Boys played the female roles in Shakespeare’s theater, and they might have been more convincing as young girls than as more mature women (though audiences presumably found a boy playing Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth satisfactory). There are several reasons he might have done so. In one respect, Shakespeare altered the story in a way which is shocking to modern audiences: he lowered Juliet’s age from sixteen to just under fourteen. Despite its Italian setting, the language, attitudes, and customs are generally English. He used an English poetic retelling of an old Italian tale: Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet. Shakespeare wrote almost no original plots. Your goal in this assignment should be to familiarize (or refamiliarize) yourself with exactly what Shakespeare wrote so that you can observe what it is Zeffirelli has done with it. Like all productions, it is an interpretation, leaving some things out, putting others in, placing emphases differently than other productions. This is a script for performance, and our study of it will prepare us for a version of the real thing: the film version directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The play also contains some of Shakespeare’s most-quoted lines, and some of the most beautiful.Īlthough Shakespeare’s dialogue often reads beautifully enough on the page, please keep in mind that he never intended his words to be read. Several operas and ballets have been based on the story. Romeo and Juliet are often considered the archetypal lovers, and at one time “a romeo”–meaning a lover–was a common noun. As noted, this is often regarded as a lesser Shakespeare tragedy by scholars, but what should also be kept in mind is that audiences have made it one of the most beloved plays of all time from the Elizabethan Age to the present. The introduction focuses primarily on comparisons with West Side Story, so it has relatively little to say about the play as such. Paramount called their recollections “completely false and perjured testimony”.The notes were prepared for use with an edition of Romeo and Juliet bound together with the book for West Side Story and in conjunction with a showing of Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of the play, but they will be useful with any edition or production. They were reportedly seeking $100m in damages. He called them “very young naive children in the 1960s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them”.īoth actors submitted declarations, claiming that they “acted like we were having intercourse” and suffered “mental anguish and emotional distress” in the years since and lost out on job opportunities.
“They’re profiting off these images without consent.” “Children cannot consent to use of these images,” the pair’s lawyer Solomon Gressen said. The actors, who were both under 18 at the time, are allegedly planning to appeal as well as file a separate lawsuit pinned to the recent Criterion DVD release of the film which would not be affected by the statute of limitations.
Mackenzie wrote that there had been no persuasive argument as to the film being “sufficiently sexually suggestive as a matter of law to be held conclusively illegal” and that the plaintiffs had “cherrypicked language from federal and state statutes without offering any authority regarding the interpretation or application of those statutory provisions to purported works of artistic merit”. This week, Judge Alison Mackenzie has suggested she will side with the studio in a tentative ruling, rejecting the claim that the film amounted to images of child abuse while stating that the plaintiffs had not correctly followed the rules of the California law that allowed for a temporary suspension of statue of limitations over abuse claims.
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