As the most-filmed of all plays, Romeo and Juliet serves as an example of how cinematic interpreters of Shakespeare have become more liberal over time. The play itself, with its universal themes of passionate youth, the destructiveness of feuds and doomed romantic fatalism, remains uniquely adaptable for any time period. In fact, the story was

	The Bard's Playhouse
	When audiences first sat down to watch Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing at the end of the sixteenth century, the crowd surrounding the stage was likely a mix of classes, from the upper crust to the lowest peasants. However, along with the mix of economic classes in the audience came a mix of seating choices. The less privileged members of the audience paid a penny each for admittance to the ground surrounding the stage--hence, their distinction as the "groundlings". A penny more bought admittance to the galleries looking down on the stage from the sides, and higher galleries yet with better views cost even more.

long-established even when Shakespeare wrote it in 1594 or 1595--he was adapting the earlier Italian tale The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet. Despite its Italian setting, the play's language, attitudes and customs are generally English, and the actors wore contemporary English clothing.

The themes are also very much of their time. The play champions the sixteenth-century belief that true love always strikes at first sight. Shakespeare's moderate values come into play, as always, with his insistence that the lovers not consummate until after they are married in the eyes of the church and the law. In addition, the young people rebel, but only in service of the greater good: they want to be true to their love and their God, but are not allowed to do so under the constraints of their corrupted families.

Even though many of these themes seem tied to sixteenth-century belief systems, and therefore less marketable to a modern-day audience, the plot, which was experimental even at the time of its writing, has several timeless themes. That combined with the fact that Shakespeare himself departed from several long-standing conventions in the play's production, help justify many of the risks directors have taken in adapting Romeo and Juliet.

For one thing, Shakespeare lowered Juliet's age from 16 to just under 14, possibly because he was limited to using boy actors to play the female parts. He also highlighted the violent dueling, in deference to Queen Elizabeth's distaste for feuding. Additionally, the play took a controversial stand against arranged marriages, the norm in 1595, and championed the headstrong kids over the bullying, unthinking parents. Finally, Juliet represents a step forward for stage heroines: she is strong, intelligent and completely equal to Romeo in courage and passion--a theme that was reinforced in Luhrmann's adaptation.

Modernizing Shakespeare's themes
Romeo and Juliet also lends itself to modernized, marketable film adaptations because of many of the innovative themes presented throughout the play, which include love vs. hate, light vs.

	Discussion
	Do you think Shakespeare's works should be adapted to cater to a younger audience? Or should teens be encouraged to appreciate his plays in their original form?

dark, age vs. youth, and fate vs. determinism. Even--or perhaps especially--in its time, sex played a central role in the text. Elizabethan attitudes toward sex were far more open-minded than the succeeding Victorian ideal of purity. Allusions to Romeo and Juliet's passion abound, as in the character of the nurse, the bawdy old lady who revels in sex and sympathizes with young lovers. Her very first words are about sex, referring to the fact that the last time she was a virgin she was twelve.

Other central themes, made much of in more recent adaptations, include violence (the swordplay that Elizabethan audiences adored); religion; and the integrity of youth (Romeo rebukes the Friar for being old, just as Juliet earlier rebukes her nurse). With these up-to-date topics, combined with the beautiful language and suspenseful plot, it becomes clear why the play remains a favorite over the ages.

After director George Cukor's unpopular attempt to bring the lovers to the screen in 1936, it wasn't until 1954 that the story was tackled again. That year, Renato Castellani produced a visually opulent version that made the most of the screen's contemporary youth rebellion, embodied by James Dean. By using young actors for the first time to portray the petulant, young characters, he remained true both to the spirit of the play and the mid-'50s climate. In 1968, Franco Zeffirelli remade the story, this time for the children of the Summer of Love, as the summer of 1967 was called. In this adaptation, Zeffirelli charmed his young demographic by leaning heavily on the play's generation-gap theme, paring down the text and highlighting the sensuality. According to Brode, with this film Zeffirelli "established an approach to cinematic Shakespeare that has been accepted as the norm ever since."

Baz Luhrmann's teen audience
Baz Luhrmann's 1995 fever-pitched, drug-fueled take on Romeo and Juliet heralded the beginning of the teen Shakespeare fad. It also marked one of the most audacious approaches to Shakespeare to date, infusing the classic story and language with hip-hop, gangsta violence and music-video flash. The film succeeded in drawing a large, young audience, but critics were divided in their reactions, which ranged from admiration to disgust.

	Baz Luhrmann
	Born in New South Wales, Australia, in 1962, Bazmark (Baz) Anthony Luhrmann became renowned for his unique filmmaking style with his first three major movies as a director, collectively known as the "Red Curtain" trilogy. Describing his approach to the making of Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann says that his style is one that "comprises several distinct storytelling choices. A simple, even naive story based on a primary myth is set in a heightened or created world that is at once familiar yet exotic, distant." "Each of the 'Red Curtain' trilogy has a device which awakens the audience to the experience and the storyteller's presence," Luhrmann continues, "encouraging them to be constantly aware that they are in fact watching a film. In Strictly Ballroom dance is the device, the actors literally dance out the scenes. In Romeo+ Juliet it is Shakespeare's heightened 400-year-old language. In Moulin Rouge, our ultimate 'Red Curtain' gesture, music and song is the device that releases us from a naturalistic world."

In the end, however, Luhrmann has given us what is perhaps the most faithful of all film versions of Romeo and Juliet, in keeping with the spirit of both the play and Shakespeare himself. This movie, as Shakespeare intended, is independent, anti-authority, rebellious, populist and about the impetuousness of youth. The bravado and radicalism of Luhrmann's frenetic editing, sumptuous art direction and slapstick humor revolt against authority and prudence as much as do Romeo and Juliet themselves.

In fact, Luhrmann has declared that he wanted to direct the movie as Shakespeare would have if he had been a film director. His aim was to make the film completely palatable to young viewers renowned for their short attention spans and desire to be dazzled. To this end, he outfitted his characters in gaudy rock-and-roll leather-and-lace duds, transported them to seedy "Verona Beach" and piled the mise-en-scene high with Catholic imagery, drenched colors and punk iconography. Luhrmann's shooting notes use terms like "macro slam zoom" and "distorted out-of-focus close-up," extreme angles and camera movements meant to lend the film an almost manic energy. The soundtrack swells with rap, rock and the occasional classical refrain. The film is loud, lurid, ironic and in-your-face; in short, it's got a quintessentially teenaged attitude.

Using a script similar to Zeffirelli's, Luhrmann snipped the dialogue even further, intercutting some scenes and assigning bits of dialogue to characters for whom it wasn't originally intended. As a result, much of the sixteenth-century poetry is lost, but the plot remains intact. Although this appalled many critics, many other scholars have pointed out that Shakespeare meant for his text to be used as a starting ground for his stories, rather than a static script.

Every aspect is boldly re-imagined: the family feud becomes a turf war; the Capulet party, a club scene; Verona, a brutal police state. The casting was equally daring, with well-known stars who were almost as young as the characters were meant to be. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes recite their lines in their natural American accents, using modern inflection, while the diverse, non-classically trained cast either stumble over the language or perform it seamlessly.

While critiques ranged from "breathtakingly alive" to "obvious and stupid," most reviewers agreed that the love scenes were handled with a restraint that's missing in the rest of the film. The scenes in which Romeo and Juliet meet, fall in love, declare their devotion and, finally, die in each other's arms, retain much of the original dialogue and abstain from the machine-gun editing pace. As a result, the love story in essence rises above the din, rendering it as sweet and poignant as the playwright could have imagined.

Differences abound, however, between the original and the wildly energetic remake. In the play, sex is a natural extension of love, especially young love. It's more naughty than dirty, even when it's being joked about. Here, sex is polarized--it's either tawdry (like the prostitutes who line the beach) or so chaste that it isn't even shown (instead, the lovers cavort among bedclothes like puppies in a basket).

Another major departure from the source occurs in the final scene, in which Juliet wakes before Romeo dies--if Romeo had just turned around before drinking the poison; if Juliet only had cried out in time. The heightened sense of doomed tragedy that this change adds makes the ending more heartbreaking and ever more cynical.

A crucial final difference is that Luhrmann never shows the families reuniting. In the play, Capulet and Montague agree to end their feud; in the Zeffirelli film, the families converge visually. In the 1996 version, however, the parents have been relegated to the background all the way through, brought in only to reinforce their short-sighted authoritarianism. To keep the ending unresolved cleaves true to a late-'90s reality of family breakdowns, gang wars and international strife.

The next session will concentrate on a close analysis of the balcony scene in order to examine how the film changes a specific scene to fit the film's frantic style and streamlined dialogue.