Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

Okay, it’s happening. We’re going classic here. I know we started with Nina and all that, but trust me, this one is… bigger. And better, depending on your take. This week, we’ll be exploring my favorite monologue from one of the best and most iconic ingenue roles of all time:

ROMEO AND JULIET

by William Shakespeare

Looking at

JULIET

(of course.)

Now, you read this play in high school or university, but read it again, now. It’s brilliant. The balcony scene makes me cry every time with its innocence and earnestness, Juliet’s (often cut) tragic struggle to maintain control of a situation that is entirely out of her hands in Friar Lawrence’s cell -- ugh. Brilliant.

Doing Juliet has its danger, but it also has its freedom. Everyone has seen, read, knows, and has an opinion about this play. But if you do it well, no one will care. And the key to doing it well is DO NOT IMITATE OTHER JULIETS. I’m gonna repeat that:

DO NOT IMITATE OTHER JULIETS.

Shakespeare wrote humans, not archetypes, and finding where Juliet fits into you is just as important as nailing the verse, in my opinion. Every great actress has played Juliet at some point, and finding out what YOUR Juliet looks like is an essential part of the journey. If you walk into the room with Just Another Juliet, you’ll be walked out pretty quickly. But if you spend time with this piece and find where it lands on you, where it resonates, what you understand best about it and where you think it’s funny or quirky or interesting… that’s when you find an audition worth doing. Anyway, if you’ve been asked to bring in Shakespeare, they’ve seen everything anyway, so doing something you like is better than doing something ‘rare’.

Okay, enough ranting.

Also, I’m not going to summarize for you (#sorrynotsorry #readtheplay). Shakespeare summarized it himself, and so I’ll just use his:

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona where we lay our scene.

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth, with their death, bury their parents’ strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end nought could remove,

Is now the two-hours passage of their stage.

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

(Also, two hours? Ha. Shakespeare: an optimist, ammirite?)

On to the monologue!

This is sometimes known as “the potion monologue” because it’s the scene where Juliet, having been given a potion by the Friar, is about to go into her “death-like sleep.” Despite being secretly married Romeo, Juliet has been sentenced by her father to marry the count Paris. As a means of escape the Friar has given her a potion that will put her into a sleep that will seem like death, with the promise that Romeo (newly banished) will wake her in her family’s vault after she has been buried. Pretty morbid, eh? She’s just bid her mother and (more importantly) her Nurse (her best friend), farewell for the final time, and is about to take the potion.

JULIET:

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.

I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,

That almost freezes up the heat of life:

I'll call them back again to comfort me:

Nurse! What should she do here?

My dismal scene I needs must act alone.

Come, vial.

What if this mixture do not work at all?

Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?

No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there.

(laying down her dagger)

What if it be a poison, which the friar

Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,

Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd,

Because he married me before to Romeo?

I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not,

For he hath still been tried a holy man.

How if, when I am laid into the tomb,

I wake before the time that Romeo

Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point!

Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault,

To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,

And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?

Or, if I live, is it not very like,

The horrible conceit of death and night,

Together with the terror of the place,--

As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,

Where, for these many hundred years, the bones

Of all my buried ancestors are packed:

Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,

Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,

At some hours in the night spirits resort;--

Alack, alack, is it not like that I,

So early waking, what with loathsome smells,

And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,

That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:--

O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,

Environed with all these hideous fears?

And madly play with my forefather's joints?

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?

And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,

As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?

O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost

Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body

Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay!

Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.

Ugh. So good.

Juliet also has some other amazing monologues that are even MORE commonly done: “Romeo, Oh Romeo” in Act II, scene II, “Gallop Apace” in Act III, scene II, and… pretty much the whole play. Again, read the play, have fun with the monologues, and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t play Juliet: you totally can.

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!