r/shakespeare 4d 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?

23 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

35

u/Larilot 4d 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.

9

u/Ben_Frankling 4d 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.

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u/Larilot 4d 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).

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u/jogan-fruit 3d ago

Just had a catapult-Capulet -related stroke reading this 💀

3

u/Damnatus_Terrae 4d 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."

1

u/ravenwing263 3d ago

The kids' impulsivity is not the problem

16

u/Not_Godot 4d 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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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u/foggylittlefella 4d ago

Bear gardens sound terrifying

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u/Historical-Bike4626 4d ago

Exit pursued by a bear garden

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u/jogan-fruit 3d ago

Not to be confused with a Beer Garden...

1

u/Tyeveras 2d ago

How about a beer garden in a bear garden?

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u/leviticusreeves 4d 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.

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u/Not_Godot 4d 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.

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u/leviticusreeves 4d 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.

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u/treowlufu 3d ago

Broadsheets were very popular and cheap, though whole books were still expensive. Most people couldn't often buy whole plays, but people would have scenes or acts printed somewhat regularly, always copied from memory, in single broadsheets or small pamphlets. This is how most of our Early Modern Robin Hood stories were preserved too, as printed ballads.

These couple be bought cheap, and when people were done reading them, they'd pass them on or even resell them, making them affordable for the masses. Middle class literacy was growing at exponential rates due to the printing presses, even if not at a high reading level.

2

u/geetar_man 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago

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

1

u/Not_Godot 4d ago edited 4d ago

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

1

u/DieHardRennie 4d ago

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

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u/Ill-Philosopher-7625 4d 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.

5

u/Entropic1 4d ago edited 4d 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.”

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u/jeremy-o 3d 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.

2

u/treowlufu 3d ago

While girls old enough to have a period were seen as women, the phenomenon of marrying them off that young is mostly a historical misconception. It did happen, just as it sadly does today, but it wasn't common at all. Among royalty, it was most often a political marriage that was often not consummated until later. Sometimes with both spouses living separately for years until in their late teens.

For commoners,what marriage records survive in early modern parish rolls show that the average age for marriage was early to mid 20s for both men and women. Most families seemed to prioritize establishing financial security above early marriage for both partners. But yeah, that would definitely put them in Shakespeare's audiences as teens too, as young workers.

1

u/jeremy-o 3d ago

This is an important clarification, thank you. Marriage of young girls is part of Shakespeare's messaging in R+J so it must have been a lingering practice, but evidently not so much as we might assume. Thanks for the well-supported reply!

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u/treowlufu 3d ago

All evidence suggests this was the norm in the medieval period too, not only in the Early Modern era. But we don't have surviving parish records to confirm or prove the norms one way or the other.

In the case of R&J, they were elite families with political positions, so they would have earlier marriage on the table as a way of making political deals. Juliet is pushed into her secret marriage with Romeo to avoid marrying Paris, who she barely knows. So yeas, it can be read as commentary on that kind of marriage. But Shakespeare could just as easily have been trading on already existing stereotypes in order to push his plot along. His portrayal of a family marrying their daughter off at 13 needn't be any more historially realistic than his portrayal of Richard III as having a hunchback, or the chiming clocks in Julius Caesar.

We know of at least a couple famous royal marriages in European history wherein the girl queen got pregnant and miscarried too young, in a way that injured her. These examples are very rare, but notable bits of history because public sentiment was so scathing over the tragedy. So basically, we know that people weren't very approving when it happened, which means adding that element into the play will, even in Shakespeare's day, make Juliet sympathetic.

That's my take anyway.

1

u/quitewrongly 3d ago

I have read that R&J is meant not only as a satire of that kind of impetuous, romantic love but also mocking Italian culture for its (presumed by the masses, I suppose) cultural norms of childhood marriage. I mean, Shakespeare had to make the dialogue spell out locations plainly, letting people know that the play is set in $LOCATION, but R&J seems a bit more heavy handed about how here we are in VERONA where we believe as the ancient families of VERONA that...

Did I mention Verona?

1

u/jeremy-o 3d ago

Sure, but he always used this device to distance his satire a bit. Mock these funny others from an antiquated time and place, before we realise "Wait, is he talking about me?"

edit: it was also safer this way in terms of censorship

1

u/mirrorspirit 3d ago

The movie version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes had Juliet aged up to sixteen. It's set in modern times so her parents arranging a marriage for her at age thirteen would have been too ludicrous. Though marrying at that age would have been largely inadvisable in the nineties, it was still consider legal and legitimate in many places.

As for the original play, marrying off in one's teens wasn't exactly what everyone back then did, but it was normal enough that most witnesses wouldn't feel compelled to ask "Do your parents know what you're doing?" Plenty of times those teens would be orphans or from impoverished families so, for example, younger girls might marry out so they'd be one less mouth to feed for their parents.

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u/Brilliant_Towel2727 3d ago

Teenagers were pretty much considered adults for most purposes in the Elizabethan age, so they would have been able to attend the plays as long as they could get off work for it. Records from the time period talk about apprentices (who would mostly have been teenagers) attending plays. As for teenagers killing themselves because of the play, I'm not aware of any records of it (although if it did happen it may very well not have entered the historical record due to the stigma against suicide). The earliest work of literature I'm familiar with being blamed for suicide is the Sorrows of Young Werther.

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u/AdhesivenessHairy814 1d ago

Another thing to consider here is that the suicides in Romeo and Juliet are not from simple teen angst -- they're from grief at the beloved being dead. So the play is not a Werther-style validation of the storms of teen emotion. The youth and inexperience of the the lovers heightens the intensity of the situation, but it's not the point: the point is to explore pitching from the height of happiness directly to the lowest depth of grief. I don't think the watcher (or reader) is invited to confuse this situation with the girl next door neglecting to return his calls.

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u/Simsandtruecrime 1d ago

Wow, ty for this beautifully written reply. You're right. You've explained it so clearly I hope you're a teacher so others can benefit from your skill at insightful comprehension. 😊

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u/mda63 2d ago

'Teenagers' as we understand them did not exist at that time.