chapter, 'Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet' by Ronald Knowles, in Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, edited by Ronald Knowles, published by Macmillan. The books I quoted from above are: Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (1988) published by Palgrave Macmillan. David Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown (1987) Cambridge University Press. Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and his world (1984) Indiana University Press. The interview with Neil Bartlett in which he discusses his 2008 RSC production of Romeo and Juliet and the construction of gender identity is online here: production - if you Google 'Neil Bartlett Romeo and Juliet' it is the first result. Andrew Cowie (director), September For more information and to book tickets visit or call The Crescent Theatre box office on (0121) page 5 of 5