The Master of Verona

The real Capulets & Montagues

Someone just found this site by Googling the names "ANTONIO CAPULLETTO" and "MARIOTTO MONTECCHIO." Which is flattering, as the only way that person could have gotten those names is by reading my novel.

Because I made them up.

With that in mind, I feel honor-bound to make clear a bit about names and history.

There were Montagues and Capulets, they were real families - Montecchi e Cappelletti. Dante is the most famous person to mention them (PURGATORIO, canto VI), but they are in many histories and period chronicles as well. They actually clashed more in the area of Cremona than Verona, but were so famous for their squabbles (and famously mentioned) that their names became synonyms for "feuding families" - much as Hatfield and McCoy are today.

My only answer as to why so many writers connected them with Verona is that there is a castle and a village between Verona and Vicenza, both called Montecchio. Naturally, one would assume that the Montecchi lived there, no?

Actually, most often period Italian names indicate the place of origin, not the place you currently resided. If I was born in Parma, but lived in Venice, I would be David of Parma. Everybody would know who that was. Then, after a few generations, the name is still there. My son would be Dash of Parma, even though he'd never been to Parma in his life.

Now, there were Montecchi who were intimately involved in Veronese affairs - but that wasn't the branch of the family famous for fueding. It's more likely that the Montecchi in Cremona originally came from the village of Montecchio, and were neither the owners of that castle nor the masters of that village.

However, all of that is mere speculation on my part, as my research has been focused on the area around Verona and how to mesh Shakespeare with history. Presupposing that both families lived in Verona, I invented histories to both.

All of which is a long way of saying that Antony and Mari are fictional characters, their names stolen from elsewhere.

Mariotto's name was taken from the poet Masuccio Salernitano’s 33rd Novel from IL NOVELLINO - an early version of the R&J story.

The name Antonio I borrowed from Luigi da Porto, a native of Vicenza and the first person to name the famous lovers Romeo & Giulietta. In his version he mentions that the young girl's father is called Antonio.

That's where those names came from. Instead of working forward from history, I worked backwards from the play, setting Shakespeare's characters in among the true historical figures. Because, by the time of the novel, most of the Capulets and Montagues had died off, or moved away - notably, to England, where there is a famous family called Montagu.

Which brings the whole thing full circle and is enough to make a grown man weep.

The Death of Benvolio

If you wanted to throw my whole theory about the cause of the feud out of whack, you could point out to me that Lady Montague does not, in fact, have the final death in the play.

I would answer with a nod, a sigh, a smile. “I know. Benvolio does.”

The first legitimate publication of Shakespeare’s plays was the First Folio. Put together by his actors after he died in a wonderfully mercenary attempt to raise cash, it sets down in print together for the first time the Bard’s most famous plays.

But there are discrepancies. Because of the expense involved in copying out a play, only the prompter or stage manager would have had a full text. Actors had their cues, their lines, and their stage directions, usually worked into the text. So when Condell and Heminges tried to put together 36 plays, there were several missing. Some they reconstructed by memory, or got lucky and the actors had held onto their rolls of ink-stained parchment (where we get the word 'role'). Some they had complete, thanks to a fastidious stage-manager. And some were taken from the Quartos.

In publishing terms, a Quarto is the result when four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper. Each leaf is usually printed on both sides, leaving eight printed pages in total. In Shakspeare’s time this was true, but there was another wonderful connotation – bootleg.

Today when a movie comes out there are always some jerks in the audience with video cameras, and a shaky version of the film shows up the next day on the internet. This happened during Shakespeare’s heyday, too. Pretend you’re an Elizabethan going to see, say, Measure For Measure. You’re rich, so you’ve got a seat in the balcony. Down the row from you some shifty-looking patron is sitting with a quill and inkpot, scribbling in a fast shorthand every word the actors below are saying. A week later you see advertised at a different theatre a play called, astonishingly, Measure For Measure. There are no copyright laws, no redress or remuneration for the author. That’s just the way it goes.

Sometimes a Quarto would be published by the author, but far more often a Quarto of some play would appear having been ‘stolen’ as it were from a live performance. These Quartos sometimes have wild differences from the Folio versions, as bootleggers often could not write as fast as actors spoke. There were gaps that had to be filled in. If there are lots of these gaps, caulked in with low verse and poor rhymes, you get what is known as a ‘bad’ Quarto.

What has all this got to do with Benvolio? Because in the Second Quarto (the ‘bad’ Quarto, the ‘eeevil’ Quarto) of Romeo & Juliet, printed by Thomas Crede for Cuthbert Burby in 1599, Benvolio dies.

What? you cry aloud. How? Why?

Alas, I reply, we don’t know. Montague brings us news that his wife is dead. Then he adds, as if in after-thought, ‘And young Benvolio is deceased as well.’ No word of how or why. All we know is that no one makes it out of this play alive.

I actually like this line. It gives me a lot of freedom as a director. Several times now I’ve contrived ways to kill Benvolio in the latter part of the play. My favorite is to have him meet a girl at the Capulet party. Later, after Juliet has drunk her potion but before she’s found, Benvolio meets this girl for an assignation. They embrace, but she recoils at once. His sword-hilt is jabbing her. Sexily, she either removes his sword belt or unsheathes the weapon and lays it aside.

At that moment, unseen by Benvolio, Gregory and Sampson from the opening scene creep up. Benvolio senses them, however, and puts up a desperate fight. But he’s unarmed and is quickly killed. It’s a nice parallel to the light-hearted melee at the top of the show. Then – ah-ha! – Lady Capulet arrives to pay off her three servants, who then remove the body.

Lady Capulet. She’s already told Juliet that she’s planning to send a poison to Mantua and have Romeo done in. But she blames Benvolio for spinning a web of lies around the death of Tybalt, despite the fact that he spoke true. Would she let him, ‘a kinsman to the Montague,’ live? I think not!

So there’s a peek at how my mind works, filling in gaps much like the bootleggers of Shakespeare’s time.

I could refute the claim that Benvolio gets the final death by saying that maybe he died days ago, while Lady Montague died this very night. Maybe she sensed her son’s passing. Maybe she killed herself for her part in the fued. Maybe she did in fact die of grief. Or maybe she and Benvolio had a sexual-suicide pact and leapt naked off of one of Verona’s forty-eight towers. The world may never know.

Origins of the Feud

Early in 1999 I was directing Romeo & Juliet at the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre (a great space that to my everlasting regret has since become a church). It was my fourth or fifth encounter with the play, but my first as director.

Getting ready to direct Shakespeare for the first time became an event. I read and re-read the script, watched other productions, even visited Verona as a lark – not that Shakespeare ever went there, but for the past hundred years or so the city has become, at least partially, an industry town for the play. 

As an actor, you focus on your role and leave the overall play to the director. But as a novice director, I was forced to explore the play as a whole for the first time since Mr. Tobin’s ninth grade English class. I looked at all the questions, including the perennial ‘What caused the feud?’

The cause is never actually mentioned in the play, and it’s not vital to either an actor’s or audience’s understanding of the show. At the top of Act One, the ‘ancient grudge’ is already an established fact. But still, I pondered it for a time, then set it aside for more immediate concerns.

Today when I direct, cutting a script is my least favorite chore. Back then it was murder – what to take out, what to keep? In Shakespeare there are many seeming repetitions, but it was impossible not to hear each one in my head as the best expression of a certain thought.

At last I made it to the final scene – Paris is slain, Romeo and Juliet are both dead, we’re firmly into the denouement. It was then that a line jumped out at me. Capulet and his wife find their daughter's bleeding body. Romeo’s father, Lord Montague, enters to tomb, and the Prince addresses him: ‘Come, Montague, for thou art early up / To see thy son and heir now early down.’

Montague replies:

    Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight;

    Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her breath.

    What further woe conspires against my age?

These lines baffled me. Realize, I’d been looking at the show for days thinking about actors entering and exiting, who I could double-cast and so forth. I clearly didn’t need Lady Montague for the final scene – her husband just told us she’s dead. I flipped back to find her last scene. She’s listed as entering in Act Three, Scene Four, when Mercutio and Tybalt both buy it – but she’s strangely quiet in that scene. Lord Capulet, too, but at least people talk to him. No one addresses Romeo’s mom, even when her son is banished. In fact, looking at it harder, Lady Montague hasn't been heard from since Act One, Scene One, in which she uttered a mere two lines!

So this was my quandary – do I cut Montague’s lines at the end of the show? Why not? Here we are, the play is basically over. We’ve just watched the two romantic leads die pitiably, and young, kind, noble Paris just croaked it as well. Why do we care if some woman we barely remember is dead?

But it continued to bother me. There had to be a reason she was dead.

Of course, in Shakespeare’s day, there was a very good reason. The actor who played Lady Montague was probably needed in another role – the exigencies of the stage.

Even realizing this, I couldn't let go of the line. My wife is dead tonight. The rules of dramatic structure nagged at me. An off-stage death like that is supposed to be symbolic. But of what? Clueless, I left the line in, hoping my actors could figure it out.

In the event, they didn’t have to. I was going about my business later that week when it hit me – the feud! The thing that gets closure at the end of the show is the feud! Montague and Capulet bury the hatchet. ‘Brother Montague,’ Capulet calls him. They're even going to build statues to honor their dead kids.

Could Lady Montague’s death be symbolic of the end of the feud? The only way that could work would be –

If she were the cause of the feud.

I remember a heart-stopping moment as the idea formed – a love triangle a generation earlier, between the parents! Romeo’s mother, engaged to a young Capulet, runs off with a young Montague instead. That’s certainly cause for a feud, especially if young Capulet and Montague were friends. Best friends, childhood friends, torn apart by their love for a woman. A feud, born of love, dies with love.

This explains so much in the play – Lord Capulet, Juliet's doting father, suddenly threatening to kill her for refusing to marry the man he’s chosen for her. He tells her to ‘hang, beg, starve, die in the streets’ – this from a man who has called her ‘the hopeful lady of my earth.’ His fury seems to come out of nowhere and is brutally excessive. But if his own bride-to-be had jilted him and run off with his best friend instead, of course Juliet’s similar behavior would press his buttons.

This notion also goes on to inform much of Capulet's relationship with his wife – a younger wife, we know from the script, not well content in her match, married to a man who thinks she is ‘marred.’ It hints, in turn, at her relationship with Tybalt. In fact, the behavior of both families is wonderfully colored by this single, simple idea. Romeo’s mom jilted Juliet’s dad.

Oddly enough, all this doesn’t affect the actual performance of the show overmuch. It’s fun for the actors to play, and there are moments when it can be very clear, but the play stands, as it always has, on its action and language. The backstory ends up being superfluous.

But it was an idea that had its hooks in me and wouldn’t let go.

- DB