Romeo and Juliet

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, written in the early 1590s after a series of histories and comedies. His audience already knew the story of the feuding Capulets and Montagues in Verona and the fate of the young lovers from their rival houses, but not how Shakespeare would tell it and, with his poetry and plotting, he created a work so powerful and timeless that his play has shaped the way we talk of love, especially young love, ever since.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Helen Hackett 3 episodes
  Professor of English Literature at University College London
• Paul Prescott No other episodes
  Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California Merced
• Emma Smith 6 episodes
  Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford

Reading list

• Romeo and Juliet: Language and Writing
  Catherine Belsey (Bloomsbury, 2014) Google Books →
• The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty
  Helen Hackett (Yale University Press, 2022) Google Books →
• Shakespeare in Production: Romeo and Juliet
  James N. Loehlin (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy
  Claire McEachern (ed) (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Romeo and Juliet: Arden Performance Editions
  Paul Menzer (ed) (Bloomsbury, 2017)
• William Shakespeare: 'Romeo and Juliet', Writers and Their Work
  Sasha Roberts (Northcote House/British Council, 1998) Google Books →
• The Shakespeare Handbooks: Romeo and Juliet
  Ed Rocklin (Red Globe Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Romeo and Juliet
  William Shakespeare (ed. Rene Weis) (Bloomsbury, 2012) Google Books →
• Romeo and Juliet: Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare (eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine) (Simon & Schuster, 2011) Google Books →
• This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright
  Emma Smith (Pelican, 2019) Google Books →
• Shakespeare and World Cinema
  Mark Thornton Burnett (Cambridge University Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Shakespeare's Tragedies: A Very Short Introduction
  Stanley Wells (Oxford University Press, 2017) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0014gml

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014gml

Auto-category: 822.33 (Shakespeare’s plays)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Romeo and Juliet marked a turning point in Shakespeare's career, a move from history and comedy towards tragedy, although it contains all three.