The Everlasting Love Story

The Everlasting Love Story

            The timeless stories created by Shakespeare have been adapted and readapted since their inception. The stories range from following Shakespeare’s dialogue faithfully, to only capturing his essence and deriving from his inspiration. With the vast availability of Shakespearian work (literal or not), taken from the original stories and ideas that were written almost four hundred years ago, there will be no generation that will not be introduced to some type of Shakespearian comedy, tragedy, history, or poem. His legacy is the passion that resonates within his work and ignites that same fervor with past, present, and future readers alike.

              Romeo and Juliet is one Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies and is featured on the reading list of almost every high school student in the United States. One could undoubtedly argue that there are hundreds if not tens of thousands (taking into account unpublished and amateur adaptions; including the hysterical comic book version I handed in as my ninth grade final paper), of versions of Romeo and Juliet floating around the proverbial literary water cooler; each version somewhat different from the last. This essay will take into account the 1968 Romeo and Juliet directed by Franco Zeffirelli, the 1996 Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann, the 2011 Gnomeo & Juliet directed by Kelly Asbury, and the 2013 Warm Bodies directed by Jonathan Levine. Each version correlates either directly or indirectly with the original Romeo and Juliet written by William Shakespeare in the early 1600s (who actually took his inspiration from the Italian Romeus and Juliet written many years before).

             “Two households, both alike in dignity / From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. / From forth the fatal loins of these two foes / A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life” (Prologue.1-5). This is how the majority of Romeo and Juliet adaptations begin and the 1968 version is not different, in fact the movie deviates very little from the original play. In an interview with Pitch weekly Zeffirelli said, “You're talking to

someone who's done 80 percent of his work based on classical material” and his work on Taming of the Shrew (1967), Hamlet (1990), and  Jesus of Nazareth (1977) add credence to that (Lybarger). One of the most important characteristics Zeffirelli takes from the original play is the naivety of the characters. He takes two young people: Leonard Whiting (Romeo) who was seventeen at the time and Olivia Hussey (Juliet) who was fifteen at the time and allows their adolescent character to flourish on screen capturing both their innocence and budding romance.

            The 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet also features much of the original dialogue with minor changes to modernize the text to screen dynamic. The most abrupt change is to set and scenery as this version takes place in modern day (1996 modern day anyways). The movie features cars, guns instead of swords, and the two opposing families are actually two opposing corporations (one owned by the Capulets and one by the Montagues). The major difference (besides the set), is the grittiness of the 1996 version from the 1968 version. Luhrmann really captured the action, struggle, and resistance of the Romeo and Juliet story in a way that Zeffirelli didn’t. In this versions Romeo and Juliet both are more mature than in Zeffirelli’s adaptation; they (especially Leonardo DiCaprio), captured the essence of tormented teenagers stuck between a life and death situation with such passion and anguish Shakespeare himself would have given a slight nod from the audience.

             Apart from the literal adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, there are many stories that take only inspiration. Gnomeo and Juliet was a kids movie made in 2011 that featured two rival garden gnome families (one blue and one red), that lived in two adjacent yards. This movie centered around two characters (Gnome and Juliet), who met one day and fell in love, but were forced apart due to some very devastating horticultural differences. The movie features some of the famous lines (if only a little different): “A weed by any other name is still a weed” and “The story you are about to see has been told before. A lot. And now we are going to tell it again. But different. It's about two star-crossed lovers kept apart by a big feud. No one knows how this feud started, but it's all quite entertaining” (Gnomeo & Juliet). The movie is clearly directed towards young children and features music, playful action, and of course: A HAPPY ENDING!

            One of the even less literal adaptations for Romeo and Juliet is Warm Bodies directed by Jonathan Levine in 2013. The main character “R” is a zombie who early on in the film begins to wonder about himself in a very existential kind of way. He wonders why can’t connect anymore with anyone (which draws on many modern day worries of connecting physically with people rather than digitally). Then he meets “Julie” (getting any hints yet?), who begins to change him and instead of wanting to eat her brains, he wants to protect her. The two warring ‘families’ are the humans and zombies and if that isn’t enough evidence there is very compelling balcony scene. In the end the love between the two ignites R’s heart and turns him human again (happy ending!).

            The reason I choose these four adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is because they all deserve a place within the storylines. Literal adaptations like Zeffirelli’s aid in a more classical understanding of Shakespeare while Luhrmann’s version creates a textual understanding of the story but adding a more relatable exterior. As for the last two examples (Gnomeo and Juliet & Warm Bodies), they make Shakespeare available to the masses; available to people (teenagers and children especially), who would not be drawn to more literal adaptations. This is an important point because although there are people who swear by the original, it just isn’t plausible to assume everyone is going to be able to spend time learning an old English story from start to finish. I do wholeheartedly believe that if Shakespeare was here today he would want people to understand the underlying idea of Romeo and Juliet; not just the literal or textual complexity but the passion and electricity that is available when you connect with someone so completely. For that reason, I can’t argue for what genre presents Shakespeare best because they all do, in their own ways; for different people, on different days.

Works Cited

Gnomeo & Juliet. Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2011. DVD.

Lybarger, Dylan. "Spreading the Wrong Gospel: An Interview with Franco Zeffirelli." Lybarger Links. N.p., 13 Mar. 1999. Web. 18 July 2015. <http://www.tipjar.com/dan/zeffirelli.htm>.

Shakespeare, William, and G. Blakemore Evans. "Romeo and Juliet." The Wadsworth             Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Second ed. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage        Learning, 1997. Print.