'Searching for Juliet' by Sophie Duncan

In February I read and wrote about Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: a biography. Now comes another study of how a fictional female character by a (the) giant of English literature has had an extraordinary and persistent afterlife. The title of  Sophie Duncan’s Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine alerts us in those plural nouns to Duncan’s central idea: Juliet did not just live and die in Shakespeare’s tragedy, but she has continued to do so for four centuries. Those lives and deaths tell us as much about the worlds in which they happen as about the girl herself; in the words of Hamlet, they hold a mirror up to our nature. This wide-ranging study is essential reading for those of us who teach the play.

Duncan sees Juliet as the prime driver of Shakespeare’s text, well ahead of her less-interesting lover (as acknowledged in the phrase ‘Juliet and her Romeo’):

Juliet Capulet is amazing. She confronts Romeo with the prospect of marriage within six hours of their first kiss, insists that he schedule their wedding within twenty-four hours, and then suborns a much older servant to confirm arrangements … She seems confined to Casa Capuletti except to attend confession. On the two occasions she manages to escape, she conducts a secret marriage with the son of her parents’ great enemy, and plans to fake her own death with the help of the family priest, respectively.

Duncan sees her roots as being in the rebellious girls of (the) new comedies, citing Hermia from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who escapes a father-desired death by running away (In that sense, Romeo and Juliet is a play about what happens with Hermia stays). Juliet and her Romeo are victims of a purposeless dispute between two families; they are in fact well-suited for each other and the tragedy is how an inexplicable and arbitrary feud could destroy them both. Juliet is full of spirit, extraordinarily so for such a young and protected child, and somehow is unbowed by an oppressively patriarchal society. Sophie Duncan calls her exceptional, unruly and vital.

That vitality seems somehow to ramify unbowed through the character’s extra-textual life over the centuries. This book covers a lot of ground, from mid-18th century funeral practices to the career of Charlotte Cushman to the racial assumptions of West Side Story to the queasy Pirelli calendar of 2020 to real-life ‘Romeo and Juliets’ in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland. There is some lighter material: Verona is one of my favourite Italian cities (the amphiteatre and Piazza del Erbe for a start), but Casa di Giulietta is a tacky horror. It turns out that people all over the world write to Club Giulietta to ask for advice about their love lives. Perhaps their distress over their romantic feelings blinds them: there could hardly be a worse figure from whom to seek guidance. Duncan examines some of the historical letters, and then one day spends time helping to write the return letters; she ‘is’, briefly, Juliet.

No fun at all, however, is the powerful and upsetting Chapter 3, ‘Country Marks’, which looks at how British colonial slaveowners so often gave their slaves Shakespearean names, the most common of which were Juliet, Ophelia and Hamlet (no Lears or Macbeths for obvious reasons):

These plantation-owning men ‘themed’ their slave-names in a given era in the same way dog-owners might a litter of puppies.

This was a kind of ‘name-washing’:

Forcing Shakespearean names on your slaves marked you out as cultured, literate, refined, and even witty, adding some literary cachet to your plantation.

and

There’s a cruel irony to enslaved people denied freedom, literacy, citizenship and a voice being (re)named after Shakespeare’s most beloved – and often voluble – characters.

There is a lot more material of interest here.  Juliet has indeed been ‘protean’ for so long, and there is no sign that such fertile liveliness will die anytime soon. This book is a terrific overview of its memorable subject.