Shakespeare and love: from Romeo and Juliet to the Sonnets

William Shakespeare staged love in almost all its forms: sudden infatuation, courtship as a game of wit, destructive jealousy, mature passion that defies power. None of his works, however, has become an archetype as much as Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy written around 1595 that tells of the love between two young people of Verona belonging to enemy families.

An Italian story

The story was not Shakespeare's invention. In 1476 Masuccio Salernitano had told, in his Novellino, a Sienese tale of two ill-fated lovers, Mariotto and Giannozza. Around 1530 Luigi da Porto moved it to Verona and gave the protagonists the names Romeo and Giulietta, linking them to the Montecchi and Cappelletti families, already mentioned by Dante in the Purgatorio as an example of civil discord.

Matteo Bandello took up the story in his Novelle, published in 1554; from there it passed into French and then into English, in Arthur Brooke's poem of 1562, which was Shakespeare's direct source. The playwright drastically sped up the action, compressing it into a few days, and turned a moral tale on the dangers of passion into a tragedy of youth and chance.

The lovers' language

The first exchange between Romeo and Juliet, at the feast in the Capulet house, is written in the form of a sonnet, shared between the two voices and sealed with a kiss: an explicit homage to the Petrarchan tradition, then highly fashionable in England. Shortly before, Romeo had been pining for Rosaline with the conventional antitheses of the Petrarchists; meeting Juliet teaches him a more direct and truthful language.

The famous balcony scene plays on the theme of the name. Juliet reflects that the name Montague is no part of the person, and that things would remain what they are even if they were called otherwise. Love thus stands against social and family identity, against the weight of words that divide, and it is precisely this opposition that leads the lovers to ruin.

The Sonnets and the comedies

In 1609 a collection of 154 sonnets by Shakespeare was published, dedicated to a mysterious Mr. W.H. whose identity is still debated. Most of the poems are addressed to a young man of extraordinary beauty, while a later group concerns a dark-haired woman, the so-called Dark Lady, loved with a restless desire. They are poems about time, about beauty that fades and about the power of poetry to make it eternal.

The comedies offer another face of love. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the pairs of lovers swap and become confused through a spell in a wood near Athens. In As You Like It Rosalind, disguised as a man, schools her own suitor in love. Antony and Cleopatra, finally, stages an adult passion that sacrifices an empire.

Shakespeare gathered the legacy of the Italian novella and of Petrarchan lyric and handed it on to the modern theatre. His couples, happy or tragic, have inspired countless adaptations in music, painting and film. In Verona, a city the playwright knew, as far as we can tell, only through his sources, a medieval house identified as Juliet's house draws many visitors every year.