William Shakespeare’s world renowned Romeo and Juliet (written between 1591 and 1595) stands in the English-speaking world as one of the greatest love stories ever written. It is most interesting to discover then, that Romeo and Juliet was not, in fact, truly of his own creation, but rather a variation on a story told many times in Italian literature from the fourteen hundreds onwards. Centered on the theme of star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet’s tale was told at least a century before Shakespeare actually wrote it.
The first certain tale of the woes of Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet descends from Italian author Masuccio Salernitano (1410-1475). Published a year after his death, Salernitano’s 33rd chapter of his Il Novellino tells of Mariotto and Giannoza, a pair of lovers who come from the feuding families of Maganelli and Saraceni respectively. In this account, their romance takes place in Siena, Italy rather than in Verona and is believed to have occurred contemporary with Salernitano’s time. Much like Shakespeare’s version, Mariotto and Giannoza fall in love and marry secretly with the aid of and Augustine friar. Shortly thereafter, Mariotto has words with another noble citizen—in this case, not his love’s own cousin—and kills the nobleman, resulting in his fleeing the city to avoid capital punishment. Giannoza, distraught, is comforted only by the fact that Mariotto has family in Alexandria, Egypt and makes a good home for himself there. However, her own father—unaware of her wedding—decides it is time for her to take a husband, putting her in a terrible position. With the aid of the friar who had wed her and Mariotto, Giannoza drinks a sleeping potion to make her appear dead, so she can be smuggled out of Siena to reunite in Alexandria with her husband. Of course this plan goes terribly awry, and her letter to explain their plan to Mariotto never reaches him, though news of her death quickly does. While she flees to Alexandria to finally reunite with him, Mariotto returns to Siena at risk for his own life to see her corpse one final time. It is then he is captured and taken to be executed for his previous crimes, beheaded three days before Giannoza’s own return to the city. Giannoza then, heartbroken, wastes away of a broken heart, to be finally reunited with her husband in heaven.
As one can see, there are many similar elements between Shakespeare’s tale and Salernitano’s. The themes of feuding families, the forbidden love, the sleeping potion, and the terrible communication mishap all lead to the parallel ending of mutual death. Writing only a hundred years apart, Shakespeare could well have come across Salernitano’s work, or one of the many other variations that were written before the story reached the Shakespeare’s desk. Luigi da Porto in 1530 wrote a similar compilation of Romeo Montechhi and Giulietta Cappelleti, moving the setting of their lives from Siena to the Verona from where Shakespeare would write it. The pair again wed in secret with the aid of a friar only to be torn apart by Romeo’s accidental killing of Giulietta’s cousin and their subsequent deaths—Romeo by Giulietta’s sleeping potion, and Giulietta by holding her breath so she could die with him.
Following da Porto came Matteo Bandello (1480-1562), a monk and an author who took da Porto and Salernitano’s tales even further. He is the Italian author who is most directly credited as having influenced Shakespeare, as Bandello introduces many of the specific themes that make Shakespeare’s play so well known today. Bandello’s version, while in many ways comparable to Salernitano’s text, provided the well-known last names of Montague and Capulet to the two titular characters. Bandello also added the element of the costume ball, at which Romeo and Juliet meet, and also the pertinent moment in which Juliet viciously kills herself with her lover’s dagger so that she may join Romeo in the afterlife, rather than merely wasting away as Giannoza did. Bandello’s tale was closely copied by the French author Pierre Boaistuau, whose version was then translated into English by Arthur Brooke as The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet in 1562. This English translation was the actual text that influenced William Shakespeare to write his Romeo and Juliet.
References:
• Masuccio Salernitano (Il Novellino, 1476)
• Luigi da Porto (Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti, 1530)
• Matteo Bandello (Giulietta e Romeo, 1554)
• Pierre Boaistuau (Histoires tragiques, 1559)
• Arthur Brooke (The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, 1562)
• William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, 1591-1595)
