Full Disclosure

I adore Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Like so many others, I first read it as a high school freshman. It was my first exposure to Shakespeare (the first I remember, anyway) and reading it, unbeknownst to me at the time, would set me on my professional journey.

I think I liked Shakespeare back then because that’s what I was supposed to like. It was as though I earned smart, artsy girl street cred by being a Shakespeare fan. The words were so pretty, and I didn’t find them nearly as difficult as I was led to believe I would, so I felt pretty good about myself.

As time and my Shakespearean education went on, I grew to appreciate the plays for what they are instead of how they make me look. I’m no longer a blind-faith fangirl. With the help of some excellent professors and performance opportunities, I have learned to value the text* for what it says about the characters, their motivations, their world, their lives.

I don’t know whether you’d call me a traditionalist or a purist or whatever other pejorative describes someone who passionately defends the text. I don’t mind trimming the text for time (in fact, I consider it a bit of a personal specialty). Nor do I mind “renovating” Shakespeare by setting the plays in varied locales, ages, etc. After all, if Shakespeare is as universal as we claim he is, his work should hold up to such creative scrutiny. But I want to see productions trust and honor the text.

Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter

If, for instance, a character says, “on my knees,” I believe the actor should be kneeling. Yet, I have seen productions that appear to have so little respect for—or understanding of?—the text, they ignore such simple performance clues, let alone subtler ones embedded in the meter, rhyme, line endings, and rhetoric.

Then there is the newest film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, a production with so great a disregard for the text it may as well have been improvised “in the Shakespearean style” (and with significantly less fluency than a rousing Improvised Shakespeare Company performance). But alas, it was not improvised; there was a script, and it came not from the mind of Shakespeare but of Julian Fellowes, of Gosford Park and “Downton Abbey” fame.

Fellowes has seen great success writing stylized dialogue reminiscent of bygone eras, but said success appears to have clouded his judgement here. Rather than trusting Shakespeare’s words, Fellowes decided to adapt the play by adding his own, many of his own. The party line seems to be that the script was about 80% Shakespeare, 20% Fellowes (Douglas Booth says so here, and Fellowes himself does here), but having now seen the film, I can say it feels a lot more like the reverse. Let’s look, for example, at the prologue. Shakespeare writes:

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-crossed lovers, take their life:
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows,
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage:
Which but their children’s end naught could remove:
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

This prologue is often the first bit of Shakespearean language a student ever sees—and understands. It’s not a particularly difficult passage. It easily works as an introduction to the play, the use of verse, and the sonnet form. The vocabulary isn’t archaic. Even the syntax is relatively straightforward.

Were I to adapt the prologue for a screenplay, I would likely sacrifice the sonnet form to cut the references to “stage” and “ears.” As film is a visual medium that lacks the constraints of the stage, those references can feel out of place. But I see nothing in the remaining lines to give me pause. Fellowes clearly feels differently, for his prologue says,

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.
And so the Prince has called a tournament
To keep the battle from the city streets.
Now rival Capulets and Montagues,
They try their strength to gain the royal ring.

This “new and improved” version shows what many Early Modern English drama scholars have known all along: iambic pentameter alone does not a Shakespeare play make. Fellowes, while exhibiting an understanding of blank verse’s structure, comes across as an amateur playing at the bard. Throughout the film, his updates to the text jar the ear. And, from what I could tell sitting in the cinema, no passage, no matter how famous or clear, is left unscathed. This film is decidedly not William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Ooh, shiny!

If I let myself ignore the abominable Frankenscript, I find a perfectly reasonable film, filled with eye candy of all types. It’s beautifully shot by cinematographer David Tattersall with the same kind of sentimentalism that marked his work in The Green Mile. Every scene drips with a sort of Pre-Raphaelite sensibility that will surely please those who view the source material as the Western world’s ultimate depiction of love.

Even the settings ooze romanticism. I couldn’t help but feel, though, that all the lovely murals adorning the interiors reflect the issues permeating the film through its script: they’re faux -Fra Angelico, -Giotto, or -Michelangelo just as the words are faux-Shakespeare.

I found myself wishing Fellowes, director Carlo Carlei, and Ileen Maisel (one of eighteen credited producers) had chosen to do an “inspired by” adaptation that threw Shakespeare’s text out the window and allowed Fellowes to create a completely original screenplay that better suited his style and storytelling ideals. Perhaps then the language wouldn’t have sounded jarring or anachronistic, and the additions, such as (Spoiler Alert) Benvolio’s feelings for Rosaline (End Spoiler), could have been fully incorporated into the story.

The Forest for the Trees

Since the film is neither 100% adaptation nor 100% Shakespeare, it confounds expectations (which is not, in this case, a compliment). I knew what to expect—or at least thought I did. I had been aware of the production for at least a year, had read interviews from the cast and crew throughout the process, and had watched every trailer and clip I could get my eyes on. Yet, for all that preparation, I realized at one point that I was watching the movie through my fingers as though it were Shakespeare’s first horror film.

The problem is the production’s fundamental attitude towards both Shakespeare and his audience. In a now-infamous interview, Julian Fellowes defends his drastic changes to the text:

to see the original in its absolutely unchanged form, you require a kind of Shakespearian scholarship and you need to understand the language and analyse it and so on. I can do that because I had a very expensive education, I went to Cambridge. Not everyone did that and there are plenty of perfectly intelligent people out there who have not been trained in Shakespeare’s language choices.

He goes on to explain how he didn’t want audiences to feel “alienated” by Shakespeare’s language. In doing so, however, he unintentionally alienates them more than Shakespeare’s language possibly could. His presumption shows the abhorrent academic elitism that pervades modern culture. Whether it’s literature, ballet, opera, or modern art, the denizens of the ivory tower validate the time and money spent on their educations by claiming such high-brow entertainment is theirs. They feel special by excluding the rest of the populace from their culture club (I shall refrain from making any jokes about Douglas Booth playing Boy George jokes).

The saddest part is it works. The elitists have perpetuated this low bar for the less privileged for so long that, after generations of being told how difficult Shakespeare is, people believe it. They accept that only those with the secret password can get in. Fear pushes them away from Shakespeare as they assume they’re not going to “get it.” At the beginning of my recent Shakespeare on Film course, I asked my students what their gut reactions were when they heard the word “Shakespeare.” Their responses revolved around anxiety: they worried they wouldn’t be able to understand because the language is “hard,” “confusing,” “Old English” (I quickly set them straight on that last one). Even Nicholas Hytner, director of the Royal National Theatre, has gotten in on the action, claiming, “For the first ten minutes I sit there thinking ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about.’”

On the bright side, Hytner also believes in the power of performance to break through the potential confusion. Performance illustrates and illuminates the most obscure text. After reading five plays and watching nine films in seven weeks, even my most hesitant students got past their anxiety. Had Julian Fellowes and company had faith in themselves and us, their Romeo and Juliet would have been worth the cost of admission and may have become a new staple in high school classrooms. As it is, this film will work best as a cautionary tale for underestimating (and insulting) the very people it means to impress.

*For simplicity’s sake, in this post I’ll be using the term “text” as though there are no distinctions among quarto, folio, and edited editions of the play.