Comparing Filmic Adaptations Of Shakespeare`s `romeo And Juliet`

From its brilliant use of metaphors to its wide variety of language games, Romeo and Juliet is unique among Shakespeare's works principally because of its 'virtuosities of language'. It would seem then that the wordless medium of ballet is an inadequate art form to which Kenneth Macmillan has adapted the play. On the other hand, we can argue that Macmillan's ballet is successful in finding physical movement and imagery through which the feelings of Shakespeare's characters and the dramatic atmosphere created by the text can be conveyed. Franco Zeffirelli's film similarly uses a rich array of visuals, deploying colour, movement and music to convey and often intensify the dramatic effects of Shakespeare's language. It is important to keep in mind however that both directors adapt the play using highly differing modes. Indeed the technically formal nature of academic, classical ballet does not necessarily limit Macmillan's adaptation. On the contrary, Macmillan's language of dance in combination with Sergei Prokofiev's music is arguably able to express emotion and appeal to the senses as effectively as Zeffirelli's film.

One of the key elements of the play brought out to the fore in the ballet is the lovers' unique union. In the text this is conveyed by the lovers' distinctly brilliant and bold use of language - Romeo describes how Juliet's 'eyes in heaven/ Would through the airy region stream so bright' in one of his many dazzling conceits. The ballet too emphasizes the uniqueness of Romeo and Juliet's love through their style of dancing. Celebrated for his deeply expressive style well suited to the extreme psychological states of mind he often chose to choreograph for, Kenneth Macmillan acutely depicts the lovers' intense states of utter ecstasy and piercing grief. The dizzy rapture of passion is conveyed for example in the sweeping ponches, big lifts in which Juliet seems to fly in the air, deep backbends and leaps and pirouettes in the lovers' balcony pas de deux. The thrilling speed and difficulty - the dancers achieve amazing bodily feats through their dangerous lifts and leaps - communicates a limitless quality to the lovers' passion helped particularly in this scene by the continually unfolding and emotional tour de force of Prokofiev's music. In the play, the lovers' religious wordplay on pilgrims and holy palmers connects the touching of their hands and lips to a spiritual experience. The ballet also imbues the lovers' exchanges with an unreal quality, lifting them above their ordinary social world of feuds and patriarchal conventions through their unique style of dancing. This is further effectively depicted by the stark juxtaposition of the lovers' pas de deuxs and the rest of the dances in the ballet. The dance at Capulet's ball for example, with its severe formal rigidity is a complete contrast to the spontaneity and constant contact of the lovers' exchanges. We can argue therefore, that the ballet brings out the uniqueness of the lovers and the extremity of their psychological states of mind through an expressive style of dance and by creating an intense dramatic atmosphere through a visual poetry of motion.

In the ballet, Romeo and Juliet are always in close physical contact, leaning and wrapping their bodies around each other. Their relationship is certainly very physical and passionate. However, given that Macmillan's adaptation is in the mode of classical ballet, we can argue that the combination of music and choreography in the lovers' exchanges depict the erotic nature of their union in an idealized way. In Franco Zeffirelli's filmic presentation of the lovers however, there is arguably more of an emphasis on the sensual part of the lovers' relationship. In fact, many aspects of Zeffirelli's adaptation such as the use of primary colours, lush Italian landscapes and architecture, a rich musical score and an attractive and youthful cast of actors infuse a sensual abundance in the film and create the backdrop to the lovers' narrative. At Capulet's ball a similarly lush and sensual atmosphere is achieved by the music, the brightly coloured costumes, the noisy, energetic bustle of the ball and the abundance of piled fruits and wine. Against this background, Juliet, whose physical longing is candidly shown in the play 'O, I have bought the mansion of a love/ But not possessed it' is presented as a sensual being. In the extreme close-up shot of Juliet slowly closing her eyes with pleasure when Romeo grabs her hand behind a pillar and the mid-close-up shot when she tilts her head back and traces her lips with her fingers in remembrance of her first kiss, Zeffirelli emphasizes her stunning youthful beauty and her growing sexual awareness. In the balcony scene further close-ups of Juliet's desiring gaze reveal her sexual longing and the lovers' physical relationship is indicated by the frequent pausing of speech to touch and embrace. Nino Rota's music effectively underscores this scene. Brought in at certain moments such as the lovers' first embrace where Juliet passionately declares her love 'My bounty is as boundless as the sea,/ My love as deep; the more I give to thee,/ The more I have,' the rich string melodies intensify and enhance the spoken words of passion and self-giving. Deborah Cartmell argues that Zeffirelli's use of colour, music and atmospheric sets, the 'visual extravagance' which 'unashamedly appeal to the senses [.] distract the audience from the words as much as possible'. However, we can argue that the sensual richness of Zeffirelli's film actually intensifies the language, acting as a 'visual correlative' which feeds off and adds to the exquisitely rich language of Shakespeare's text.

On the other hand, it is important to recognize that the sensual eroticism of Romeo and Juliet's love in Zeffirelli's adaptation is very different from the lewd and sexually violent eroticism of the young men in the play and film 'O, that she were/ An open-arse, thou a poperin pear!' Indeed, Zeffirelli's adaptation emphasizes the youthful sweetness and energy of young love. As in the play where the youth of the lovers is communicated by the frequent allusions to Juliet's being thirteen years old ('not fourteen') Zeffirelli casts two young actors to play Romeo and Juliet - Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey were sixteen and fifteen when filming started. These actors' angelic faces and the child-like innocence that they bring to their characters highlight the youth of the two lovers. Hussey's Juliet for example often pouts and is innocently artless in her startled looks of wonder and surprise. Both actors also bring a youthful spontaneity to their reactions. Juliet lets out uninhibited giggles of delight and Romeo giddily hangs off a tree in a boyish expression of joy in the balcony scene. Macmillan's ballet similarly brings out the youthfulness of the lovers but to a lesser degree. Juliet for example still plays with a doll and jumps onto her nurse's lap when we are first introduced to her. These aspects all help to emphasize the youthful sweetness and innocence of Romeo and Juliet's love.

Furthermore, Zeffirelli emphasizes the energetic vitality of youth. In the balcony scene, a 'breathless pace and passion is given to the lovers'. The balcony becomes a 'runway' in which the lovers can display their youthful energy in physical terms. Romeo climbs up a tree, Juliet crosses and recrosses the balcony and the lovers constantly reach out to each other, touch and then break apart, interrupting moments of speech with passionate embraces. In the play, Juliet is shown to be a spirited and eloquent heroine. She asserts her control, correcting Romeo to 'swear not by the moon' because it is 'inconstant' and practically plans for the future, asking if Romeo's 'purpose [be] marriage'. She is also aware of the real dangers of Romeo being caught by her family 'If they do see thee, they will murder thee'. Zeffirelli includes these lines in the film and equally emphasizes his heroine's confidence and assertiveness through 'visual correlatives' of her physical self-command. Juliet's control is indicated by the assertive use of her body to express herself and her uninhibited declarations of passion, but also by her physical withdrawal when she believes she should be 'more strange,' stage directing Romeo by deciding when they should be touching and when they should be apart.

However, Zeffirelli's and Macmillan's emphasis on youth not only champions the vitality, passion and positive nature of Romeo and Juliet's generation but also highlights by juxtaposition the shortcomings of the older adult generation. Indeed, Zeffirelli's adaptation implies that the marriage between Capulet and Lady Capulet is not one of love and respect. This is revealed when Lady Capulet coldly closes the shutter to her husband's gaze in the scene before the ball accompanied by Capulet's comment 'too soon marred are those [marriages] early made' indicating the disunity between the two. It is even suggested that Lady Capulet is having a relationship with Tybalt when Lady Capulet is able to control Tybalt's rage with a short rebuke and when she displays an excessive grief over Tybalt's death. Macmillan's adaptation similarly condemns the older generation, evident in the first fight of the play when Montague and Capulet fight with swords absurdly too large for them, indicating their stubborn insistence on continuing a feud they are too infirm to fight or control. By stressing the deficiencies of the older generation, both adaptations implicitly indicate that the patriarchal values and violence of the 'ancient grudge' they uphold are stifling and eventually killing their own children.

The emphasis on the contrast between younger and older generations can to some extent be seen in Zeffirelli's case as a clear appropriation of the cultural movement of its time, to 'endorse a set of values of the international youth movement' of the 1960s where the youth protested against 'civil rights, meaningless wars and repressive governments' upheld by an older generation. The film's attempt to address its contemporary audience in this way however does not become a distortion of the play. In fact, we can argue that it illustrates and intensifies one of the key themes of the play. The social context of the play, the adult world of violence, feuding, masculine dominance and patriarchy constantly impinges on the lovers' insular world, and play a decisive role in driving the lovers' to their tragic fate. Romeo fights and is banished as he is caught up in a feud created by the 'ancient grudge' of the older generations of Montagues and Capulets. On the other hand, the reason why Mercutio fights in the first place (his death triggers Romeo's reluctant involvement in the fight) is because for him upholding the feud and responding when challenged to a duel becomes a matter of upholding his masculinity and a way of displaying patriarchal values: 'O calm, dishonourable, vile submission!' It is not only the older generations which are responsible for the lovers' fate but more specifically the patriarchal values they uphold and the pressure to continue a feud in order to retain male honour. As Coppelia Kahn states 'the feud [.] is the primary tragic force in the play' as it becomes a self-destructive 'expression of patriarchal society' and 'promotes masculinity at the price of life'.

In Macmillan's ballet, this patriarchal and violent society is articulated in various ways. Although ballet does not have the minutiae of verbal exchange the violent, patriarchal character of society is powerfully represented at Capulet's ball. The imposing 'Dance of the Knights' music for the ball is a militaristic march giving a violent undertone to the scene. Roles are highly gender specific, the men, hands on hips dancing with simple but forceful steps whilst the long-skirted women gracefully swoop into elegant poses, always lower in height especially in the end pose where they seem to kneel in submission towards the standing men. Tybalt becomes associated, as in Zeffirelli's adaptation, with the intrusion of the violent society into the lovers' world not only in his direct confrontation with Romeo but also through the character of his music. At the ball, Tybalt's entry and interruption of Romeo and Juliet in a private pas de deux is accompanied by a varied transposition of the militaristic 'Dance of the Knights' melody at the opening of Capulet's ball. As Tybalt pushes Romeo in a burst of anger, the same violently clashing dissonances heard at the end of the first act fight are also repeated. The absoluteness of patriarchal power and its frequent expression through violence (in the play Capulet tells his daughter to 'hang, beg, starve, die in the streets' when she disobeys him) is further conveyed in the ballet in the harrowing pas de deux which Juliet is forced to dance with Paris. Her distress shows in the limpness of her body and the extreme distance to Paris she tries to maintain, a sharp contrast to the close contact and exhilarating abandon with which she dances with Romeo. By articulating a rigidly patriarchal and masculine society which finds expression in feuds and violence, Macmillan highlights how the adult generation does not provide a nourishing environment for the young, eventually causing Romeo to kill Tybalt and be banished. Thus the ballet indicates that the Veronese society of the play is ultimately to blame for the lovers' tragic fate.

Zeffirelli similarly portrays the constant impingement of the violent, patriarchal values of society on the lovers' world. He does this by showing moments of the lovers' private exchanges being intruded on by the outside world through the manipulation of the camera. At Capulet's ball, Zeffirelli angles the camera as though from the point of view of Romeo and Juliet, using close-ups and selective focus pans of their faces to create a sense of intimacy between the couple and to suggest that despite the bustle of the ball the lovers only have eyes for each other. However, these interchanging shots are frequently interrupted by shots of the other guests, in particular close-ups of Tybalt's face. When Romeo declares his admiration for the 'snowy dove' he sees, the shot of Romeo quickly changes to a shot of Tybalt angrily recognizing Romeo's voice. Zeffirelli uses these quickly changing shots to inscribe private moments between the lovers with the violent danger of the streets associated with Tybalt from the first act fight. In this case, the changing shots also ironically highlight how even as Romeo first lays eyes on Juliet the seeds of the later violence to follow are sown. Whilst Peter Donaldson claims that the interchanging shots of Tybalt make Romeo's discourse to Juliet apply to Tybalt and therefore suggest a homoeroticism between them we can argue that this is not the case as shots of Tybalt are also interchanged with selectively focused and close-up shots of Capulet and Lady Capulet. Thus Zeffirelli aims to show how the violent and patriarchal values of society intrude on the lovers, placing the tragedy in the social context of Verona.

In the play the plot is tightly squeezed into a four day period and 'the play is unusually full with words like time, day, night, tomorrow, years, hours, minutes and specific days of the week giving us the sense of events moving steadily and inexorably' to their end. This is also stressed by a sense of a ticking time bomb as the date of Paris' wedding to Juliet is named on the day Romeo and Juliet are married 'ratcheting up the pressure by providing an end date beyond which the story cannot go'. The ballet's compression of the ending acts to similarly tighten the dramatic timing of the narrative. The ballet excludes the apothecary scene, the plot of the letter which does not reach Romeo and the speeches of the Prince and Friar Laurence. This allows a rapid development of events from when Juliet obtains the sleeping potion to her suicide, emphasizing as the play does, a sense of the unstoppable destructiveness of time. Furthermore, the audience that Macmillan envisaged when producing the ballet was assumed to know the play. This allowed Macmillan to focus on the more lyric moments of the tragedy without the need to explain plot developments. Thus the last pas de deux between Romeo and Juliet dominates the last act and becomes the last resonating note of the ballet. It is an intensely harrowing scene as Romeo drags Juliet's body across the stage, trying to recreate steps from their previous pas de deux with her lifeless limbs. Indeed, such a realistic and 'shockingly grotesque' portrayal of pain and death had not been seen in ballet before. By choosing to end the ballet on this note and by cutting out the reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets, Macmillan's ending removes any sense of redemption and emphasizes the intense emotional pathos of two lovers' deaths.

Zeffirelli's adaptation similarly makes drastic changes to the ending. The apothecary scene is cut and Paris is not present in the tomb. This we can presume to be partly as a result of the time constraints enforced on commercial films. However, the cuts also show the younger generation in a better light: Romeo and Juliet 'can do no wrong'. Romeo's exploitation of the apothecary, his threat to Balthasar at the entry of the tomb, and his murder of Paris are indeed problematic. By eliminating these elements Zeffirelli's adaptation allows Romeo to remain untainted and 'pure' and for the blame and condemnation to therefore rest solely on the older generation. Thus, we can say that Zeffirelli's adaptation ends in a far more conventional and romanticised way than Macmillan's adaptation. As Zeffirelli commented, in the tomb scene 'young people wanted us to have the romantic meeting between the dead girl [.] and Romeo' which would have been diluted if Romeo was 'a murderer'. By cutting out questionable elements of Romeo's character and ending on the reconciliation of the feuding families, the film indicates Zeffirelli's aim to appeal to the masses.