Juliet & Romeo
Page 30
Once she’d have avoided this place for anything, haunted by visions of the corpses beneath the ground. Now she didn’t dread them. She knew: it was life that she’d shrunk from, not death at all. An age seemed to have passed in this strange, short week of joy and horror, love and hate. The agony of his passing would never leave her. Yet in their too-brief time lay such discoveries, of passion, warmth, devotion. A sense of freedom too. That was Romeo’s gift, though it came at such a cost.
John was struggling with his mount as they trotted past the gates towards the cobbled path that led to the Adige. The animal grumbled at his clumsiness.
‘Never been on anything but a mule before,’ he admitted. ‘This beast’s a lot harder than they ever were.’
‘I suppose.’
The bend of the gleaming river emerged ahead, fishing boats idling on the surface, tethered cormorants like dark upright hooks in their bows.
His animal bucked again and he murmured a gentle curse.
‘What will you do in Venice, John?’
‘I thought I’d find a ship. Provided I don’t get seasick.’
‘If you struggle with a little mare the high seas might be a bit…’
She didn’t finish. He doffed his grey cap and grinned.
‘Aye… lady… lad… whatever you are today. That’s true. Best I find something else then.’ He took the reins more firmly. ‘And you? I don’t wish to be too bold. But what’s done is done. Maybe there’s a fine husband waiting amongst all those rich Venetian gentlemen. We all need someone. Can’t go through this grim world alone.’
Her mother’s voice came back to her. ‘We’ll see.’
He was watching the way she handled the horse. ‘You’re all right with that animal, aren’t you?’
She turned for one last look at the city. The spiky line of battlements rose behind her, that glorious crown of thorns. Ahead the sparkling water beckoned, and the long flat road to the east.
‘I’ll cope,’ she said and didn’t think then, just lightly tapped the Bardigiano’s flanks with her ankles. No spurs needed for a horse like this. The little beast couldn’t wait to run, almost as much as she.
With a happy bray the mare tossed its head and set off down the track, hooves rattling into a gallop, eyes firm on the way ahead.
John, they left behind, as the horse flew on, bold and wild and wilful.
Down to the winding river, on to the boundless sea.
Acknowledgements
I’m deeply grateful to the many people who made this book possible. Steve Feldberg of Audible US set the wheels in motion with the original project as an audio performance, bringing Richard Armitage on board to narrate. Richard, as well as doing an amazing job, gave me innumerable and generous insights into the story which helped when it came to the substantial rewrite of the audio version as a novel. Katja Reister and her colleagues in Audible Berlin also gave me very useful fresh perspectives when the work was adapted as a full-blown drama in German. And during my several visits to the wonderful city of Verona I was always grateful for the amicable, enthusiastic and selfless assistance I received from the many locals who helped me learn there’s so much more to the place than ‘Juliet’s House’ and a few, oversubscribed tourist locations. Finally to Rebecca Lloyd and her colleagues at the Dome Press who took on the task of helping me adapt this adaptation of an original drama into the form of a book. Many thanks to you all.
David Hewson
Author’s note
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’strife.
So begins Romeo and Juliet with Shakespeare making the unusual decision to summarise the play to come in the space of eight lines of verse. In the beautiful but hot-tempered city of Verona two warring families renew hostilities. Their unfortunate offspring become lovers and kill themselves. With their deaths, the vendetta between the two houses ends.
Violence, ancient hatred, hot-blooded teenagers, doomed illicit passion and redemptive suicide… Ingredients enough for a tale that has become the most famous romantic tragedy in the world. But, despite his interpretation’s fame, the story itself was not the creation of Shakespeare.
The first recorded version of what was to become Romeo and Juliet appeared in a collection of Italian romances published in 1476. It was then set in Siena and the lovers were called Mariotto and Gianozza. The names of Giulietta and Romeo didn’t appear until an adaptation by a Venetian writer in 1531. This was elaborated upon further by a later Italian author, Matteo Bandello, as part of a story collection which may also have inspired Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, as well as Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
In 1562 Bandello’s work was translated into French. That version was turned into an English poem by a little-known writer called Arthur Brooke. Shakespeare used Brooke’s version as the source material for his play.
Brooke copies Bandello in stating that the story really happened, ending his poem with the claim that the tomb of Juliet and her knight still stood in Verona and was much admired. Like the tale itself, this is pure fancy. There is no record of any family with a name like Capulet in the city. One called Montecchi – perhaps an Italian Montague – did exist, but they were expelled in 1229, long before anyone began to write about two star-cross’d lovers.
Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters through and through. None of this stops millions of tourists visiting modern Verona to see Juliet’s so-called house with its pretty balcony (erected by a canny tourist office in the 1940s) or taking selfies by her supposed coffin in the former monastery (which strictly speaking was a convent, though the home to monks) of San Francesco al Corso.
Stories are sometimes made as much by the imaginations of audiences and readers as they are by a playwright or author. If enough people believe a myth to be true, is it really still a myth? It’s impossible to separate the tale of Juliet and her Romeo from this ancient city in the Veneto. So, from the start, I took the deliberate decision to set much of this narrative in places you can still see today.
Verona’s historic centre, set behind its walls in a bend of the Adige river, is recognisably the same as the city of five hundred years ago. The social centre is where the first scene takes place – the market square, once the Roman forum, now the Piazza Erbe, where the servants of Montagues and Capulets are spoiling for a fight. Another key location is the imposing basilica of San Zeno, one of Verona’s most impressive sights. The embalmed corpse of the saint, which so appals Juliet, remains there sixteen centuries on from his death, visible in red robes in a glass casket. Above the doors is the famous rose window with its Wheel of Fortune characters around the circumference.
Sant’Anastasia, the Capulets’ parish church, is little changed, though its extraordinary Pisanello fresco of Saint George and the Princess, with hanged men in the background, has suffered over the years. Around the corner runs the low colonnaded street of Sottoriva where Romeo has his fateful meeting with Tybalt.
Back towards the Piazza Erbe lie the central monumental buildings of the city and the curious raised tombs of the Scaligeri clan where Romeo meets Mercutio and Benvolio before the Capulet banquet. The statue of Cangrande above his sarcophagus, grinning on his horse, a dog’s head mask on his back, is a copy. The original you’ll find in his castle, the seat of Escalus in this version. Today the fortress is known as the Castelvecchio, the old castle. But to the players in this tale it wouldn’t be old at all, so here it’s called simply Cangrande’s castle. The red-brick swallow-tail bridge over the Adige which Romeo rides across is a popular place for evening excursions. The building itself has been converted into a
museum and art gallery – the painting of the girl with her charcoal drawing of a stick figure, seen in Juliet’s bedroom, can still be found there. The Roman arena, where the three youths meet after the banquet, is no longer a haunt for prostitutes and vagabonds but a major tourist attraction used for operatic performances that attract music lovers from all over the world.
The tragic event that shapes the lives of both Friar Laurence and his brother Nico – the massacre of the martyrs of Otranto – was all too real. In 2013 Pope Francis canonised the 813 victims of the Ottoman slaughter in the southern Italian city. Many of their skulls make a grisly public memorial behind the altar of the town’s cathedral.
The nine canvases of Carpaccio’s Ursula Cycle, which have a frightening resonance for Juliet, now live in a room of their own in Venice’s Accademia Gallery. The contrasting versions of Adam and Eve which she’s nagging her mother to visit in Florence remain on the walls for which they were painted, the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine.
Shakespeare doesn’t state when his tale is set, though usually it is assumed to be in the early fourteenth century. I’ve placed this version very deliberately in July 1499, a time when Italy was in a feverish state of excitement due to what we now call the Renaissance.
This was the era of Machiavelli and Da Vinci, the discovery of unknown continents and the questioning of age-old ties to religion. A new century was just a few months away, and with it the start of the second half of the millennium. It seemed an apt moment for a story about two young people who wish to shrug off the stifling world of their parents and explore the brave new one emerging around them.
Juliet, here, is not the winsome shrinking violet she’s occasionally portrayed as on stage. Nor is she in the play, in truth. In the balcony scene, for example, where Romeo wishes to swear by the moon she throws him by objecting, ‘O, swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb.’
Being an intelligent, sensible girl she’s making the practical point that it’s odd to swear by something so irregular. This side of her – rational, argumentative, stubborn – contrasts nicely with Romeo’s obviously dreamy, impulsive and poetic nature. It also jars with one of the stranger alterations Shakespeare makes to his source material, declaring quite explicitly that she is only thirteen years old. I’ve gone back to the Italian originals here and made her a more believable sixteen, two years younger than Romeo, though perhaps a touch more mature.
I’ve added much that’s new or changed, including a different ending from Shakespeare’s rain of corpses, the traditional close for an Elizabethan tragedy. Why? For the same reason that he and many other writers have departed from their source material over the centuries. Because that’s what adaptation entails. This isn’t Shakespeare translated any more than Shakespeare was a translation of Brooke or Bandello.
Nor is it a simple love story – or, as Juliet has it here, a story concerning love. This is a narrative that portrays the gulf between generations, the persistence of hope in a time of promise and peril, and the consequences of feuds and hot-headed teenage violence. Its principal subject, however, is Juliet herself, a precocious young woman desperate to throw off the shackles of family, to be free of a society determined to force her into an unwanted marriage.
A key to understanding her predicament lies in the most quoted – and misunderstood – line in the play, ‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ She’s not asking where her lover can be found. ‘Wherefore’ means ‘why’. Juliet’s broader question is: why should she and Romeo be deprived of their love simply because of the names they both bear? What defines us really? The labels family and society wish to place on us? Or that mysterious, elusive thing inside we call ‘self’?
Love-struck Romeo may not understand her point but he’s only too eager to meet her wishes. ‘My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee. Had I it written, I would tear the word.’
Fate denies him the opportunity to tear the word. But this Juliet, a stronger, smarter character, deserved, I felt, the chance.
David Hewson
Published by The Dome Press, 2018
Copyright © 2018 David Hewson
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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