Still Star-Crossed

by Melinda Taub

  “What of thy yearlong exile from Verona?”

  “I’ll send Marius.” His lips found hers again, muffling her laughing protests.

  “We’d best go now and tell our families. If we carry on so in public, House Montague will not allow thee to wed such a scandalous jade.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Didst thou not just say thou art a confirmed wanton? Where’s the harm, then?”

  “Benvolio!” Laughing, she placed a hand to his chest to hold him at bay.

  He gave a mighty sigh. “As you wish.” He stole one more kiss, then they mounted their horses and turned back from the gates. Benvolio grinned as they rode up the street. His city had not seemed such a beautiful sight in months. It was as though the burden that had been lifted from his shoulders had relieved all Verona too. The streets were crowded with merchants, nobles, and servants, the color and clamor of the city overwhelming as it returned at last to life. On such a fair day, it was impossible to imagine that even the dead could slumber through it. A group of young men were bent over a dice game, and he imagined that he saw Gramio’s and Truchio’s slim young forms among them—that Mercutio’s lanky form flashed him a mile-wide grin in the corner of his eye.

  And, at the crest of a distant hill, he thought he saw another young Montague, hand in hand with a slim, dark-haired maiden, both of them smiling down at the newly betrothed couple. Beside him, Rosaline reached over and laced her fingers through his. And they smiled too.

  Author’s Note

  The wonderful thing about Shakespeare is that we all feel like he belongs to us. We’ve heard his words our whole lives, but his stories still feel as fresh and moving as they must have when they were first performed. In some plays, the settings he creates feel very self-contained—it’s hard to picture Elsinore after Hamlet, for example—but with Romeo and Juliet, he created a world so bursting with life that it’s impossible not to imagine what happened afterward.

  That’s what inspired me to write Still Star-Crossed. Since Shakespeare himself borrowed liberally from other stories, I trust that his spirit will forgive me for borrowing the characters and setting I love so much. But to further my hope that he and I will one day have a less strained meeting up in writers’ heaven (lots of coffee, no writer’s block, chairs with lumbar support), let me lay out which parts of Still Star-Crossed are borrowed from Shakespeare’s works and which are my own creation.

  First, a note about the setting. Still Star-Crossed doesn’t take place in Italy—it takes place in Shakespeare’s Italy, an imaginary country where the geography is slightly different and everyone speaks English. Thus this book makes no claim to historical accuracy for any period of Italian history. I did my best to keep the characters’ speech true to Shakespearean diction and vocabulary, but I felt it was more important to channel Shakespeare’s love of language than to painstakingly replicate his style. His vocabulary is famously vast; I didn’t want to make mine smaller than usual, so there are doubtless plenty of anachronisms. You may have also noticed that each section begins with a line or two on its own; those are in iambic pentameter, which is the usual rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse. Romeo and Juliet contains some of the most beautiful examples of it.

  Most of the major characters from Still Star-Crossed either appear in Romeo and Juliet or are mentioned there. Benvolio appears throughout the first half of Romeo and Juliet, usually teasing Romeo about his infatuation with Rosaline. His very first line is “Part, fools! Put up your swords. You know not what you do,” but seven lines later he’s dueling Tybalt himself, which is a mixture of maturity and stab-happy impulsiveness that really inspired me as I wrote my version of his character. He disappears from the play after Mercutio’s death, but as far as the audience knows, he survives.

  Prince Escalus appears throughout Romeo and Juliet, but aside from his increasingly short temper with the feuding Montagues and Capulets, we aren’t privy to a great deal about his inner emotional life. His relationship with Rosaline is entirely invented.

  Friar Laurence, the nurse, Lord Montague, and Lord and Lady Capulet all appear in the play. Lady Capulet’s characterization is probably the most different in Still Star-Crossed—in the play, she’s kind of a piece of work, but not actually evil as far as we know.

  Probably the greatest liberty I took was with the character of Paris. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo kills him outside Juliet’s tomb, and he does not live on to become a secret villain.

  Rosaline never appears onstage in Romeo and Juliet, but she is frequently mentioned in the first couple of acts, most often by Benvolio, who is sick of hearing the lovesick Romeo moan over her. We learn very little about her, except that she is Capulet’s niece, that she is beautiful, and that she steadily refuses Romeo’s ardent advances, preferring to “live chaste.” These three pieces of information went remarkably far in the creation of my grumpy, independent heroine.

  This is a list of party guests that appears in act one, which I found useful when naming Capulet types.

  Signior Martino and his wife and daughters

  County Anselmo and his beauteous sisters

  the lady widow of Vitruvio

  Signior Placentio and his lovely nieces

  Mercutio and his brother Valentine

  mine uncle Capulet, his wife, and daughters

  my fair niece Rosaline; Livia

  Signior Valentio and his cousin Tybalt

  Lucio and the lively Helena

  As you can see, both Livia and the Duchess of Vitruvio appear on this list. I decided that Lord Capulet was the kind of guy who would refer to his noble mother-in-law not by her full title, but as “the widow,” probably to get on her nerves.

  Penlet, Tuft, Lucullus, the gravedigger, and all the other Montagues and Capulets are my creations. Their names are mostly drawn from other plays or are made up, although my friend Graham Moore’s book The Sherlockian contains a character named Melinda who (spoiler alert) also dies a violent death, so I named Gramio after him in revenge.

  Shakespeare superfans will have noted that I introduced a couple of small crossovers. The gravedigger alludes to a cousin in Denmark in the same profession—that’s a reference to Hamlet (the “Alas, poor Yorick” bit). Princess Isabella is my creation, but she’s married to Don Pedro of Arragon, who is a character from Much Ado About Nothing. She was going to be Hermione from A Winter’s Tale, but I woke up one day and remembered Hermione’s father was the emperor of Russia. I’m still annoyed about that.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would never have been written without the help and support of many wonderful people. My agent, Jennifer Joel at ICM, has been with the book from the very start, and I can never thank her enough for all her insight, faith, and patience. My editor, Michelle Poploff at Delacorte Press, also made this book a hundred times better.

  Every day I worked on Still Star-Crossed, I referenced an electronic copy of the complete works of Shakespeare compiled by Project Gutenberg, which was an endlessly useful tool.

  I’d like to thank all the other friends who have helped me through this process. The Upright Citizens Brigade taught me to write and helped me get paid to do it. UCB and all my friends there mean the world to me. For three months, Avi Karnani, Matt Wallaert, and their company Churnless gave me a desk in their office to write. It was one of the greatest creative windfalls I’ve ever gotten. I will also always be grateful to Graham Moore; Will Hines; Charlie Baily; Ayesha Choudhury; Nick Sansone; Terry Figel; Marysue Foster; Patty Riley; my parents, Bart and Barbara Taub; my sister Hannah Taub; my brother, Nathan Taub; all the other friends who put up with me muttering in iambic pentameter; and most especially, my sister Amanda Taub, without whom this book would not exist.

  Finally, I would like to thank William Shakespeare, for Cordelia, for the forest of Arden, for “exit, pursued by bear,” and above all for the surpassing beauty of Romeo and Juliet.

  About the Author

  Melinda Taub got a Trapper Keeper for her seventh birthday and sat right do
wn and wrote her first story in it. The Trapper Keeper is long gone, but the writing never stopped. Her work has appeared on FUSE TV’s Billy on the Street, on the Onion News Network, and at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Her Internet videos have been viewed by more people than the population of Fiji.

  Melinda lives in New York City. She likes biking, running, eating Peking duck, and seeing every Shakespeare production she can.