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Edward Dick on Romeo and Juliet

Verona is a fairytale world, almost a mythical world. It’s a very violent world, and it seems to me that everyone in that world is enraged. They’re consumed, almost all of the characters, with an unacknowledged rage.

Romeo and Juliet only have four scenes together. The play isn’t the romance that the title suggests. I believe the central themes of the play are sex and death and the play explores the relationship between them. It is extraordinary that both Juliet, a thirteen-year-old girl, and Romeo, who is only a little older, predict their own deaths. They do it after they’ve first met and after they’ve had sex.

Juliet is a famously difficult part to cast. She’s meant to be almost fourteen. Obviously there are issues which mean it is not possible to cast an actual fourteen year old. But, Juliet also has a huge, great, tragic second half of the play. So you need an actress with enough weight to communicate that tragedy, but also with a youthful innocence and spirit. To find that right balance is very tricky. Romeo is easier to cast. He’s also on the cusp between being a boy and a man.

Edward Dick is the Director of the Globe’s touring production of Romeo and Juliet

Giles Block on the language of Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is the Shakespearean tragedy with the most rhyme. Rhyme suggests a harmony between words - it gives us a sense of completeness. Shakespeare most frequently uses rhyme when completing something, the end of a scene for example. It is also used amongst lovers; they become poets. But, rhyme can be limiting. If you have to rhyme all the time, the possibilities of what you can say are restricted.

Friar Laurence speaks a lot in rhyme; his first lines are: ‘Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye / The day to cheer, and night’s dank dew to dry, / I must upfill this osier cage of ours / With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.’ (2.3.1-4) This whole scene is in rhyming couplets and Romeo joins in.

Rhyme usually makes us smile. There is something simple, not quite of this world about a character that rhymes a lot. It gives the sense that everything is in its right place, everything is possible. Maybe that's one of the causes of the great tragedy in the play: the Friar is the one who messes up; he takes an awful lot on, thinking he can bring harmony to Verona. This simple man is at the centre of all the action and his other-worldliness is therefore dangerous.

Giles Block advises on text in performance at Shakespeare’s Globe

Yolanda Vazquez on playing Juliet

Juliet was the very first professional part that I played, so I still have very strong feelings about what it was like to play her. I was twenty-one.

The beginning of the play was a joy; it involves reliving the experience of being in love for the first time. The parts I found extremely difficult came after the death of Tybalt, the long speeches; they are exhausting, physically and emotionally.

Juliet is part of a very particular world. We don’t see her outside of it. I found that very interesting, because I think that’s what makes her spontaneous and increases her desire to reach out. For me, that’s one of the reasons she falls so completely and so quickly for Romeo. He is the first man that she has met without her guardians being around her. It’s thrilling. Some characters might be withdrawn in such closed worlds, afraid of the outside world, but Juliet is not one of them – she wants out. She has an inherent lively spirit.

When I think of Juliet, I think of a truly multi-faceted character – unlike Ophelia, for example – passionate, mature, lively and innocent. She’s young, she’s never had sex, but she’s excited because she has these desires, but she is sensible too. Juliet makes sure they get married first. She works it all out: time, place, witnesses; the only thing she doesn’t do is tell her parents. When she finds out about Romeo’s banishment, she goes through a terrible cycle of emotions, but her resolve is the acceptance of her husband as her husband. She takes complete control in that scene.

In our production, the hardest scene to act, for me, was at the end of the play, in the tomb. It was phenomenally difficult, because I had to mime being dead for so long. During that scene you are being still whilst all this fighting happens around you, and you have someone holding you and weeping, and then Juliet has to wake up, hopefully timing it to maximise the tragedy, just before Romeo breathes his last breath.

Yolanda Vazquez is an actress, who has appeared in many Globe productions including: Adriana in The Comedy of Errors, Hypollita in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Hermione in The Winters Tale. Yolanda is a Globe Education Practitioner

Dominic Dromgoole on Romeo and Juliet

I remember my first Romeo and Juliet. I was eight, and on my first visit to Stratford. There was a huge humdinger of a fight at the beginning as the Montagues and Capulets piled into each other. Then I had my first experience of what was to become a constant in all my Shakespeare-going life. Stupefaction. At first I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, but soon I had to admit it. I couldn’t understand a blind word anyone was saying.

The occasional word penetrated through the mist, a ‘love’ or ‘fate’, or more helpfully a name, ‘Romeo’ (that’ll be him, then) or ‘Capulet’ (he’ll be on their team, then).

To begin with I was resentful, since I felt this must obviously be an adult thing. On the page this stuff was comprehensible, but obviously as soon as they got it into the theatre, the adults encoded it to make it harder for children.

Then I looked around and saw that a large percentage of the adults in the audience were as stupefied as I was. So why were they all there? I angrily pondered this, but against my injured will I was swept back into the story again, sick with rage at what had happened to Mercutio, indignant about Romeo’s exile (Oi, referee, put your specs on, that Tybalt had it coming) and worried sick about how Juliet was going to take it. By the end, I was stomach sick with grief at the loss of the two lovers.

Shakespeare shares a quality with opera. No matter the minute-to-minute sense, some underground movement, some oceanic swirl, catches you and hurls you merrily about. I was then, as now, hopelessly innocent before it.

Dominic Dromgoole is the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. This is an edited extract from his book, Will and Me – How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, Penguin, 2006

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