Page 53 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

42 / Shakespeare in the Movies

sation, Shakespeare's experiment forever altered drama in the West-
ern world.
Will found in the material, or imposed on it, his own emerging
vision. On a personal level, he made over the tale of "Romeo and
Giulietta" as cautionary fable. Though the source does not specify
whether the two become lovers before their hasty marriage, Shake-
speare's Romeo and Juliet serve as role models for teens in his audi-
ence—repressing sexual desire until receiving full church sanctity.
The balcony scene is the moment when these youths undergo a
metamorphosis from puppy love to mature, loving friends. "A rare
example of true Constancie" is how Will described his play; perhaps,
he fashioned Juliet as a foil for his own wife, Anne Hathaway, whom
he may have feared was anything but constant.
Actors playing Romeo and Juliet dressed not in Italian period
clothing but as contemporary English youths. As for his play's polit-
ical import, when members of the Montague and Capulet clans
("two houses, both alike in dignity") preceded the leads onstage,
everyone in Shakespeare's audience understood, from anachronistic
costuming, that they represented the Houses of Lancaster and York.
The supposedly historical Verona "feud" (historians question
whether it occurred) served as stand-in for England's War of the
Roses. Whatever his immediate intentions, the playwright achieved
something greater. His transformation of literary lovers into univer-
sal archetypes expanded a popular, if minor, fable to a larger-than-life
legend. Ever since, Romeo and Juliet have symbolized idealistic
youth, their sincere emotions extinguished, if never suppressed, by
the insensitive society around them.

Early Efforts

Shortly after the birth of film, France's Georges Melies mounted a
brief Romeo and Juliet, characterized by his in-studio approach. No
trace of the film exists today. Thomas Edison produced a brief bur-
lesque of Melies's film, which had been released in the United
States, though this, too, is lost. Available, though, is Vitagraph's 1908
version; Florence Lawrence fetchingly appeared as Juliet in a crude
short (ten minutes) produced by Stuart J. Blackton. Other early ver-
sions appeared in Italy (1908) and France (1910).
Romeo and Juliet has been filmed more often than any other play,
Shakespearean or otherwise. The first ambitious version was shot
on location in Verona by Gerolamo Lo Savio for Film d'Arte Ital-