Page 52 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

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STAR-CROSSED LOVERS

Romeo and Juliet

All are punished!
—the Prince of Verona

y late 1594 Shakespeare was established, and his works competed
Bin popularity with those of Robert Greene and Thomas Kyd.
Still, no one compared him to the brilliant Christopher Marlowe.
History plays and light comedies were all well and good, but Will
had yet to attempt the most difficult genre, tragedy—the ultimate
test of a playwright's mettle. Even the loftiest tragedies, including
Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, were considered of only passing interest. Due
to the plague that was sweeping London, Shakespeare temporarily
abandoned theater. From 1591 to 1593 he composed culturally
respectable epic poems: Venus and Adonis (published in 1593) and
The Rape of Lucrece (published in 1594). Then he returned to
London, ready at last to approach the tragic mode.
The thirty-year-old Shakespeare devoured Italianate novellas in
search of suitable subject matter. Written 250 years earlier, they had
a century before been translated into French and now, at last, En-
glish. Most likely, Will discovered the tale of Romeo and Juliet in a
1562 volume of English poetry by Arthur Brooke, based on a French
source by Boiastuau (1559), in turn derived from a purportedly fact
based novelle (1554) by Matteo Bandello. Forsaking the in-vogue
notion of tragedy as revolving around the destiny of a great man in
some position of power (the prototypical tragic hero), Shakespeare
toyed with a new concept: tragic victims, a normal boy and girl
destroyed by their total lack of power. When the play became a sen-

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