Shakespeare Unlimited: Juliet's Answer Glenn Dixon Interviewed by Barbara Bogaev a Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast February
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Shakespeare Unlimited: Juliet’s Answer Glenn Dixon Interviewed by Barbara Bogaev A Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast February 7, 2017 ------------------- Introduction MICHAEL WITMORE: The letters all start the same: “Dear Juliet.” “Dear Juliet, I am sixteen years old, and have waited so long to meet my Romeo. When will he appear?” “Dear Juliet, I've been accepted to a college far away, but my boyfriend lives here.” “Dear Juliet, women don't like me. I find that I can't lead them to close relationships, and then to have sex. Please tell me what to do.” “Dear Juliet…” Juliet, a fictional character, a fake Italian created by an Englishman more than 400 years ago. And yet, the letters pour in from all over the world: “Dear Juliet, Dear Juliet...” What's going on? [MUSIC] From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Witmore, the Folger's director. This podcast is called “Any Man That Can Write May Answer A Letter.” Starting in the 1930s, people began sending letters asking for advice on love and romance to Verona, Italy. The letters were addressed to Juliet, and for years, no one knew what to do with them. In 1972, a man named Giulio Tamassia began hosting dinners for a group of his friends. They started calling themselves “The Juliet Club,” and 17 years later, as the letters continued pouring in, a Verona city commissioner asked if it was okay for the town to send all the letters over to them. Giulio has long since retired, but the letters keep coming, and today his daughter runs a team of volunteers who continue to dole out advice. In 2014, a Canadian high school teacher named Glenn Dixon, whose love life was itself kind of a mess, decided to take some time over the summer vacation to go to Verona and work as one of Juliet's secretaries, as the volunteers are called. The result is a delightful memoir titled Juliet's Answer, that was published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster. Glenn came in to talk about his book, the adventure that led to it, and how it actually ended up changing his life. Glenn spoke with Barbara Bogaev. ------------------- BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, let's start at the beginning of this story. How did you first hear about The Juliet Club? GLENN DIXON: Well, I taught high school English for twenty years, and I had to teach Shakespeare to mostly compliant teenagers. And at the back of our textbook, the Romeo and Juliet textbook, there were a series of essays. And one of the essays was about these letters to Juliet. So, I had actually known about this for a couple decades, really. BOGAEV: Right, and in that article, which was called “A New Career for Juliet: Advice to the Lovelorn” (and it really described the whole process of what happens in this Juliet Club), it said that the letter answering was started by the groundskeeper at an estate in Verona. How did that come about, and why did letters start arriving around 1937, I think they said? DIXON: Yeah, and that's right. Because there was an early movie version in 1936, 1937, something like that. That was the first, you know, sort of popular rush. And all of a sudden letters just started appearing at what they call the Tomb of Juliet, which is on the grounds of this Franciscan monastery. And there was a groundskeeper there who didn't really know what to do with these letters, and bless his heart, he decided that he would start answering them. And that's how it all started. BOGAEV: That's wild. And at a certain point, the current director of the club, her father took over, right? In the 1980s, when there were just a lot of letters, kind of a surge. DIXON: Right, so that's Giulio, Giulio Tamassia, and he had a bunch of friends, in I think 1972, that they would get together and drink wine. And they called themselves “The Juliet Club.” And then the city of Verona actually came to them, I think, in 1979 and asked if they could somehow organize the answering of these letters. And that's how, sort of the modern version started. And yes, Giovanna, who's now sort of the head secretary, she took over from her father, Giulio. And now she kind of runs the place. BOGAEV: Yeah, I want to talk more about how you answered these letters. But first, I think we really need to know what was going on in your mind, and in your life when you took off for Verona. Because it sounded like you were in need of a little love therapy. DIXON: [LAUGH] A little love therapy. Yeah. There were actually two trips to Verona. So, the first trip I went there, it was all a bit of a lark, it was a male going to work amongst these legendary secretaries of Juliet, and I hoped to get a good little magazine article, or a chapter in a book. But I had my own little personal agenda. And when I was there, I wrote my own letter to Juliet. I had basically had a disastrous love life, and I needed some answers. BOGAEV: Well, it sounded like you were stuck. DIXON: I was completely stuck. And I didn't know why, and I didn't know how to get out of it. I mean, the basic story is that I was in love with my best friend. I called her Claire in the book, that's not her real name. But she wasn't in love with me. And this had gone on for almost two decades, if you can possibly imagine. And so I decided I'd ask Juliet for help. But I think I can tell you that it didn't work, it got more disastrous. And at this point, I think I had to decide, what do you really want to do here? Do you want to just write some little, you know, fluffy article about this? Or are you really gonna write about this? Which meant writing about myself. So, I did, I started to write the things that happened to me, the letter I wrote, the answer I got, how it went wrong. And I knew I had to go back to Verona a second time to, well, I guess, get my real answer. BOGAEV: So, you had this mix of motivations to go to Verona. And this is a town that, from the way you describe it, it sounds almost like a Romeo and Juliet movie set. Why don't you give us a sense of just how much Verona milks the tourism potential out of this association with Shakespeare? DIXON: Well, I think that was in my original first chapter; well, it is still there. Like, for example, there is a place called Juliet's House. And there's a balcony there, but it's completely fake. It was put there in 1937, also for that movie that we talked about before. On the other hand, that building is more than 700 years old, and it belonged to a family called Capello. Which, we're pretty sure now is what Shakespeare called the Capulets. There is the Capelli House, which is a 700-year-old house belonging to a rich family, but just up the street from that, there's a place they call Romeo's House. And it's a complete fake. It is a house from the right time period, and it's this fortified house. So, it was the house of a rich family. But as I spent a lot of time in the city, and as I talked with the secretaries, you know, one in particular, I’ll mention her name is Manuela, and she is a certified city tour guide, and she was telling me, this wasn't really the Montague house. They were called the Montecchis, and we have historical records that the Montecchi family actually lived outside, south of the medieval city wall. So, this was not their house. And at that point it was kind of funny because I was thinking, “Well, wait a second, are you actually saying that these were real families? The Capellis and the Montecchis?” And she nodded her head, “Yeah, yeah, we have the historical record for them.” BOGAEV: Okay, wait, let's back up because this is really rich stuff here. First there's this Juliet's House, it has this fake balcony, which is kind of a selfie spot, or you know, a place to get your photo taken with your lover. And there's also a Juliet statue too, right? DIXON: Yeah. There's a Juliet statue. It took me a long time to realize that actually at the end of the play Romeo and Juliet, Lord Montague, Romeo's father, declares that he's going to build a statue of Juliet. So, it's kind of symbolic that there's a really beautiful statue of Juliet in the courtyard there. The only funny thing about that is, for some reason, the tourists have been going there and they rub her right breast for luck. So, her right breast is polished to a sheen. And it's really kind of this bizarre thing that goes on there. BOGAEV: And there's also Juliet's tomb. DIXON: Yes. There are these vaults that are hundreds of years old, and really quite spooky. And in one of them, there's this sarcophagus, it's unadorned.