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Staging Romeo and Juliet: Evidence from Brooke's Romeus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
In his first plays, Shakespeare exercised great freedom in devising his plots. The First Part of King Henry VI, it has been said, “darts about the period in a bewildering way.” It is “not so much a Chronicle play as a fantasia on historical themes.” Its two episodic sequels are equally or perhaps even more loosely plotted, while Richard III picks and chooses among events that took place in the decade and a half before 1485 and also seems to incorporate matter from earlier plays (Latin as well as English). In the The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare began with a groundwork drawn from Plautus's Menæchmi but added the twin Dromios as well as some material from the Amphitruo. The Two Gentlemen of Verona integrates plot elements from a number of sources, including Montemayor's Diana, the well-circulated story of Titus and Giseppus, and the myth of Robin Hood. In making The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare combined elements from the oral tradition (the drunken peasant, the taming) with a literary subplot drawn from George Gascoigne's Supposes.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1993
References
1 Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Bullough, Geoffrey. 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1975), 3: 25.Google Scholar
2 Cited from The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Hinman, Chariton (New York: Norton, 1967).Google Scholar Line numbers follow Cairncross' Arden, A. S. edition (London: Methuen, 1964).Google Scholar
3 Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed. Allen, Michael J. B. and Muir, Kenneth (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1981.Google Scholar The complex relationship between folio 3 Henry VI and the quarto (properly octavo) True Tragedy is summarized in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with Jowett, John and Montgomery, William, William Shakespeare, a Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar (henceforth Tex Ox), 197–208.
4 Cairncross, , 3 Henry VI, Appendix 1, 154.Google Scholar
5 Quotations from Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet follow the photographic facsimiles in Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto. The performance which Q1 reports must have taken place between July 1596 and March 1597 when the company to which Shakespeare belonged was known as Hunsdon's.
6 Romeo and Juliet, ed. Blakemore Evans, G. (Cambridge: University Press, 1984), 207–8.Google Scholar See also Tex Ox, 288–305.
7 In his Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1980), Brian Gibbons rejects this particular stage direction, arguing that “this piece of business looks like a gratuitous and distracting bid on the part of the actor in the unauthorized version to claim extra attention to himself…” (3.3107n). But it is difficult to imagine the actor of Friar Lawrence's part standing idle while the Nurse usurps his role.
8 Brooke, Arthur, The Tragicall Hislorye of Romeus and Juliet (1562)Google Scholar, Narrative and Dramatic Sources 1: 284–363.
9 The notion that Shakespeare was especially attentive to the language of hands in Romeo and Juliet may be supported by a recently discovered detail. The “Monckton Milnes Manuscript” includes an early transcript of a few lines of I.v. A side-note to “If I prophane with my unworthiest hand” reads “taking her by the hand.” It is asserted that these lines “were copied from manuscript rather than printed sources” (Sotheby catalogue for 22 July, 1980, 342).
10 Gibbons, , Romeo and Juliet, 3.2. 88n.Google Scholar