Historical Context
While the recent movie, Shakespeare in Love, is a delightful
meditation on how Shakespeare came about to write Romeo and Juliet, the
movie got certain historical facts wrong. Although
the movie is probably aware of its own historical inaccuracies, they offer a
tidy structure for discussing the historical context of this play.
Written in 1593 with the assistance of a rival playwright, Christopher
Marlowe – wrong, Shakespeare probably wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1595
shortly before or after he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which
shares several thematic links. On
the other hand, Twelfth Night, which we are led to believe in the movie
was written right after Romeo and Juliet, was in fact written at around
1601. While it’s true that Marlowe did actually die in a bar
fight in 1593, he (like the fictitious Viola de Lesseps) probably offered no
inspiration whatsoever to the real Shakespeare while he worked on this
particular play.
“Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter,” the working title of this
play – also wrong, Shakespeare’s direct source is Arthur Brooke’s long
English poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562). For the most part, Brooke’s poem is a moralizing, dull work
and Shakespeare adjusts certain elements to suit his needs: he expands the roles
of Mercutio and the Nurse, resolves somewhat the issue of the Friar’s
immorality, and telescopes the action of nine months into less than a week.
Brooke’s poem is based on a French translation by Pierre Boiastuau in
1559 of an Italian novella written in 1554 by Matteo Bandello, who in turn based
his prose narrative on Luigi da Porto’s version written in 1525.
Luigi sets the scene in Verona, names the two families the Montecchi and
the Cappellati, and calls the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Guilietta.
This version, in turn, is based on Masuccio Salernitano’s 1476 Il
Novellino, which tells the story of the heroine not being rescued in time by
the hero who doesn’t know she’s not really dead; she’s just sleeping.
The concept of the sleeping potion taken to avoid an undesirable marriage
goes back to Ephesiaca, a Greek romance written in the fifth century.
Considering the wealth of literary sources that Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet indirectly and directly draws upon, it is unlikely that he had
any confusion about what to title this play.
Shakespeare in Love does capture, however, what it must have been
like to live in London at around this time.
Theaters were closed down constantly for fear that such a large gathering
of people helped to spread the plague – this is mentioned in Scene 5.2 where
Friar John explains to Friar Laurence that he couldn’t step out of the house
since the authorities prevented it. Perhaps
the line, “A plague o’ both your houses” is a veiled reference to
playhouses being hit by the plague. While
Shakespeare probably spent most of his time sitting at his desk and probably
never got writer’s block, it’s a comfort to fantasize that it might have
been otherwise – doing so brings us a little closer to him.
