Shakespeare's big hit before romeo and juliet is a narrative poem venus and adonis. The sonnet that begins the play, two households both alike in dignity, tells us the outline and makes it clear what's going to happen. Although the play is teetering on the edge of comedy, it also does foreclose that at the beginning by giving us the outline that only the death of the lovers can heal the feud. This is re treading the parameters of the story to set things up so that what can be of interest is the exquisite passion pathos of how this happens.
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