A round-up of intriguing looks at "Romeo and Juliet"

As we welcome the Folger Theatre’s new production of Romeo and Juliet (learn more about it from our recent Q&A with director Raymond O. Caldwell, among other sources), we’ve also been looking over the abundance of varied, intriguing, and sometimes surprising posts we’ve published about the play. While we can’t share them all, we thought we’d offer a sampling that you might enjoy.

Romeo and Juliet: Is Shakespeare’s famous love story actually a play about violence?
Casey Kaleba, one of the Washington, DC, area’s most sought-after fight coaches for stage plays, argues that Romeo and Juliet is not just a play about love, but about violence, in this fascinating excerpt from a classic Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episode.

Interested in fencing? You might also learn more about: A fencing manual from our website’s “Collection Highlights.”

Excerpt – The Girl on the Balcony by Olivia Hussey What was it like to play Juliet in Franco Zefferelli’s classic movie? Read this excerpt from Olivia Hussey’s memoir The Girl on the Balcony—and notice the subtitle, too: Olivia Hussey Finds a Life after Romeo & Juliet.

Interested in cinema? You might also take a look at:

• Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet turns 25 by Carla Della Gatta
• “The purpose of playing”: Working with Shakespeare in Sing Sing and Ghostlight by Austin Tichenor

An Ofrenda to Shakespeare’s Afterlives  Learn more about Borderlands Shakespeare from this post written by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos, the co-founders of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva.

Exploring three plays that draw on Día de los Muertos to explore Indigenous Mexican and Christian views of the afterlife, the post includes Edit Villarreal’s play The Language of Flowers, which first appeared under the title R and J in 1991, a work that reframes the story of Romeo, Juliet, and their afterlives.

Oct 11, 6:30pm | Kathryn Vomero Santos moderates a pre-show conversation with Margo Hendricks and Jeannette Christensen. Free. 

Excerpt – ‘How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England’ by Ruth Goodman Have you ever wondered what’s so terrible about telling someone you will “bite your thumb” at them? Read on to learn more.

Looking for other reading suggestions? You might also try:

• These Violent Delights: Retelling Romeo and Juliet, in which YA author Chloe Gong writes about adapting Romeo and Juliet for her debut novel about the teen heirs of rival gangs in 1920s Shanghai
• Julia, an artful Italian diva—Excerpt: “The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage” by Pamela Allen Brown
• Summer Reading: Romeo and Juliet, Revisited, emma poltrack’s recent list of recommended novels inspired by Romeo and Juliet

Drawing Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Part of a series in which Paul Glenshaw draws and writes about each of the nine bas-reliefs by John Gregory on the Folger façade, this post explores the bas-relief of a scene from Romeo and Juliet and what Paul Glenshaw learned about it. “By drawing this sculpture, I learned with humility how nuanced John Gregory’s storytelling is—and how much I had to learn about the story itself,” he writes. “The scene Gregory depicts is from Act III, Sc. 5. It’s the last moment Romeo and Juliet share together alive, an excruciating, beautiful, terrible moment of letting go.”

Birds of Shakespeare: The lark Although larks are often mentioned in the plays, Juliet refers to them four times, more often than any other character. Learn more about the lark and what it represents in artist Missy Dunnaway’s blog post, one of several she wrote about her painting series Birds of Shakespeare, which she developed while she was a Folger artist-in-residence in 2021; the series is intended to represent every bird in Shakespeare’s plays and poems—at least 65 species.

West Side Story: 60 years as a cultural barometer Carla Della Gatta wrote this post for the 60th anniversary of the best-known Shakespeare-based musical. “Watching Rita Moreno dance on a New York rooftop,” she writes, “singing about living in “America,” it is easy to forget that one of the most prominent depictions of US Latinx on stage or film for many years was also the most recognized Shakespearean adaptation in the world.”

And that completes this sampling of our past blog posts on Romeo and Juliet! We hope you enjoy them and our many other posts on Shakespeare, his works, his characters, his era, and more.

… But would you like one more set of Romeo and Juliet posts? Why not enjoy our Romeo and Juliet quizzes, too?

Try out our recent challenge: Quiz: what do you know about “Romeo and Juliet”?

Or take a look at two of our “Order It” puzzles:

Order It: The prologue to Romeo and Juliet

Order It: Juliet’s “What’s in a name?” speech