“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
What if Juliet wasn’t the only girl who uttered these words? Rosaline transforms tragedy into comedy and puts a minor character in the spotlight, where she immediately starts ridiculing her cousin and her ex boyfriend. In Shakespeare’s play, she receives barely a mention, but in the new film directed by Karen Maine, she’s a snarky, self-minded girl who sees right through the BS.
You know what happens next. Romeo crashes the Capulet masquerade ball to catch a glimpse of her and instead catches the eye of Juliet. In a plot twist, the spurned Rosaline teams up with her BFF Paris to foil the budding romance in this fresh spin on one of the most lamentable tragedies ever penned. It’s smart, it’s perceptive, and it’s funny because it pokes holes in everything people love to loathe about the play. “Come on, they’ve barely known each other three days,” Rosaline complains to her nurse.
With any new interpretation of Shakespeare’s work, the purists venture out of the woodwork. You know, the type who can’t abide any changes to a 400-year-old text being performed today. When Romeo declares his love in iambic pentameter in a farce of the famous balcony scene, Rosaline squints at him and says “Why are you speaking that way?”
Well, why was he speaking that way? And why is it a controversy whenever he doesn’t speak that way?
Is purism about preserving the tale? Or the language?
I’ve run into my fair share of linguistic purists. I loved Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia, which put a fresh, feminist perspective on Hamlet, but not everyone shares my enthusiasm. There are plenty of people out there who believe that if you can’t stomach middle English you have no business enjoying Shakespeare. As this snippet from the Guardian puts so pointedly—“The first obvious hurdle this film faces is figuring out how these people talk. They can’t speak the language of Shakespeare, so the dialogue is dumbed down to a generic Game of Thrones level.”
I don’t hear anyone complaining about classic fairytales like Beauty and the Beast being adapted again and again rather than being told exactly as Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve intended when she published it in 1740. Why? We recognize that she popularized the tale but she wasn’t the original author. Beauty and the Beast draws on the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, and some sources say the tale’s origins are even older. Let’s set the record straight. The Bard of Avon’s ideas weren’t his own, either. He was the ultimate cribber.
Shakespeare and other authors drew from Greek myth
Romeo and Juliet is actually the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, written down by the Roman poet Ovid, who lived during the reign of Augustus. Don’t believe me? The titular characters are star-crossed lovers from rival houses in ancient Babylon who whisper sweet nothings to each other through a chink in a wall. Forbidden to marry, they arrange to wed in secret. Pyramus comes to the tomb near a mulberry tree to meet Thisbe, but upon seeing her cloak lying on the ground and believing her dead, he falls on his sword. When she returns and finds his body she takes her own life. Sound familiar?
The Romeo and Juliet we know and love differs a little from its source material. The play—performed at the Globe in 1597—was based on The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brook, which was published in 1562. But Brook actually translated his work from a 1554 Italian novella by Matteo Bandello about a pair of lovers from fair Verona named Reomeo and Giulietta. And Bandello likely cribbed his story from an even older version by Luigi da Porto. Some of the most recognizable elements of the play that are in stark contrast with Ovid—like Romeo’s pining for Rosaline—came from Bandello, not Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote for his audience, we need to adapt for ours
I assure you, when these tales were nothing more than oral traditions, they weren’t so flowery. The language would have been very different to the verse Shakespeare used. So, why do we have to suffer the slings and arrows of Shakespeare purists insisting that Hamlet say “get thee to a nunnery” rather than “I told you to go to the nunnery” when they don’t rail their fists at Emma Watson for not singing in Occitan or Provençal French as she runs through the wildflowers in the latest adaptation of Beauty and the Beast?
Shakespeare entertained the masses. With time, what was palatable to an audience changed. I, for one, love a good Shakespearean drama, but can’t abide by the fact that his women were simpering wallflowers. Women with no agency fit within the context of his time, but not mine. The beauty of language is that it is a living thing. It is constantly evolving, and just as Shakespeare updated ancient tales for his sixteenth-century audience, we update myths, legends and fairytales for future readers.