Intertextual Relations Between Romeo & Juliet the Play and the Baz Luhrmann Film.

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                                                            Dimitri Endz

Topic Seven IV:

Intertextual Relations Between Romeo & Juliet the Play and the Baz Luhrmann Film

John Frow wrote “Texts are not structures of presence but traces and tracings of otherness. They are shaped by the repetition and the transformation of other textual structures.” (Frow, ‘Intertextuality and Ontology’ from Worton and Still Intertextuality: Theories and Practises 1990. pg. 46) The “original” Shakespearean version of Romeo and Juliet (written between 1594 and 1596) indeed contains traces of otherness, almost as heavily as Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film adaptation.

   When a modern day audience goes to see a ‘new’ film they carry along certain expectations. Some of the situations of the film may be familiar, we may be able to anticipate the ending; the characters should not be too different from people we meet day to day, and they may speak lines that we have heard before in other films. However usually we demand a new story. The Elizabethan audience differed in that they were happy to be given a familiar story so long as the dramatist’s treatment was new and individual. The basic plot for Romeo and Juliet can be found as early as the third century A.D. Shakespeare relies almost entirely on a narrative poem entitled The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke (published in 1662). In turn the English poem is itself a translation of a popular prose fiction by Bandello (published in 1554). Even this derives from Italian stories, particularly one written by Luigi da Porto (1530).  

   Baz Luhrmann’s film version is aware of the intertextual history of the story and makes clear in its title that this is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Luhrmann dealt freely with the material provided from Shakespeare’s play in much the same way that “Shakespeare helped himself to portions of Brooke’s poem and made whatever alterations he thought fit.” (Gill, ‘A Couple of Unfortunate Lovers’ from Romeo and Juliet. 1990. pg. ix). The cinematic experience of the story, although different from watching the play in a traditional theatre, or even any other film version for that matter, retains the intensity and level expression that Shakespeare originally put into the script, which could not be expressed through as limited a medium as theatre. Luhrmann takes the very old and well-known play and gives it a modern context and setting while retaining most of the original language. He employs an especially unconventional style of film making, using jump cuts frequently throughout the film, upsetting the continuity while adding to the intensity. It could be said that the jump cut technique is the heartbeat of the film; speeding up with the intense scenes and slowing down as the action dissipates. Shakespeare employed a similar technique through his use of narrative when adapting from the Brooke version. Brooke gives the lovers three months of marriage while Shakespeare permits only one night to heighten the intensity and speed up the action. Lurmann employs further techniques to speed up the action; he literally speeds up the film to intensify certain scenes.  

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   The sequence at Verona beach (itself an intertextual reference to the setting of the original play; Verona, Italy) is an ideal example of this intensification. Tybalt challenges Mercutio to a one-bullet "turn and draw" gunfight (the closest modern equivalent to a sword fight since there is at least some skill involved) filmed using a Hong Kong action movie/Jackie Chan-esque method of cinema characterised by a seemingly absurd speeding up of action sequences and close-up, followed by extreme close up of the subject, in this case Abra (or in the play Abram) Capulet. "There is another sense in which ...

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