Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is one
play in a series of stories about two young lovers with feuding
families. The first known story was in the fifth century
A.D., not printed until 1726, called Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus.
The wife is separated from her husband and to avoid marrying another man,
she takes a sleeping potion. She wakes up in a tomb and is carried
off for other adventures.
Based on this story is Masuccio's Il Novellino
of 1476. It is an Italian story about Mariotto and Giannozza.
A Friar secretly marries them, and then Mariotto kills an important citizen
and is exiled to Alexandria. Giannozza takes a sleeping potion to
avoid marrying a man of her fathers choosing and after being buried, sneaks
away to Alexandria. Pirates capture the messenger that was going
to tell Mariotto that Giannozza was not really dead. Therefore, when
Mariotto hears of her death, he returns home and tries to open the tomb.
He is beheaded and Giannozza comes back and dies in a convent. The
sequences of events in this story are very similar to Romeo and Juliet.
However, there is no mention of feuding families and the lovers do not
commit suicide.
In 1530 Luigi da Porto published Historia
novellamente ritrovata di due Nobili Amanti based on Masuccio's story but
set in Verona with feuding families, the Montecchi and the Cappelletti.
Romeo meets Giulietta at a Carnival ball and forgets about an unrequited
love he has for another girl. They see each other at church
and Romeo visits her chamber window. Romeo mistakes Giulietta's sleeping
for her death and kills himself. When Giulietta wakes she "drew in
her breath and held it long, and then, uttering a great cry, fell dead
on the corpse of Romeo." It lacks characters comparable to the
Nurse and Benvolio but Mercutio
has an undeveloped counterpart in this narrative, named Marcuccio.
Inspired by Porto, Matteo Bandello wrote Novelle
in 1554. In this version, Julietta wants to run off with the banished
Romeo but he forbids it. Romeo writes a letter to his father explaining
everything when he learns the false news that Julietta is dead. Julietta
and Romeo share a scene in the tomb where they are both alive. Mercutio
and the Nurse have minor roles.
Pierre Boaistuau translated this version by
Bandello into French in 1559 in his Histoires Tragiques. For
the first time the names Romeo
and Juliet
are used in the story. Romeo attends the ball hoping he will find
a new woman so he will forget about his unrequited love. Juliet's
father shows his temper with Juliet for not wanting to marry the Count
Paris introducing the power of the father figure. Also, Romeo dies
before Juliet awakens and she kills herself with Romeo's dagger.
The Friar explains the whole situation to prove his innocence, the apothecary
is hanged and the Nurse is banished for concealing the marriage.
The sole source that Shakespeare must have
used is Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet
published in 1962. Brooke was a writer during the 'Drab Age'
but Shakespeare was able to dramatize Brooke’s poem into an emotional play.
The evolution involved character development and a strict time schedule,
necessary for the action that occurs in a play. Brooke touched on
the love/hate theme in his poem and also stressed the star-crossed fortune
of Romeo and Juliet.
In order to make the young lover's fate more believable, Shakespeare
compresses the time lapse of the action into a few days. This contrasts
the 9 months it takes Brooke's poem to unfold. Juliet also gets increasingly
younger as the story is told. Bandello has Julietta as 18, Brooke
makes Juliet 16, and Shakespeare lowers her age even father to almost 14.
It is not certain whether Shakespeare did use all
of these sources but there is an obvious connection between them.
The most influential for Shakespeare seems to have been the narrative poem
by Arthur Brooke. Shakespeare's choices were made to make the story
a successful play rather than a narrative or poem. More character
development was used and a different time schedule moves along the action.
Regardless of the sources, most scholars would agree that Romeo and
Juliet by William Shakespeare is a masterpiece manipulating language
and human interaction.
Sources
Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.
Herford, C., ed. The Works of Shakespeare. New York: The Macmillan company, 1904.
Muir, Kenneth. The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays. Great Britain: The University Press, 1977.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed.
David Bevington. New York: Scott, Foresman and Company,
1980.