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Shakespeare's Romeo, banished from Verona, tells Juliet as he leaves their bridal cham ber, "all these woes shall serve / For sweet discourses in our times to come" (III. i. 523). Times to come have indeed served numerous renditions of their sweet discourses, the most recent being the Academy Award winning Shakespeare in Love (1998). Though the film is a delight to watch, anyone who has studied Shakespeare beyond the high school level knows that the plot for Romeo and Juliet was inspired by much more than Shakespeare's affairs (whether theatrical or sexual) and that it is highly unlikely Twelfth Night followed on its heels. Nevertheless, the film charms audiences not only with its vision of socio-economically-crossed lovers, but also with its modernist mystification of the autonomous author who can generate great art only when inspired by great beauty and even greater love. This may explain why discourse about Shakespeare in Love has been considerably sweeter than that generated by Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, which one reviewer described as a "monumental disaster" (LaSalle). However, with Shakespeare in Love creating so much interest in the conceptualization and performance of Romeo and Juliet in the 1590s, I think it is time scholars assess the postmodern conceptualization and performance in the 1990's of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, which has elicited very little commentary since the film was initially panned by reviewers.
Indeed, discourse about Luhrmann & Pearce's highly-frenetic screenplay has been far less than sweet.l Janet Maslin, decrying the film's "pink hair, screaming billboards, tabloid television stories, [and] music-video editing," writes that "the dialogue is lost and upstaged." Jim Welsh, in a Literature/Film Quarterly review, notes that "[t]he film's spectacle constantly overpowers and overwhelms the poetry" (152), echoing Clement Scott: "We are gradually overdoing spectacle so much that poetry must suffer in the long run. The question is no longer how this or that character in Shakespeare ought to be played, but how much money can be spent on this or that scene" (Odell 2:434). Scott's review of Romeo and Juliet, however, was written in 1884, illustrating that despair over abuses to Shakespeare's poetry is nothing new. Even the 1968 Zeffirelli film, which some critics of Luhrmann's film hold as the ideal...