Book contents
- Frontmatter
- The Challenges of Romeo and Juliet
- The Date and the Expected Venue of Romeo and Juliet
- The ‘Bad’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The Places of Invention
- ‘Death-marked love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet
- Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet: A Bakhtinian Reading
- Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet
- Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s
- Picturing Romeo and Juliet
- Nineteenth-Century Juliet
- ‘O, what learning is!’ Pedagogy and the Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet
- The Film Versions of Romeo and Juliet
- The Poetics of Paradox: Shakespeare’s Versus Zeffirelli’s Cultures of Violence
- ‘Lawful deed’: Consummation, Custom, and Law in All’s Well That Ends Well
- ‘Have you not read of some such thing?’ Sex and Sexual Stories in Othello
- French Leave, or Lear and the King of France
- The Actor as Artist: Harold Hobson’s Shakespearian Theatre Criticism
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1994–1995
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January-December 1994
- Critical Studies
- Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Picturing Romeo and Juliet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- The Challenges of Romeo and Juliet
- The Date and the Expected Venue of Romeo and Juliet
- The ‘Bad’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The Places of Invention
- ‘Death-marked love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet
- Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet: A Bakhtinian Reading
- Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet
- Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s
- Picturing Romeo and Juliet
- Nineteenth-Century Juliet
- ‘O, what learning is!’ Pedagogy and the Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet
- The Film Versions of Romeo and Juliet
- The Poetics of Paradox: Shakespeare’s Versus Zeffirelli’s Cultures of Violence
- ‘Lawful deed’: Consummation, Custom, and Law in All’s Well That Ends Well
- ‘Have you not read of some such thing?’ Sex and Sexual Stories in Othello
- French Leave, or Lear and the King of France
- The Actor as Artist: Harold Hobson’s Shakespearian Theatre Criticism
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1994–1995
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January-December 1994
- Critical Studies
- Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
From the eighteenth century to the present Romeo and Juliet has ranked among the most frequently illustrated of all Shakespeare’s plays. The sheer number and diversity of the pictures it has generated explains why Henry Irving believed that ‘Hamlet could be played anywhere on its acting merits. It marches from situation to situation. But Romeo and Juliet proceeds from picture to picture. Every line suggests a picture. It is a dramatic poem rather than a drama, and I mean to treat it from that point of view.’ So rich is the subject that one could write at length about the illustration of Romeo and Juliet in books, acting, stage designs, photographs or film and video. In the space provided here the focus will be mainly on paintings and prints of the play and their relationship to the theatre.
The earliest illustrations are in editions of Shakespeare dating from the first half of the eighteenth century when Thomas Otway's adaptation Caius Marius (1679) still held the stage. Shakespeare's text had been performed soon after the Restoration in competition with James Howard's tragicomic version where the lovers survived. Both were ousted by Otway who cut Shakespeare heavily and set the story of the couple — renamed Marius and Lavinia - in classical Rome. They met a tragic end after bidding each other farewell in the tomb. In 1744 Theophilus Cibber rescued the original title in an amalgamation of Shakespeare and Otway that included the lovers' farewell.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 111 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
- 5
- Cited by