“BE SOME OTHER NAME / BELONGING TO A MAN” PAUL WERSTINE
What difference does it make to Shakespeare that he died four hundred years ago? After all he’s dead. But if we take “Shakespeare” to mean what it usually means, as in “Brush up your Shakespeare,” - namely the texts of his plays and poems - those four hundred years matter. The (de)formation of these texts that got underway before he died continues apace. One bit of this story affects Shakespeare’s words in the famous so-called Balcony Scene in Romeo and Juliet. I write “so-called Balcony Scene” because the association of this term with Shakespeare is part of the process of his texts’ formation. Shakespeare never uses the word balcony in Romeo and Juliet or anywhere else; the word initially becomes linked to the scene when in 1680 the Restoration dramatist Thomas Otway writes his adaptation titled The History and Fall of Caius Marius, in which his Juliet figure, called Lavinia, appears “in the Balcony” in the comparable scene’s stage direction.
cosmos 1/2016
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