Around 1594 - 1595 William Shakespeare presented what is arguably his most famous play of all time: "Romeo & Juliet", a passionate play about true love and death (but don't all of Shakespeare's plays incorporate these two things?). Over the last 400 plus years of the 37 or so plays that hold Shakespeare's name, Romeo and Juliet has maintained, if not gained, popularity. In today's society we forget that Juliet was only about 13 and Romeo 16, we forget that their families literally hated each other to death and regularly tried to kill each other, and most importantly we forget that Romeo and Juliet had only known each other a single night before they decided that they would marry. All we focus on is the complete allure of a love that seems so strong and so pure that life without that other person would be so incredibly unbearable that the only option is to plea with an apothecary for poison or stab yourself with his blatantly obvious phallic sword. Despite the notable problems with the play and its details, it has been reproduced countless times, sometimes well (Baz Luhrmann's 1996 modern make Romeo + Juliet) and sometimes not so well namely Gary Winick's 2010 movie Letters to Juliet, starring Mamma Mia's Amanda Seyfried.My purpose in this blog is not to compare and contrast Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet to Letter's to Juliet (though Luhrmann's re-make of the play is absolutely phenomenal and I always get a little teary-eyed at the end), but rather to examine the minsconseptions presented in Letter's to Juliet.
So for those of you not familiar with Letter's to Juliet the basic plot this: girl living in New York hoping to be a journalist but her fat male boss just doesn't believe she has what it takes, she is engaged to a guy who is obviously not right for her and then everything changes when she and her fiancé go to Verona (the quote "City of Love" which I am right here and now calling BS on though Ill get back to that) and she discovers the wall of Letters to Juliet - oh and by the way she is a hopeless romantic. So she finds this wall and sits down observing all of the desperate weeping women writing sappy and ridiculous letters to Juliet (a 13 year old who married a boy she barely knew, lest we forget) when she suddenly spots a woman taking the letters. This woman ends up being a "Juliet Secretary", one of five or so, who take the letters and respond to them. Naturally girl (Sophia if we must have names) joins this little group because she is lonely, left all alone by her food and wine obsessed chief fiancé, and discovers a letter that is 50 years old (and naturally she responds to it). Her response brings the woman over from her home in London, and her dashing and appropriately aged grandson (who honestly looks like he could be Amanda Seyfried's brother) as an escort. Then after much arguing, mostly just by the grandson (Charlie), they all decide to go searching for the Grandmother (Claire's) lost love Lorenzo. Naturally during this adventure Charlie and Sophie begin to fall in love but once they finally find Lorenzo Charlie does not go after Sophie because of her fiancé and so she returns to New York and they completely disappear from each other's lives for a few months. But then the grand turn, Claire and Lorenzo are getting married and Sophie, discovering that she does not love her fiancé anymore, goes to the wedding in hopes of confessing her undying love to Charlie. But when she arrives he is with a girl but it turns out that this girl is just his cousin, but all of this (Sophie being single and Charlie bringing his cousin as a date) does not come out until Sophie - in the perfect image of Juliet- is on a balcony and they both confess their love for each other right before Charlie does a misstep on a vein and falls to the ground (possibly breaking or severely damaging his back but this of course is ignored). And so we get a happy ending (okay that was a much longer summary than I intended, I got carried away apparently).
Now that you have a general idea or reminder about Letters to Juliet I will move onto the bulk of this blog (I will not go into Romeo & Juliet if you are unfamiliar with it I hope that you have no other excuse than you grew up in a cave because beyond that there are no excuses as to why you are not familiar with it). One of the main problems, bypassing the obvious cliche character of Sophie as a hopeless romantic living in New York aspiring to be a journalist but not quite making it until a life changing adventure during which she finally finds love, is this wall of letters to Juliet. The biggest issue here is Juliet was 13, living a drastically different existence than we do today as a basically pampered princess, only daughter of one of the most powerful men in Verona, so why on earth would anyone every write a letter to her about their love life? I suppose to a degree I understand the lure of writing to a fictitious character who in some way represents your ideals or something but really the girl is so sheltered that she doesn't even consider that Romeo's love could only be temporary or that marrying Paris really is the thing to do. And building off of that, it has been noted by many scholars that Romeo's love is fickle; before he sees Juliet he is madly in love with Rosaline whom he simply cannot live without:
Benvolio: Good morrow, cousin.
Romeo: is the day so young?
Benvolio: But new struck nine.
Romeo: Ay me, sad hours seem long.
Was that my father that went hence so fast?
Benvolio: It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
Benvolio: In love?
Romeo: Out -
Benvolio: Of love?
Romeo: Out of her favour where I am in love.
(act I scene i lines 145 - 155)
And there is the suggestion later on in his conversation with Benvolio in act I scene i, that he is not actually in love but rather lust. He says Cupid's arrow but then immediately mentions that Rosaline holds tightly to her chastity:
Well, in that hit you miss: she'll not be hit
With Cupid's arrow, she hath Dian's wit,
And in strong proof of chastity well armed,
From love's weak childish bow she lives uncharted
(lines 198 - 201)
So we have these women writing their every agony out about love - whether lost, gained or confused - to a girl whose brain is not nearly developed, who lives in a period when love and marriage were rarely one and the same thing, and who deciders within a few hours that she cannot live without a boy who up till this point has proven to be untrustworthy when it comes to his infatuations. I cannot imagine what type of advice one could expect from such a girl, not to mention she kills herself in the end.
In retrospect of writing all of that, that really is the bulk of my issue with this movie because it arises not just in the wall filled with letters to Juliet but throughout the whole movie. The movie presents Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as this beautiful and perfect example of unblemished love but the reality is that it is not that at all, rather it is a play that ends in completely unavoidable tragedy which makes it a near comedy; which I would argue all of Shakespeare's tragedies are near comedies because they are just so absurd in how they become tragedies (think of Hamlet for goodness sakes, he quite literally goes mad while playing that he is mad).
Though I enjoy the ridiculousness of romantic comedies (though I rarely buy into the possibility of falling in love with someone that you have known for three days, who you met in a beautiful country that is not your own; seriously it is a fairytale and the instant you step out of that setting it will fall to pieces) I found issue with how Letters to Juliet has in a sense "bastardized" Romeo & Juliet by skirting the reality that the character's were kids and their love, to be completely honest, probably had a 50/50 chance of survival. And there in lies the real question: if Romeo and Juliet had been able to survive the obvious doom of their love would they have survived or would Romeo's fickle nature cropped up again leaving Juliet weeping and Romeo delivering yet another set of beautiful but empty words to some new infatuation?
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