Romeo Y Julieta

Liliana Osuna
Professor Shelley Orr
THEA 406-A
November 8, 2012
Shakespeare on Stage and Screen

Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous plays all around the world made by William Shakespeare. Nowadays, we can find a lot of Shakespeare’s plays that had been converted to film. Some examples include Otelo, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, As you like it, The Tempest, Titus, 10 things I Hateabout You inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, among other. The film that I choose to discuss in this essay is the screen adaptation of Romeo and Juliet made on 1996 called Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes. This film is not the only one made of this tragic play. There are more than 50 screen adaptations of this play including television and film.According to Miranda Giles of “Shakespeare vs. $hakespeare,
“Luhrmann and Shakespeare made a successful team because they both employed a wide range of tactics to seduce their audiences. Shakespeare’s work is still popular for its fantastical, often gruesome plots, daring special effects, and stunning language. These elements form an amalgamation of high and low culture that is reflected fittingly ina modern setting where the same mixed audience can be reached in a movie theatre with the application of the same formula.”(Giles 16-17)
Romeo and Juliet negotiates a relationship between contemporary cinema and the early modern English theatre, because three main topics. The first relation that they have is the language that the characters used in the original play and the film. The way thecharacters talked and expressed in film has change in a certain way from the original play, but never losing the true sense of the story. Also, another important relation that they had is tragedy and love. Tragedy is an important element that appears in the contemporary cinema when people watched screen adaptations from Shakespeare plays. But in the film Romeo + Juliet they adapted tragedy andlove for the new generation. Finally, the social classes and culture are important in this film. The director of this film Baz Luhrmann, really wanted to make emphasis on the representation of a distinguished social class in our society, same as Shakespeare did in the original play.
A unique characteristic of Shakespeare is the language that he used in his plays. He uses Elizabethan, but we needto remember that Elizabethan have the same principles as Modern English. For our generation, is hard to understand a Shakespeare play without having a translation made. Nowadays, is easier to understand Shakespeare plays, because online translators had been made, dictionaries, and the most important is that most of the plays have been modify into modern English. A scholar named Miranda Giles fromBrigham Young University made an article called “Cultural and the Canon in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet: Shakespeare vs. $hakespeare” were she mentions that,
“Linguistic capital is the value we place on the words in and around $hakespeare. The fact that we can’t understand his verbiage one hundred percent of the time only adds to his mystery and our feeling of unworthiness as we cower beforehis genius.” (Giles 17)
Even though that the film Romeo + Juliet is a contemporary film, the director decided to use the same language as the play. Personally, it was weird to watch the actors talking as they were in other time period. I believe that Luhrmann decided to leave the original dialog, in order that the audience could relate to Shakespeare, and his way of thinking. Going back inhistory, in the time period of Shakespeare; many changes were made in language. From the article The Language of Shakespeare”, written by David Crystal, he argues that,
“Early Modern English was a period of extraordinarily dynamic change. The consequences of the Renaissance were sweeping through the language, and causing not a little consternation among people unsure on how they should react to the...