Romeo and Juliet

Discover how our perceptions of Juliet have evolved over centuries, as Sophie Duncan explores the lasting legacy of Shakespeare’s first tragic heroine.

Hit musical & Juliet combines Romeo and Juliet with the songs of pop hitmaker Max Martin. Its writer, Schitt’s Creek writer and executive producer David West Read, tells us about how the idea came to him while he was concussed.

Theater artists José Cruz González and David Lozano, authors of “On Making Shakespeare Relevant to Latinx Communities” in the book Shakespeare and Latinidad, talk with us about adapting and translating Shakespeare, performing and directing it in ways that make it relevant to Latinx audiences, and whether the Bard has a place at theater companies working to carve out a space for Latinx voices.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 165 The National Theatre’s new production of Romeo & Juliet was meant to premiere in the summer of 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Simon Godwin, the production’s director, was tasked with turning it into a…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 152 Charlotte Cushman was one of the most famous American theater artists of the mid-19th century. And while she was known for her Lady Macbeth and Oliver Twist’s Nancy, she was acclaimed for her performances as Romeo…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 115 In a novel just released in the US, author and longtime BBC radio host Simon Mayo tells an amazing—but true—story: that England’s first all-black production of Romeo and Juliet was staged by Black American prisoners of…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 113 Olivia Hussey was just fifteen when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in Romeo and Juliet. When the film was released in October 1968, it catapulted Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the young actor playing Romeo, to global stardom. For…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 80 Without a doubt, American composer Leonard Bernstein’s most significant contribution to the world of Shakespeare was West Side Story, the 1957 smash Broadway hit adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written and created by Jerome Robbins, Arthur…

For nearly a century, people have been sending letters asking for advice on love and romance to Verona, Italy. The letters were all addressed to Juliet. Glenn Dixon tells us about the volunteers today, called Juliet’s secretaries, who answer these letters.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 62 While print sales of adult fiction are down in the last decade, the juvenile market – which includes YA – has actually gone up 40 percent. In this episode, two YA authors talk about their writing,…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 60 How does Shakespeare portray girls and girlhood in his plays, and what do those portrayals tell us about life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England? Our guest for this Shakespeare Unlimited episode, Deanne Williams of York University…

Charlotte Cushman was a 19th-century theatrical icon, so famous and beloved that, like Beyoncé today, newspapers called her by just her first name. But her fame wasn’t for conventionally Victorian feminine portrayals.