Balcony Scene

© 2017 ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE / SCENE FOCUS (IRCL-UMR5186 du CNRS) ISSN 2268-977X. Tous droits réservés. Reproduction soumise à autorisation. Téléchargement et impression autorisés à usage personnel. www.ircl.cnrs.fr Shakespeare’s Anti-Balcony Scene Sujata IYENGAR University of Georgia Appropriations of Shakespeare’s so-called “Balcony Scene” in Romeo and Juliet appear worldwide in novels, films, plays, social media and all kinds of popular outlets, ranging from the duets sung on the fire escape in the classic Broadway musical West Side Story to the fights in the martial-arts movie Romeo Must Die, the rock group Dire Straits’ 1981 power ballad “Romeo and Juliet”, in which a male singer “serenade[s]” his lover at her “window” with a “movie song” (Figure 1), or the Peabody-award-winning ice-dancing extravaganza Romeo and Juliet on Ice, starring the Olympic figure-skating medallist Dorothy Hamill.1 Figure 1. Dire Straits, “Romeo and Juliet,” screen-shot from official music video, accessed April 17, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Mz rirPrCI Often such allusions are “attenuated”, to borrow Kathleen McLuskie’s term: attenuated references allude glancingly to a famous phrase, staging, or plot motif, and engage with 1 West Side Story, directed by Jerome Robbins, Winter Garden Theatre, September 26, 1957; Romeo Must Die, directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, Warner, 2000; “Romeo and Juliet”, written by Mark Knopfler, Vertigo Records, 1981; Romeo and Juliet on Ice, directed by Rob Iscove, CBS television, 1983. Thanks to Lucas Hatlen at the Peabody Collection, University of Georgia, for alerting me to the existence of Romeo and Juliet on Ice. Balcony Scenes/Scènes de balcon ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE/SCENE FOCUS 6 (2017) “Shakespeare” or the plays or poems themselves only to a very limited extent.2 For example, the facetious, popular French high-school film Les Profs 2, or Serial Teachers 2 in English (2015), deploys the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet as a synecdoche for both romance and England without ever uttering a word of Shakespeare’s text.3 Les Profs 2, the sequel to another equally lightweight comedy, both based on a popular French comic strip, Les Profs, transports a team of the so-called “worst teachers” and “worst students” in France to a Hogwarts-like academy in England as part of a scheme to tame the Queen of England’s shrewish granddaughter Vivienne. The teachers prove unsuccessful until Boulard, career student, romances Vivienne on a balcony. He chooses this locale because, he recalls vaguely, “those guys, you know, Romeo and Julien or somebody [sic]”, in an allusion to Shakespeare’s play joyfully recognized by the film’s viewers and excerpted on YouTube (Figure 2). Boulard’s mistake – calling the lovers “Roméo et Julien” – delightfully satirizes the heteronormative and patriarchal culture of the Montagues and Capulets by turning the love-story into an imaginary same-sex romance even as it alludes to the film’s own reworking of the star-crossed lovers motif and its rewriting equally of The Taming of the Shrew. Boulard is a charming loser and Vivienne is royalty; both are considered impossible students, but the intelligent Vivienne gains in wit and power throughout the film, unlike in Shakespeare’s play. Figure 2.“Top 5”, “Les profs 2 blague Roméo et Julien”, screen-shot from user-excerpted video, accessed April 17, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbjMd0GCEck The attenuated Shakespearean references in Les Profs 2 and other popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and 2 Kathleen McLuskie, “Afterword,” Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, London and New York, Bloomsbury, Arden, 2015, p. 323-338, p. 334- 335. 3 Les Profs and Les Profs 2, dir. Pierre-François Martin-Laval, Production Co: Union Générale Cinématographique (UGC), Les films du premier, TF1 Films Production, 2013 and 2015. <136> S. IYENGAR, Shakespeare’s Anti-Balcony Scene Cleopatra likewise include scenes in which lovers are separated by vertical distance on stage and engage in a kind of duet. This essay surveys Shakespeare’s three romantic balcony scenes, identifies the key speech-acts and use of visual space that they share, and contrasts with them what I call an anti-balcony scene – the opening of Othello, in which Iago and Roderigo, below and without, roughly awaken Brabantio, upstairs and within, with the shouted news of Othello and Desdemona’s elopement. I observe the power and translatability to world cinema of the opening movement of Othello and suggest we can likewise understand that scene and its ubiquity as an anti-romantic appropriation of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, one that renders Othello and Desdemona’s match instantly recognizable as a wooing gone awry. Finally, I speculate that the power of the romantic balcony-scene in Shakespeare stems from its folkloric origins, which eased its global translation into other cultures and modes.4 Above and Below, Within and Without A 2014 discussion on the “Shaksper” electronic discussion list, and a subsequent article in the popular magazine The Atlantic, debated the extent to which we are justified in calling the archetypal scenario in Romeo and Juliet a “balcony” scene, given that Shakespeare nowhere uses the word “balcony” and Romeo and Juliet indicates from the dialogue that the heroine appears at a “window”.5 Yet balconies, called “galleries” or “terraces”, were present as architectural features in Italian and English buildings (OED gives “a gallery or balcony” as the earliest English sense for the word “terrace”, in 1515).6 Moreover, many instances in early modern drama present scenes where characters engage with each other along a vertical axis and where they emerge as if from within in order to speak to characters without. Stage-directions such as “aloft”, “above”, “on the walls”, “within”, “in the upper chamber” and so on indicate that the early modern public theatre is three- dimensional, allowing for action and dialogue not only up-stage and down-stage or stage- left and stage-right as in a picture-frame proscenium arch theatre but also vertically, as in a crowded city street. We are therefore justified in continuing to classify Juliet’s fictional “balcony” as a “balcony”, even if Shakespeare or his exact contemporaries might have called such a space in real-life a “gallery” or a “terrace” or a “bay-” or “bow-window” and the theatre where Romeo and Juliet was first performed did not include an actual “balcony”. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s invaluable Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, documents that Shakespeare and others use the markers “above” and “aloft” to connote an upper playing space (probably above the tiring-house) in many situations, not merely in romantic contexts.7 Fumiyuki Narushima distinguishes between the idiosyncratic usage “aloft” (popularized by Shakespeare but rarely used by his contemporaries) and the more common term “above”. The former, “aloft”, when used in a 4 On the underlying mythography of the parted lovers that antedates Shakespeare, see Balz Engler’s forthcoming essay, “On Gottfried Keller’s ‘A Village Romeo and Juliet’ and Shakespeare adaptation in general”, in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11.2 (2018): “The words ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the title of the tale do not refer to Shakespeare's play, but to the myth we have come to name after it.” 5 Lois Leveen, “Romeo and Juliet has no Balcony”, The Atlantic, October 29, 2014. URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/romeo-and-juliets-balcony-scene-doesnt- exist/381969/ accessed April 17, 2017. 6 OED Online, “Gallery”, n.2a, 2b; “Terrace”, n.3; “bay-window”, n., accessed April 17, 2017. 7 Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. <137> Balcony Scenes/Scènes de balcon ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE/SCENE FOCUS 6 (2017) play might connote not solely the upper stage but also gentlemen’s galleries, the other galleries, and even “the gods”, the author argues. Imagine deities descending from the heavens, Narushima suggests, especially in the smaller indoor theatres. “Above”, he continues, connotes more narrowly what an earlier generation of scholars dubbed the upper stage and we are now more comfortable calling an upper performing space or a playing gallery above the tiring-house. Narushima further breaks down the distinction between “above” and “aloft”, suggesting that an upper playing area is usually evoked by the phrases “at the window” in tragedies or comedies, or “on the walls” in the histories.8 Leslie Thomson observes that the vertical distance between man and woman in such balcony scenes establishes the woman as heavenly, divine, celestial and so on, as the language then elaborates.9 In the cinema, Shakespeare’s vertical plane can be enhanced or replaced with a movement from outside to “within”, as we can see in several filmed versions of Romeo and Juliet. Renato Castellani’s Giulietta e Romeo (1954) uses “architectural images of entrapment” – grilles, banisters, “enormous marble pillars” to separate the lovers;10 Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) deploys extreme close-ups of bodies and body-parts (lips, hands, eyes) in order to move

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