Bowling Green State University ScholarWorks@BGSU Honors Projects Honors College Spring 4-25-2021 "The Most Insistent Subject of Popular Music": An Exploration of Romeo and Juliet Music Adaptations and Their Expressions of Modern Cultural Issues Gabrielle Sheets [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/honorsprojects Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Repository Citation Sheets, Gabrielle, ""The Most Insistent Subject of Popular Music": An Exploration of Romeo and Juliet Music Adaptations and Their Expressions of Modern Cultural Issues" (2021). Honors Projects. 595. https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/honorsprojects/595 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors College at ScholarWorks@BGSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@BGSU. Sheets 1 “The Most Insistent Subject of Popular Music”: An Exploration of Romeo and Juliet Music Adaptations and Their Expressions of Modern Cultural Issues Gabrielle Kristina Sheets A thesis submitted to Bowling Green State University’s Department of English and Honors College for partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English (Honors) April 26, 2021 English 4010H Spring 2021 Dr. Stephannie S. Gearhart, Advisor Dr. Matthew Donahue, Secondary Advisor Sheets 2 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Introduction 4 Chapter 1: The Definition of Adaptation as Applied to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet 8 Chapter 2: Why Shakespeare?: Evidence for the Persistent Popularity of Romeo and Juliet 12 Chapter 3: West Side Story’s Cultural Critique through Adaptation 17 Chapter 4: Hopeless Fountain Kingdom’s Feminist Form of Romeo and Juliet 29 Conclusion 39 Works Cited 42 Appendix A: Thesis Proposal 45 Appendix B: Annotated Bibliography and Response Revisited 50 Appendix C: Presentation of Thesis Script 63 Sheets 3 Abstract Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) has been persistently popular throughout history, especially in the modern production of popular music releases. People are often widely familiar with Romeo and Juliet’s usage throughout music. However, the reasoning behind the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is relatively undiscussed. Romeo and Juliet is a leading symbol of tragic romance, an ever-present topic in popular music. Romeo and Juliet’s canonical qualities lead music artists to adapt the original play since it permits access to an audience that is familiar with the contexts of Shakespeare’s tragedy. This essay also provides a clear definition of “adaptation,” requiring pieces to be extended engagements with a source text and provide their own interpretations of current cultural issues. As a result, the 1961 musical West Side Story and the 2017 studio album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom are examined. West Side Story reinvents the original Romeo and Juliet to express the racism against Puerto Rican immigrants present in 1950s New York. Hopeless Fountain Kingdom reverses the gender roles of the original play and establishes a feminist take on Romeo and Juliet that expresses the fluidity of female sexuality. Romeo and Juliet is adapted so often because it permits adaptors to assert their own stances on current social issues while preserving the canonical qualities of the play. Modern music artists continue to adapt Romeo and Juliet because it allows them to express current cultural tensions, making Romeo and Juliet music adaptations worthwhile reflections of issues that matter to artists and to their audiences. Keywords: Romeo and Juliet, Popular Music, Popular Culture, Adaptation Studies, West Side Story, Halsey Sheets 4 Introduction Despite the original publication of his works taking place hundreds of years ago, William Shakespeare’s plays continue to be omnipresent in today’s culture, especially that of modern popular music. Popular culture and media as a whole embrace the subjects and themes of different Shakespeare writings, but various pieces of music have taken on a particular interest in the sense of tragedy established long ago in one of his most famous plays: Romeo and Juliet. Historically, Romeo and Juliet has provided many music artists with inspiration for their own musical creations. There is the French opera Roméo et Juliette by Charles Gounod and even the orchestral overture by Tchaikovsky of the play’s original name, both created in the late 1800s. The 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story is adapted from the original Romeo and Juliet with an adaptation of its own, West Side Story, the musical film version released in 1961. Then, more recently, there are popular works such as Taylor Swift's Love Story and Halsey’s Hopeless Fountain Kingdom that were created throughout the 2000s. By focusing on some of the more modern aforementioned music adaptations, it is possible to examine Shakespeare’s persistent popularity in current society and how modern music artists use Romeo and Juliet to express their own ideas within popular culture. This relationship between the original Romeo and Juliet and popular music is of particular interest to modern audiences because of the following statement made by R.S. White, a professor of English: “if some person were unaware of its existence as a play by Shakespeare, she or he could be forgiven for thinking that Romeo and Juliet is in essence a musical” since “the most insistent subject of popular music composed for the mass consumption of adolescents in modern times has been melancholy love” (183). The majority of popular music listeners will be unsurprised by the claim that popular music contains the insistent subject of melancholy love that Whites mentions. However, popular music is also a sector of Sheets 5 popular culture containing a plethora of Romeo and Juliet adaptations and direct engagements with Shakespeare’s text. This claim may come as a surprise to modern day listeners and readers since the relationship between Romeo and Juliet and popular music adaptation is relatively unpaved in terms of scholarly discussion. With the examination of modern popular music adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in comparison to the original contexts of Shakespeare’s play, it is clear that Romeo and Juliet is the leading brand for tragic love hence its prevalence in the popular music of today. William Shakespeare’s original tragedy, Romeo and Juliet (1597), takes place in 16th century Verona, Italy. The play focuses on the two lead characters Romeo Capulet and Juliet Montague, two members of opposing families. Even though Romeo and Juliet are raised to hate one another and their family lines, they inevitably fall in love after meeting at a masquerade ball hosted by Juliet’s family, the Capulets. Knowing that both of their families will disapprove of their relationship, Romeo and Juliet contrive an elaborate plan to get married in secret by the authority of a cleric they both know, Friar Laurence. However, despite Romeo and Juliet’s feelings for each other and the advice the friar gives them on avoiding the contestation of their families, their dueling families continue to despise one another. This continual hatred leads to the death of Romeo’s close friend, Mercutio, and then the death of Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, at the hands of Romeo himself. Following Tybalt’s death, Juliet is distraught, and her father wishes her to marry a suitor, Count Paris, in an effort to make her happy once again. Desperate to avoid being married off to Paris and save her relationship with Romeo, Juliet takes a sleeping potion at the suggestion of Friar Laurence. The intention was to convince the Capulet family that Juliet was dead so that she would not be able to marry Count Paris. Then, Juliet could run away with Romeo once she had awoken. However, Romeo inevitably discovers Juliet’s sleeping body, Sheets 6 believing her to be dead after all. As a result, Romeo dies by suicide, unable to go on with his life without Juliet. Juliet eventually wakes up from the potion’s effects and discovers her lover’s deceased body next to her. Juliet then dies by suicide as well. This left the opposing Capulet and Montague families without a son and daughter, exposing the dangers that their feud brought upon each of their families. The majority of present-day audiences are familiar with the plot, characters, and themes described above because Romeo and Juliet has been adapted and alluded to within popular media for quite some time. This historical reuse of Shakespeare’s tragedy offers an initial introduction as to why it continues to be a worthwhile source of adaptation for popular music artists in particular; however, why has Romeo and Juliet continued to be a leading source of adaptation for so long, especially in popular music? Other than an audience’s recognition of the household name, “Romeo and Juliet,” how is the text expressing the culture and ideals of the 16th century expected to resonate with modern listeners? In short, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet continues to be such a common, recycled source for popular music because it has been established as a symbol/canon that the people of today reuse to convey particular themes and ideas, even when they apply these themes and ideas much differently than the original text. This goes to say that modern day music artists that choose Romeo and Juliet as a source text often do not intend to replicate the text and its implications but use it as a tool to express their own ideas. Thus, the original, Romeo and Juliet, and its cultural implications should not be expected to resonate with modern-day listeners. Instead, modern-day listeners should expect to connect with the new, adapted forms of the text that are presented by those in the popular music industry. The modern-day popular music creators that will be discussed do not adapt William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet merely in the effort to appropriate the play’s popularity or its Sheets 7 expression of 16th century culture.