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Catherine, annotated

From Catherine, Annotated · sauerannotated.com/posts/romeo-and-juliet-review/

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Romeo and Juliet Is a Remake, and the Original Had a Lion

Shakespeare's famous love story is a cover of an Ovid myth from 1,600 years earlier. Both are about love. Both are mostly about not waiting five minutes.

Everyone calls Romeo and Juliet the greatest love story ever told. That’s generous. It’s the greatest story ever told about two teenagers who could not wait five minutes.

And it isn’t even original. Shakespeare was working off a story that was already about 1,600 years old, from the Roman poet Ovid. Same forbidden love. Same secret meeting. Same tragic misunderstanding. The main difference is that Ovid’s version has a lion.

Meet the original

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pyramus and Thisbe are next-door neighbors in Babylon. They fall in love, their parents say absolutely not, and so the two of them do what any reasonable couple would do: they find a crack in the wall between their houses and whisper sweet nothings through it. Every night, they kiss the wall. Each on their own side. The wall gets more action than anyone in this story.

Eventually they plan to sneak out and meet under a mulberry tree by a tomb outside the city. Thisbe gets there first. A lioness wanders up to drink from a nearby spring, her mouth still bloody from an earlier meal. Thisbe runs and hides, and on the way she drops her veil. The lioness, finished with her drink, gives the veil a chew and leaves.

Then Pyramus shows up. He sees lion tracks. He sees a bloody veil. He does not look around. He does not call her name. He immediately concludes that Thisbe is dead, decides it’s his fault, and falls on his sword.

Ovid, a poet, describes the blood spraying up like water from a burst pipe. It splashes the white mulberries and turns them dark red. Thisbe comes back, finds him, and uses the same sword on herself. The gods are moved, and mulberries stay dark forever in their memory.

Same song, new arrangement

Put the two stories side by side and Shakespeare’s remake is not subtle.

  • The forbidden part: Pyramus and Thisbe have disapproving parents. Romeo and Juliet upgrade to an entire family feud with sword fights in the street.
  • The barrier: a wall becomes a balcony. Still a building between them. Still whispering in the dark.
  • The meeting place: Ovid sets the climax at a tomb. Shakespeare sets it in one.
  • The misread evidence: a bloody veil becomes a girl who looks dead but is only drugged.
  • The ending: a guy dies because he jumped to a conclusion, and the girl shows up just in time to be too late. She finishes the job with his weapon. Both times.

A brief timeline of Romeo’s week

The thing nobody remembers from ninth grade is how fast this all happens. The whole play takes about four days.

  • Sunday morning: Romeo is sobbing over a girl named Rosaline. He will love her forever.
  • Sunday night: Romeo has forgotten Rosaline exists.
  • Monday afternoon: Romeo is married.
  • About an hour later: Romeo kills his new wife’s cousin and gets banished.
  • Wednesday: Romeo hears Juliet is dead, buys poison the same day, rides back to Verona, kills a guy outside the tomb, and drinks the poison minutes before she wakes up.

Here’s the best part. Juliet knows. On the night they meet, standing on that balcony, she says it out loud:

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say “It lightens.”

Then she marries him the next afternoon.

The adults are not helping

Friar Laurence gets the best advice in the whole play:

Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.

Excellent. Wonderful. Then this same man secretly marries two kids he met that week, hands a thirteen-year-old a potion that makes her look dead, and sends the explanation to Romeo by mail. The mail gets stuck in a plague quarantine.

Every year, someone asks why Juliet didn’t just text him. Honestly? Fair question. The entire tragedy is a delivery problem.

Shakespeare knew it was ridiculous

Here’s my favorite fact about this pairing. Around the same time Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, he also wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in that play a group of amateur actors performs Pyramus and Thisbe. Badly. On purpose.

A guy plays the Wall. He holds up his fingers to make the crack. Another guy plays the Lion and pauses to reassure the audience that he is not, in fact, a real lion. Pyramus delivers a heartfelt speech directly to the masonry. The audience onstage laughs the whole way through, and one of them sums it up perfectly:

This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

That’s the real lesson hiding in this pairing. It’s the same plot either way. Whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy depends entirely on whether you take the lovers seriously. Shakespeare wrote it both ways, because he understood that from the outside, teenage love looks like the end of the world and a bit of a farce at the same time.

So what’s it actually about?

Love, sure. The feelings are real, and Shakespeare never mocks them. Juliet’s lines are some of the most gorgeous ever written about falling hard for someone.

But both stories are really about speed. Nobody in either one dies because they loved too much. They die because they decided too fast. Pyramus doesn’t look for Thisbe. Romeo doesn’t wait for anyone to explain. In both cases, five more minutes would have turned a tragedy into a really good story they told at their wedding.

The verdict

One star off. Half for Act 1, in which Romeo mopes about Rosaline, a girl who never actually appears onstage, at such length that you start rooting for the feud. The other half because my students called it mid, and I can’t fully argue with them.

Everything else? Required reading, and it’s even better with Ovid next to it. Read Pyramus and Thisbe first. It’s only a few pages. Then watch your students (or your kids) realize they’ve already read the ending of Romeo and Juliet before they start it.

Fair warning: it might backfire. When I taught them together, my students liked Pyramus and Thisbe better. Their official review of Romeo and Juliet, the most famous love story in the English language, was “mid.”

Honestly, I get it. Ovid tells the whole thing in a few pages and includes a lion. Shakespeare takes five acts and includes Rosaline.

Read it if: you teach ninth grade, you love a tragedy, or you once made a major life decision in under an hour.

Skip it if: you need the characters to make good choices. They will not.

Pair it with: Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and one question at dinner: what’s the fastest decision you ever regretted?