The line that has become most emblematic of this play, and indeed of shakespeare perhaps most more generally. It's in juliet's soliloquy when she's waiting for romeo to come so they can spend their first night together. Paul: "She speaks with great erotic force and power about her desire for this night" And i think through this very rapturous language that she gets, sh Shakespeare enables her to express a love which is at once very sexual, it's very sensual and physical, but it's also spiritual and transcendent fused together."
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Shakespeare's famous tragedy, written in the early 1590s after a series of histories and comedies. His audience already knew the story of the feuding Capulets and Montagues in Verona and the fate of the young lovers from their rival houses, but not how Shakespeare would tell it and, with his poetry and plotting, he created a work so powerful and timeless that his play has shaped the way we talk of love, especially young love, ever since.
The image above is of Mrs Patrick Campbell ('Mrs Pat') as Juliet and Johnson Forbes-Robinson as Romeo in a scene from the 1895 production at the Lyceum Theatre, London
With
Helen Hackett
Professor of English Literature at University College London
Paul Prescott
Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California Merced
And
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson