Twenty-first century Juliets: angels, florists, and students (oh my!)
You have likely heard of Romeo and Juliet with gnomes, or singing gangs in 1950’s New York, but what about the star-crossed lovers as immortal avenging angels, middle-aged rival florists, or summer school students? These adaptations appear in the second chapter of my thesis, which concerns theories of adaptation and Shakespeare’s ‘relevance’ through analysing twenty-first century women writers’ novelisations of Romeo and Juliet. The above examples are just three of 27 such books, which include one poetry collection, one short story, and 25 novels (eighteen Young Adult, two Middle Grade, and seven Adult). Across these age-groups, eleven are fantasy, eight are contemporary, seven are historical fiction, and one is a historical/contemporary hybrid. In this seminar, I will talk you through my research process with this large and varied corpus, sharing intriguing commonalities and unexpected findings. I will demonstrate how even the most bizarre of these texts are significant in exploring Juliet as a ‘relevant’ icon for contemporary readers, and ultimately reveal the centrality of Shakespeare’s supposed universality even amongst texts that engage with the feminist praxis of re-writing.
Amy is a Midlands 4 Cities funded PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham and is in her final year. Her thesis is titled Shakespeare and Relevance, an exploration and theorisation of the construction and perpetuation of Shakespeare as a ‘relevant’ figure across biography, adaptation, and performance. Amy periodically works with Nottingham Theatre Royal and Concert Hall as part of their Heritage Lottery Funded Project ‘Our Theatre Nottingham’, having undertaken a research project for them last year using archival materials to create a history of Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal. She also tutors with the Brilliant Club, teaching a course she has written called ‘Shakespeare in the classroom: does he still belong?’.