I felt I needed something to tie my protagonists tightly together in a complex way—not simply a case of blind lust, or even love at first sight (though these are emotions that certainly come into play in my version). The conceit I decided upon was Romeo’s and Juliet’s mutual love of poetry—in particular their reverence for Italy’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri.
In two of the Italian stories Juliet offers to cut off her hair and don men’s clothing to become Romeo’s page and follow him into exile. Cross-dressing women, it seems, turn up a lot in both medieval literature and history, so as in Signora da Vinci, I was comfortable with my heroine in male drag when the story called for it.
Also in the Italian versions, Juliet does away with herself in various ways, all less violent than with Shakespeare’s “happy dagger.” She simply wills herself to die in one, and holds her breath till she does in two others. The Bard has Romeo expiring in the tomb before Juliet wakes from her self-imposed stupor, but that did not allow for the passionate ending I envisioned. I quite liked Bandello having the lovers reunite one last time before Romeo’s poison takes effect, and made it my own.
Q. How has Dante Alighieri influenced O, Juliet . . . and your life?
A. The only way I can describe this man’s influence with the generations (and centuries) that came after him was that he was a Renaissance rock star—the John Lennon, the Bob Dylan, the Shakespeare of his age. During the bloody feuding between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in the thirteenth century, the Florentine government executed a political screwup that they would regret forever—they banished Dante from the beloved city of his birth for life. After his death in Ravenna, the Florentine government tried to retrieve his remains to place in a monument they had created for him, but his adoptive town would not release his bones.
In subsequent years, Boccaccio (Decameron), who was Dante’s first biographer, was paid a small fortune by the Florentine city fathers to give a course of public lectures—the Cathedra Dantesca—on the writer he idolized. In the early fifteenth century the most sought-after and highly paid scholar in Italy, Francesco Filelfo, taught the Dante Symposia, drawing huge crowds wherever he went. The tradition has continued in Florence from that time to the present day. My Friar Bartolomo is a fictional character, but you can be sure that if Romeo and Juliet had indeed lived in that city, one scholar or another would have been giving those popular lectures.
That poetry could so inflame two lovers in those days I have no doubt. Alberti’s poetry competition in 1441 (the one I have Juliet sneaking her poem into) was a major cultural event. The great historian Will Durant says of Filelfo that he “made all Italy resound with his erudition and vituperation,” and that in the Renaissance “scholarship could be passion and literature could be war.”
For Romeo—himself an amateur poet—to find a woman who was his creative and intellectual equal, if not his better, would have shaken his world. And for Juliet to discover a soulful, wild-hearted, and secretly subversive young poet determined—as few others were in those days—to be a peacemaker would have been enough to spur her on to great heights of rebellion against a killingly repressive society, even if escape from it meant her death.
Q. Can you share a bit of your own love story?
A. By the time I wrote O, Juliet, I had been married to my own Romeo, Max Thomas, for twenty-five years. Handsome, sensitive, and a bit of a daredevil, he took me from my sedentary life of the mind on white-knuckle adventures I’d never dreamed of having. Our version of the ascent to the apex of the Florence Cathedral dome at midnight was climbing to the top of a massive rock formation in Joshua Tree National Park at noon. We committed to our life together on the Hawaiian lava fields of Mauna Loa.
Fortune has blessed me, as it did Juliet, to have found a man to love who “sees me as I wish to be seen, hears me as I wish to be heard, and loves me as I wish to be loved.” I have literally followed him through a firestorm. He is my rock and my inspiration.
And yes, he possesses a pair of strong, square hands.
Robin Maxwell would enjoy hearing from you at www.robinmaxwell.com.
Robin Maxwell lives in the wilds of the California high desert with her husband, yogi Max Thomas. She would enjoy hearing from you at www.robinmaxwell.com.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The role that families played in arranging marriages in fifteenth-century Italy—indeed, in most of the civilized world—was enormous. Children had little or no say in the husband or wife chosen for them. Does it surprise you to know the practice continues even today? In what regions of the world and at what levels of society do you imagine this still happens?
2. Lady Diana Spencer was carefully chosen to be the virgin bride of England’s Prince Charles. Discuss how you think theirs being an arranged marriage led to the tragic end of Princess Di.
3. Did your parents have anything to do with the choice of any of your spouses, lovers, or significant others? Did the level of their influence change as you got older?
4. Did you ever openly defy your parents in choosing a lover or spouse? What was the result?
5. Did you ever forgo a love relationship because of parental disapproval? Did you regret it, or did it turn out for the best?
6. Were you familiar with the Italian poet Dante Alighieri before reading O, Juliet? Many people know of him as the author of The Divine Comedy, The Inferno, but were you aware that he and his Beatrice are considered one of medieval history’s great pairs of lovers?
7. Did you enjoy Dante’s writing and poetry about love from Vita Nuova (A New Life) quoted in O, Juliet?
8. Did it ring true to you that Juliet and Romeo would connect so strongly via poetry? Have you ever experienced a love connection that was enhanced by a shared interest?
9. What qualities made Romeo the perfect lover? What were the most attractive characteristics of Juliet’s personality to Romeo? What are the traits in a person that make you fall the most deeply in love?
10. In fifteenth-century Italy, even friendships between women were constrained and limited, as girls and even married matrons were kept behind closed doors most of their lives. Do you imagine that two young women like Juliet and Lucrezia could sustain a friendship that close and intimate under such conditions? How important did you feel their relationship was to the telling of this story?
11. Were you aware of the importance of the Medici family—particularly Don Cosimo—in the genesis of the Renaissance? Did you find yourself thinking what a fortunate woman Lucrezia Tornabuoni was to be marrying into such a family?
12. Everyone knows how this story ends. Did you find yourself wishing that the author had allowed one or both of the lovers to live?
13. Do you believe Lucrezia should have been able to talk Juliet out of taking her own life?
14. If you had been Juliet, would you have chosen to commit suicide?
15. Despite Romeo’s and Juliet’s deaths, was the ending of O, Juliet satisfying to you as a reader?
Signora da Vinci
By Bestselling Author
ROBIN MAXWELL
In order to watch over and protect her extraordinary son, Leonardo da Vinci, his mother, Caterina, follows him from the tiny village of his birth to Florence. In order to gain admittance into his world—as apprentice to the city’s most successful artist—she has had to assume the identity of a man, “Cato the Apothecary.” This disguise proves so successful that Cato/Caterina is invited by her new friend Lorenzo—heir to the city’s ruling family, the Medici—to dinner at their grand palazzo.
Enjoy this excerpt from SIGNORA DA VINCI
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(the Signora da Vinci page).
Click on the gold “BONUS PASSPORT”
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“This way,” Lorenzo said. “We�
�re dining under the loggia.”
At the south wall of the garden we were confronted by three sweeping stone arches separated by ancient marble columns in the Greek style. A moment later we’d passed through the arches to see a high-vaulted chamber and an immense dining table, perhaps the largest single piece of furniture I had ever in my life seen.
It would have easily seated forty, but places were set only at one end—I counted eight. Though the silver filigreed candelabra and saltcellar would have paid for a whole new section of Vinci to be built, the place settings surprised me with their simplicity—terra-cotta plates and goblets, no finer than would be found on my father’s table.
The other diners were flowing in through all three arch-ways now. There was a young woman who, I surmised, must be Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice Orsini. My gossiping customer had been right—the newest member of the Medici clan had a palpable air of snobbery about her. She was tall, though not as tall as me, with a pale moon face on a long thin neck and a headful of tightly curled hair, more red than blond. She was not unpretty, but the aloof tilt of her chin, and her lips, which seemed perpetually pursed, made me sorry for Lorenzo the instant I set eyes on her.
Giuliano and Lucrezia de’ Medici clutched either arm of Piero. First Giuliano seated his mother; then together with Lorenzo the boys helped their father to his chair at the head of the table. The ruler of Florence grimaced as his knees bent to sit.
Giuliano and Lucrezia took places on Piero’s right and left, Lorenzo and his wife next to Giuliano, and I across from Lorenzo at their mother’s side. Sandro Botticelli sat next to me. Next to Clarice was an empty place setting. No one spoke of it.
“This is my new friend, Cato Cattalivoni,” Lorenzo announced, sounding very pleased. He introduced me in turn to his mother, father, brother, and wife.
“Will you make a blessing on our table, Lucrezia?” Piero asked his wife in a voice rough with suffering.
We all closed our eyes as she prayed.
She spoke in a lovely, melodious tone, and suddenly I felt a pang of longing, almost to the point of physical pain, for my own gentle mother, whom I had never known.
The blessing was over and the servers were bringing in wooden platters of steaming loin of veal with sour orange relish, and ravioli in a fragrant saffron broth. The chicken with fennel was equally delightful, and an herb and mushroom omelet was redolent with mint and parsley and marjoram. This would certainly be a feast, but it was, I realized, one of the simplest food, none that Magdalena had not served my father and me a hundred times.
Suddenly I heard my name spoken. Lorenzo was addressing his parents. “Do you remember that fabulous mechanical sun and constellation that Verrocchio and his apprentices erected for our third wedding feast?” His mother nodded. “Cato’s nephew, Leonardo da Vinci, designed it. Cato has just opened a wonderful apothecary on Via Riccardi.”
“Really it is my master’s shop,” I demurred. “He’ll be joining me presently.”
“You are modest, Cato. You yourself refurbished the place and made it a thing of beauty.”
“Whosever shop it is, we are delighted to have you at our table, Cato,” Lucrezia said, leveling me with a warm and welcoming smile. I could see that her two front teeth crossed a touch at the bottom, but it only increased her charm.
“Oh, I so loved the sun and stars!” Clarice cried, sounding more like a little girl than a woman. “We had three feasts,” she told me across the table, “one more splendid than the last. My in-laws built a great ballroom out into the Via Larga, just for the occasion. We had fifty dishes at each feast,” and added pointedly, “Served on the best gold plate!”
“Clarice thinks us very strange for eating simple fare on stoneware when we dine as a family,” Lorenzo told me, trying to suppress his amusement. “In fact, the first time her mother came for a visit, she was insulted by it.”
“Well, it is strange, husband. And it was positively embarrassing when, instead of sitting with our guests at the wedding feast, you stood up and waited on them.”
“That is nothing for you to be embarrassed about, Clarice,” Lucrezia said. “Lorenzo has a fine sense about what is right and proper in any given situation. He has since he was very young. Do you suppose his father would have sent him at the age of sixteen to visit the new pope if he had—”
“I was seventeen, Mama.”
“Sixteen when you went to Milan as a proxy at the wedding of the Duke of Sforza’s son,” she insisted. “And on the way investigated our banks in Bologna, Venice, and Ferrara. And you are quite right, my darling.” She smiled at Lorenzo. “You were seventeen when your papa sent you to Rome to wrest a concession from the pope for our family to work the alum mines in papal territories.”
“Your brothers advised me all the way,” he said to his mother. He seemed embarrassed at the praise being heaped on him in front of me. But Lucrezia was not finished.
“Well, my brothers were not present when you visited that appalling creature in Naples.” Lucrezia addressed me directly now. “Don Ferrante, the ruler there, is renowned for his extreme cruelty and violence. He is positively determined to rule the whole of Italy. My husband sent Lorenzo to discover the man’s intentions.”
“And I never did,” Lorenzo demurred.
“But you fascinated the man. Charmed him. And came to an understanding with him that has held Tuscany in good stead with Naples ever since.”
“Please, Mama,” Lorenzo begged her.
“I know how to silence her,” Giuliano said with a wicked grin.
“No, son,” she pleaded, appearing to know what was coming. She began to flush pink.
“Our mother,” he began, “is the most accomplished woman of the century.”
“A noted poetess,” Lorenzo went on, pleased that the conversation had veered away from himself. “She has written in terza rima a life of Saint John the Baptist, and a brilliant verse on her favorite biblical heroine, Judith.”
“That big-boned woman in the garden about to decapitate Holofernes,” Sandro told me.
Lucrezia, sincere in her modesty, sat with downcast eyes, knowing she could not quiet the boys and their litany of her accomplishments.
“She is a friend and patron of artists and scholars,” Giuliano boasted.
“And a businesswoman of some merit.” This was Piero who had chimed in. “Do not forget the sulfur springs at Morba that she purchased from the Republic and turned into a successful health resort.”
“Enough! All of you! I shall never brag about any of you ever again,” she announced with comic solemnity. There were murmurings of mock approval all around the table. “Though it is a mother’s right,” she added, as if to have the final word.
I smiled inwardly, agreeing with her entirely. It was indeed a mother’s right to brag about her children. To glow with the pride of their accomplishments. But here at this table I was witnessing a remarkable happenstance—children that were reveling in their mother’s achievements.
I suddenly noticed that despite Piero’s enjoyment of this family banter, the patriarch’s eyes were closed. Giuliano, too, had observed this.
“Papa!” the younger son cried. Piero’s eyes sprang open. “Why were you sitting there with your eyes closed?”
He smiled sadly at the boy. “To get them used to it,” he said.
There were cries all around of “No, Papa!” “Don’t say such a thing!”
Lucrezia grabbed his sore-knuckled fist and bit her lip. She looked at me imploringly.
“Have you anything for pain, Cato? All of my husband’s physicians have thrown up their hands with it.”
I looked around, momentarily unsure about talking of so intimate a subject at this table, but I could feel all around me the raw love and concern of family for family, and no less affection in Sandro Botticelli’s eyes than in Lorenzo’s or Giuliano’s. Manners be damned, I thought. I leaned toward Piero.
“Is there a repression of urine?” I asked, and he nodded yes. “Frequent fev
ers?”
“Almost every day,” Lucrezia answered for him.
I was silent for a time, recalling a decoction my father had once made for Signor Lezi’s condition, one that closely resembled the Medici patriarch’s. It had not cured the gout, but considerably lessened the man’s fever and suffering.
“If your sons”—I smiled at all the young men, Sandro included—“will come to my shop tomorrow, I will send them home with something that I promise will help you.”
Lucrezia bit her lip and blinked back tears of gratitude.
“Thank you, Cato,” Lorenzo said. “We all thank you.” He grinned. “First thing in the morning we’ll be descending on your apothecary like a pack of hungry dogs.”
Now everyone was smiling. Even Piero looked hopeful.
“Forgive my tardiness,” I heard from one of the garden arch-ways. We all looked up to see a sweet-faced man of perhaps thirty-five, hurrying to take his place across the table from me, next to Clarice.
Lorenzo nodded at me. “Let me introduce you to our beloved tutor and longtime family friend, Marsilio Ficino.”
I was startled, to say the least. Ficino was a legendary scholar, one of the greatest writers and translators in the world. “Silio,” Lorenzo went on, “meet our new friend, Cato the Apothecary.”
“I fear I must go back to bed,” Piero said suddenly. “The pain has simply overtaken me.” His hands were flat on the table and he attempted to push himself to standing.
O, Juliet Page 25
