David Blixt

THE MASTER OF VERONA Audiobook

The audiobook for THE MASTER OF VERONA is finally here! After weeks spent recording, re-recording, even rewriting pieces to better flow from the lips, then more weeks as my producer put it all together with the help of an audio proofer and several listeners, it is now, at last, available to you.

You can purchase it on Audible or iTunes today, and on every major audiobook retailer next week. Meanwhile I'm looking into creating a link to buy it direct from me. But don't wait - get it today!

Huge thanks to my producer, Judith West, for guiding me through this process. Even with almost 30 years of professional acting behind me, this was a new skill-set, one that was both frustrating and joyful. The best part is that even I can listen to the final product and actually enjoy the story, only cringing over that word choice or that line delivery maybe once a chapter. Can't wait until January to start again with Falconer...

If you are not an Audible member, you can get a FREE copy of The Master Of Verona by clicking here. If you're already a member, please consider this a lovely gift for yourself or someone else this holiday season. 

Let me tell you a story...

THE PRINCE'S DOOM Cover Reveal!

On Tuesday the new cover for the fourth novel in the Star-Cross'd series hit the web, and today I'm happy to share it with you here!

VOICE OF THE FALCONER Cover Reveal!

The new ebook edition of VOICE OF THE FALCONER is out, revised and ready! The print version will hit the shelves in January, and next week I head into the recording studio to start work on the audiobook for it. Exciting!

Of all the Star-Cross'd books, this is probably the happiest. Yes, it's Verona, so there's always murder and intrigue. But there's so much joyful discovery as well. Characters from The Master Of Verona have matured and changed in the eight years since last we saw them. And this was where I got to start writing Cesco as a fully-fledged individual. Whereas before he was a McGuffin, an object of plots and plans, here he's the instigator of half the action and all the quips. This novel also sees Pietro recognizing a truth about himself, a distasteful one that makes him rethink his actions and motives. It's also the point in the story where I get to introduce young Romeo and even little Juliet, a newborn child who has no idea of the plots and dangers swirling around her.

With chases and races, grave robbing and incarceration, battles and taunts, many moments of mirth and one of true tragedy, this whole novel was a joy to write - and to revisit! So grab your copy today!

"Origin Of The Feud" Print Release Date - Nov 28th!

Five years ago I released an ebook collection of essays on Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet entitled ORIGIN OF THE FEUD. Basically promotion for the Star-Cross'd series, they were all pieces I'd written prior to then. 

I didn't expect to be asked for a print edition, so it could be available to teachers. But I was, and often. This summer the demand finally became enough for me to act. 

My trouble was that I didn't feel the ebook had enough meat. The essays were good, but far from comprehensive. There were several elements of the play I didn't touch on at all. So in September I sat down and revised the whole text, more than doubling the number of essays. It's a whole new book, with sections on characters, themes, structure, performance history, inside jokes, songs referenced, and Shakespeare's sources for the story. 

Of course, as the title suggests, it also contains my original thesis for the origin of the Capulet-Montague feud. But now there is so very much more. Written not as an academic but as an actor and director approaching the text for performance as well as literature, I hope it's as entertaining as it is informative. (And yes, the ebook will be updated to include the new material.)

Here's a list of the chapters, a hint of the subjects it covers: 

Foreword
I Always Hated Shakespeare
Origin of the Feud
Sources
Don’t Believe the Title
The Prologue
The Real Capulets & Montagues of Verona
Draw Thy Tool
The Juliet Trap
Mab
It’s Not a Masked Ball!
Redeeming Romeo
The Window Scene
The King and the Beggar
Ratcatcher
The Art of Mistiming, Part I
The Quartet
Family Disfunction
Tybalt’s Ghost
She’s Not Dead Yet!
The Art of Mistiming, Part II
The Friar’s Guilt
The Death of Benvolio
Loving Lady Montague
Favorite Play
A Prayer Before Dying
Coffee with the Count
Resources

 

The new edition comes out November 28th, kicking off a month of Star-Cross'd releases, including THE MASTER OF VERONA audiobook! Stay tuned! 

 

MoV 10th Anniversary Cover Reveal, Audiobooks, and More!

2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the release of The Master Of Verona. To mark the occasion, there's a new cover, new format - and, by popular demand, an audiobook! All of which drop in December.

First, take a moment to admire the gorgeous new cover by Kim Killion at The Killion Group. She's currently working on similar covers for the rest of the series, which will have an across-the-board facelift for the digital editions. Fans of the old covers, never fear, they'll remain on some print copies. But the larger trade paperback version of MoV coming in December will sport the new cover. 

So will the audiobook. I spent the Spring recording at the studio of my friend Judith West, and she's engineered a truly wonderful-sounding version of the story. It being my voice, I was afraid to listen to the finished product - only to find myself enjoying it! I'm sure I'll be hyper-critical of certain line deliveries and cadences, but I have to say, it was fun to listen to the story.

As if all of that isn't enough, there's an expanded edition of ORIGIN OF THE FEUD coming this month, and expanded markets for the ebooks of the Colossus series. I'm enjoying re-immersing myself in the world of Colossus, so I can finally finish the long-awaited third novel, WAIL OF THE FALLEN. 

I'll be back soon to blog more about all of this. So much is happening, it feels like a waterslide trying to keep track of it all. 

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, saying, “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’). For some they had complete texts, 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 Shakespeare’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 playwright. That’s just the way it goes.

Sometimes a Quarto would be published by the author himself, 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 First 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, 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. 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.

Just then, unseen by Benvolio, the two louts from the opening scene, Gregory and Sampson, 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? Well, she’s already told Juliet that she’s planning to send a poison to Mantua and have Romeo done in. And 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 feud. 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.

The Weeping and Wailing Scene, or She's Not Dead Yet

Ask anyone who has ever played Lord or Lady Capulet, and especially any Nurse, to name their least favorite scene, and they’ll tell you it’s the Weeping and Wailing scene.

(Aside – actors almost always use short-hand when referring to a scene. R&J has the Opening Brawl, the Boys, First Juliet, Mab, the Party, Post-Party, Balcony, Friar, the Street Scene, Return of the Nurse, the Wedding, Mercutio-Tybalt, Romeo-Tybalt, the Quartet, the Engagement, the Morning After scene, Family Dysfunction, the Cell, the Potion, Weeping and Wailing, Mantua, and the Vault. I think there are only four or five scenes that don’t merit their own title)

The Weeping and Wailing scene is where Juliet’s drunk the potion, and everyone loses their minds, thinking she's dead.

I’ve long had a pet peeve about this scene, but it was my wife who really figured it out. Both of us come at it from the same place, and it’s the same thing that drives us both crazy. Most directors miss this. They forget one simple, true fact:

She’s not dead yet.

At the moment that her family discovers her, Juliet is in fact alive and well. Everything is going according to plan. Again, it’s the same plan from Much Ado – we’ll pretend she’s dead and everything will be all right.

So the family’s grief seems utterly out of place. The Friar knows she’s not dead. The audience knows she’s not dead. So why do we have to go through the motions of grief.

It was Jan who noted how badly written the grief in this scene is. Don’t get me wrong, Shakespeare can write grief:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Or even later in R&J, Lady Capulet says:

O me! this sight of death is as a bell,
That warns my old age to a sepulchre.

Shakespeare’s grief is often like this – brief. As if the speaker lacks the words. Whereas the grief in the Weeping and Wailing scene is hardly brief:

FRIAR LAURENCE
Come, is the bride ready to go to church?

CAPULET
Ready to go, but never to return.
O son! the night before thy wedding-day
Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies,
Flower as she was, deflowered by him.
Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir;
My daughter he hath wedded: I will die,
And leave him all; life, living, all is Death’s. 

PARIS
Have I thought long to see this morning’s face,
And doth it give me such a sight as this?

LADY CAPULET
Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!
Most miserable hour that e’er time saw
In lasting labour of his pilgrimage!
But one, poor one, one poor and loving child,
But one thing to rejoice and solace in,
And cruel death hath catch’d it from my sight! 

NURSE
O woe! O woful, woful, woful day!
Most lamentable day, most woful day,
That ever, ever, I did yet behold!
O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!
Never was seen so black a day as this:
O woful day, O woful day!

PARIS
Beguiled, divorced, wronged, spited, slain!
Most detestable death, by thee beguil’d,
By cruel cruel thee quite overthrown!
O love! O life! not life, but love in death! 

CAPULET
Despised, distressed, hated, martyr’d, kill’d!
Uncomfortable Time, why camest thou now
To murder, murder our solemnity?
O child! O child! my soul, and not my child!
Dead art thou! Alack! my child is dead;
And with my child my joys are buried.

Look at those exclamation points. Look at those ecphonetic Os. This is not subtle grief. These are not the heart-breaking words that rend the soul of the hearer. Rather, this is Italian opera.

Instead of giving each speech time to unfold, take all those speeches and overlap them. Let the characters embrace their Italianness. And suddenly the audience is laughing. As they should be! Because at the moment, everything is working.

This was my wife’s idea, playing off of my love for the end of the scene. Because it’s the end that convinces me the whole thing is supposed to be funny. How do I know that? Thanks to the musicians who enter with Paris.

(Second aside – I feel really bad for Paris. He’d be the hero of any other play. He’s a good guy, and his story arc is just awful – fall for girl, ask girl’s dad to marry her, dance with girl, get permission from dad, see girl at church, go to marry her and find her dead, take flowers to her tomb and get killed. There is nothing wrong with Paris. Hell, in an earlier version of the story Juliet is turned off by him because he has cold hands when they dance. Jilted for poor circulation. Just like everybody else, he’d simply star-cross’d)

Back to the end of the scene. Everybody leaves, except for the Nurse, the servant Peter, and the two musicians, who have the following exchange:

First Musician
Faith, we may put up our pipes, and be gone. 

Nurse
Honest goodfellows, ah, put up, put up; for, well you know, this is a pitiful case.

Exit

First Musician
Ay, by my troth, the case may be amended. 

Enter PETER

PETER
Musicians, O, musicians, ‘Heart’s ease, Heart’s ease:’ O, an you will have me live, play ‘Heart’s ease.’ 

First Musician
Why ‘Heart’s ease?’ 

PETER
O, musicians, because my heart itself plays ‘My heart is full of woe:’ O, play me some merry dump, to comfort me. 

First Musician
Not a dump we; ‘tis no time to play now. 

PETER
You will not, then? 

First Musician
No. 

PETER
I will then give it you soundly. 

First Musician
What will you give us?  

PETER
No money, on my faith, but the gleek; I will give you the minstrel. 

First Musician
Then I will give you the serving-creature. 

PETER
Then will I lay the serving-creature’s dagger on your pate. I will carry no crotchets: I’ll re you, I’ll fa you; do you note me? 

First Musician
An you re us and fa us, you note us. 

Second Musician
Pray you, put up your dagger, and put out your wit. 

PETER
Then have at you with my wit! I will dry-beat you with an iron wit, and put up my iron dagger. Answer me like men: ‘When griping grief the heart doth wound, And doleful dumps the mind oppress, Then music with her silver sound’-- why ‘silver sound’? why ‘music with her silver sound’? What say you, Simon Catling? 

Musician
Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound. 

PETER
Pretty! What say you, Hugh Rebeck? 

Second Musician
I say ‘silver sound,’ because musicians sound for silver. 

PETER
Pretty too! What say you, James Soundpost? 

Third Musician
Faith, I know not what to say. 

PETER
O, I cry you mercy; you are the singer: I will say for you. It is ‘music with her silver sound,’ because musicians have no gold for sounding: ‘Then music with her silver sound with speedy help doth lend redress.’

Exit

First Musician
What a pestilent knave is this same! 

Second Musician
Hang him, Jack! Come, we’ll in here; tarry for the mourners, and stay dinner.

They're joking! They're making light, as servants are wont to, of Tragedy. Only the audience knows this is no Tragedy, because she's not dead. If all goes according to plan, she'll awaken in Romeo's arms. And she does, which is where the real Tragedy lies. If we spend all our grief and passion here, then what is the end of the play about? No, this isn't about real grief, but displays of grief. Because we still have honest grief to come.

Shakespeare wanted us laughing at the end of this scene. And I tend to trust his instincts.

Tybalt's Ghost

It amazes me that, of the thirty-odd productions I’ve been a part of and the dozen more I’ve seen, I’m the only director to make use of these lines from Juliet:

   

O, look! methinks I see my cousin’s ghost 
    
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body 
    
Upon a rapier’s point: stay, Tybalt, stay! 
    
Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.

   

She says she sees the ghost! I cannot fathom why directors ignore this. She straight up says that she sees the ghost!

It seems a wonderful (and obvious) device to have dead Tybalt enter, covered ‘all in blood, all in gore blood’ as the Nurse describes him, and search for Romeo. It is also great motivation for Juliet to drink the Friar’s potion, which until that moment she has been talking herself out of doing. I’ve used this twice, and it’s frightfully creepy.

Yet I’ve only ever seen the ghost in my own productions. So perhaps I am simply insane. But I think this is one of the most powerful points in the show. The creators of West Side Story surely thought so – they staged an entire dream ballet around it.

Charles Dvorak and Stephanie VanAlstine

 

The Window Scene, or I Hate Balconies

You know what drives me consistently crazy? The preconceptions people have about Romeo & Juliet. So often after a student matinee a teacher or a parent will complain: “Why did you add all those sex jokes?” When we explain that we did not add them, they assure us we did. “I know Romeo & Juliet, and that’s not in there!” When we take them through the script line by line, they’re shocked. And then they tell us we shouldn’t have performed it the way Shakespeare wrote it.

I guess it’s important that students read Shakespeare, just so long as they don’t understand it.

We have to remember that Shakespeare knew that sex and violence puts butts in the seats. It worked for the ancient Greeks and Romans, worked for Shakespeare, works today. There are very few Shakespeare plays entirely devoid of dirty jokes (hell, it's what the Porter in Mac exists for). But R&J may be the most jam-packed with both sex and violence. 

But that's not the way the show is perceived. There are so many preconceptions about this show. And one of the biggest is the Balcony Scene. People speak of it as one of the ‘greatest romantic scenes in literature.’ This is because of the trap this show has become. It’s called ‘the greatest love story every told’ (I’ve even used that tagline in selling The Master Of Verona). But it’s a lie. In a great love story, they’d live.

So, if the Balcony Scene isn't about pure romance at its finest, what is the scene about, then? It’s about how wonderfully stupid teenagers in love are.

It’s also where I think Romeo redeems himself from the lovesick fool he was in the whole first Act. Because Romeo has fallen for the ideal of Romantic Love, of Chivalric Love. Love from afar. He loves Rosaline not for herself, but because he’s enjoying his anguish:

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vex’d a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
He’s not in love with Rosaline. He’s in love with love.

This was the fashion, starting with the French tales of Lancelot and Guinevere, continuing through Dante’s passion for his Beatrice, right through Petrarch’s love for his unobtainable Laura. Mercutio mocks him relentlessly for this:

Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with a
white wench’s black eye; shot through the ear with a
love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the
blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft.

And later:

BENVOLIO
Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo.

MERCUTIO
Without his roe, like a dried herring: flesh, flesh,
how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers
that Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his lady was but a
kitchen-wench; marry, she had a better love to
be-rhyme her; Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gipsy;
Helen and Hero hildings and harlots; Thisbe a grey
eye or so, but not to the purpose. Signior
Romeo, bon jour! there’s a French salutation
to your French slop.

It’s tempting to read French slop as a reference to Romeo’s mode of attire. But in this case I think Mercutio means this ridiculous notion of Courtly Love, made famous by French poets, where one aspires to love only from afar. In both MoV and Fortune’s Fool I reference a book by Andreas Capellanus entitled De Amore, which lists the 31 rules of Courtly Love:

1. Marriage should not be a deterrent to love.
2. Love cannot exist in the individual who cannot be jealous.
3. A double love cannot obligate an individual.
4. Love constantly waxes and wanes.
5. That which is not given freely by the object of one’s love loses its savor.
6. It is necessary for a male to reach the age of maturity in order to love.
7. A lover must observe a two-year widowhood after his beloved’s death.
8. Only the most urgent circumstances should deprive one of love.
9. Only the insistence of love can motivate one to love.
10. Love cannot coexist with avarice.
11. A lover should not love anyone who would be an embarrassing marriage choice.
12. True love excludes all from its embrace but the beloved.
13. Public revelation of love is deadly to love in most instances.
14. The value of love is commensurate with its difficulty of attainment.
15. The presence of one’s beloved causes palpitation of the heart.
16. The sight of one’s beloved causes palpitations of the heart.
17. A new love brings an old one to a finish.
18. Good character is the one real requirement for worthiness of love.
19. When love grows faint its demise is usually certain.
20. Apprehension is the constant companion of true love.
21. Love is reinforced by jealousy.
22. Suspicion of the beloved generates jealousy and therefore intensifies love.
23. Eating and sleeping diminish greatly when one is aggravated by love.
24. The lover’s every deed is performed with the thought of his beloved in mind.
25. Unless it please his beloved, no act or thought is worthy to the lover.
26. Love is powerless to hold anything from love.
27. There is no such thing as too much of the pleasure of one’s beloved.
28. Presumption on the part of the beloved causes suspicion in the lover.
29. Aggravation of excessive passion does not usually afflict the true lover.
30. Thought of the beloved never leaves the true lover.
31. Two men may love one woman or two women one man.

It’s as though the Romeo in Act I has studied this list, and is determined to stick to it. His friends see this and lament it, missing their witty and joyful friend who has been replaced by this stick-in-the-mud who declares himself incapable of dancing:

A torch for me: let wantons light of heart
Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels,
For I am proverb’d with a grandsire phrase;
I’ll be a candle-holder, and look on.
The game was ne’er so fair, and I am done.

Though their efforts to tease him out of his ‘love’ mood fail, Benvolio’s plan to make Romeo forget Rosaline succeeds. Because the moment he sees Juliet at the ball, Romeo changes, throws off the mournful cloak of Courtly Love and suddenly understands what true love is.

We know this because he does something unthinkable to a Courtly Lover – he acts! First he grabs the girl by the hand and talks to her, even stealing two kisses. Then he leaps her wall in the middle of the night to play Peeping Tom. His love for Rosaline is all talk, whereas his love for Juliet is genuine because it moves him to action!

Which brings us at last to the Balcony Scene.

Or as I like to call it, the Window Scene.

Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Zefferelli's R&J

In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, no one says ‘balcony.’ Never. The word is not in the script. We call it the Balcony Scene because on the Globe stage there were two balconies that were used for just these kind of moments. But just because that’s the way they staged it doesn’t mean we should follow suit.

Instead, Romeo says window. ‘What light through yonder window breaks?’ Being interested in the script, this is something that’s always bothered me about this scene and, after years of snide remarks behind my hand, the last time I directed the show I finally did what I’ve long threatened: I got rid of Juliet’s balcony entirely. 

I’m sure I’m not the first. And I didn’t do it to shock anybody. I wasn’t trying to be postmodern, or to bite my thumb at convention – at least, not for the sake of biting my thumb. I did it to free the scene. Both from the weight of expectation, and literally free the actors to, you know, interact.

Here’s what often happens. Romeo comes in and hides. Mercutio and the boys chase him, tease him, then leave. He comes out, then sees her in the balcony and hides again, close to the audience. But if he’s going to see her, he either has to turn his back on the audience, or he has to be entirely across the stage – he’s got lots of asides before he reveals himself. So there’s always this physical gulf between them. And it lasts through the whole damned scene – unless you have him climb up to the balcony. But if he can do that, why does he need cords to climb down a two acts later?

So I decided to scrap the balcony, and put the window Juliet’s standing in on the ground floor. And it worked, worked so very well. What I liked best about it was Juliet’s freedom, and the intimacy it allowed her to share with the audience. Juliet is a character forever put on a pedestal – by teachers, by readers, by actors, by directors, by audiences, who all think of her as the ideal young lover. Placing her high on some balcony away from the audience reinforces that, whereas I always want to undermine it.      

   

Why undermine? Because she’s a thirteen year-old girl! She’s not some savvy, romantic ideal. She’s young, smart, funny, conflicted, bursting with too many emotions at once. She ping-pongs from thought to thought, emotion to emotion, bubbling over with more than she can express, and not all of it is demure or sweet (this leads into a discussion of the ‘Juliet Trap’ where even the most talented actresses get caught up in playing the idea of Juliet instead of the character, which is much better. For some reason it happens much more with this character than any other). It was great fun to allow Juliet to match her metal ricochets with full physical freedom.

(Note, too, that in my last production Juliet wore pajamas. Not some flowing night-gown, but what an almost-fourteen year-old wears to bed. Just like in the first Spider-Man movie, where MJ is wearing pajamas, not a negligee. That’s the way a young girl dresses!)

So, by removing the balcony, I freed both Juliet and the audience.  

Now I’m the first to admit not every line is with me. Romeo has a reference to her ‘being o’er my head.’ But there are two or three other reasonable interpretations to that line. Likewise, I found ways to stage ‘One kiss and I’ll descend’ and ‘I see thee, now thou art so low, as one dead,’ both lines from the Morning-After scene, by using the window and a couple steps. And the cords the Nurse brings? We used those to help Romeo get over the wall.

As I say, I’m sure I’m not the first to get rid of the balcony. But I went further with this idea than just putting Juliet on the ground floor. When Romeo ditches his friends, Benvolio says, He ran this way, and leapt this orchard wall.’ I thought, Romeo climbed a wall? Why not leave him up there?

Thus, for the first part of the scene, Romeo was up, and Juliet down. He descends before the initial love talk is done, well before her ‘Farewell, compliment’ speech. And suddenly it was a scene I had never seen before.

Which is to say, we’d shaken off the baggage of preconceptions, and could look at what these two people are actually saying.

Matt Andersen and Stephanie VanAlstine as R&J

The scene, of course, begins with Romeo seeing Juliet in her balcony (window). He tells us all about the stuff we can see for ourselves – she’s sighing, laying her hand upon her cheek – the same hand Romeo had held and tried to kiss during the party.

By rights, this is the moment when he should step out and proclaim his love, swearing by the stars and God in Heaven how deeply he adores her, in return for which she might give him a glove, some token to carry to the end of his days as he pines for her. That’s Courtly Love. It’s pretty stupid. But those are the rules.

Instead Romeo does something unthinkable in a Courtly Lover. He eavesdrops on her, listens to her most intimate thoughts – because they happen to be of him.

JULIET
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Romeo even asks the audience if he should talk, or go on listening:

ROMEO
[Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

JULIET
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

He listens until he can’t contain himself any longer and leaps out of the bushes, shouting, ‘I take thee at thy word!’

At which she screams, because there’s a Peeping Tom in her garden.

Seriously, the scene can and should be as funny as it is sweet. There are plenty of moments for both. The genius of Shakespeare is his ability to so utterly inhabit each character he writes. And we all remember being those kids! We remember the awkwardness of love – does she love me, what must he think of me, did I sound stupid?

I have four favorite comedic moments in the scene. The first two come relatively early, back to back, as she’s trying to compose herself after realizing he’s overheard her give away the game. She starts talking, and can’t stop. Think of a thirteen year-old girl going through the whole gamut of emotions – embarrassment, abandon, concern, trust, more concern, hope, more concern, posturing, self-doubt, chastisement of him, and more self-doubt. Imagine, too, a boy trying to open his mouth at each piece of punctuation, trying to get a word in edgewise:

JULIET
Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night
Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
What I have spoke: but farewell compliment!
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay,’
And I will take thy word: yet if thou swear’st,
Thou mayst prove false; at lovers’ perjuries
Then say, Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully:
Or if thou think’st I am too quickly won,
I’ll frown and be perverse an say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou mayst think my ‘havior light:
But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.
I should have been more strange, I must confess,
But that thou overheard’st, ere I was ware,
My true love’s passion: therefore pardon me,
And not impute this yielding to light love,
Which the dark night hath so discovered.

And here’s my next favorite bit of comedic timing. Belatedly, Romeo tries to play the lover, making grand oaths of love:

ROMEO
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--

JULIET
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Romeo is confused. He knows a Lover has to swear by something.

ROMEO
What shall I swear by?

And Juliet says the sweetest thing:

JULIET
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee.

How beautiful is that? The only thing in the world that he could swear by is himself, because he is the only thing in the whole world that matters to her.

Being stupid, Romeo starts to do it:

ROMEO
If my heart’s dear love--

JULIET
Well, do not swear:

Shhh. Don’t talk, pretty boy. You’ll spoil it.

That comic timing right there, coming right after the most wonderful sweetness – that is some genius hilarity. It’s like that wonderful line Mary Louise Parker had on her second episode of the West Wing: ‘Maybe not so much for you with the talking.’

Next in the comedy goldmine comes a pair of lines that need no explanation:

ROMEO
O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

JULIET
What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?

Self-explanitory - especially his totally innocent answer.

My final favorite moment comes towards the end of the scene, where Romeo and Juliet are in effect two teens on the phone late at night, complete with the You hang up / No, you hang up moment:

JULIET
I have forgot why I did call thee back.

ROMEO
Let me stand here till thou remember it.

JULIET
I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,
Remembering how I love thy company.

ROMEO
And I’ll still stay, to have thee still forget,
Forgetting any other home but this.

If played right, it is at least as funny as it is touching.

Just like the scene.

Balcony or no.

Capulet Ball - To Mask, or not to Mask

Despite what Baz Luhrmann did in his film, the party in R&J is not a masked ball.

It was common practice in Renaissance Italy to show up wearing a mask to a party one was not invited to. Which is exactly what the boys are doing. Mercutio is even delighted to don a mask to a party he was invited to (‘A visor for a visor!’), because it’s much more fun to crash a party than to be welcomed.

Why do I know it’s not a masked ball? Because Capulet makes such a big deal out of the boys showing up masked:

Welcome, gentlemen! I have seen the day
That I have worn a visor and could tell
A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,
Such as would please: ‘tis gone, ‘tis gone, ‘tis gone:
You are welcome, gentlemen!

More, he remarks how much the boys in masks are going to liven his party, saying, ‘Ah, sirrah, this unlook’d-for sport comes well.’ Unlook’d-for being the important phrase here. This was not a party to which everyone was supposed to come masked. It’s a large party, and only the crashers are masked.

A few lines later he asks a relative when the last time they went masked to a party:

Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet;
For you and I are past our dancing days:
How long is’t now since last yourself and I
Were in a mask?

Which brings us to the first of two references to The Taming Of The Shrew. Second Capulet (sometimes Old Capulet) tells Cap it’s been thirty years since they crashed a party in masks. Cap disagrees:

What, man! ‘tis not so much, ‘tis not so much:
‘Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio,
Come Pentecost as quickly as it will,
Some five and twenty years; and then we mask’d.

So Capulet and Old Capulet were at Lucentio and Bianca’s wedding (which raises its own problem, seeing as those two were wed in secret...).

At the end of the same scene, as the revelers are departing, the Nurse identifies one of them as ‘young Petruchio.’ Thus we have our timeframe – it’s been 25 years since the events of Shrew, and Petruchio has a son. It’s a lovely in-joke for anyone in Shakespeare’s audience who’s seen Shrew, and one that I keep alive in the short story Varnished Faces.

One last note – the last two times I saw the show, I thought the directors were brilliant (confession: one of them was my wife) in how they handled the Capulet Ball. Because it always feels as though the story has to stop so we can all watch a dance. Whereas these directors put the whole party offstage. The scene we see is on the Capulet yard, or garden, or somewhere just outside the party itself. Man, did that help.

Why? Because Shakespeare parties suck. In a cast with fifteen men and four women, it’s always a sausage-fest. In opera you have the bodies, but in most Shakespeare productions you just don’t have extra women to put in dresses for that one scene. Which means everyone is looking at Juliet, and Romeo’s fascination with her is less impressive – of course he noticed her, she’s the only girl his age onstage!

It also neatly deals with the issue of what to do with the party when Romeo grabs Juliet’s hand and begins to talk to her. Do the rest of the revelers freeze? Do they dance in slow-motion? Do the lights dim except for a pin-spot on the lovers as they perform their perfect (and perfectly lovely) sonnet? Doesn’t it make much more sense that Juliet is escaping the unwanted attentions of Paris by retreating to the garden, where Romeo grasps her hand? Doesn’t it make the Nurse’s line, ‘Madam, your mother craves a word with you’ make much more sense, appearing from the house where the party continues. Shakespeare loved offstage scenes – the first conversation between Cassius and Brutus in Caesar is peppered with shouts and clamors from offstage. Why not here?

In both productions the choice to move the party offstage got savaged by critics, because once again people have built up an image of what this show is ‘supposed to be’ rather than what it is. There is no reason for us to see the party, just people going in an out. I cannot tell you how much it helped take the air out of the play, moving it right along.

So, no masks except for the boys, and off-stage dancing. Those are the keys to a good party.

(For more essays and insights on Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, download ORIGIN OF THE FEUD - just $1.99! Exclusively on Amazon Kindle)