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.

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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 8 episodes
  Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford

Reading list

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

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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.