Shakespeare’s Valentine: Romeo and Juliet’s Balcony Scene
Is there any other single storyteller who has created a more impactful view of romantic love than William Shakespeare? Is there anything more vital than his balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet?
From my perspective, the greatest rendering of this sequence can be found in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 classic, Romeo and Juliet. The motion picture starred Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. I was a teenager when I first saw it. It was popular among my generation, in part, because it was a film that used actors close to the age of the characters from the original play. The mesmerizing Olivia Hussey was only 15 when she played Juliet. More of her personal story can be found in her delightful memoir published this past year, The Girl on The Balcony.
“You know how Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare invented us? It’s a fascinating idea, and you can go quite far with it,” said Director Mike Nichols in a New York Times interview several years ago.
What Mr. Nichols was referring to is the BIG IDEA that William Shakespeare (with his complex characterizations of men and women and their triumphs and tragedies against backgrounds of power, compromise and fancy etc.) — painted a portrait so brilliant of modern man and woman, that civilization stepped into the portrait. Man rendered by Shakespeare became western man.
