Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo and Juliet
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Romeo and Juliet who?

• The story of young, tragic love a familiar
  archetype through early literature.
• Rooted in the romance traditions of French and
  Italian narratives especially the 12th c.
  troubadours whose stories dealt with courtly
  romance and chivalry.
• Early medieval archetypes include stories of
  Tristan and Iseult, Troilus and Cressida stories
  circulate in numerous versions the latter taken
  up by both Chaucer and Shakespeare.
• Classical archetypes also popular through
  renaissance Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe
  (parodied in Midsummer), Dido and Aeneas.
• Composer Richard Wagner gives the name
  Liebestod or love and death to this narrative
  masterplot in his own opera, Tristan und Isolde.

Frank Dicksee, Romeo and Juliet (1884, oil on
canvas).
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Sources

• Principal source provided by Arthur Brookes 1562
  ballad, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and
  Iuliet (see first page) Shakespeare might have
  read another version by William Painter in The
  Palace of Pleasure.
• Brookes version emphasizes role of Fortune
  borrows tropes and language from Chaucers
  Troilus and Criseyde.
• Brookes poem based on an earlier story by the
  Italian writer, Matteo Bandello, the novella
  Giulietta e Romeo (1554) Bandello emphasizes
  Romeos initial love melancholy.
• Bandellos based on an earlier version by Luigi
  da Porta, Historia novellamente ritrovata di due
  Nobili Amanti (1530) includes feuding families,
  the Montecchi and the Cappelletti.
• 5th-c. story Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus
  includes sleeping potion story.
• See Oxford Intro (Levenson), pp. 1-15.

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Prologue

• Spoken by a chorus figure a kind of soliloquy.
• Written in sonnet form anticipates rhetorical
  style of the play.
• Spoils the plot or, provides information about
  the plot/characters that is already known by
  audience.
• Invites audience to listen to play with their
  ears primacy of auditory/textual experience
  rather than visual experience invention will be
  at the level of the plays language, not plot or
  character.
• Anticipates thematic ambiguity are these lovers
  fated to die (Brooke) or are they impetuous and
  rash youth? The fearful passage of the
  death-marked love.
• Introduces problem of genre is this a comedy or
  a tragedy, or both?