SOURCE: Jorgens, Jack. “Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.” In Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays, edited by John F. Andrews, pp. 163-76. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

[In the following review, originally published in 1977, Jorgens assesses Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film, Romeo and Juliet, commenting on its visual excessiveness, its refreshing “nontheatrical” acting, and is paring down of the original text. Jorgens concludes that while the film's action, emotional impact, and conception of theme and structure may be appealing to some viewers, the work as a whole is a more immature effort than Shakespeare's play.]

Shakespeare's source for the story of Romeo and Juliet was Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and now in Englishe by Ar. Br. (1562). In his “Address to the Reader,” Brooke spoke of

a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire; neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends; conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity); attempting all adventures or peril for the attaining of their wicked lust; using auricular confession, the key of whoredom and treason, for the furtherance of their purpose; abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage to cloak the shame of stolen contracts; finally by all means of unhonest life hasting to most unhappy death.

In the story itself, however, he abandoned his heavy moralizing and showed great sympathy for both the young lovers and the Friar, and rather than tying the tragic ending to character and divine justice, rooted the cause in Fortune.

Certainly Shakespeare trusted the tale and not the teller. One of his most popular plays, written when he was about thirty and also at work on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet is an exuberant celebration of young love—its excitement, passion, and lyricism. Despite the ominous Prologue, which foretells the sacrifice of the young to “bury their parents' strife,” critics often note that this love story has many of the characteristics of Shakespeare's romantic comedies: the fool Mercutio, the bawdy, funny Nurse, the stereotypical villain Tybalt, the blocking of the loves of the young by the values and laws of the old, ornamented verse, domestic detail, and even the motif of dreaming. Only with the death of Mercutio does the story become a tragedy of Fate and begin its breathless race toward the tomb.

What Romeo and Juliet lack in depth of character they make up in energy, beautiful innocence, and spontaneity. If the arc of their rise and fall seems unusually intense and brilliant, it is because it is set against a rich, dark background. Love clashes with hate, the ideal with the real. Romeo and Juliet's romance avoids sentimentality because it must pass through the fires of the Nurse's jokes and meandering, trivial, pragmatic mind, Mercutio's bawdy wit, the demands of duty and honor, the ugly rigidities of the old, and the feud, which though bound up with Fate seems to have a life of its own. Shakespeare's pattern seems true because it is never a simple one. If the parents want to live their lives over again through their children, they also have great affection and hope for them. Blended with the impulses of the young toward rebellion are hot tempers and the need to prove their maturity, which keep the feud alive when the old are ready to let it die. Analogous to the literal tragedy that the young and innocent are sometimes cruelly cut off in life is the figurative one that youth, innocence, spontaneity, passion die as we grow older—they are sacrificed to meaningless conflicts, adult responsibilities, and accommodating oneself to a fallen world.

Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, based loosely on his energetic stage production for the London Old Vic in 1960, is the most popular and financially successful Shakespeare film yet made. It shares with his Shrew rich colors and textures, elegantly reconstructed Renaissance interiors and costumes bathed in idyllic golden light and resembling paintings by the old masters. It is spectacular, extravagant, full of nervous motion, energy, camera movement, rapid cutting. We find the same frenetically active extras and strenuous physicality in the clowning of the Maskers before Capulet's ball and the fights in the square that we find in Petruchio's pursuit of Kate and their destruction of Paduan proprieties. (The saturnalian pattern is at work here too, but the outcome is deadly, not festive.) The director fills his frame with motion, people, and things in an effort to give the film a realistic solidity, fullness, and spontaneity. At times it becomes almost operatic in its excess. As in Shrew there is so much music that one expects the actors suddenly to burst into song. Yet the acting, far from being operatic, is in a fresh, nontheatrical, nonelocutionary style. The director uses a pared down text, often interrupts the flow of the lines with entertaining gestures and sounds, and generally keeps the talk out of the way of the action according to the convention of film realism.

Critics have been harsh with Zeffirelli's rash, reckless style. John Simon complained of what he called “centrifugality.”¹ In comparing Romeo and Juliet with Kozintsev's Hamlet, Ronald Hayman argued that

wasting visual effects is quite as bad as wasting words, and where Kozintsev is tautly economic, Zeffirelli is loosely lavish. Each visual detail, each movement of the actors and each movement of the camera means something in Kozintsev, whereas Zeffirelli's camera wanders all over Verona, grabbing at anything that catches its eye, and putting in movements (or even dances like the gratuitous Moresca at the Capulets' ball) for the sake of their immediate photogenic appeal.²

Though we may question whether a “tautly economic” style would really suit this play, there is truth in Hayman's objections. Zeffirelli's films sometimes veer out of control, lapse into visual clichés, caricatures, and sentimentality, wander between muddled motivations and geography and a tendency to make everything simple and obvious. Still, he is no mere mindless popularizer of Shakespeare. Like Shrew, Romeo and Juliet is a critically underrated film which has some interesting dimensions. When he has things under control, Zeffirelli's images embody interpretative truths about the play very well.

The panoramic opening shot of Romeo and Juliet (a tribute to the opening of Olivier's Henry V—he even has Olivier reading the prologue) strikes many as a conventional establishing shot, an attempt to be “scenic.” But Zeffirelli is doing here what the critics have not credited him with doing—using imagery in a significant way. To begin with, the shot provides a visual equivalent to the godlike, distant, formal tone and style of the prologue which contrasts so vividly with the passion and violence inside Verona's walls. As the camera pans over deathly still Verona, bathed in early morning light, the city is shrouded in fog. There is a formal rightness in this image, for the white shroud is one of the central motifs of the film. It recurs in Mercutio's white handkerchief, which at various times becomes his apron as he kneels in mock prayer and mimes the priest “dream-ing of an-o-ther ben-i-fice” (a glance at Friar Laurence?), his needle work (not long after, we see Juliet sewing), his contraceptive as he plays the gossip and the bawdy jokester with the Nurse, his deathlike mask (“blah, blah, blah”) and washrag in the hot square, and finally his bandage which hides the bloody fatal wound and is rubbed in Tybalt's face by Romeo. The white shroud also appears in the Nurse's veil (“A sail! A sail!”), in the sheets and gauze curtains in Juliet's room, and in the winding sheets in Juliet's funeral and covering the corpses in the Capulet tomb. Opposing the fogshrouded city of death in the opening shot is the burning circle of the sun. The camera zooms rapidly in on it (an overused device in this film) until it fills the screen with blinding orange light, making of it a symbol of the opposing passions of the play. It represents not only the love of Romeo and Juliet (the sun greets them in bed and shines at their funeral), of Romeo and Mercutio, and of the Nurse and Juliet, but also the general hatred unleased in the feud—the frustrated rage of Tybalt, Mercutio, Romeo, and Prince Escalus. The symbol captures the underlying unity of emotions which come together dialectically at the end of the play.

Zeffirelli's splashy style is evident in the two big scenes of the film, Capulet's ball and the fatal duels in the square. Each is shamelessly milked for emotion, the dance for the tenderness and lyricism of young love, including the sticky sweet song “What is a Youth?” and the fights for the raw excitement of seeing mockery and tests of skill turn into a fight to the death as well as the shock and pain of seeing Mercutio die while his friends laugh, thinking it is another of his jokes. Each scene is filled with spectacle: the ball with swirling costumes, candles, torches, glasses of wine, heaps of fruit, diffused gold backgrounds, and the comic faces among the guests (including a tall, homely, moon-eyed girl who stares down at Juliet), and the duels with Mercutio's clowning and playing to his audience even in his bravura death, and the vicious, dirty, unromantic fight to the death between Romeo and Tybalt, shot in the midst of the dust with a hand-held camera and punctuated with nervous bursts of cuts, climaxing with Tybalt's running on Romeo's sword (a grim repetition of the accidental stabbing of Mercutio) and his sightless corpse falling on top of Romeo. Yet, in these scenes Zeffirelli does more than just immerse his audience in action and spectacle. Each scene presents a complicated pattern of characters, relationships, and themes central to Zeffirelli's interpretation of the play.

For Zeffirelli, language is primarily a key to character. He is more interested in “the poetry of human relationships” than in ideas, imagery, and the music of the words,³ and he is not timid about fleshing out characters roughly sketched by Shakespeare. Lady Capulet, for example, is at the hub of the continuing feud. In her appearances before the ball, we learn that her marriage to the older Capulet is not a happy one. As the camera tastelessly zooms in on her sour face and a violin comically whines on the sound track, it is all too evident that Capulet has learned about girls being marred by early marriage and motherhood from personal experience. Capulet's remark to Paris that Juliet will be his only heir and, later, his joking lament for his lost youth at the ball suggest that he is impotent, that what is left of his marriage is the social arrangement. Lady Capulet, on the other hand, is still young, vain about her looks (we see her primping and being made up), uncomfortable with a nearly grown daughter, in need of the Nurse when she must broach the subject of marriage, in need of Capulet when Juliet is disobedient. At the ball we learn more about the conflict between Lady Capulet and her husband. He is a nouveau riche, lacking the polish and refinement of his guests, while she is a daughter of the old aristocracy, embarrassed by her gauche, gregarious spouse, positively withering in her irony as she reprimands Capulet and Tybalt for quarrelling at the ball (with a hostess's smile: “well said my hearts!”).

In a sense, the Capulet marriage is a recapitulation of the larger conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues, who, Zeffirelli said, “are a noble, military family who have gone to seed. They are in decline. They produce only students—Romeo learns verses and Benvolio carries books. The Capulets are a rich merchant family, full of social climbers, men of wealth as well as men of action.”⁴ Louis Gianetti notes that the bright colors worn by middle aged, clean-shaven Capulet contrast with the dark robes of grey-bearded Montague.⁵ Lady Capulet's refusal to help Juliet is thus more clearly motivated in the film. She is anxious to shore up the respectability of her family with an alliance with Paris; she is uneasy in the role of mother and annoyed that Juliet's stubbornness has subjected her to Capulet's anger. Underneath, too, one guesses that she welcomes the opportunity to subject Juliet (obviously Capulet's favorite) to the unhappiness she herself suffers by marrying her to a man she does not love. Lady Capulet is further implicated in the feud in that her refuge from her husband is handsome, virile, young Tybalt, her dancing partner at the ball, the “young princox” who submits to her when he will not to his uncle. The intensity of her grief when, with her hair down, she cries to Prince Escalus for justice (revenge) reflects the loss of much more than a favorite nephew.⁶ This frustrating relationship also clarifies the keenness of Tybalt's anger, his anxiousness to prove his manhood, to uphold family honor, and to prevent Juliet from “consorting” with Romeo.

In the duels, Zeffirelli is once again interested in “the poetry of human relationships.” There is deep friendship, even love, between Romeo and Mercutio. Mercutio's mercurial showmanship seems aimed at Romeo, and his anger, when Romeo is off sighing for love or making a milksop of himself before Tybalt, is tinged with jealousy. How could a friend abandon male comradery for “a smock”? These feelings, along with the oppressive heat, general boredom, and shallowness of Benvolio, make Mercutio push Tybalt too far and set the wheels of Fate in motion. The combatants are natural opposites. Tybalt fights with strength and skill, Mercutio with resiliency, wit, and a talent for doing the unexpected. Tybalt frightens and threatens his victim (he puts a sword to Mercutio's throat and lets him sweat, cuts off a lock of his hair), while Mercutio ridicules his (by bandying words while baptizing himself in the fountain, whistling nonchalantly when cornered, doing pratfalls and running in mock fear, arming Tybalt with a pitchfork, and forcing him to retreat by sharpening one sword on the other before his face). This ingrained antipathy between Mercutio and Tybalt—Tybalt's need to humiliate an opponent, Mercutio's need to flirt with danger (very near a death wish)—and Romeo's guilt, first at abandoning Mercutio and then at causing his death, come together to accelerate the tragic movement begun at the ball.

Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet does not have particularly distinguished readings of the verse, being in this respect at the opposite end of the spectrum from the articulate readings of Olivier's films or Peter Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This was in part lack of skill and in part artistic choice. “What matters is modernity of feeling rhythm, modernity inside. The verse must always have an intimate rhythm, the rhythm of reality. It must never become music.”⁷ The ball and the fight heighten the contrast in the film between the young who do and the old who talk. “What Zeffirelli suggests is that the means of communication between the young, or those who understand the young, is not essentially words, as it is for the older generation, but gesture and action.”⁸ Romeo and Juliet fall in love at the ball through looking and touching more than through words. Tybalt need only look at Juliet to know what has happened. In the duel, and earlier when he sports a death mask, raves in an empty square, and lifts up the Nurse's skirts, it is what Mercutio does as much as what he says that makes him so bawdy, irreverent, erratically alive. Like the lovers, the young bloods of the square “speak” with their bodies and their “weapons.” The young distrust the rhetoric of the old: Juliet asks “what's in a name?” Mercutio responds to Benvolio's echoing of parental cautions with “blah, blah, blah,” and Romeo is so impatient with Friar Laurence's tired saws while awaiting Juliet that he fills in the next word each time the holy man pauses. The impotent old, on the other hand, talk and talk, give worldly advice like the Nurse, send tardy letters and lend spiritual guidance like the Friar, or lecture and threaten like Capulet and the Prince. They seem overly deliberate, unspontaneous, slow compared with the young. That is why they are unable to help or even to understand.

Zeffirelli not only used the ball and the duel scenes to entertain, to further characterization, and to contrast young and old, he also displays something of Shakespeare's analogic habit of mind by underscoring the parallels between rituals of love and hate. Both scenes are ironic. Capulet intends the dance to provide a respite from the feud, to be a gesture of peace, a ritual of harmony in which his enemies are welcomed as his friends. Instead, it pours fuel on the glowing coals. Like Benvolio, Romeo tries to keep the peace in the fight scene, but he only manages to make “worm's meat” of Mercutio and Tybalt and get himself banished from Verona and his new wife. The good intentions of old and young go for naught. Hence, the ball and the fights are thematically linked by the motif of the circle,⁹ which was first introduced in the opening shot of the sun, and is echoed later on the church floor at the marriage of Romeo and Juliet. The dance is choreographed as a symbolic feud, beginning with two separate circles of dancers and shifting to two concentric circles moving in opposite directions. In an analogue of the overall movement of the play, after the dance the crowd merges into one static circle as a singer of a melancholy song of love and death performs. The “dances” of the duellists also take place in a circle formed by spectators. Following Shakespeare, Zeffirelli shows that love and hate, and the rituals Verona has generated around these passions—the dance and the duel—are intimately related. In Shrew Zeffirelli found a play which celebrates the liberating and creative aspects of love. In Romeo and Juliet he found a play which focuses on eros, the destructive aspect of love (between Capulet and Lady Capulet, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Mercutio, the Nurse and Juliet, Lady Capulet and Tybalt, Friar Laurence and Romeo).

In many ways, this film is a “youth movie” of the 1960s which glorifies the young and caricatures the old, a Renaissance Graduate. While Romeo acquires a stubble of a beard and defies the stars, and Juliet learns that she must stand alone when her parents and the Nurse abandon her, we have little sense that they grow up. They are Adam and Eve in the Edenic greenery of Capulet's garden and never lose the golden aura of innocence which insulates them from reality. Romeo's way of opposing the feud is to wander the streets alone sniffing flowers and sighing with melancholy, avoiding his parents and friends, playing at love. Through cuts in the text, Romeo is not forced to take advantage of the ugly, dehumanizing poverty of the apothecary, nor is he guilty of a second murder, that of Paris.

Juliet begins the film as a laughing girl running playfully through the house, becomes a credible teenager in love at the ball and in the balcony scene, and at least starts to mature when, abandoned by her parents, she turns to the Nurse for comfort and finds none. Shakespeare expresses the moment verbally:

Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!
Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn,
Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue
Which she hath praised him with above compare
So many thousand times? Go, counselor!
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain.

Zeffirelli says it with fewer words. Sadly advising Juliet to forget Romeo and marry Paris, forcing herself to praise the County, the Nurse makes up the bed in which Romeo and Juliet hours before consummated their marriage. To her a little straightening of the sheets can make everything as it was before. Juliet's response is simply “go!” The Nurse reaches out to touch and reassure her, but Juliet backs away. The Nurse goes to the door, looks back for the conciliatory look she had always found before, and, finding none, backs out of the room, crushed, bowing as she closes the door like one of the common servants. This, however, is the extent of Juliet's growth.

Finally, there is no real sense of maturity or eroticism in their love. As Pauline Kael wickedly remarked, theirs is a “toy marriage.”¹⁰ It is damaging that Mercutio seems to feel and know more than Romeo and Juliet. He dies in irony and anger. They sob uncontrollably at losing each other. The limitations and the virtues of Zeffirelli's portrayal of Verona's youth are summed up in John Russell Brown's description of the original stage production.

All the youth of Verona were at ease. Running and sauntering, they were immediately recognizable as unaffected teenagers; they ate apples and threw them, splashed each other with water, mocked, laughed, shouted; they became serious, sulked, were puzzled; they misunderstood confidently and expressed emotion freely. … [Zeffirelli] gave prominence to a sense of wonder, gentleness, strong affection, clear emotion and, sometimes, fine sentiment, as well as to high spirits and casual behavior.¹¹

In comparison to the young, Brown noted, the old lacked conviction, and this carries over to the film. Their grief is not particularly moving. They often seem two-dimensional (in the zoom-in on Lady Capulet's face or Friar Laurence's leering at Juliet through his test tubes). The Prince has his moments of ferocity when breaking up the opening brawl on his magnificent, nervous horse with the sun burning behind him, and again at the conclusion. And the Nurse, a delightful mock nun who is eager to find in Juliet the daughter she lost, steals wine at the ball, refuses and then takes Romeo's money, rages at Mercutio, is human throughout—right to the moment when she stares stunned at the bodies of the two lovers at the end. But in general the older characters are less convincing, seem hastily sketched in, and this causes an imbalance. What keeps the film from being totally one-sided is the fatal, self-destructive urge in these youths. They are reckless, bored, cynical—children of the feud, just as a generation of Americans were children of Vietnam. They are implicated in keeping the feud going. It provides them an outlet for feelings of jealousy, insecurity, and rage not merely at the old and everything they are responsible for but at mortality in all its forms. Even Romeo is not always glamorized, turning into a bloodthirsty animal as he goes after Tybalt. In this sense, Zeffirelli does preserve Shakespeare's balance between old and young.

In shaping the text for the film, Zeffirelli and his fellow scriptwriters accelerated the already rapid sequence of events, reduced speeches to stress the inarticulateness of the young, and stripped away much of the self-conscious verbal artifice which clashes with realistic surfaces and colloquial readings. For example, Escalus's ornamented image is cut:

What, ho! You men, you beasts,
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins!

Extended conceits are removed, such as Lady Capulet's urging Juliet to “read o'er the volume of young Paris' face” (the figure is elaborated in “beauty's pen,” “margent of his eyes,” “unbound lover,” “gold clasps,” and “golden story”). The film avoids the formal idiom of Juliet's grieving over the death of Tybalt or of the Capulets' mourning over the supposed death of Juliet. In the play Romeo uses oxymoron to embody the fundamental paradox of love and hate:

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

Zeffirelli uses visual contrasts, shows the maimed survivors of the brawl and their mourning kin as they interrupt flower-sniffing Romeo's talk with Benvolio (Romeo throws the flower on the stones, walks away in disgust). Some of Zeffirelli's cuts (especially those in the cumbersome final scene) are usual on the stage and rescue what is in some ways an immature play from its own excesses. Some are compensated for by adequate gestures and visual imagery, such as the fierce, proud look on Tybalt's face as he turns to see Juliet sighing over Romeo at the ball, replacing “I will withdraw; but this intrustion shall / Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt'rest gall.” Some substitutions are less successful, as when a dull shot of Italian countryside replaces

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Check'ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light;
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's burning wheels.

In keeping with the anti-intellectual tone of his films, Zeffirelli makes a philosophically thin play even thinner by cutting the Friar's thoughts that “The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb. / What is her burying ground, that is her womb,” and his wonder at a world where the vilest things do good and virtue can become vice. Also, occasionally cuts result in missed dramatic opportunities. For a director who underscores the structural and thematic relations between the Capulets' ball and the duels, as well as between the balcony scene and the deaths of the lovers, for example, it was a remarkable oversight to omit Shakespeare's striking transition from the Capulets' festive wedding preparations to mourning and funeral preparations when Juliet is found dead.

Many have complained that Zeffirelli's ornate brand of realism is inappropriate to tragedy. Certainly one would not like to see King Lear in his style. Yet in view of the strong elements of romantic comedy in the first half of Romeo and Juliet, the bright colors, constant movement, and rich detail seem true to the original. And often Zeffirelli foreshadows the darker, bleaker moments to come by cutting across this festive style: when Mercutio is bellowing in the empty square bathed in eerie blue light, when Juliet pauses in the shadows of Capulet's courtyard, and when Romeo is pursued along a dark, tunnellike street. The dust and stone of the hot town square contrasts with the warm, colorful interiors, and the imprisoning walls and mazelike streets symbolizing centuries of tradition and a social system hardened against change underscore the central theme of this and Castellani's film—“youth against a hostile society.”¹²

Most important, the style of the film changes radically after the death of Mercutio; it is drained of its busy look and festive colors. Juliet's room dominated by whites, the somber tones of Friar Laurence's cell, the dark of Capulet's house, the subdued funeral for Juliet, Romeo's shadowy house in exile, the Capulets' tomb, and the desolate wind-blown square filled with mourners in black—all these serve to erase the festivity and effectively embody Shakespeare's shift in tone. And Zeffirelli not only shows his protagonists imprisoned in colorlessness and stone, he shows them imprisoned in a pattern of events. Visually, he emphasizes the symmetry of the escalating conflicts from the opening brawl to the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Three times the Montagues and Capulets come before the Prince, and three times he chastizes them, but only the last time, when the cost has been great enough, do the families see that they are destroying themselves by allowing the feud to continue. The love which blossomed in a garden withers in a tomb. The shrouded city becomes a tomb. As in Throne of Blood, the artistic patterning which provides the work with coherence and meaning becomes an embodiment of Fate which enmeshes the principal characters.

Some films of Shakespeare's tragedies end with a close-up of the face of the hero (Richardson's Hamlet, Brook's King Lear, Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar), placing emphasis upon the individual fall. Some conclude with a movement outward or upward, the society being involved in a final ritual (Welles's Othello, Olivier's Hamlet, Kozintsev's Hamlet). Some are circular (Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Welles's Macbeth, Polanski's Macbeth), stressing the continuing power of the pattern. Zeffirelli's conclusion is a blend of the latter two. In the end the rituals of love and death merge. The bells which continually remind us of passing time, and celebrate the wedding, now become funeral bells. The Montagues and the Capulets, who streamed twice before into the square in parallel linear movements, now form a single procession as they bear Romeo and Juliet to be buried in their wedding garments. All the people we care about are dead, and with them have gone spontaneity, energy, and innocence. The silence in the sunlit square is broken only by the tolling bell, muffled footsteps on the stones, and the whistling wind. Compositions are rigidly symmetrical as the families gather on the steps of the church. The chaos of the brawls has been replaced by order, but it is a dead order. The camera picks out somber faces (especially the Nurse's), which reflect guilt, recognition, a sense of loss. Then emphasis shifts to the Prince and the Shakespearean theme of “responsibility learnt in adversity.”¹³ In the sole outburst of passion, the Prince's formal pronouncement, “all are punished,” becomes a howl of rage and pain, “All are punished!”

As the two families file through the cathedral door toward the camera and the credits pass over the screen, there are gestures of consolement and reconciliation. The feud is over. But when they have all filed past, and the credits are through, the camera holds on the castellated wall towering over Verona's empty square, echoing the second shot of the film and providing a final symbol of division, war, imprisonment, continuity with the past. If this conflict has ended, conflict itself has not.

Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet is in most ways superior to the films by Cukor (1936) and Castellani (1954). It has energy, humor, and life where the others do not. No one would be tempted to say of it, as George Bernard Shaw said of Forbes-Robertson's production in 1895, that “the duel scene has none of the murderous excitement which is the whole dramatic point of it.”¹⁴ It avoids the static, ornate prettiness of the studio sets of the 1936 film, yet despite some excesses, never becomes a distractingly beautiful travelogue of Renaissance Italy the way the 1954 film often does. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey are credible and likeable lovers as Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer or Laurence Harvey and Susan Shentall are not.

However, one may like the film for all its action, emotional power, and sense of theme and structure and still be aware that this Romeo and Juliet, transforming tragedy into a story of sentiment and pathos, is a less mature work than Shakespeare's. It is not merely that the hero and heroine do not ripen in understanding. It is that their deaths are conceived too simply. The sorrow, the sense of loss, the sexual overtones of “death” are present at the end, but the insight and defiant anger are missing. Neither Romeo nor Juliet senses the larger pattern. They never see what a corrupt and flawed world it is that they are leaving, never give any indication that they know how they contributed to their own downfall, and never understand that love of such intensity not only cannot last but is self-destructive. Sorrow at losing each other is not coming to terms with life or death. The clear-sighted calm and sense of inevitability with which Shakespeare's tragic hero and heroine greet their end have disappeared.

Notes

1. John Simon, Movies into Film (New York, 1970), p. 107.

2. “Shakespeare on the Screen,” Times Literary Supplement (London), Sept. 26, 1968, p. 1082.

3. Franco Zeffirelli in Directors on Directing, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Crich Chinoy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 440.

4. Ibid., p. 439.

5. Louis Gianetti, Understanding Movies (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 154.

6. Albert R. Cirillo, “The Art of Franco Zeffirelli and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet,” TriQuarterly 16 (Fall 1969), 81.

7. Zeffirelli, in Directors on Directing, p. 440.

8. Cirillo, “The Art …,” p. 82.

9. Ibid., p. 87.

10. Pauline Kael, Going Steady (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 189.

11. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), p. 168.

12. Paul Jorgensen, “Castellani's Romeo and Juliet: Intention and Response,” Film Quarterly 10 (1955), 1.

13. Brown, Shakespeare's Plays …, p. 176.

14. Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 179.