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
The Date and the Expected Venue of 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
Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet share some staging features that in the original performances laid quite distinct demands on their venues: a large balcony, a trapdoor, separate entry doors, and a sufficiently ample opening for ‘discoveries’ to admit the use of a curtained bed. The playwright when writing these plays must either have chosen to be exceptionally demanding over what the playing-places he expected to be used for the play could provide, or have been confident that the plays would be performed only at places which had these resources. They are features that so far as we know all of the suburban open-air theatres of the time, even the Swan, could offer without difficulty. Titus was performed at the Rose up to 1594, and Romeo at the Theatre and from 1597 at the Curtain, so the facilities the plays demand must have been available there. The company or companies that staged these two plays did not, however, have any fixed venue for playing until after the establishment of the two leading companies as a ‘duopoly’ after May 1594. If either play was written before that development, we ought to wonder why their author should have laid such substantial demands on the then-expected venues.
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- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 15 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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