I Am Juliet (14 page)

Romeo and Juliet
is full of vulgar puns that modern audiences don’t understand (Mercutio again: ‘… and quivering thigh, and the demesnes that there adjacent lie’), either because the meaning of the words has changed, or because we don’t look for bawdiness in elaborate speech. Shakespeare didn’t just talk about sex; he made it funny. His was a bawdy age, when sex was often joked about. Even Queen Elizabeth I, in her fifties, opened the front of her dress to below her waist before the Spanish ambassador, teasing him that she was ‘hot’.

A sexual joke these days is referred to as a ‘dirty joke’. In Elizabethan times, open discussion of sexual matters was acceptable. Although these days a woman can expose her knees without being thought a loose woman, and advertisers use sex to sell everything from soft drinks to tight jeans, talking about sex is far more taboo today than it was back then.

This book is far less erotic than the play. I wanted it to be about the girl, not sex. Sex has a habit of taking over both books and lives, as it did for Romeo and Juliet. If their passion for each other had been less urgent, they might have lived.

In the play
Romeo and Juliet
, a thirteen-year-old girl marries and has the physical relationship that comes with marriage. That too is a taboo in our culture. Shakespeare had far more freedom to write about his lovers than I do.

MARIE DE FRANCE

Marie de France was a real person, a writer or singer of tales, some that she may have learned, others that she may have made up or retold in her own words. She lived and sang, or told, her stories in about the twelfth century, but nothing else is known of her; not where she lived nor even her true name. ‘France’ back then may have meant she came from the Île de France, now part of Paris. Or Marie might not have been French at all, but was given that name because she told tales from Brittany and France. Marie was the most common of names back then, and might even have been an alias.

Her stories were often passionate, which made them different from the more common morality tales, in which the more abuse a woman accepted from her husband, the more virtuous she was. Marie’s stories may have given women more interesting roles than did others of her time, but as in the tale of Guigemar, her heroines were still often nameless. As Marie herself still is.

ELIZABETHAN POISONS AND REMEDIES

Do not try the poisons or remedies in this book. Even the rue in Juliet’s poison ‘remedy’ is toxic. The lead-based cosmetics, or the eye drops that made Elizabethan
women’s eyes look larger and shine brightly, were often deadly; and the remedies for their poisons were usually based on superstition, not science. Most Elizabethans led short lives. Even their poisons were not reliable: the toxicity and other properties of plants vary according to where and how they were grown, and prepared and stored.

ELIZABETHAN FOOD AND DRINK

For the poor, food was whatever they could scavenge: bread when they could afford it; cheese, if possible; sometimes butter or milk; salt cod or other dried fish; and meat as a luxury. The rural poor ate pottage, which was a thick soup made of grain or dried peas stewed with green vegetables or weeds like nettles.

Fruits and vegetables were only available when in season, and included apples, pears, quinces, medlars, parsnips, turnips, peas, broad beans, celery, skirret, sea kale, radishes, onions, wild garlic and cabbages; nuts like walnuts and chestnuts; and a range of salad greens and edible flowers. Wild foods, like blackberries, burdock, dandelions, bilberries, hazelnuts, sloes, nettles, saltwort, sorrel, edible seaweeds and shellfish, were gathered too. Potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, pumpkins, fat orange carrots and many other fruits and vegetables we now take for granted had not yet been brought to
England in Shakespeare’s time. The end of winter and the beginning of spring was ‘the hungry gap’, when stored food had been used up and the early harvest hadn’t yet begun. At this time, an onion might be a luxury. In wealthy households, gardeners ‘forced’ asparagus spears or young celery to grow fast in beds of hot manure.

To us today, ‘food’ can mean a wide range of dishes, but for an Elizabethan it meant bread and meat first, pease pudding, and fresh or dried fish. For snacks, they would eat raw nuts, or roasted chestnuts in autumn and winter; oysters, winkles, mussels; apples bought hot and baked from the apple seller; pickled crabapples; radishes by themselves or with butter; or a crust of bread dipped in ale.

Two cooked meals were eaten each day, if you could afford them. Servants and those who did heavy work ate bread, perhaps with butter or cheese or leftover cold meat, when they first woke up. They would also drink ale, which might be heated in winter and have bread sopped in it. Dinner was the main meal, eaten at noon, with a smaller supper at dusk. Nobles and the wealthy ate dinner earlier, at about 11 am (their leftovers would feed their servants), and had supper earlier too. A banquet might begin at midday or mid-afternoon and continue for many hours with various courses, with music or dancing in between some of the later courses until they turned into ‘supper’.

‘Courses’ weren’t a single main dish with vegetables or salad, as we’re used to today. A course might involve
many different roasts, sweet dishes, and pies garnished possibly with fruit or vegetables, all on the table at once. Each course offered a different choice — roast venison instead of roast lamb or mutton, for example, or roast pigeon instead of roast duck. The final course at a banquet would often be mostly sweet foods, especially those made by the ladies of the house out of vastly expensive sugar: preserved cherries, stewed quinces, medlar paste, tiny marzipan figures coloured with vegetable juices and decorated with gold leaf. But even this final course might have meat dishes too, sweet ones like chopped spiced chicken with sugar, or fish cooked with honey and apples. At more simple dinners, the last course might be cheese and stewed fruit or a fruit pie, or a dish made of grated cheese sweetened with sugar and spiced with herbs.

Meat, and lots of it, was a sign of both wealth and strength. White bread was a luxury, and came in many shapes and flavours. Pies were common, but only as containers for their filling (only the poor bothered to eat the tough pastry). A ‘humble pie’ was a pie made of ‘humbles’ or deer entrails, well spiced.

The Elizabethans drank an enormous amount of alcohol. Low-alcohol ale was preferred over water as it had the advantage of not giving you the runs or killing you. Much ‘fresh’ water from wells was polluted by sewage, as were rivers or streams. Wine was drunk in wealthy houses, even by children, usually with a lot of
water added. In a life filled with pain and hardship, even if you were wealthy, drunkenness was prized.

When you look at many of the stupider events of the last five hundred years of history, it is useful to remember that many or most of the participants were probably drunk. Lord Capulet’s rage when Juliet refuses to marry Paris is more explicable once you realise that during the night spent sitting with Tybalt’s corpse (as duty required) he had probably refreshed himself regularly with brandy. By the time he spoke to his daughter he would have been exhausted and very drunk indeed. The audience would know this and expect it. That was their world.

ELIZABETHAN TABLE MANNERS

A place setting at a formal meal would have a plate (not the trenchers of bread more common in earlier times), a spoon and probably a knife. Forks were a new fashion, arrived from Italy, but even the most fashionable people were only just beginning to learn to use them. Men carried knives as a matter of course, and might use them to cut their food as well as to dispatch an enemy. A knife sometimes had prongs or a prong on one end to help in picking up food from the common dish. But usually food arrived at the table already in pieces that could be eaten with the fingers or a spoon, or as great joints that were carved at the table.
In simple households, the male head of the house would carry out the carving. In wealthier homes, it might be done by a professional carver, who would also add sauces or seasoning to the pieces he had carved.

A spoon might be hand-carved wood, or silver, or an alloy of gold, depending on your status. A sucket spoon was a small spoon with a hollow handle used to eat moist sweet dishes, like stewed quinces.

Most Elizabethans used their fingers to pick up their food. Washing your hands before a meal, and wiping your fingers during it, was an important part of table etiquette. A host provided a basin and jugs of warm or scented water for their guests before they sat at the table. There would be bowls of scented water on the table to dip your fingers into during the meal, before drying them on the tablecloth or linen napkins.

The servants would serve wine or ale into the cups (wood, tin, pottery or expensive glass, or pewter, brass, silver or gold) at the sideboard, then serve each person individually; or the women of the household would serve the men. Food was put on the table for everyone to help themselves to. It wasn’t good manners to reach across the table. You waited for your neighbour to ask if they could help you to a dish, or you asked for some of it, though the latter wasn’t acceptable for a woman or a young person. Nor was it good manners to pick the most delicious bit for yourself, to wipe your face with your
hand or sleeve, to dip your sleeve into the stewed apple or sauce, or brush it against the roast. If you didn’t have the grace to make your long sleeves fall away from your wrists, it was best to discreetly pin them back before you helped yourself to food.

The wealthier you were, the more food you had in front of you. You weren’t expected to eat it all, or even to taste each dish. In a household like the Capulets’, the servants would eat the family’s leftovers. In the royal household, royalty ate first, and it was an honour to eat the leftovers from the royal table.

TRANSPORT

Few people had carriages at the time when
Romeo and Juliet
was first performed; nor were most of the narrow roads suitable for carriages to travel on. People rode horses, donkeys or mules; or were carried in chairs, or in litters where they lay on cushions.

HAIRSTYLES

A young Elizabethan girl of good family wore her hair loose, perhaps with the hair next to her face plaited and drawn back, and decorated with flowers or jewels. A
married woman swept her hair up into a bun or other style, and covered it with a veil, wimple, hairnet, hat or cap, depending on who she was and what she might be doing. A servant’s hair might also be covered. A poorer woman might keep her hair covered much of the time to try to keep it lice-free.

ELIZABETHAN COLOURS

The poor wore dull colours, and the rich wore bright ones. The richer you were, the brighter your clothes, unless you wore black for mourning. The dyes came from insects, lichens and plants, and were costly. Most dyes faded quickly.

Bright pink was a popular colour for men as well as women. Only royalty or those closely related to royalty, like Paris, were allowed to wear gold or silver, although the law was often disobeyed.

THE BANQUET SONG

This is taken from Thomas Morley’s
First Book of Ballets
(1595). The song in
I am Juliet
has been changed slightly to fit the scene. This is the original:

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 130

Paris’s song in the banquet scene of
I am Juliet
is meant to be the kind of song Shakespeare lampooned in this poem. Well-born men composed poetry, songs and music, and would perform in company, partly as entertainment, and sometimes, probably, to show off their wit and cleverness. The explicitness of Paris’s song — and his making such an open claim on Juliet in public — would be insulting today, but expected in the 1590s.

A manuscript is sometimes like an almost made cake, with still a bit of mixing, as well as baking and icing to be done.

I am Juliet
was remixed as well as spiced by the superb editing of Nicola O’Shea, who smoothed out the lumpy bits where the combination of Shakespearean and modern language didn’t quite mesh, the whole guided and shaped by the wonderful Kate Burnitt of HarperCollins.

Lisa Berryman as always gave me the confidence to contemplate a marriage of my words and Shakespeare’s (I didn’t realise until I was well into it how ambitious a task it would be). Lisa calmly beheaded the book, removing the last unnecessary chapter. When I lack the courage or clarity to evaluate my work, Lisa is there. She shared the planning of the next two books in this series:
Ophelia, Queen of Denmark
(2015) and
Third Witch
(2016). As always, there are no words enough to thank her.

Enormous gratitude to Angela Marshall, for yet again taking a mess of badly spelled words and turning them into a readable manuscript, and in this case, sharing her knowledge and love of the play to help fit text with the book.

To the teenagers who first inspired this book, complaining about
Romeo and Juliet
’s unrealistically long speeches: I hope by now you have travelled far beyond the teacher who discouraged you from expressing what were well thought out and valid opinions, even if you hadn’t been taught how to transfer them to a page. With luck you have discovered that most teachers are not like yours (I eavesdropped on your teacher’s conversation in the staffroom, and was grateful yet again that I was blessed with superb teachers, not ones who muttered, ‘I don’t know why we turn up, really’ — I’m not sure why they turned up either). I hope you have found teachers with enthusiasm, insight and compassion. But if you haven’t, and if you did leave school, thinking there was no point staying any longer: you are not stupid, despite your teacher’s claims. If you still need to know how to write an essay: just write it down, exactly as you told me. I hope you will seize the most wonderful of futures, and perhaps even look again at Shakespeare and find beauty in his words.

And — belatedly — to the Brisbane Arts Theatre of my youth, who gave a teenager the privilege of playing
third witch in
Macbeth
. One of my most treasured teenage memories is of sitting on a pile of scenery, dressed in black robes, warts and hunchback, studying for the next day’s economics exam while Banquo in red velvet breeches lectured me on Marxist economics (I just wanted to work out how to calculate GNP). Without the Arts Theatre, and the magic of feet upon the stage, I too might have thought that Shakespeare was just ‘all those words’.