In the early 1590s, Shakespeare wrote what is probably his best known play in Romeo and Juliet. It’s one of his first romances and had a mix comedy and tragedy along with the romance. It’s one of the most performed plays of all time. And it’s not an original Shakespeare idea. The story was published in English decades earlier and was taken from an Italian story which had been around even longer. And since Shakespeare first wrote it, the play has been interpreted and reinterpreted over and over again. Proving that the idea doesn’t matter, but the execution does.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy there was a mention of our famous couple’s warring families. “Come and see, you who are negligent, / Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi / One lot already grieving, the other in fear”. This was almost 300 years before Shakespeare and yet the warring families were already known. The story stayed mainly in Italy for centuries until Arthur Brooke published a translation of “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” in 1562. The poem was converted a story in 1567 by William Painter’s anthology of Italian stories, The Palace of Pleasure. The Palace of Pleasure not only had Romeo and Juliet, but other future Shakespeare plays including All's Well That Ends Well. By the time of Shakespeare, the English audiences would be very familiar with the story and the characters. But it is Shakespeare’s version which is most remembered.
But that’s not the only version of the story. Let’s look at some other interpretations of the same basic story. West Side Story is a variation on the story only set in New York with Hispanic gang against a white gang instead of the family conflict.
The Dire Straights song “Romeo and Juliet” focuses on a sad sack Romeo who’s pining for a Juliet who’s lost interest in him.
Speaking of songs, Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” shows us the Juliet version with parents who just don’t understand their young love. It doesn’t go into much detail why the parents are against the young man and ends on a happy note.
The move Romeo Must Die, shows a forbidden love as an Asian gang fights against a black gang.
Baz Luhrmann brought a stylized approach to move Romeo + Juliet with young lovers in from warring business families.
It’s the same story, the same characters and yet they are very, very different. There are an infinite different ways to tell the same story, just as there are an infinite way to execute an idea. And that’s what we need to realize. The idea is nothing. All that matters is the way that the idea is how it is expressed. One of the great arguments for more diversity is that it brings more ways to look at an idea and come up with new ways to express it.