O, Juliet (32 page)

Special thanks go to my spectacular Web designer, Linda Lazar, for outstanding work on my Web site, and to author friends Christopher Gortner and Michelle Moran, who dragged me kicking and screaming into the new world of online promotion and my first-ever “virtual book tour.” With the Internet and the blogging community as a conduit, I am connected with my fans in a way I never was before and now, with some sense of who they are, I can express my gratitude to them for their priceless support.

My sourcebook for all versions of
Romeo and Juliet
wrapped up in one volume was
Romeo and Juliet: Original Text of Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi Da Porto, Matteo Bandello, William Shakespeare
, edited and with an introduction by Adolph Caso (Dante University of America Foundation, by special arrangement with Brandon Publishing Company).

It may be unfair to single Shakespeare out from all the other storytellers, but I must, since
Romeo and Juliet
would never have become so overwhelmingly iconic without him. I have to be honest—I had never read a word of Dante Alighieri until I decided to make him part of my novel—but I was flabbergasted by the beauty of his words, both poetry and prose, on the subject of love. I took great pleasure in finding the right quotes for the right moments in my story.

Last, but never least, I give my deepest love and thanks to my darling Max, who simply makes life worth living.

READERS GUIDE

 

ROBIN MAXWELL

 

A. I am a hopeless romantic.

As early as thirteen years old I foresaw myself with a career, and I dreamed of “being friends with the Beatles,” which was my way of imagining myself surrounded by extraordinary people. But above all, my future was dominated by a single relationship. I desperately wanted a wonderful husband, someone who understood me and accepted me for who I was—a true “marriage for love.” I had no idea what this man might look like or what he’d do for a living. All I demanded—for reasons I’ll never understand—was that he possess a pair of “strong, square hands.”

On the road to finding my life’s partner, I claimed many remarkable men and women as friends. My career, of course, became writing, but the screenplays I began with were broad, bawdy comedies about bawdy broads, ancient civilizations, and extraterrestrials. Later, in my novels, I wrote of the strong, ahead-of-their-time women of history who defied despots in male-dominated societies.

During my search for a soul mate I was always drawn to great love stories, in books, films, and songs. But nothing moved me as profoundly as Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
. The first time I saw Franco Zeffirelli’s version, I sobbed for half an hour after leaving the movie theater.

It was the perfect romantic tale. Beautiful, tenderhearted, yet passionate young lovers, gorgeous language, glorious Italy, family feuds, and a touch of violence. Even the tragic ending wasn’t so bad because Romeo and Juliet were reunited in death.

 

Q.
Romeo and Juliet
was famously set in Verona, and yet, you set your lovers in Florence at the time of the Medici. Why?

 

A. Of course it’s been rejigged a hundred different ways—from Broadway musicals to operas to ballets. Most recently director Baz Luhrmann’s feature film starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. What I didn’t know till recently was that Shakespeare’s play was not the first telling of “Romeo and Juliet.” Since the time of the Greeks and Romans, countless “girl-and-boy-from-warring-families” tragedies have been written. But in 1216 in Florence, two families from opposing factions came to blows when a Donati girl ran off with a Buondelmonti boy, and her cousin was killed at the Ponte Vecchio during the ensuing battle.

This legend apparently took root in Tuscan consciousness, because no less than three writers in the two following centuries decided to commit it to the written word in novella (short story) form.The first, Masuccio Salernitno, set the story in Siena, with Juliet traveling to Alexandria, Egypt, to find her banished husband. Both Luigi Da Porta and Matteo Bandello placed the tale in Verona, with Romeo escaping to Mantua. Those locations “stuck” when, in the sixteenth century, Arthur Brooke wrote the story as a narrative poem, and in 1594 Shakespeare finally took up the gauntlet, immortalizing the lovers in his masterful play.

I had just completed my seventh historical novel,
Signora da Vinci
, the story of young Leonardo and his devoted mother, Caterina, and had become completely immersed in the culture of Renaissance Italy and enamored, in particular, of the glorious Medici family. My divine editor, Kara Cesare, had been urging me to stay in the Italian Renaissance for my next book, an idea I liked, as it meant I could do without long months of monumental, brain-scrambling research once again. She suggested the possibility of using as a character one of her personal favorites from
Signora da Vinci
, the magnificent materfamilias of the Medici clan, Lucrezia Tornabuoni.

Since I dearly wanted a close female confidant for Juliet, a young woman with whom she could celebrate and commiserate, Lucrezia became the perfect “best friend.” Having decided on that, I realized I had my place—Florence, where Lucrezia and the Medici lived—as well as the date, a year in which the girlfriends at eighteen were considered ripe and ready for marriage, 1444.

This allowed me the run-up to the social event of the decade, Lucrezia’s wedding to the heir of Florence’s ruling family, the Medici. It came at a time when the city was at peace, and was prospering with its nexus of bankers, artists, and textile merchants.

And it afforded me another utterly brilliant character—Don Cosimo de’ Medici. He was, after all, the man most responsible for the Renaissance happening in the first place, and he would have adored his beautiful, highly intelligent daughter-in-law-to-be. For the family Juliet was meant to marry into, I chose the Strozzi, who were, in fact, second only to the Medici in wealth and power. Allessandra Strozzi was famously fierce when it came to matchmaking for her children. Jacopo—the ignored and bitter “third son”—was a figment of my imagination.

Suddenly I had a perfectly logical, believable, and richly textured setting for my scenario and all my characters.

Today in Verona, “Romeo’s Castle” and “Juliet’s Balcony” are popular tourist attractions. I hope the citizens of that fine city will forgive my literary license, returning the bulk of the story to its earliest Italian roots, Florence.

 

 

A. One day, in one of those moments of epiphany that writers long for, and only occasionally in a whole lifetime of writing are afforded, I realized that no one had written a historical novel of Romeo and Juliet. I’d been longing to write a great love story, and while every one of my books included a love relationship, the love between a man and a woman had never been its central theme.

Richly lyrical and transcendentally passionate as the Bard’s rendition was, I’d never gotten a true sense of these two young people who inspired the story. I wanted to know about their inner lives, about their families and the society whose stringent rules and restrictions attempted to keep them apart and brought about their tragic ends.

For research I read the three Italian short stories and used Shakespeare’s play as my “skeleton,” and as all the writers before me I liberally borrowed, embellished and changed the details to suit my personal tastes. Never did I feel constrained by any of the earlier versions.

I knew that I did not want my Romeo and Juliet to be the fourteen-year-olds as Shakespeare had written them. That age for girls to marry was customary in sixteenth-century England, but not fifteenth-century Florence. Eighteen for a woman and twenty-five for a man was the norm, and that suited me perfectly. I wanted my lovers to have fully formed minds and full-blown passions.

I felt I needed something to tie my protagonists tightly together in a complex way—not simply a case of blind lust, or even love at first sight (though these are emotions that certainly come into play in my version). The conceit I decided upon was Romeo’s and Juliet’s mutual love of poetry—in particular their reverence for Italy’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri.

In two of the Italian stories Juliet offers to cut off her hair and don men’s clothing to become Romeo’s page and follow him into exile. Cross-dressing women, it seems, turn up a lot in both medieval literature and history, so as in
Signora da Vinci
, I was comfortable with my heroine in male drag when the story called for it.

Also in the Italian versions, Juliet does away with herself in various ways, all less violent than with Shakespeare’s “happy dagger.” She simply
wills
herself to die in one, and holds her breath till she does in two others. The Bard has Romeo expiring in the tomb before Juliet wakes from her self-imposed stupor, but that did not allow for the passionate ending I envisioned. I quite liked Bandello having the lovers reunite one last time before Romeo’s poison takes effect, and made it my own.

 

Q. How has Dante Alighieri influenced
O, Juliet
. . . and your life?

 

A. The only way I can describe this man’s influence with the generations (and centuries) that came after him was that he was a Renaissance rock star—the John Lennon, the Bob Dylan, the Shakespeare of his age. During the bloody feuding between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in the thirteenth century, the Florentine government executed a political screwup that they would regret forever—they banished Dante from the beloved city of his birth for life. After his death in Ravenna, the Florentine government tried to retrieve his remains to place in a monument they had created for him, but his adoptive town would not release his bones.

In subsequent years, Boccaccio (
Decameron
), who was Dante’s first biographer, was paid a small fortune by the Florentine city fathers to give a course of public lectures—the
Cathedra Dantesca
—on the writer he idolized. In the early fifteenth century the most sought-after and highly paid scholar in Italy, Francesco Filelfo, taught the Dante Symposia, drawing huge crowds wherever he went. The tradition has continued in Florence from that time to the present day. My Friar Bartolomo is a fictional character, but you can be sure that if Romeo and Juliet had indeed lived in that city, one scholar or another would have been giving those popular lectures.

That poetry could so inflame two lovers in those days I have no doubt. Alberti’s poetry competition in 1441 (the one I have Juliet sneaking her poem into) was a major cultural event. The great historian Will Durant says of Filelfo that he “made all Italy resound with his erudition and vituperation,” and that in the Renaissance “scholarship could be passion and literature could be war.”

For Romeo—himself an amateur poet—to find a woman who was his creative and intellectual equal, if not his better, would have shaken his world. And for Juliet to discover a soulful, wild-hearted, and secretly subversive young poet determined—as few others were in those days—to be a peacemaker would have been enough to spur her on to great heights of rebellion against a killingly repressive society, even if escape from it meant her death.

 

A. By the time I wrote
O, Juliet
, I had been married to my own Romeo, Max Thomas, for twenty-five years. Handsome, sensitive, and a bit of a daredevil, he took me from my sedentary life of the mind on white-knuckle adventures I’d never dreamed of having. Our version of the ascent to the apex of the Florence Cathedral dome at midnight was climbing to the top of a massive rock formation in Joshua Tree National Park at noon. We committed to our life together on the Hawaiian lava fields of Mauna Loa.

Fortune has blessed me, as it did Juliet, to have found a man to love who “sees me as I wish to be seen, hears me as I wish to be heard, and loves me as I wish to be loved.” I have literally followed him through a firestorm. He is my rock and my inspiration.

And yes, he possesses a pair of strong, square hands.

 

Robin Maxwell
lives in the wilds of the California high desert with her husband, yogi Max Thomas. She would enjoy hearing from you at
www.robinmaxwell.com
.

1. The role that families played in arranging marriages in fifteenth-century Italy—indeed, in most of the civilized world—was enormous. Children had little or no say in the husband or wife chosen for them. Does it surprise you to know the practice continues even today? In what regions of the world and at what levels of society do you imagine this still happens?