Shakespeare\'s Play: Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare's play: Romeo and Juliet / film and musical: West Side Story / one of Leonard Bernstein's songs used in the film

Star-crossed lovers' then and now: A Comparison of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story"

Both William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" take up an old tale, once told by a different author in a different genre, and reconfigure that tale to create a new, artistic vision. Even before Shakespeare told his story of the two young "star-crossed lovers," in his "Midsummer's Night's Dream," he used the comedic depiction of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, two lovers fleeing oppressive parents, who die tragically because one believes that the other is dead, to highlight how the conflicts of the old can wreck havoc upon the lives of the young. Bernstein, of course, famously co-opted Shakespeare's characters and narrative arc for his famous Broadway musical (later turned into a Hollywood film), as in his depiction of the fiery cousin of the young heroine. Bernstein also included an intermediary, older figure of a woman who advises the girl to spurn her lover after he murders her cousin. Thus what makes both versions of the 'star crossed lovers' unique is not Shakespeare or Bernstein's storyline, plot or even their characters, but the way these stories are applied or not applied to contemporary situations. Shakespeare creates a story for all time, where the old are pitied against the young. Bernstein creates a story about young people in America who are ostracized from society, have little hope of growing old, and find momentary happiness in love rather than a real future.

In 'Romeo and Juliet,' whose climax closely resembles that of Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespeare does not shy away from artifice and contrivance. His tragedy is unusually dependent on coincidence, mischance, and accident" (Greenblatt 865). The young lovers are victims of parents and family members who cannot make peace, and despite the adolescent's impetuous behavior, the lovers are in a way more mature than those adults who would kill others merely because they bear the name of Montague or Capulet. "The story of the ill-fated lovers from bitterly feuding families had been told many times in the 16th century by Italian and French writers. Shakespeare's direct source is Arthur Brook's [poem] 'The Tragicical History of Romeus and Juliet' (1562)...Shakespeare follows the main outline of Brooke's narrative" (Greenblatt 865). But Brooke's tale takes nine months, Shakespeare's takes a few days. The story is given extra, mythical intensity through its compression. Also, Shakespeare adds characters, like the satiric Mercutio to add humor and also a sense of distance in the play, as Mercutio deflates Romeo's romantic passions.

Likewise, Bernstein adopted a previous tale to suit his own purposes, taking what had become Shakespeare's now-classic story of violent, warring lovers who are able to use love as a vehicle of compassion in a cruel and uncaring world. Bernstein did not select a far-off land, as Shakespeare selected Italy to add to the romance of the narrative. Shakespeare's hot-blooded, feuding Italians would have seemed foreign to his original English audience, but Bernstein selects a setting close at hand, that of New York City. Bernstein attempts to show that the sort of compassion evoked by Shakespeare for the young lovers in a never-never land of Italy is relevant to his own viewer's contemporary era and the racial strife of his day. The types of seemingly meaningless violent discord between Italian clans in Shakespeare are parallel to the struggles of Puerto Ricans and Anglos in New York, and ultimately just as empty and brutal in its consequences. Bernstein's evocation of "America," both in the song "America" suggests that the tragedy of Tony and Maria is not simply a sad event of circumstance and mishaps, but also a fundamental betrayal of the American dream of integration and that "everyone free in America."

Perhaps because of this reference to contemporary political ideals, the romance of Shakespeare seems more archetypal than the immediately relevant sociological commentary of "West Side Story." Bernstein's musical is unapologetically topical, dealing with the 1950s obsession with juvenile delinquency and even common theories to explain it, as in the song "Gee Officer Krupkie" which suggests alternatively that delinquency is caused by society, psychology, and also a young thug being "no damn good." While Shakespeare's conflict between young desires and old hatreds and resistance to change could apply to a variety of contexts, from ancient times as in the case of Pyramus and Thisbe, to the lovers of Brooke's history of Italy, to New York City gangs, to Bosnia, Bernstein's specific focus on the linguistic differences between Puerto Ricans and whites in their speeches and songs, the significance of juvenile crime in American society, and specific cultural ideals like that of 'making it' in America would make it difficult to, for example, set "West Side Story" in another place and time, as many filmmakers and playwrights have done with "Romeo and Juliet," as in Baz Luhrmann's 1996 modernization of the aesthetic, if not the language of the Shakespearean tragedy.

Bernstein, to make the tale more plausible to a contemporary setting, also made some notable alterations, namely the absence of adults in the story. While in "Romeo and Juliet," the parents of both lovers are just as determined to wage familial warfare as the quarreling servants in the street and the angry young men engaged in dueling (particularly Old Capulet, who tries to force his daughter to marry Paris), there are no parental figures in "West Side Story" urging the young people to fight. Rather, the absence of caring and responsible parental figures is part of the tragedy. There is only Bernardo, who is still extremely young, almost as young as Maria (although he perceives himself as her guardian), who is roughly the same age as Tony. Doc, the 'Friar Lawrence' figure has a relatively minor role in the tale. Rather than an elderly Nurse, Maria's semi-willing intermediary in her affair is Anita, a young, opinionated and highly sexualized woman rather than an elderly, comic figure like Juliet's nurse. Because Maria and Tony are chronologically older than their Renaissance counterparts, all of the actors of the Bernstein musical seem more alike in age than different. All of the characters are victims of society and the way that poverty drives the white gangs to hate Puerto Ricans, and the prejudice against the Puerto Ricans in society drives Puerto Ricans to hate whites.