Romeo and Juliet (36 page)

Between 1642 and 1660 the London theaters were closed, but with the restoration of Charles II to the throne the theaters reopened. Of Davenant’s revival of
Romeo and Juliet
in 1662, the self-assured theater-enthusiast and diarist Samuel Pepys wrote, “To the Opera, and there saw
Romeo and Juliet,
the first time it was ever acted, but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do, and I am resolved to go no more to see the first time of acting.” As Pepys’s comments on other productions of Shakespeare’s plays show, his taste did not run to Elizabethan drama (except when it was heavily adapted to Restoration taste); his comments on the ineptitude of the performers are more surprising, since Thomas Betterton (a leading actor of the period) played Mercutio, and the much-acclaimed Mary Saunderson, later to be Betterton’s wife, played Juliet.

A little later—the exact date is not known—James Howard transformed the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet
into a tragicomedy, keeping the lovers alive at the end. One report says that versions were alternated, “tragical one day and tragicomical another.” Howard’s adaptation, however, as well as Shakespeare’s original, was driven from the stage by an even freer adaptation, Thomas Otway’s
Caius Marius
(1679). In this work, set in Republican Rome, Romeo is changed to Caius Marius and Juliet to Lavinia. Otway restored Shakespeare’s tragic ending, but Juliet revives briefly before Romeo’s death, and in an effort to increase the pathos the lovers exchange dying speeches.
Caius Marius,
virtually an original play, was staged regularly until 1727, utterly displacing Shakespeare’s play during these years.

In 1744
Romeo and Juliet
—somewhat cut, and still with some added passages from Otway, and still with Juliet awakening before Romeo dies—first reappeared on the stage, in a version by Theophilus Cibber, with Cibber playing Romeo, and his daughter Jenny playing Juliet. This version, however, was halted after only nine performances because it was given in an unlicensed theater. In 1748 David Garrick, manager of the theater in Drury Lane, put on his own adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet,
and this adaptation held the stage for the rest of the eighteenth century. During this period, in fact, it was the most frequently performed Shakespeare play on the stage. Its life continued well into the first half of the nineteenth century, for John Philip Kemble’s modified version (1803) of Garrick’s version was performed until 1845, thus in effect giving Garrick’s
Romeo
a run of ninety-seven years. Although Garrick’s version marked a significant step in the direction of restoring Shakespeare’s texts to the stage, by modern standards Garrick treated the text very badly. Although at first he restored Romeo’s early love for Rosaline, when he published his text in 1753 he bowed to critical opinion and, following Otway and Cibber, omitted all reference to Romeo’s love for Rosaline. Moreover, again taking a cue from Otway, he restored Juliet to life before Romeo died so that the lovers could exchange words Garrick invented for them. Further, he cut almost half of the play, including the bawdry, and he touched up a good many lines—for instance simplifying some lines for his hearers. In deference to the eighteenth-century opinion that puns do not belong in tragedy, most of the puns are cut—even Mercutio’s line that he is “a grave man.” After 1750 Garrick added to the beginning of the fifth act a funeral dirge for Juliet. And of course there is added dialogue (about sixty-five lines) between the lovers at the end of the play. Here is a sample from the addition:

Garrick went on, after Juliet kills herself, to reduce Friar Lawrence’s long summary (5.3.229-69) by half, and to reduce lines 270-94 (by the Prince, Balthasar, and the Boy) to three lines spoken by the Prince. Capulet’s and Montague’s speeches of reconciliation are retained, and the play ends with a speech Garrick composed (drawing on Shakespeare) for the Prince:

It is easy to laugh at Garrick’s verse, and to become indignant with his cuts and revisions, but acted by Spranger Barry and Mrs. Cibber (Cibber’s estranged second wife), this version was the talk of the age. When Barry and Mrs. Cibber abandoned Garrick and Drury Lane, and went over to the rival theater, Covent Garden, they continued to perform something close to this version of
Romeo and Juliet
. The ensuing War of the Theaters aroused both interest and irritation, for if it allowed theater buffs to compare performers (Garrick and Miss George Anne Bellamy now took the title roles at Drury Lane), it also narrowed the choice of plays that one could see. A theatergoer expressed what must have been a widespread feeling:

But there was also a good deal of excited commentary about the relative merits of the performers. Perhaps the most engaging judgment was that of the actress Hannah Pritchard, who said that if she were playing Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, his words were so hot and passionate in the garden scene that she would have expected him at any moment to climb up to the window—but if she were playing to Barry’s Romeo, his words were so sweet and seductive that she would have gone down to him. One other point should be made about the eighteenth-century productions of
Romeo and Juliet
: they were done in fashionable contemporary dress, not in the Italian Renaissance costumes used in most nineteenth- and twentieth-century productions. Details about Juliet’s costume are not known, but Romeo wore a knee-length coat, knee breeches, and a wig with the hair gathered together behind and tied with a knot of ribbon.

Although Garrick’s text, in Kemble’s adaptation, held the stage during the first four decades of the nineteenth century—even the great William Charles Macready in 1838 used the Garrick version—in 1845 Charlotte Cushman, an American actress in London, returning to Shakespeare’s ending, abandoned the added dialogue of the dying lovers in the fifth act. Cushman played Romeo, and her sister, Susan, played Juliet. Since Ellen Tree had played Romeo as early as 1829, and Priscilla Horton had played him in 1834, the novelty was not that a woman played Romeo, but that Shakespeare’s text was restored to the stage. On the whole the reviews of Cushman’s production were favorable, and the play had a substantial run—substantial enough for Samuel Phelps in 1846 to use Shakespeare’s text in his revival of the play.

To say that Shakespeare’s text displaced Garrick’s is not to say, of course, that Shakespeare’s text was faithfully followed down to the last word. Few productions added speeches, but almost all made substantial cuts. Take, for example, Henry Irving’s production of 1882, with Irving as Romeo and Ellen Terry as Juliet. Irving, in his usual manner, employed illusionistic sets, for example an elaborate marketplace (fountain, donkeys, and all) for the opening scene, a great hall for the masked ball, and an impressive marble balcony for Juliet. He therefore had to delete or rearrange some scenes, so that the cumbersome sets would not have to be struck, set up again, struck again, and set up again. Moreover Irving, in the tradition of the Victorian actor-managers, cut much in order to emphasize the roles of the star actors. Thus the final scene in the tomb, after the death of the lovers, was completely cut except for the Prince’s final four lines, ending the play with a tableau that Ellen Terry described as “magnificent.” Henry James, however, wryly commented that the play was not “acted” but was “obstructed, interrupted.” Irving, by the way, was forty-three when he played Romeo, and Ellen Terry was thirty-five—ages that are not especially remarkable when one recalls that Garrick played Romeo until he was forty-four, and within living memory Olivia de Havilland was thirty-five, and Katharine Cornell was thirty-six, when they played Juliet.

Under the influence of William Poel, who argued that Shakespeare’s plays are best staged in comparatively simple conditions approximating those of Shakespeare’s own stage, and of Poel’s more imaginative successor, Harley Granville-Barker, most productions of Shakespeare in the first half of the twentieth century were relatively simple and fast-moving when compared with Irving’s, but somehow
Romeo and Juliet
remained an exception until fairly recently; reluctant to lose the chance of dazzling with showy spectacle, directors of the twentieth century continued the Victorian tradition of using splendid sets that supposedly evoked the Italian Renaissance. What may well be the most successful production of the twentieth century (1935), however, achieved its greatness not through spectacle but through the acting of Peggy Ashcroft (Juliet), Edith Evans (the nurse), and John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier (alternating as Romeo and as Mercutio). Gielgud himself, however, in an autobiography entitled
Early Stages
, has expressed reservations about his own performance:

If the staging of the play, at least until the 1960s, continued to smack of the Victorian period, so did the text, which usually was presented with much of the bawdry deleted. But this fault has been amended in our day. Thus, in Terry Hands’s 1973 production at Stratford, Mercutio (who was portrayed as a homosexual) obscenely dallied with a life-size female doll during his conjuration of Romeo:

This production was notable, too, for the set (a severe metallic affair), the costumes (somber), and the manner in which Romeo killed Tybalt (a thrust in the groin with a short dagger).

Probably Hands’s choice of a set was dictated by our age’s tendency to avoid prettiness and to see the plays through the eyes of Samuel Beckett, but he may also have felt that the one kind of set that surely must be avoided, if unfavorable comparisons were to be avoided, is the showy Renaissance set (very much in Henry Irving’s tradition) that Franco Zeffirelli used in his production for the Old Vic in 1960, with John Stride (twenty-four years old) and Judi Dench (twenty-six) in the title parts. One reviewer thought that Stride seemed to be a chubby Marlon Brando, and Dench “a younger Kim Stanley.” In an interview in
Shakespeare Survey
27 Dench forthrightly says that in this heavily cut production Zeffirelli offered youth in place of poetry. Chiefly, however, he offered spectacle, at the expense of actors and of the text. No later director could hope to compete with Zeffirelli in this department; or if a director had any such hopes, they must have been dashed by Zeffirelli’s film version—to be discussed in a moment—made in 1968, with its spectacular Renaissance interiors.

In 1968, the Washington, D.C., Summer Shakespeare Festival staged
Romeo and Juliet
at the outdoor Sylvan Theatre, on the slope of the Washington Monument grounds. The play (perhaps taking a cue from the popularity of
West Side Story
by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim) was converted into a play about race: Juliet’s family was black. Romeo’s white; the setting was New Verona, in Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, and the ball scene was part of the Mardi Gras. A decade later, in 1978, Los Angeles saw a racial version, again with the Capulets black (though Juliet’s nurse was white) and the Montagues white. The production seems to have been well received, even though it ran for four hours. (In the Prologue to the play, the Chorus speaks of “the two hours’ traffic of our stage,” and though most productions of
Romeo and Juliet
run to more than two hours, four hours seems excessively long for what is one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays.) Another modern production in Washington—this one at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in 1986—turned
Romeo and Juliet
into a play about teenage suicide. At least the program note says that the play “addresses a tragic crisis facing our nation—teen suicide,” and the production was co-sponsored by the Folger and the Youth Suicide National Center.

One other revival must be mentioned before we look at screen and television versions, Michael Bogdanov’s production at Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1986, with Niamh Cusack as Juliet and Sean Bean as Romeo. Eschewing Zeffirelli’s untoppable Renaissance Italy, the play was set in Verona at the present time: the Prince was a Mafia don; Romeo and Juliet first met at the Capulets’ poolside party; Tybalt (in black leather) drove an Alfa Romeo; Mercutio, Tybalt, and Juliet died to rock music; Romeo injected the poison into his arm (he got a packet, not a potion), and Juliet killed herself with a switchblade knife. Inevitably some of Shakespeare’s lines were at odds with the text. For instance, Juliet, awakening to find the dead Romeo, says,