The most widely performed love story in the world was written between 1594 and 1596 by William Shakespeare at the height of the golden age of Elizabethan theater.
Although the story of the two lovers thwarted by the family is one that has found many variations since antiquity, Shakespeare was inspired by some earlier works written by Italian authors, such as Luigi Da Porto of Vicenza.
The Montecchi and Cappelletti were in fact two important Veronese families whose rivalry had brought death to both factions.
It was Matteo Bandello (1485-1561) who included Da Porto’s story in his Novelle, later translated into French and English. And this was the version that inspired William Shakespeare’s tragedy.
If Bandello’s novella resonated with moralizing intentions by showing young people what happens when they give vent to their passions by disobeying their parents, Shakespeare embraces the story by changing its meaning. He turns the two lovers into positive, unfortunate heroes.
Their love will represent in the centuries to come the purity and strength of feeling in a relationship between very young people, capable of going against the established order, opposing the violence and clashes of opposing families. Even at the cost of their own lives.
Before making the 1968 film, Franco Zeffirelli had done two stage versions of the famous tragedy.
The first had been in 1960 at the Old Vic in London, where the young director had broken with the tradition whereby “reciting Shakespeare had ended up becoming an exercise in beautiful and correct verse diction, without ever questioning the author about the truth of the situations and characters, which instead were closest to his heart.” And he had aimed instead at the dramatic substance of the characters. He had investigated the intimate nature of the protagonists, to show them sincere and whole on stage.
Sensing the universality of Shakespeare’s creation, its being beyond all time, Zeffirelli immediately kept the first performance of the tragedy in mind. The first Juliet, in the presence of Shakespeare himself, was actually a 13- to 14-year-old boy who certainly expressed the height of Shakespeare’s verses far more through the vigor and enthusiasm of his few years than through an academic and traditional acting technique.
Zeffirelli thus chooses to read Shakespeare through that “scent that was hovering among English youth, of rebellion, certainly, but one that nevertheless carried a message of hope and joy instead of despondency.”
This is the beginning of the 1960s, which prelude to the youth movements. These are the years of the so-called “Beatniks,” of the birth of rock: the Beatles that very year were forming in Liverpool, and only a couple of years later Mary Quant would invent the miniskirt!
Here that atmosphere, that whiff of youth culture, the very essence of youth, that quivering rebellion inherent in human beings at the dawn of their maturity, came overpoweringly into the Old Vic with two very young actors, Judi Dench and William Stride. It was actually a literary and philological interpretation of the Shakespearean text, starting from the very essence of its telling!
It would be the same in 1964 in Verona, starring Giancarlo Giannini and Anna Maria Guarnieri, in the show that brought to Italy the new interpretation of the Shakespearean tragedy presented by Zeffirelli himself and accepted by the Old Vic.
The 1968 film Romeo and Juliet brought to theaters the interpretive choices of the Shakespearean play that Franco Zeffirelli had adopted 8 years earlier in London for its first staging at the Old VIc.
What was only an intuition at the dawn of the 1960s had now become reality. The new English culture was offering itself to the world as a response to the new needs of the new generation.
It was again two very young actors who played the two lovers – Olivia Hussey (15) and Leonard Withing (17). Two teenagers who in the narrative met in a typical teenage setting: Romeo had “crashed” a birthday party in disguise with the intention of “meeting” new and complacent girls. Chance then made him hopelessly in love with Juliet!
It was a generational success. Who knew how to embody the spirit of the time, flower – power, peace and love.