“Steeped in blood”: The doomed youth of Shakespeare and Stephen King

Though I tend to see William Shakespeare almost everywhere I look in popular culture, Stephen King has haunted my brain (and library; see my shelfie below) even longer, ever since I picked up Carrie from a drugstore paperback rack almost 50 years ago. I’ve frequently wondered why two seemingly disparate authors have so powerfully captured my imagination, and thanks to the recent flurry of productions of Romeo and Juliet — in Boston, a blood-soaked version in London,  on Broadway, and the current one at the Folger— I’ve finally unlocked the spooky connections between these two masters of their craft.

It’s not just that both Shakespeare and King wrote (and in King’s case, continues to write) crowd-pleasing entertainments whose literary merit only came to be acknowledged later; nor is it the eerie coincidence that King spent a chunk of his childhood in Stratford (albeit the one in Connecticut). Both authors write dramatically cathartic tales of frequently young protagonists confronting the powers of darkness from within and without, battling inner demons and external monsters (some human, some not), and in settings where the barrier between the realistic and the supernatural is thin and permeable, allowing for, in King’s memorable phrase, “other worlds than these.”

The coming-of-age connections are most immediately apparent between Shakespeare’s star-crossed heroine Juliet and the doomed protagonist of Carrie, both adolescent girls who reach physical maturity and contend with social and family pressure with tragic results. Juliet, of course, falls in love with Romeo, a boy from a rival family, secretly marries him, and kills herself after a plan to fool their parents goes awry. Carrie White, after a lifetime of abuse from her religious fanatic mother and bullying from her classmates, channels her pain and rage through her latent telekinesis to destroy first her high school and then her entire town. Blood frames both stories: from the “civil blood” in Romeo and Juliet’s fourth line to the tomb that’s “steeped in blood” in its final scene and the menstrual blood that opens Carrie to the pig’s blood dumped on her at the prom that incites the novel’s destructive climax. Would Juliet have fared any better if she’d had Carrie’s telekinetic powers? Probably not, but it opens up the cheery possibility that she could’ve taken most of Verona down with her.

Although Shakespeare’s plays are full of scary elements, from his many ghosts to the witches of Macbeth and the gory ultraviolence of Titus Andronicus, it may seem surprising that Barbara Bogaev, the host of the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, describes Romeo and Juliet as filled with “a lot of suspense and horror.” But in her conversation with Sophie Duncan, the author of Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine, Duncan reveals that Shakespeare’s choice to make Juliet 13 years old makes the story not just tragic but inherently “appalling.” “Because these are children, you know?” Duncan continues, “Marriage is for grown-ups.” We in the 21st century tend to think children got married that young all the time back then, but Duncan says this isn’t true. “For an Elizabethan parent,” Duncan maintains, “the plot of Romeo and Juliet would be your worst nightmare.” Novelist Margaret Atwood, in her appreciation of Carrie’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, describes Carrie as “one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society,” and Shakespeare, too, tapped into the fears of his audience, fears that still have power four hundred years later.

Carrie’s creation also has a wonderfully Shakespearean origin story. King wrote the first three pages — wherein Carrie experiences her first period while in the communal high school shower and, because her mother never told her about such things, thinks she’s bleeding to death — but threw them away because, as he confesses in his invaluable memoir On Writing, “I didn’t know jack-shit about high school girls.” King’s wife, poet and novelist Tabitha King, famously fished the pages out of the bin and, like a benign Lady Macbeth encouraging her husband to “screw your courage to the sticking place,” told her husband to finish writing because she wanted to know the rest of the story. The result was King’s first published novel and literary history.

Margaret Atwood calls horror “the most literary of forms, especially when it comes to the supernatural, which must perforce be inspired by already existing tales,” and King seasons his writing with Shakespearean allusions with the same easy familiarity he references rock and roll songs or his beloved New England sports teams. In Carrie alone, King defines a popular couple as “the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet” of their high school, and describes Carrie as “unaware that she was scrubbing her bloody hands against her dress like Lady Macbeth.” Another character observes “dolefully” that “Macbeth hath murdered sleep and Carrie hath murdered time.” As a former English major and high school English teacher, King knows well the tradition he’s working in, and in Danse Macabre, his non-fiction analysis of the roots of horror fiction, he writes that “Modern horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.” The modern horror novel is probably the closest thing we have to classical tragedy, stories that serve as (hopefully entertaining) cautionary tales.

Yet King, like Shakespeare, also transcends genres. Though one doesn’t think of King as a romantic author – and I confess to being moved to tears by several of his books, notably The Dead Zone and 11/22/63 – his novel Wizard and Glass, the fourth book in his Dark Tower series, opens with a 10-line epigraph from Romeo and Juliet, the most direct evocation of that play’s tragic romance in any of his novels. Arguably King’s most classically Shakespearean epic, Wizard and Glass is a page-turning tale that combines gallant knights (or “gunslingers,” in King’s parlance), evil witches, noble quests, fools who tell truth to power, a character described as “more sinned against than sinning” (a direct but unattributed quote from King Lear), and a Hamlet-like duplicitous royal love triangle that also leaves the protagonist’s mother dead by tragic accident. It could well be these echoes of Shakespeare that explain why an NPR survey of its listeners singled out Wizard and Glass as one of King’s best books.

Of course, Juliet and Carrie are not the only young protagonists Shakespeare and King wrote about. “I love writing about kids,” King told the hosts of The Losers Club podcast in 2022, and one imagines Shakespeare felt the same way. Shakespeare had as much fondness for rebellious daughters — in addition to Juliet, think of Helena, Desdemona, Rosalind, Cordelia, Jessica, and Kate Baptista — as King has for supernaturally resourceful children Danny Torrance in The Shining, Mark Petrie in ‘Salem’s Lot, Charlie McGee in Firestarter, Jake Chambers in the Dark Tower series, Jack Sawyer in The Talisman, Abra Stone in Doctor Sleep, the seven kids who tangle with Pennywise the Clown in It, and more recently, Charlie Reade in Fairy Tale and the talented children subjected to experiments and torture in The Institute.

Shakespeare and King also refuse to treat their young characters sentimentally. Shakespeare’s Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, Macduff’s son in Macbeth, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Arthur in King John, the doomed young princes in Richard III, and King’s Ralphie Glick in ‘Salem’s Lot, Georgie Denbrough in It, and Bradley Trevor in Doctor Sleep — among many other examples — all suffer horrible fates we wouldn’t wish on grown-ups, let alone children. Both Shakespeare and King play for keeps.

Stephen King is not doing anything so literal as turning Shakespeare into novels, though others have; Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies, included in this blog’s Summer Reading series, repurposed Romeo and Juliet into a love story between a still-living “Julie” and an undead boy named “R.” Both Marion’s novel and its 2013 film adaptation reinvented the rules of the zombie genre established by Night of the Living Dead’s creator George A. Romero, but the title Warm Bodies represents a major missed opportunity. I mean, come on… Romero & Juliet was just sitting there!