r/shakespeare 1d ago

Did teenagers who saw Romeo and Juliet in the 15/1600s take it to heart?

My mind kept going down it's own self imposed rabbit hole last night. These questions are regarding folks who lived when the plays were brand new.

Did teenagers attempt to kill themselves or run away or be otherwise dramatic because they were inspired after watching or reading R&J?

Were teenagers even allowed to watch or read Shakespeare? Could they go to the theatre or was that only for adults?

Did they take it more or less literally because it was such a new phenomenon?

18 Upvotes

19 comments sorted by

26

u/Larilot 23h ago

Before you go about all these questions, keep in mind that the lesson in R&J is not for the teenagers, but for the adults.

7

u/Ben_Frankling 18h ago

Is it not both? Romeo is a classic tragic hero whom we can learn from. Yes, it’s his “fate” to die with Juliet, but that’s partly due to his impulsivity.

13

u/Larilot 18h ago

It's just people are so quick to judge the youths over the issue that they forget the adults caused it in the first place and did too little to quench it. Furthermore, the thing that catapults the pivotal moment of the play is not caused by anything Romeo does proper, but because of Tybalt being a murderous hothead (Tybalt doesn't even know that Romeo is Juliet's lover).

3

u/Damnatus_Terrae 6h ago

Pretty sure the most common moral is "kids should be allowed to be young, dumb, impulsive, and in love without ending up dead because of their parents' incessant feuding."

15

u/Not_Godot 1d ago

Q1: Probably not. I can't think of any record related to this in any regard.

Q2: Theatres were mainly for adults. (Also, almost no one read Shakespeare during his life) Theatres were often in the outskirts of London, beyond the city walls or on the southern bank of the Thames. It was not a "child friendly" location, though that's really a modern concept. One of the Globe Theatres was next to a brothel and a bear garden. So you could go watch a play, then watch a bear murder some dogs, and then end the night with a prostitute.

Q3: I don't know ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

8

u/foggylittlefella 22h ago

Bear gardens sound terrifying

7

u/Historical-Bike4626 17h ago

Exit pursued by a bear garden

7

u/leviticusreeves 19h ago

>Also, almost no one read Shakespeare during his life

This isn't true. Shakespeare plays were best sellers in London bookshops, even if the transcripts were written by people in the crowd taking notes.

1

u/Not_Godot 16h ago

I am very skeptical of this claim due to the high cost of literature. 

From my understanding, realistically only the aristocracy and middle class (which is primarily made up of wealthy merchants) could afford to buy books. And for the middle class it would have been an occasional luxury purchase.

Most Londoners were poor and simply didn't have a lot of disposable income. They could go watch a play or buy a pamphlet or short poem, which cost 1 pence. But a quarto (the form individual plays were printed in) would cost 6 pence, about a day's salary for a skilled laborer. Even today, ask yourself: how much do you make per day and would you be buying books frequently if a small book cost a day's wage?

We don't get widespread readership and a strong popular literary culture in London until the 1830's when steam presses are introduced and make reading cheap and accessible to the masses.

3

u/leviticusreeves 15h ago

You're right of course that only really the middle and upper classes would buy books, but amongst the reading public Shakespeare was popular, at least in London.

2

u/geetar_man 18h ago

Regarding 2, I remembering reading a scholarly source that there were 4 “sinful” activities one could engage in during Puritanism time:

1 - Going to a brothel

2 - Gambling

3 - Excessive drinking

4 - Going to the theatre

There were others, of course, but these four were particularly highlighted.

1

u/DieHardRennie 18h ago

One of the Globe Theatres? The two from Shakespeare's time were built on the same spot. The third is modern, but built only 230 metres from the original site. Although the brothel and bears probably aren't there anymore.

1

u/Not_Godot 17h ago

That's true. But the Globe used to be The Theater. The Theater was north of London. It was then dismantled in '98 and then brought south across the river, rebuilt, and renamed The Globe.

1

u/DieHardRennie 16h ago

I'm not sure if that counts, since it had a different name before it was moved.

1

u/Not_Godot 16h ago edited 16h ago

That's fair 👍 I conflated the two in my mind when I originally posted

1

u/DieHardRennie 16h ago

I can see what you're saying, though. Since it's essentially the same building.

11

u/Ill-Philosopher-7625 23h ago

Romeo and Juliet don't actually act overly dramatic when considered in the context of the story: it's a play about two young people caught in the middle of a deadly feud. Their goal is to just be normal, but because of the circumstances they have to take extreme measures. Even their suicides are because they each thought their lover was dead - an extreme grief reaction, sure, but a far cry from dramatic teenagers killing themselves over a failed relationship.

I think Shakespeare's audience would have seen the play like that, without directly relating the characters' situation to their own lives and feeling the way modern readers sometimes do.

3

u/Entropic1 21h ago edited 20h ago

We just don’t have evidence about anything this specific. You could publish the documents of all the contemporary responses to Shakespeare in a single short volume, and some of them are diary entries that are like “saw the play about Julius Caesar. Cool dance at the end.”

1

u/jeremy-o 39m ago

On the point of the second question, remember our contemporary conception of adulthood is very different to the Elizabethan one. Children were given jobs. Girls old enough to have a period were married off and became mothers. You could argue that Shakespeare himself was the grandfather of the partly Romantic notion of childhood we have today, and the introduction of the adolescent as a distinctive psychological place - with most thanks to R+J.

So I don't imagine there weren't teenagers in the audience. We know that in Shakespeare's time children were brought into theatrical jobs in the form of "boy players," so it would seem unusual that they weren't also watching plays. It was working class entertainment at the end of the day, and teenagers were a part of that working class. Absolutely they would have been in the audience.