January 30

1595, 1937
1595. The first performance of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".

Like so many of his plays, "Romeo and Juliet" was his version of an already existing drama, adapted to meet the expectations of an English audience that was mixed between the aristocracy and the urban peasantry. From the Italian commedia dell’arte he borrowed plots for "The Merchant of Venice", "The Tempest", "Two Gentlemen of Verona", "Othello", "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Comedy of Errors". For "Romeo and Juliet" his source of sources was a novella by Masuccio Salernitano, which had been reworked at least twice before Shakespeare had a go at it; the first time as "Giulietta e Romeo" or "Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti" by Luigi da Porto (1485-1529); the second time as "Giuletta e Romeo" by Matteo Bandello (1485-1561). Salernitano's text does not specifically locate the tale in place, and his lovers are named Mariotto e Ganozza; both da Porto and Bandello did locate it, in the city of Verona, in the region of Venice.

The Italian connection should not surprise us. English theatre did not meaningfully exist before Shakespeare's time, and when it did it took its cue from the commedia dell’arte. A significant number of English intellectuals and artists went to Italy to complete their education, but there was also a sizeable Italian community in London, precisely in that area around Great Bartholomew's where Shakespeare lived and worked. Two of those Italians had significant personal connections with him: John Florio, the compiler of the first Italian-English dictionary, and more importantly the translator of Montaigne into English; and Emilia Bassano, the wife of Alfonso Bassano, head of the Bassano family, a company of Venetian theatre artists who were in residence at the court of Queen Elizabeth.

John Florio was a scholar, educator, translator and poet, who wrote his poetry in English and Latin as well as in Italian, and contributed more than a thousand words to the English language (click here). He so impressed Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, that he unceremoniously transferred his patronage to Florio, depriving Shakespeare of his stipend. Not that this diminished the impact of reading Florio's translation of Montaigne into English; to understand Shakespeare the thinker, in "Macbeth" and "Hamlet", in "Timon" and especially "The Merchant of Venice", you need to have read Montaigne (and can do so by clicking here).

Some authorities believe that Emilia Bassano was Shakespeare's mistress (he gave her first name to Iago's wife and her last name, with a minor variation, to Portia's beau), suspecting her of being the mysterious "Dark Lady of the Sonnets", though this is unlikely. There is no doubt that Shakspeare knew Emilia and the members of her Venetian theatre family both on a professional and a social basis. As Venetians, the Bassano family would have been thoroughly trained in the theatre, arts and literature of the commedia dell'arte, and thoroughly acquainted with the Venetian works of Italian renaissance literature. It is quite likely that the Bassanos possessed both da Porto's and Bandello's novellas of the story of Romeo & Juliet – or "Giuletta and Romeo" as it was in their versions - and that they performed these on various occasions, including in London. Da Porto names the two feuding families the Capuleti and the Montechhi, after two physically opposing castles bearing these names just outside Verona. Bandello's "Giuletta e Romeo" was translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau, and it is he who renders the family names into French as Capulet and Montague. There is also Arthur Brooke's "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet", based on Boaistuau's French version of Bandello, which Shakespeare may well have known.

Masuccio Salernitano was the pen-name of Tommaso dei Guardati (1410-1475); born either in Salerno or Sorrento (they are very close), he is best known today for "Il Novellino", a collection of 50 short stories with a strongly anti-clerical bent, a fact I mention because it got him included in the very first "Index of Prohibited Books", the one issued by the Vatican in 1557. The thirty-third tale in the collection is of the fated lovers Mariotto and Ganozza, the very ones that Luigi da Porto renamed in his cover-version "Giulietta e Romeo", and then milked for further profit in his "Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti" ("A newly retrieved story of two noble lovers"). 

Luigi da Porto (1485-1529): published that first written version of "Romeo and Juliet" as we know it in Vicenza in 1530, almost 60 years before Shakespeare, who simply Burglar Billed the plot. Bandello adopted his change-of-names (Giulietta e Romeo), and Shakespeare adapted them. Click here for the full text.

Matteo Bandello (c. 1480–1562) was an Italian writer, then soldier, then Dominican friar who achieved the status of Bishop of Agen, but became known mostly for his collection of two hundred and fourteen novellas, which made him the most popular short-story writer of his day. At OxfordReference.com I read that many of whose tales were translated by a man named Belleforest into French, and then thirteen of those made their way into English by the hand of Geoffrey Fenton in his "Certaine Tragicall Discourses" (1567). "Painter's Palace of Pleasure" includes twenty-five of Bandello's tales, nine translated from the Italian and sixteen from Belleforest. Turberville included two in his Tragical Tales (1576). Bandello, the same source tells me, "is the source of plots for many English plays, including Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and The Duchess of Malfi", which extends the Italian-list posted earlier on this page.

Da Porto's tale, mixed with Bandello's, reached an English audience by way of Arthur Brooke in his poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet", published by Richard Tottel in 1562, and most likely it was this version that Shakespeare read, even before he watched the Bassano's perform it.

Pierre Boaistuau (aka Pierre Launay or Sieur de Launay (1517-1566): originator of two genres that are still central to our literature: “histoires tragiques” (tragic tales), and “histoires prodigieuses” (weird tales), of which his “Histoires prodigieuses les plus mémorables qui ayent esté observées depuis la nativité de Jésus-Christ jusques à nostre siècle” translates into English as “The Most Memorable Strange Tales Observed from the Birth of Jesus Christ to Our Century” - isn’t that splendid! Click here, and here, for texts and wood engravings well worth the view.



Vanessa Redgrave as Isidora Duncan (see May 27) in the 1968 biopic


I would have loved to have separated that last from this with a photo of Vanessa Redgrave playing Juliet, but alas, as far as I can discover, she never did, or at least, if she did, there are no photos out there in the Internet to pilfer. She did, however, play Ma Capulet, to Francesca Annis' Juliet and Robert Powell's Romeo, in the 1990 Belgian film "Romeo.Juliet", directed by Armondo Linus Acosta, an exploitation of the ancient tale, but actually, according to its own blurb, focused on "an eccentric bag lady who rescues the stray cats of Venice and puts them on a boat to set sail for the new world." Anything to make money!

And in case you are wondering why Vanessa Redgrave - my favouritest actor of any gender was born, today, in 1937 (she makes cameo appearances in this blog on June 20, May 27, August 8 and Oct 22).


Amber pages
Some days in history appear to have themes. Today, for example:
King Charles was beheaded in England
Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany
Gandhi was assassinated (Mahatma; Rajiv was assassinated on May 21, Indira on Oct 31)
North Vietnam launched the Tet offensive against the south
and British troops in Ireland perpetrated Bloody Sunday
The same day, not the same year, obviously. But tyrannies, of one form or another, all taking action against the individual

The years, incidentally, were 1649, 1933, 1948, 1968 and 1972
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