'All Are Punish'd!' The history and import of 'Romeo and Juliet'

By Brad Miner. I got an. A. although The word "plagiarism" comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper." I've known writers who've referred to a book or a poem or a play they've written as their "baby." And if somebody had pilfered their text, they'd have considered it tantamount to child abduction. The word, rendered as plagiary, didn't find its way into English until the beginning of the 17th century, specifically in 1601, when dramatist Ben Jonson (author of The Alchemist and Shakespeare's acquaintance and rival) first used it. It's rather like this exchange in Lewis Carroll: Alice: Well, I must say I've never heard it that way before. . . Caterpillar: I know, I have improved it. And it captures the attitude of writers in the 17th and earlier centuries. It wasn't so much that, say, William Shakespeare stole from Luigi da Porto (1485-1529), or Matteo Bandello (c. 1480-1562), or Arthur Brooke (d. 1563) - all of whom had written earlier versions of a tale of star-crossed lovers. It's that the Bard of Avon improved them all in his Romeo and Juliet. Da Porto's was first in 1524: Historia novellamente ritrovata di due giovani amanti ("Newly discovered story of two young lovers.) In 1554, Matteo Bandello - as with da Porto, a name never mentioned in my college Shakespeare classes - wrote his own novella based on da Porto's. It's unclear if it was Bandello's work that Shakespeare principally drew upon. (But thinking of Friar Lawrence in the Bard's version, note that Bandello was a Dominican friar - and a bishop of Agen in France!) Shakespeare was likely conversant in Italian. As Prof. Kent Cartwright - excerpted in the Folger Shakespeare Library article - writes: [Shakespeare] apparently learned Italian. . .in the mid-1590s, and he read sources in Italian for plays such as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. For Shakespeare and his countrymen, "the idea of Italy," as [scholar Michael] Wyatt puts it, "took on a life of its own." But Shakespeare also had access to English translations of Bishop Bandello made by William Painter (d. 1595) and, more especially, the narrative poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke (1562). I never tire of reminding myself and, therefore, of boring others with the fact that during this time, England was Catholic, Protestant, Catholic again, and finally Protestant in the space of a bit more than a quarter-century. It was a period of destabilization and violence. But it was also an era of great creativity. And at the end of the chain begun by Luigi da Porto, we have Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1597). Hamlet usually tops a list of "Shakespeare's Greatest Tragedies," which is fine. In college, I wrote an essay suggesting that the Prince of Denmark was a kind of existentialist Christ figure. I got an. A. although that was for effort and not because the professor thought I'd proved the point. (I wasn't a Roman Catholic then, or I might have.) In March, my wife and I will see Denzel Washington in Othello on Broadway (with Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago), and one could argue that the great tale of jealousy deserves consideration as Shakespeare's best. The Greatest Writer in the English Language was at his best writing tragedy. I'm not going to suggest that Romeo and Juliet ranks above the aforementioned plays, or King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, et alia. But I think the case may be made that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare's most influential play. This is because it's the most read and often the first read Shakespeare play by impressionable students. And it is the most-taught, most-performed play in American high schools by far. Scholar Jonathan Burton, writing on the Whittier College website, says, "No play is taught more frequently than Romeo and Juliet, which appears in roughly 93% of all ninth-grade classes." I believe it. If "To be or not to be" is the most quoted line from Shakespeare, "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" can't be far behind - even if...