Juliet and Romeo, Shakespeare’s tragedy among the most famous and performed tragedies in the world, the best-known and best-loved love story that has become a symbol of perfect love opposed by society, can be placed between 1594 and 1596.
This is the golden age of Elizabethan theater, a rich and fertile spectacular season in which women, however, were not allowed to act. Despite Elizabeth’s Protestant views, in line with her father, it would only be with the political, religious and cultural victory of the Puritans that paradoxically women would peep onto the stages at “musical entertainments.” At the time, female parts are instead assigned to young actors.
Guilietta and Romeo is believed to have been performed before 1597 by the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company to which Shakespeare belonged. The famous Richard Burbage himself is thought to have played Romeo for the first time, and young Robert Goffe took the parts of Juliet instead.
These are very lively years for the theatre. The University Wits, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe even before Shakespaere! But these were also the years of the Vagabond Act, announced as early as 1531. The law prohibited vagrancy and therefore effectively made the wandering companies of actors outlawed.
To survive and continue acting, the acting companies therefore had to obtain the protection of some noble house. By wearing its livery, they could thus continue to act freely in exchange for private shows, of great prestige for the rich patron families.
Shakespeare becomes part of the company founded by James and Richard Burbage and protected by none other than the Lord Chamberlain himself: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. One of the best known and admired companies during the Elizabethan era, to the point that it later became the King’s Men, the company protected by King James I.
Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces in this fertile and lively cultural humus alongside figures who were crucial to the history of English theatre. In fact, it was James Burbage who asked for and obtained permission to build the first public theater building, The Theatre, in 1576, which once dismantled served for the construction of the ancient Globe.
His tragedies and comedies are animated by the architectural symbolism typical of the Elizabethan playhouse, where the scenography is practically non-existent and everything is entrusted to the action represented. It is an evocative theater where the founding element is the word and the relationship of complicity between actors and audience, a legacy of the medieval tradition also in the mix of comic and tragic.
It is here that Shakespeare’s timeless work was born, endowed with that extraordinary narrative freedom that makes it very modern. Which will survive the destruction of the theaters carried out by the Puritans after Lord Cromwell’s revolution.