Part One
Representation Matters
1
Re-visioning Rosaline; or, Romeo and Juliet Are Dead
Fiona Hartley-Kroeger
Something Is Rotten with Romeo and Juliet!
âRomeo and Juliet are just two rich kids whoâve always gotten every little thing they want. And now, they think they want each other âŠ. Itâs Shakespeare making fun of love.â1 When asked to articulate her unimpressed reaction to Romeo and Juliet, Eleanor, one half of the eponymous duo in Eleanor & Park, voices a persistent stance within millennial receptions of Romeo and Juliet: that Romeo and Julietâs doomed romance engenders cynicism rather than sublime catharsis, nostalgia, or affection for the play. There is something wrong with the play, or more precisely with its reputation as the ultimate love story, that frustrates its audience and instills a powerful need for creative correction. Romeo and Juliet themselves prove impossible vehicles for this correction: they are dead, crushed by clichĂ©d sentimentality, and cannot be the vehicles of Romeo and Julietâs resurrection. Since the turn of the millennium, however, a micro-trend of Romeo and Juliet-inspired young adult novels have been published that feature not the eponymous star-crossed lovers but Rosaline, Romeoâs initial object of poetic adoration, and Romeoâs cousin, Benvolio. In Still Star-Crossed by Melinda Taub and Prince of Shadows by Rachel Caine, as well as Stacey Jayâs duology of Juliet Immortal and Romeo Redeemed, Rosaline and Benvolio serve as doubles for the doomed Romeo and Juliet in efforts to resolve frustrations with the play and its ubiquitous but unsatisfactory reputation as the greatest love story ever told. These transformations engage directly with events of Shakespeareâs play, with special focus on Rosaline as a replacement romantic heroine for the dead, idealized Juliet, drawing on Rosaline as the distant, chaste, silent beloved of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in order to illuminate a need for women to survive and tell their own stories.
A number of scholars have positioned the act of retelling and adapting Shakespeare as an enterprise particularly congenial to feminist âre-vision,â a term coined by Adrienne Rich to describe âthe act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.â2 For Rich, re-vision is âan act of survival,â of understanding how women âhave been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to seeâand therefore liveâafresh.â3 Re-vision enables women writers to reimagine possibilities for fictional womenâpossibilities beyond the fears of losing their youth and beauty, or of dying young and thus remaining beautiful eternallyâand thereby to imagine possibilities for themselves and other women who read their work. As Marianne Novy observes, âUsing fiction as a form of criticism, they [women rewriting Shakespeare] let characters escape plots that doom them to an oppressive marriage or to death âŠ, and they imagine stories for figures who are silent or demonized in Shakespeareâs version.â4 Shakespeareâs uber-canonical body of work is a high-profile locus for re-vision, and Julie Sanders argues that working in prose narrative is a way for women rewriters of Shakespeare to set themselves apart from âtheir male-authored dramatic precursorsâ and âassert the innovative and creative aspect of their work.â5 Juliet is one of those âimage[s]; of Womanâ who die young and beautiful that Richâs woman writer finds âin books written by menâ; but in the beautiful, idealized, dead girl, âprecisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself.â6 Re-visioning Romeo and Juliet in prose narrative, then, is a powerful and productive act of feminist imagination. Choosing Rosaline for the focus of re-vision is particularly apt: re-visioning Rosaline, the silent Petrarchan mistress of poetry written by Romeo, written by Shakespeare, is a double act of liberation that has emerged as a powerful and popular opportunity for feminist adaptation in recent young adult fiction.
Romeo and Juliet Is for Teens, and Other Frustrations
Because of the young age of its protagonists, Romeo and Juliet is frequently associated with youth (rightly so) and therefore (perhaps less rightly) a youthful audience. Young readers and viewers most often encounter Romeo and Juliet in an educational context: it is foisted upon them under the assumption that they will find the adolescent characters relatable and sympathetic and the play, therefore, interesting. A young audience is expected, as Abigail Rokison puts it, to âidentify with the playâs central themes of generational conflict, violence, rebellion, and first love.â7 John Stephens and Robyn McCallum note that Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeareâs most frequently âreversionedâ plays.8 But Romeo and Julietâs cultural primacy, its position as the Shakespeare play (or retelling) par excellence for young readersânot necessarily for teens onlyâseems to be a twentieth-century development. The first edition of Charles and Mary Lambâs Tales from Shakespeare (1807)9 places Romeo and Juliet as the seventh tale in the second volumeâhardly a position of special emphasis. The first edition of E. Nesbitâs The Childrenâs Shakespeare (1897)10 places Romeo and Juliet second. Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century retellings for children do not include Romeo and Juliet at all.11 Several twentieth-century republications of the Lambs and Nesbit, however, have reordered the retellings to place prime emphasis on Romeo and Juliet. In a single-volume edition of the Lambsâ Tales, published in 1901, the tales have been rearranged: Romeo and Juliet is now the first tale.12 Similarly, the Opie Libraryâs 1997 selection of E. Nesbit retellings begins with Romeo and Juliet.13 These editorial reorderings give new priority to Romeo and Juliet as the first tale readers will encounter, strongly suggesting that young readers are supposed to like Romeo and Juliet as an individual work and as a gateway drug, as it were, to Shakespeare.
Yet a significant set of young adult adaptations presume frustration and dissatisfaction with Romeo and Juliet, even as they reward the implied readerâs assumed affection for the language and, at the very least, a baseline familiarity with the story. W. B. Worthen locates this baseline familiarity, and its accompanying frustration, in âa contact narrative: Shakespeare in school.â14 Worthen finds that this first contact, this âcelebration of school Shakespeare as an instrument of potentially transformative class ambition structuring mass education,â cannot âovercome the inherent mystification of the project.â15 None of the participants interviewed for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and Juliet, a âdedramatize[d];â production reconstructed from the participantsâ unaided memories of the play, can explain why they are forced to read Romeo and Juliet in school.16 They share a frustration with the experience that lingers even when the playâs exact events have been forgotten. Worthen describes this frustrated, imperfect remembrance of Romeo and Juliet as âthe introjection of loss, an unhealing wound ⊠Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, are sites of shaming failure: the failure of the memory to store a culturally licensed narrative more completely.â17 In Worthenâs argument, school contact with Romeo and Juliet fails to produce acquisition of cultural capital, and knowledge of their own inability to connect with the play results in shame for readers and viewers.
Millennial transformations of Romeo and Juliet, however, are motivated not by shame but by frustration and a conflicted kind of affection for the characters and Shakespeareâs language. For underlying all of them is a desire to have a âdo-overâ: to restage the tragedy in a way that allows the lovers, whoever they are, to live. The authors rely on frustration with the ways in which Romeo and Juliet are, again and again, barely thwarted and doomed to tragedy by the flimsiest of coincidences and mishaps. All of the loversâ attempts to escape the relentless feud their familiesâ enmity has locked them into, and to define their own destinies, merely deliver them into the even more relentless machinations of a plot from which they cannot escape. The chance meeting at Capuletâs ball; the tidy, direful formulation of âMy only love sprung from my only hateâ;18 the plague in Mantua that causes Friar Laurenceâs messenger to turn back; Romeoâs arriving at the tomb just too soon; and Julietâs awakening just too lateâall these turning points piled on each other are almost farcical in their sheer volume and relentlessness. What results for the audience or reader, especially given the playâs ubiquitous reputation as the greatest love story ever told, is a frustration with that story. So appropriation is a chance to do it over; to do it right. Given the extent to which Romeo and Juliet is oversold and hypersaturated with cultural familiarity, foregrounding the minor (or non-) characters Rosaline and Benvolio brings a freshness to the act of retelling or transforming the tale.
Enter Rosaline: The Petrarchan Mistress in the Sonnet Sequence and Romeo and Juliet
Rosaline is not, technically, a character in Romeo and Juliet. She never speaks; she does not appear in the dramatis personae. She is a name for Romeo to spin into poetic platitudes, the archetypal distant mistress of the English love s...