Screen Adaptations: Romeo and Juliet

A close study of the relationship between text and film

Courtney Lehmann

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780713679120
• eBook ISBN: 9781408130957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Screen Adaptations series provides an in-depth look at how classic pieces of literature have been adapted for screen. It assesses the ways in which alternative screen interpretations offer up different readings of the original text as well as the methodologies and approaches of filmmakers.

Each title in the series collects together a vast array of study material, critical insight and thought-provoking comparisons - from literary context to the afterlife of the screen versions.

Shakespeare on Film is a huge area of study and Romeo and Juliet one of his most popular plays with many teachers using film versions as a way of approaching the text. Focussing in the main on West Side Story and Baz Lurhmann's Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, this is a unique and comprehensive insight into the adaptation process providing a vital study aid for students.

PART 1:
Literary contexts

A tale of adaptation

Four hundred years before Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film adaptation of Romeo + Juliet debuted at number one, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was performed – as the First Quarto informs us – ‘with great applause’. Despite its obvious flaws as a ‘bad’ or unauthorised version of the play (a subject to which I will return in Chapter Two) the 1597 Quarto provides valuable clues about the popularity of Romeo and Juliet in its own time, since whoever printed – or, perhaps, even pirated – the text knew that there was a substantial market for it. The fact that within two years, Shakespeare’s play had already been the subject of an adaptation, ‘Newly corrected, augmented, and amended’ in the form of Quarto Two (1599), indicates that Romeo and Juliet was still a hot commodity and that a certain proprietary impulse – linked, this time, not to profit based on quantity but to pride in quality – was emerging alongside the attribution ‘Shakespeare’.

However, attributing this play to Shakespeare alone cannot be accomplished with a clear conscience, for there are few plays with a more complicated history than Romeo and Juliet. In fact, although similar claims have been made on behalf of Hamlet and King Lear, Romeo and Juliet is, arguably, the most textually complex play in the Shakespeare canon – not only because it exists in multiple, discrete versions but also because it is a ‘legend play’ – that is, a play with a long history as another narrative form, which, in and of itself, is equally mired in centuries of changing cultural expectations and modes of transmission.

Perhaps the most intriguing, little-known truth about the play is that, were it not for Dante, the world’s most famous love story might never have come to be. In the Sixth Canto of the Purgatorio, Dante – for reasons that remain unknown – yoked the families of the Montecchi and Cappelletti together as enemies, using them as an admonitory example of the consequences of civil strife. Merely three lines of verse, this reference essentially resuscitated names which, according to Olin H. Moore, ‘had almost passed from popular recollection’ by the end of the thirteenth century, inciting a long series of inquiries into the both the veracity and the meaning of the pairing.¹ Again, as Moore explains, not only had Dante created a set of strange bedfellows by linking what Shakespeare’s Prologue would describe as ‘(t)wo households, both alike in dignity’,² but also, as Moore concludes, ‘Dante referred to them in somewhat cryptic language, as was customary when he assumed the role of high priest. As a consequence, a series of misinter-pretations arose, which became crystallised into one of the most famous legends of literature’.³

In the interests of clarification, an overview of the two ‘households’ is in order. Evidence points to the presence of a ‘Montecchi’ family in the twelfth century, after which references construe the name as a political party or faction, for any traces of the Montecchi as a family vanished precipitously by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Interestingly, no chronicles associate the ‘Montecchi’ and the ‘Cappelletti’ directly with one another. Moore explains that the Montecchi emerged as ‘bourgeois enemies of the noble Veronese house of the Conti’.⁴ According to historical records, the first member of the ‘Montecchi’ household to be referenced was Giovanni Monticulo in 1136. If, however, at the end of the century, the Montecchi, Monticulo, Monticoli, and Montecchio vanished as families, then they enjoyed a renaissance in chronicles, reborn purely as political parties or factions. Citing Rolandino’s chronicle, Moore explains that when Azzo Marqui of Este was instated as podesta of Verona in 1207, Ezzelino da Romano was incensed by the preferament proffered to his enemy, and, as Moore relates: ‘He therefore called a gathering of his followers – from Verona, Vicenza, and elsewhere – in the castle of Montecchio. This circumstance served as a sort of christening for Ezzelino’s followers, who were thenceforth known as Monteccchi’.⁵ Located in Vincenza on a ‘little mountain’ – the Latin translation being ‘Monticulus’ – this castle ‘is the only authentic landmark for the story of the Montagues and the Capulets’,⁶ despite the fantasy re-creation of Juliet’s balcony in the film Letters to Juliet. More on that much, much later.

Far more prolific are references to the Cappelletti who were not a family residing in Verona but a faction referred to in conjunction with the politics of Cremona.⁷ Appropriately, considering the association with their name, the Cappelletti (also referred to as the Cappellini faction), wore tiny caps as their emblem. The Cappelletti lost a great deal of power throughout the first half of the thirteenth century (to their chief enemies, the Barbarasi), but regained some prestige by 1267, after which they were permitted to return from banishment to Cremona, ‘where they seem to have caused a few disturbances worth recording’.⁸ Again, Dante is the last of their contemporaries to mention the faction when he does so in the Purgatorio. Nevertheless, there is little – if any – compelling evidence to suggest that the Montecchi and the Cappelletti entered into direct conflict with each other, despite Dante’s pleas to Albert of Habsburg:

Vieni a veder Montecchi e Cappelletti,
Monaldo e Filippeschi, uom senza cura;
Color già tristi, e questi con sospetti.

Loosely translated from Canto Six of the Purgatorio, the passage implores the reader to ‘Come see the Cappelletti, callous heart,/ see the Monaldi, the Montecchi ruined,/the Filippeschi fearful of their fate’.⁹ What Dante’s somewhat cryptic statement appears to invoke is the civil war between the Ghibellines, with whom the Veronese Monticoli were aligned, and the Guelphs, to whom the Cremona-based Cappelletti professed loyalty, during the battle to control Lombardy, which was waged from approximately 1249 to 1266. But there remains no suggestion that the specific factions of the Monticoli and the Cappelletti actually squared off against each other in the midst of the larger battle between the Ghibellines and the Guelfs; as Dante implies, this conflict was carried on by the Filippeschi (Guelph) and Monaldo (Ghibelline) factions. Of paramount importance for our purposes is the fact that by the end of the thirteenth century, the Monticoli (or Montecchi, as Dante calls them) and the Cappelletti were little more than incidental names in the long list of the defeated. Indeed, as Olin Moore asserts, ‘there appears nevertheless towards the end of the [thirteenth] century to have been a gradually increasing tendency to use this term [Monteculis, Monteclus, etc] as a sort of sobriquet’,¹⁰ which may explain the eventual attribution of the names Montecchi (and its variants) and Cappelletti to individual families, long after the civil strife between their respective parties had ended.

From Dante’s much disputed passage, a wellspring of comments and commentators emerged, beginning in 1323 with Jacopo della Lanna, who references the Montecchi and the Cappelletti together as factions in Cremona, continuing through 1379, when Benvenuto da Imola became the first to refer to the factions as families. It was Francesco da Buti who, in 1380, posited a less-than-amicable relationship between the Montecchi and the Cappelletti. Hence, unlike most legends, which are orally transmitted, ‘it is notable’, as Moore concludes, ‘that the commentators’ misunderstandings regarding the Montecchi and the Cappelletti were all directly traceable to written sources, rather than to folklore’.¹¹

Major sources

Though the question as to what constitutes a major and a minor influence is open to debate, I will be limiting major sources only to those stories that have plot lines which closely parallel the story we have come to know as Romeo and Juliet – with one exception: the influence of elements of Boccaccio’s Decameron, from which a pastiche framework for the Romeo and Juliet story can be pieced together.¹² Boccaccio’s tale of Madonna Catalina and Gentil Carisendi, for example, may be classified as a ‘separation romance’ – replete with parental disapproval of the lovers’ union, the ‘selling’ of the heroine to an unwanted suitor, false report of the death of the heroine, a ‘premature’ burial – all of which, in turn, are details that Boccaccio himself culls from anonymous continental literature, sung by troubadours or circulated in manuscripts. In fact, the additional detail of the sleeping potion appears all over the Decameron, particularly in the story of Fermondo, who takes a potion, collapses into a coma for three days, and is surreptitiously removed from his grave by a dubious duo comprising a monk and abbot of the church. Another critical addition to the legend that may be traced to Boccaccio is the suicide of the lover(s), appearing in the story of Girolamo and Salvestra, which culminates when Girolamo, persuaded that his love no longer desires him, holds his breath and dies; at the public funeral, Salvestra collapses – dead – on his body. Finally, in one other, lesser-known story (that of Ricciardo Manardi), Boccaccio describes the lover arriving at the balcony of his beloved via a ladder – likely the source of the rope ladder incident that will appear in later versions of the legend.

One such version is the anonymous fifteenth-century novella Ippolito e Leonora, which is essentially Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending.¹³ Like the invented feud of the Capulets and the Montagues, the war between the Bardi and the Buondelmonti is so intense that the captains of each faction maintain a retinue of approximately three hundred men. At a feast, Ippolito Buondelmonte, who is eighteen, falls in love with Leonora Bardi, who is fifteen at the time. Later, she will loudly lament the hostilities that beset the two families, much like Juliet does at her balcony in the aftermath of the Capulet ball. Meanwhile, also similar to Act One of Shakespeare’s play, Ippolito becomes weak and melancholy from his love affliction; at last his mother threatens to disown him if he will not reveal the cause, and he tells her the truth. Though she is disappointed by her son’s news, Signora dei Buondelmonti arranges a meeting between the two lovers, with the help of the mother superior of the local convent, who happens to be Leonora’s aunt and, therefore, a willing party to her happiness. Hidden behind a curtain in Leonora’s room, Ippolito, having promised to perform nothing untoward, overhears Leon...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• Timeline: cinematic adaptations of Romeo and Juliet
• Part One: Literary contexts
• Part Two: From text to screen
• Part Three: Critical responses and the afterlife of the play’s adaptations
• Select bibliography