This book explores the birth, life and afterlife of the story of Romeo and Juliet, by looking at Italian translations/rewritings for page, stage and screen. Through its analysis of published ...translations, theatre performances and film adaptations, the volume offers a thorough investigation of the ways in which Romeo and Juliet is handled by translators, as well as theatre and cinema practitioners. By tracing the journey of the "star-crossed lovers" from the Italian novella to Shakespeare and back to Italy, the book provides a fascinating account of the transformations of the tale through time, cultures, languages and media, enabling a deeper understanding of the ongoing fortune of the play and exploring the role and meaning of translation. Due to its interdisciplinarity, the book will appeal to anyone interested in translation studies, theatre studies, adaptation studies, Shakespeare films and Shakespeare in performance. Moreover, it will be a useful resource for both lecturers and students.
There is a curious moment in the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Thinking she speaks in solitude, Juliet says, “Romeo, doff thy name, / And, for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all ...myself”. Emerging from the shadows, Romeo replies, “I take thee at thy word” (Act 2, Scene 1, 92). Suddenly, Juliet’s utterance has seemingly become binding: because they have been overheard by Romeo, her words have become her word. But is Juliet truly bound by her words given that she did not know they were being overheard, let alone intend for them to be binding? Using J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative, I consider the nature and status of Juliet’s utterance, its influence on the remainder of the scene, and what insight it might afford into the play as a whole.
The paper investigates the factors contributing to the recent surge in popularity of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on the Romanian stage. One possible explanation lies in the play's adaptability ...and relevance to present-day concerns coupled with the opportunities for creative reimagining offered by its canonical Romanian translation. The article posits that directors and playwrights have engaged in a fruitful "collaboration with the dead" (Leitch 19), breathing new life into the classic text by means of different forms of rewriting. Specifically, the paper discusses two recent versions of Romeo and Juliet staged in Bucharest, at Teatrul Mic in 2018 and at Teatrul Odeon in 2021, and focuses on the process of rewriting Shakespeare’s text in the form of a theatre adaptation and of a radical appropriation.
Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a ...global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language. The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism.
With its roots deep in ancient narrative and in various reworkings from the late medieval and early modern period, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has left a lasting trace on modern European culture. ...This volume aims to chart the main outlines of this reception process in the broadest sense.
With its roots deep in ancient narrative and in various reworkings from the late medieval and early modern period, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has left a lasting trace on modern European culture. ...This volume aims to chart the main outlines of this reception process in the broadest sense by considering not only critical-scholarly responses but also translations, adaptations, performances and various material and digital interventions which have, from the standpoint of their specific local contexts, contributed significantly to the consolidation of Romeo and Juliet as an integral part of Europe's cultural heritage. Moving freely across Europe's geography and history, and reflecting an awareness of political and cultural backgrounds, the volume suggests that Shakespeare's tragedy of youthful love has never ceased to impose itself on us as a way of articulating connections between the local and the European and the global in cases where love and hatred get in each other's way. The book is concluded by a selective timeline of the play's different materialisations.
The greatest feature of Vincenzo Bellini (1801—1835), the famous composer of the first half of the 19th century, was the use of melody. At that time there were no more castrato singers. The operas of ...Bellini were no longer like the works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which only showed the great technique of the singers especially in the high register, but concentrated more on melody, legate, lyricism and beauty. This article analyzes Juliet's character in Vincenzo Bellini's “I Capuleti e i Montecchi''. Female characters had always particularly revived Bellini's inspiration. Bellini almost always entrusted his most touching melodies to them, and in them he reached one of the highest points of that period, romanticism. Behind the music the opera singer will trace the psychology of the character in the poetic text, so as to give the audience a faithful and realistic portrait of it. Only then will the singer become true character. In this article the author first makes a brief analysis of Bellini's style of music and its influx and introduction to the history of "I Capuleti e i Montecchi", presents the relationship of the characters, “l trama dell'opera”, the voice of Romeo and Juliet. Then follows the analysis of the two core arias of Juliet in "I capuleti e I Montecchi", “Eccomi in lieta vesta...oh quante volte", and "Né Alcun ritorna!...Morte io non temo", and furthermore the author analysed a duet by Romeo and Giulietta, "Sì fuggire", by interpreting and examining in detail the libretto, the form, with the accent on the text where the author sought to find out the psychology of the character.
Intertextuality has been a driving force for Adaptation Studies, but few scholars have highlighted its relevance, rather prioritizing issues such as audience reception, cinematographic technique or ...aesthetics and, occasionally, fidelity. However, the starting point for any audiovisual production (be it film, television or theater) is the written matter, the text. Inserted within the field of Adaptation Studies in dialogue with Comparative Literature and Theory of Intertextuality, the present papers assesses the extent to which there are points of contact between William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo And Juliet the Walt Disney animated motion picture Pocahontas. The paper initially discusses the adaptation of Shakespeare’s text as a starting point for film productions, proceeding to theoretical reflections between Comparative Literature, Adaptation Theory, intertextuality and rewriting, and to the comparative analysis between the tragedy and the motion picture, which leads to the conclusion of a retroversive movement between source and adapted texts, which invites to the question of intertextual rewriting in Adaptation Studies
Though the notion that comparisons might be drawn between Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1597) may seem readily apparent, surprisingly little ...academic inquiry has been conducted into the subject. This article surveys the many parallels between the two works, then explores in greater depth their similar presentations of the interplay between sexuality and death: the eroticized graves of Catherine and Juliet, Heathcliff and Romeo's passionate exhumation attempts, and in both couples the conception of a transcendent alternative heaven figured in terms not of proximity to God, but to each other.