First person: West side (teaching) story

A white, midwestern teacher reflects on the lessons he learned from his Latinx students while teaching Romeo and Juliet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1990s. While Romeo and Juliet was an easier sell than he expected, the class had a different reaction to West Side Story.

Dying to Act

Shakespeareans stereotype the comici as bawdy masked clowns, not knowing that leading Italian companies played prestigious tragedy as well as comedy and pastoral. The unmasked actress capable of stirring pathos and desire enabled them to change their repertory and their fortunes. Most Italian tragedies had female heroines, but they were long and static, so the diva set about cutting and adapting them; they also borrowed tragic stories from romance epics and the novella. They produced showpieces full of extreme passions, plangent laments, and violent words and deeds. This new style reached England and altered tragic playwriting in works by Marlowe, Marston, Webster, and others. Two groundbreaking roles—Bel-imperia in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, worlds apart in most ways—share the profile of the audacious, strong-willed, eloquent, and artful innamorata whose spectacular life and death reflect the unusual autonomy and theatrical brilliance of the tragic diva.

From Romero to Romeo—Shakespeare’s Star-Crossed Lovers Meeting Zombedy in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies

Since their first screen appearances in the 1930s, zombies have enjoyed immense cinematic popularity. Defined by Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as mindless, violent, decaying and infectious, they successfully function as ultimate fiends in horror films. Yet, even those morbid undead started evolving into more appealing, individualized and even sympathetic characters, especially when the comic potential of zombies is explored. To allow a zombie to become a romantic protagonist, however, one that can love and be loved by a human, another evolutionary step had to be taken, one fostered by a literary association. This paper analyzes Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, a 2013 film adaptation of Isaac Marion’s zombie novel inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines how Shakespeare’s Romeo helps transform the already evolved cinematic zombie into a romantic protagonist, and how Shakespearean love tragedy, with its rich visual cinematic legacy, can successfully locate a zombie narrative in the romantic comedy convention. Presenting the case of Shakespeare intersecting the zombie horror tradition, this paper illustrates the synergic exchanges of literary icons and the cinematic monstrous.