Romeo and Juliet

Charles Gounod’s 19th-century opera “Roméo et Juliette” is a love story of heartbreaking tragedy, punctuated by four masterful duets. Matthew Shilvock of San Francisco Opera explains why the work is such a masterpiece.

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…

Read an excerpt from “The Girl on the Balcony: Olivia Hussey Finds Life After Romeo and Juliet,” a memoir by the star of Franco Zeffirelli’s classic film.

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…

Artist Paul Glenshaw describes Romeo, Juliet, and the Nurse, poised at a key moment in his drawing of “Romeo and Juliet” from a Folger bas-relief.

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…

The Q Brothers are back at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival this summer with I Heart Juliet, a hip-hop adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

Listening to students speaking Shakespeare is certainly my favorite part of teaching Shakespeare, but I also love watching them play games. We’ve often ended a semester with Shakespeare-based games. (Perfect for this sunny time of year!) Student favorites have been…

I teach high school English in St. Louis, Missouri, just miles from Ferguson, Missouri. Three years ago, after the Black Lives Matter movement started, I tried to bring the conversation about power and injustice into my classroom with the classics.…

At the start of our Romeo and Juliet unit, I had my students begin a Digital Shakespeare Portfolio: a blog account that would house all of their annotations, as well as a place to discuss their thoughts on the interactive…

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,…