Juliet, Then and Now, with Sophie Duncan

Was Romeo and Juliet your first brush with Shakespeare? Whether it was on stage, on screen in films by Franco Zeffirelli or Baz Luhrmann or Shonda Rhimes’ Still Star-Crossed, or in the pages of the Folger Shakespeare edition, your early experience probably shaped how you see Juliet. Over 400 years, our thinking about Shakespeare’s first tragic heroine has shifted repeatedly, revealing as much about us as it does Shakespeare’s play.

Oxford professor Sophie Duncan, Shakespeare scholar and author of Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine, talks with us about the enduring legacy of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters. She touches on Juliet’s cultural impact, why Shakespeare may have centered his tragedy around a young woman, and how different eras, particularly the Victorian period, have grappled with Juliet’s rebellious and passionate nature, often reshaping her character to fit their values. Her insights into why Juliet remains a potent symbol of love and tragedy who continues to captivates audiences 400 years after first appearing on stage will have you reconsidering Juliet. 

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Sophie Duncan is Research Fellow and Dean for Welfare at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. She writes about Shakespeare and gender and has worked extensively in theater and television as a historical advisor. She is the author of several books, including Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine and Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle. She was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and now lives in Oxford, UK.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 27, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

Was Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film Romeo and Juliet your first brush with Shakespeare? It was for me. And I thought the young actress Olivia Hussey was the ultimate Juliet!

[Clip from Franco Zeffirelli’s, 1968 film Romeo and Juliet. Olivia Hussey as Juliet.]

JULIET: Romeo, doff thy name, and for that name which is no part of thee, take all myself.

BOGAEV:  Now it turns out the play is having a bit of a moment. There are sparkly new productions in London, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC.  And there’s also & Juliet still rollicking along on Broadway. But just like the title of that musical suggests, Romeo definitely takes second billing these days.

So it seems like a good time to check in with Juliet. Oxford professor Sophie Duncan has written the book on her. It’s called Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine. And Sophie Duncan joins me now.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Sophie, it’s really great to talk with you.

SOPHIE DUNCAN: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here.

BOGAEV: I’m so excited to talk about love, or at least, about Juliet today. I’m kind of starting at the end with this conversation because while I was reading your book I was reminded of another guest we had on the podcast, Katherina Scheil. She wrote the book Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife, which was basically—I think you know it, it was basically about—

DUNCAN: Yes, yes. Wonderful book.

BOGAEV: Yes, it’s wonderful.

BOGAEV: And it’s about how imaginings of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, reflected whatever conflict or controversy about women was going on at the time. That she functions as a kind of mirror or a proxy for society’s preoccupations. And it made me want to ask you, right at the top, whether Juliet performs a similar function?

DUNCAN: Definitely. I think one of the reasons Juliet goes on being such a potent avatar of romance for all kinds of societies and cultures and people is because she has two experiences that most people experience too, which is being an adolescent, being a teenager, and the experience of first love. We’re all very invested in first love—perhaps the more the further we get from it—and it’s something on which, however your perspective changes, people retain a fierce conviction about.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it’s very intoxicating. And it’s interesting that you point out right at the beginning of the book that nothing in Shakespeare’s plays before Romeo and Juliet indicates that he would write a play starring a young woman. She stands out so much from his other female characters. How did he then come to write about a young woman?

DUNCAN: Yes, it was something that when I came to research the book really leapt out at me. If we think of Shakespeare before Romeo and Juliet, this is a man who is making his name writing big chronicle histories— English histories, the occasional Roman play.

Then, if anything, in the last couple of years before he comes to Romeo and Juliet, there’s a trajectory of comedies in which rebarbative women and slightly more demure counterparts—if we think of Rosaline and the Princess in Love’s Labor’s Lost, or Adriana, Luciana, her sister, in Comedy of Errors, or Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—he’s interested in these pairings of comic women. But there’s nothing to suggest that he will suddenly swerve and write a new kind of tragedy which isn’t about kings and emperors and change of state but which is about two families, a feud, and a number of extremely difficult adolescents.

BOGAEV: We can’t know exactly why Shakespeare did anything. But I’m going to ask you anyway why did he turn to this story then?

DUNCAN: Yes, I mean, if I could—well, obviously, if I could be in the room with Shakespeare, there are a number of questions I’d like to put to him—

BOGAEV: Go ahead, this is great.

DUNCAN: One of them is the swerve. Why? Because it was working well for him, you know, he was doing very well in the types of plays that he was writing before Romeo and Juliet.

But if we kind of work backwards and look at those comic plays in the run-up to Romeo and Juliet he does give larger and larger scope to his boy actors in these female roles. I think he saw something or he realized the potential of at least one of those boy actors to carry a tragic heroine of a kind he hadn’t written before.

BOGAEV: You describe this as a Shakespeare swerve into Romeo and Juliet but then you point out a kind of continuity that you see, which is summed up I think, in this one sentence you write that, “Romeo and Juliet is a play about what happens when Hermia stays.” So unpack that for us, please, if you could.

DUNCAN:  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we have Hermia and Lysander who are young lovers whose marriage is opposed by Hermia’s father and they decide to run away, which is a great comic gesture of Shakespearean survival. Generally, if you run away in Shakespeare it signals you’re in a comedy and ultimately you will get your man or your woman.

It is something Juliet suggests when she’s up on the balcony—which, of course, isn’t actually a balcony—she suggests very early on, you know, one of them needs to give up their family and align with the other lord or she says, “All my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay and follow thee my lord throughout the world” so her plan is, “We’ll go.” But they don’t, and thus, seize tragedy out of the jaws of comedy, I suppose.

BOGAEV: But the other element is that Shakespeare was working from ancient origins of another plot of lovers defying unreasonable parents. Remind us of the source material.

DUNCAN: So I’m going to take you back to medieval Siena, which is the first time a version of this legend turns up. Not Verona at all. But by the 1400s and 1500s, this has become a cherished legend of Verona, and it is treated as historical fact. There are plenty of 16^th-century Italian sources that speak perfectly calmly of the existence of a Juliet and her Romeo, and the basic ingredients of the story are there.

But for Shakespeare, the first place he would likely have encountered it in English is in Arthur Brooke’s long poem about Romaeus and Juliet. And again, many of the ingredients of the tragedy are there, but there’s one big difference and that’s one of attitude. Arthur Brooke blames the kids. They deserve what they get because they are disobedient. They don’t listen to their parents, and they’re Catholic.

BOGAEV: So it’s kind of a slut shaming story?

DUNCAN: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good way of putting it: kind of slut shaming and Catholic shaming. And he is very, very down on them all the way through. What you get actually are two quite wimpy lovers who spend a lot of time crying and fainting. With Shakespeare’s play, though, there is infinite compassion for the young lovers and very clearly apportioned blame to the parents.

BOGAEV: So that’s… is that Shakespeare’s real departure from the source material? Or is it Juliet; how he characterizes her?

DUNCAN: The attitude of compassion and the blame placed on the parents is very striking. Unlike in the play, which happens incredibly quickly, you know, from curtain up to everyone’s dead. With Brooke, the lover’s secret marriage carries on for a long time and reaches a kind of natural crisis when Juliet becomes pregnant. One of the effects of really truncating the timeline in the play is how much more active and urgent Juliet seems.

She’s also, of course, younger. Another change Shakespeare makes is to make her 13. In all the various versions of the legend and the story, he’s the only one who makes her 13. Everybody else is either vague or specifies 15 or 16.

BOGAEV: Why? Why did he make her so young? What did people in Shakespeare’s audience think about that?

DUNCAN: I think because of… generally we come to our history of the period through the lives of monarchs in the aristocracy. Perfectly understandably, people often think that marrying your daughter off at 13 is a kind of normal thing to do, and actually, mercifully I think, it’s not the case.

I think the play really does spell out that this is an extraordinary thing which is happening. Near the start of the play, Lord Capulet, Juliet’s father, is offered a very attractive marriage proposal from Paris. He’s hugely eligible, he’s kinsman to the prince. But even though—perhaps because we learn that Capulet married Lady Capulet when she was even younger than Juliet—Capulet wants the marriage delayed. He thinks, you know, “We need to wait at least two years before Juliet’s old enough to be married.”

I think by Shakespeare making Juliet so much younger, only 13 years old, he increases the culpability of her parents—in knowing so little about what’s going on with her and in being ready in sort of sleep-deprived, grief-stricken expedience to go, “Actually, yeah, marry Paris, this is good.” when the players previously set up just how dangerous and rash that is.

BOGAEV: It also gives you a little more sympathy towards the father than the mother because he’s the one who brings up the age difference.

DUNCAN: That’s true. Whereas—you’re quite right. Lady Capulet says when she’s springing on her daughter, you know, “We’re just getting ready for the party. How do you feel about getting married?” She says, “You know, I was your mother much upon these years that now you are a maid.” So we’re talking about a Lady Capulet, who in kind of numerical terms is only about 25, and she thinks this is fine, this is fine and good.

At the same time, though, perhaps I think it makes what Lord Capulet does worse. Because this is a man who, in the early parts of the play, recognizes that marriage at 13 is dangerous and unacceptable, but when the chips are down is ready to make—as he says—a desperate tender of his daughter’s love to consolidate his political position.

BOGAEV: That’s true. It does. All of this, really now I see it, raises all the dramatic stakes.

DUNCAN: I think, for the audience, would have made it all the more appalling because these are children, you know? These are unquestionably children. Marriage is for grownups. It is something where the man should be able to command his estate, run a business; the wife should be able to manage the servants and the children. And these are babies. They are not equipped to do any of these things. For an Elizabethan parent, the plot of Romeo and Juliet would be your worst nightmare. It’s one of those, you know, “Do you know where your child is?” posters.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it has a lot of forward momentum for them, a lot of suspense and horror. I love how you describe how popular Romeo and Juliet was in Shakespeare’s time. Apparently, Juliet inspired immediate fan fiction back then. Like what?

DUNCAN: Oh yes. There are some, you know—and I’m all for people writing whatever they want, you know, don’t get me wrong. I think, “Fab. You go with it.”—but there are some really crashing poems about Juliet.

One of the ways we know that the play is so successful is because other playwrights start imitating it and sneering at it and talking about people speaking, “Not but pure Juliet and Romeo.” I think that’s lovely.

BOGAEV: By the way, you have some great chapter titles and one of them is called “Everybody Loves a Dead Girl.”

DUNCAN: Oh well thank you very much, I enjoyed writing it.

BOGAEV: I don’t even think I have to ask you these questions. I think everyone knows where we’re going now. But you start this chapter by pointing out how everyone makes Juliet’s dead body into a sex object. Of course you’re referring to all of the television and movies we watch now that are so much about a dead female victim. In terms of turning Juliet’s dead body into a sex object, who does this besides Romeo? Romeo and who else?

DUNCAN: Romeo, Paris, her dad. They’re all at it. You know, men in this play look at Juliet’s corpse lying in the bed and they do need to comment on how sexy she is. All of them share this anxiety that what has happened to her, that as they think death has come to her that that is essentially a sexual act, really that death has got there first, flower as she was deflowered by death.

We can unpick this in a historical and high-minded way about images of death and the maiden and plays on the idea—you know, the word consummation, Hamlet talks about, “A consummation devoutly to be wished.”

There is also, I think, just a tremendous eroticization of the passive, unspoiled, unstained, aestheticized, dead girl, who remains forever young, forever beautiful. As far as Paris and Lord Capulet are concerned, they think they’re looking at a dead virgin whereas, of course, actually they’re looking at a married woman who has had sex with her husband. For Romeo, Romeo intends to kill himself and lie dead with Juliet. But the metaphor for which he reaches is that because he thinks that death is keeping her to be his paramour he needs to be dead and with Juliet to prevent that happening.

BOGAEV: Of course, the nightmare of this trope is that when a girl is dead she can be loved forever.

DUNCAN: Yes, and in researching the book… I mean, I went into this with fairly firm sense of the ubiquity of the beautiful dead girl trope, partly as the result of an adolescence reading a lot of Wuthering Heights, a lot of Edgar Allan Poe, I’m a fully paid-up member of the gothic literature club. But even so, I found, as the centuries progress, one of the things that kind of sticks to the text of Romeo and Juliet is a massive funeral sequence for Juliet that lets us go on looking at her sexy dead body for longer.

And the slow transposition of Juliet’s grave into a bed. If you think of the Baz Luhrmann film from 1996, Romeo + Juliet, that really takes it all the way. Juliet’s grave is just a pretty, white, flouncy, kind of, American Girl doll bed at the front of a church on which she and very pretty Leonardo DiCaprio can lie forever.

BOGAEV: I want to get to the funeral part of your story. That involves David Garrick ,who was Georgian England’s most celebrated actor and he’s also credited with creating the Shakespeare industry with his Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, but before that, he staged Romeo and Juliet himself. You write that he changed the play in a couple of crucial ways. Tell us how.

DUNCAN: Garrick was tremendous for Shakespeare and for Romeo and Juliet. He was quite a free adapter of the plays. He brings them into the era of sensibility. When you look through the Restoration and the 17th and the early 18th century, admiration for Shakespeare is growing but there is a kind of regret that he’s a bit too coarse, a bit too Tudor and Stuart. Garrick tidies all that up and he introduces two innovations that, even though we have since returned to Shakespeare’s text rather than Garrick’s adaptations, there are two things we liked enough to keep: one of them is the balcony…

BOGAEV: Right, she didn’t have a balcony.

DUNCAN: Yeah, she didn’t have a balcony—

BOGAEV: She had a window.

DUNCAN: She had a window. She is just above. Because in England, we didn’t know about balconies, we hadn’t got the memo in the 1590s. There’s a wonderful 1611 travel guide by a man called Thomas Coryat who’s been to Italy and comes back and says, “They’ve got these marvelous things they call balconies. They’re a bit like a terrace and they’re stuck on the side of the wall.” But by the 18th century, we’re big on balconies and Italian architecture so Garrick pops Juliet on one.

The other is a big, beautiful funeral sequence. Funerals were big business in Georgian England, although there was controversy about the propriety and the Catholic tendencies of an elaborate funeral. But on stage, as with many other things, we can enjoy them guilt free. There were new dirges. There were handmaidens, sort of, who would have been the bridesmaids if Juliet weren’t dead, who were scattering flowers. English audiences loved it. Europeans were perfectly legitimately slightly confused and thought it was a bit sacrilegious.

BOGAEV: But you write that there was an arms race of these added funeral scenes following this whole period. What was that about?

DUNCAN: There were. Throughout the period, whenever one production introduces an innovation by way of funeral motif, if you look at the playbills at the other house, a couple of nights later there’s more dirge, there’s more musicians, it’s bigger, it’s longer, it’s more Catholic, it’s more Gothic, and the audiences adore it.

I think that’s never really gone away. I can’t think of a film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that doesn’t give us some sort of funereal, quite gothic spectacle to enjoy.

BOGAEV: I want to pick up on the how the Victorians dealt with Shakespeare. One thing you look at is that they look to Shakespeare as a guide for young girls, that they should model, that young girls should model themselves on Shakespearean heroines. But surely not Juliet. I mean she is sexually adventurous and she’s rebellious. How did they deal with someone like her?

DUNCAN: Well, in typical Victorian fashion, poorly. They deal poorly. When it comes to role models for Victorian young women, there is a thriving industry of Shakespearean interpretation that produces fictional and non-fictional works making Shakespeare’s heroines into role models. There’s Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines that gives them backstories that are edifying or cautionary to the young reader.

But Juliet does present a problem for all the reasons you describe. There is, through the period, in some quarters, an aversion to this sexually frank, rebellious, romantic, passionate girl. How they deal with her, sometimes they just get really racist, which is always a reflex for the Victorians, and they say, “Well, it’s that she’s Italian. She is Southern. It’s her passionate, precocious Southern nature. which is, you know, a classic racializing technique.

BOGAEV: Oh wow, “She’s a Southern type.”

DUNCAN: She is a Southern type. It’s her Mediterranean blood. It’s something to do with the sun—which is adjacent to, reminiscent of the sexualizing of young women of color more generally, this idea that they mature sexually sooner—which, of course, distances Juliet from nice little Northern European girls.

There’s also, I think, concern about her because she seems to approach madness in the scene where she takes the poison, you know, when she begins to see visions of Tybalt and there’s a real Ophelia-in-embryo quality to her there. And yeah, she deceives her parents, she lies, and that is very difficult for some commentators to deal with. It’s a real mess for the Victorians.

BOGAEV: Well, we’ve arrived at Juliet as an opportunity to tell a same-sex love story, really, or hint at it, with the actress Charlotte Cushman in the role of Romeo. She really heated up the stage.

DUNCAN: She absolutely did. Charlotte Cushman is a—was a phenomenal 18th, sorry, 19th-century American actress who enjoyed huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. And was part of an artistic circle that was also a web of outrageous lesbian drama. She gave performances as Romeo of Romeo and Juliet which journalists were fascinated and astonished by and wrote often that, you know, there was no way she could get away with the amorous explicitness of her performances if she had been a man. There’s a fascinating sense throughout all the commentary on Cushman from her lifetime, that it’s her gender which simultaneously, you know, creates an astonishing same sex performance but perversely also makes that all right. It kind of licenses audience enjoyment of seeing two women play the lovers because the fact of it being two women means there couldn’t be anything in it.

BOGAEV: It’s so interesting. It’s like hiding in plain sight, really, because you write her first Juliet was her sister so that was one thing—and I’m sure there was some kind of frisson because now we’re introducing incest into this—but after that run, many of her Juliets were her lovers.

DUNCAN: They were. There were plenty of women in the audience who very much wanted to be her Juliet. I think it’s fascinating that there was this episode long before people were writing explicitly same-sex adaptations—because, naturally enough, it’s a story which has lent itself to queer adaptation—there is this moment where the great heterosexual love story of Western romance becomes an opportunity for women to go to the theater and see a relationship, as you say, visually, very obviously between two women unfold.

BOGAEV: I want to get to some more modern adaptations of Romeo and Juliet—film adaptations. Of course, in the Sixties there were two biggies: West Side Story and Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. You have this really interesting argument, that overall, what happens in this period is that adapters change Romeo and Juliet from a play about love to one about hate. That’s very clear in West Side Story, that it’s about it’s about ethnic racial strife, but explain the Zeffirelli to me. And why, why does this happen in the Sixties?

DUNCAN: I think one reason it happens specifically in Zeffirelli is because of West Side Story. West Side Story creates that blueprint of Romeo and Juliet as post-war-into-Cold War parable of disaffected teenage gang masculinity.

When we get to Zeffirelli, there is a sensibility which is still in the cinematography preoccupied with the powerful young male body and the violence, but, in really plain terms, what happens is that Juliet’s part gets cut. The moments where we see Juliet’s great, sort of, subjectivity in the play, when she is most intimate with us, the two great speeches which offer such opportunity for the actress, one being, “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” where she speaks so frankly and beguilingly and in such egalitarian terms of her desire for Romeo, and the other is her taking of the poison, both of those go. It’s hard to make the films about Juliet when she just doesn’t have very much to say.

BOGAEV: It’s true, and as you point out, this is Juliet’s play. But then they cut the part. I mean, even in Baz Luhrmann, Claire Danes doesn’t get the best lines either.

DUNCAN: Not at all. When you start to cut Juliet, you know, what are you left with? You’re left with a lot of boys.

BOGAEV: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I want to get to this other point that you make about these adaptations which is, as you pointed out before, that Shakespeare sets up the story as two families that are in a family feud for no reason at all. But in this period, it becomes about racial and economic schisms between families, it becomes a much more substantial conflict. Many directors continued to read it this way and to adapt it this way and you really take issue with this. Why?

DUNCAN: The first reason is because it’s just not in the text. All we’re told is that, you know, the feud is “bred of an airy word.” But these are families who share the same confessor, you know?, they attend the same church. Romeo and Juliet ought to be a highly eligible match.

For me, the problems which come with casting the play along racial or religious or ethnic lines—which I can understand because it gives you motivation, it gives actors a lot to work on and with, and there’s pertinence, you know? You can create immense social relevance, which for a lot of people is an important way into the play. So I have huge sympathy with it in that sense. But I think the problem there is, if you cast the play along the lines of a real life conflict—well, one thing it does is trivialize it because often those conflicts are deeply rooted and complex and aren’t “bred of an airy word.” There is real feeling behind them. In real life sociopolitics, they are highly unlikely to be solved by a couple of deaths because, if so, that would have happened long ago.

At the same time, as well, I think it encourages us to see the conflicts that get sort of reinscribed in that way on stage as inevitable—not our problem, fictional, a good story, entertainment.

One thing Shakespeare is really clear about is that these houses are alike in dignity. They’re of equal status. Often conflicts where there is perhaps quite a clear oppressor and oppressed, those differences get flattened out when you make them into Montagues and Capulets.

BOGAEV: I have to ask. You grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon. I’ve never met anyone who grew up there, and the first thing I thought when I read that was that I can see it going both ways, that either you become a Shakespeare scholar or you never want to hear about him again.

DUNCAN: No, quite, I suppose that would be possible—you could just want to devote yourself to, I don’t know, action movies and mime, just go really the other way. Obviously, I adore Shakespeare so I was very lucky.

I grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon because my parents met working for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Later on, when I was a student, I worked front of house there and I also worked at Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I think the best way to get to know and experience Shakespeare is young, in the theater, and regularly. That was possible for me.

BOGAEV: Does Romeo and Juliet come up a lot among the people that come to Stratford?

DUNCAN: Certainly. When I was working in Shakespeare’s Birthplace, I was a tour guide. At the end of the tour, when you got out into the gardens, there was a small troupe of actors and they would perform scenes on request. I mean, they were troupers. They put the troupe in trouper, these guys. They were fantastic.

Lots of people who come to Shakespeare’s Birthplace come on a pilgrimage knowing loads about Shakespeare. Lots of other people come to Shakespeare’s Birthplace as part of, you know, a bigger tour perhaps, and they might not know as much about Shakespeare, but they are equally welcome and they’re equally great. Whatever their background, the most requested scene was the balcony scene—whether they’d seen lots of Shakespeare, no Shakespeare, had lots of English, had no English.

I thought that’s interesting that this story, which is—you know, as we’ve touched on in this conversation, is about two very young people doing things that most parents would really not want them to do, and it ending incredibly quickly and incredibly badly, and that, that is the cornerstone of Western romance—that when people are standing in a very beautiful garden in Stratford-upon-Avon they say, “That, please. That’s what I want to see.”

BOGAEV: Well this explains why you also went to Verona for your research. One of the things that really sticks out in your description of your experience there is that there’s this huge banner ad right in the main courtyard in Verona that offers one night as Juliet which is so insane. I mean, one night, which night do you choose? The one where she commits suicide? The, you know, the… what?

DUNCAN: Indeed. In the courtyard of Juliet’s house in Verona, where you can go and stand on Juliet’s balcony and take a selfie as Juliet and all that sort of good stuff. It is now possible, I think, to get married on Juliet’s balcony. Is this the omen you want for your wedding? You know, start as you mean to go on.

But at the same time, when you get there—and as a Stratford girl, I have a very high tolerance for and love of literary turns—you do get swept up in it. You know, when you’re walking to Juliet’s tomb in Juliet’s church, eating a Juliet ciabatta which you can buy, you go for it. It is very heady and it is so beautiful.

BOGAEV: You also volunteered to answer some of these letters that people write to Juliet in Verona asking for love advice.

DUNCAN: I did. It’s quite a phenomenon that people from all over the world write in to Juliet Verona as an agony aunt. I spent a little time replying, and there’s much which is extremely lovely.

There’s many teenage gel pen letters with hearts over the eyes being like, “My life is over. My crush is moving to at least 45 minutes away. All is lost.”  Then there’s the genre where you just want to write back, “Leave him. Love, Juliet” but you have to pad it out.

But again, what comes through—and it may sound trite—but when you read these letters, is just the overwhelming desire for and hope in human connection. Writing to Juliet, she  becomes, for them, simultaneously a kind of mystical saint, you know, sort of a Santa Claus of romance, but also a friend.

People do feel that when they’ve read the play the person they know and respect and love is Juliet. Nobody’s writing to Romeo. Why would you write to Romeo? You know, the word Romeo has become a kind of pejorative, hasn’t it, for a sort of slightly ridiculous—

BOGAEV: Lothario or something.

DUNCAN: Yeah, kind of, but also like slightly rubbish, like a kind of sub-Casanova teenage boy.

BOGAEV: Kind of a nitwit.

It’s so interesting that people write to Juliet. I mean, we’re going back now to the beginning of our conversation, that everyone sees themselves or sees something different in her, that she’s a mirror back of whatever loneliness, or hope, or romanticism, or virtues they desire or embody. But you point out, you know, she’s the last person who could console anyone about love or anyone who’s heart sick because in the end, there’s just, she can’t rely on anyone. No one’s left beside her.

DUNCAN: She can’t at all, you’re quite right. The particular tragedy of her death is not just that a very young and brave and brilliant and passionately-in-love woman dies, but that she dies so alone. I had really thought about the play as a reunion of the lovers in death, but I don’t think that’s how Juliet experiences her death at all. That’s what I want to see on stage.

BOGAEV: You and me both. I hope we both do. Thank you so much for this and thank you for the book. I really feel like I rediscovered this play that I’ve seen so many times.

DUNCAN: Well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you very much, indeed. And thank you for having me.

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BOGAEV: Sophie Duncan’s book, Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine, is out now from Seal Press.

If you’re craving a live production of the play, and you live in the eastern US, you’re in luck:

Diane Paulus’s production for American Repertory Theater at Harvard runs from August 31 to October 6.

Raymond O. Caldwell’s production for Folger Theatre runs from October 1 to November 10.

Or try to snag tickets to the Broadway production directed by Sam Gold, with music by Jack Antonoff, which starts September 26.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had web production help from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, thank you! One of you recently sent us a sonnet you’d written—that was awesome! If you feel like writing something it doesn’t have to be a poem. Instead, you could leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice to help others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

The Folger’s campus on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, is open to the public. Come check out our brand-new gardens and exhibition halls—or take in a performance in our Tudor theater. You can find more information and plan your visit at our website, folger.edu.

Thank you so much for listening.