Romeo – Juliet: The Erosion of Juliet in Baz

‘
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet’

By Jason John Horn

Literary Ramblings (blog)

In her introduction for William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Rene Weis
suggests that the focus of the play, despite its “double title”, rests “squarely on
Juliet” (Weis, 7), an assertion Weis supports with a compelling argument. 
Even if Weis’s assessment is correct though, the authorial intent of the play
does not always translate into various productions as directors and actors
alike can interpret the material in their own fashion.  Baz Luhrmann, for
example, cuts out much of the dialogue from the source material in the film
Romeo + Juliet and in the process presents a Juliet that is perhaps not the
“philosophically sophisticated” (23) adolescent girl Weis suggests Juliet is
presented as in the source material.  In observing what is absent from
Luhrmann’s production, one can see Luhrmann’s exclusions as rescuing
several of the male characters from a number of their less flattering pieces of
dialogue and, consequently, strengthening their ‘masculinity’.  Though
Luhrmann’s exclusion of certain passages, notably passages that can be
seen as dealing with sexuality and chastity, may have only been a matter of
pragmatics with the end goal of shortening a longer work and making it more
digestible for a younger, 20th century audience, such omissions change the
sources material dramatically.  When noting what is absent in Luhrmann’s
film, it seems that the elimination of a number of passages from the source
text, whether intended or not, ultimately serves to dilute the substance of
Juliet’s character whilst uplifting Romeo.

The balcony scene contains several passages that highlight Juliet’s well-
articulated philosophies, but many of the lines that showcased Juliet’s intellect
are absent from the film.  As the scene commences, Romeo describes the
feminized moon as “envious” (2.2.4) and asks Juliet to be “not her maid” (7).  
The moon, being aligned with Diana, was a symbol for chastity, so the
passage serves to demonstrate Romeo’s hunger “for Juliet’s chastity” (Brown,
344).  This scene is included in Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, as is the
culmination of Romeo’s efforts where Juliet agrees to marry Romeo (Chapter
14), but what is not included is Juliet’s argument against the traditional
concept of chastity.  Carolyn Brown suggests that “as critics look beyond
[Juliet’s] youth, they discover not a reticent virgin but a multifaceted character
who transcends Romeo’s maturity, complexity, insight and rhetorical dexterity”
(Brown, 333).  Such dexterity is on full display when Juliet explains her
forward nature, telling Romeo that if he “think’st [her] too quickly won” then
she will act “perverse and say nay to” (2.2.95-96) him.   She goes on to affirm
she will “prove more true/ Than those that have more cunning to be strange”
(100-101).  This passages demonstrates how Juliet views those who embrace
virginity as ‘strange’ and ‘cunning’, arguing that she will actually be more
chaste, or rather more ‘true’ than those who display such ‘cunning’.  Juliet
does not see herself as “yielding to light love” (105), nor does she see the
pragmatic value in the act of virginity, but this coherent articulation that
challenges notions of chastity is absent from the film, leaving Juliet’s yielding
nature unexplained and without a reasoned defense.

In examining the balcony scene, Brown suggests that Juliet “can be read as
trying to train Romeo” (Brown, 334), but much of the evidence Brown draws
upon is absent from Romeo + Juliet.  Brown notes, for example, that Juliet
“speaks of having Romeo attached to a ‘silken thread’” (337), but the
subordinating passage which Brown references (2.2.180) is excluded from
Luhrmann’s film.  Brown also notes that the “Nurse remarks on [Romeo’s]
mildness: ‘I’ll warrant him as gentle as a lamb’” (Brown, 337), but this passage
(2.5.44) is also omitted from Romeo + Juliet.  Later in the play, after Romeo
has killed Tybalt, he lays on the ground weeping, to which the Nurse
responds: “Blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering./  Stand up,
stand up, stand and you be a man” (3.3.87-88).  The Nurse is clearly
challenging Romeo’s masculinity, but like the scene where the Nurse
compares his mildness to a lamb, this scene is also cut from the film,
preserving Romeo’s masculinity, despite the fact that Luhrmann felt the need
to include (Chapter 21) the dialogue where the Nurse describes Juliet’s
weeping at their state of affairs (3.3.98-101).  As for Romeo, he “utter[s]
devotion to

Juliet and defies the outside world” (Brown, 34) by rejecting his family name
and assuring Juliet that if she refers to him as “love… [he’ll] be new baptis’d
[and]:/  Henceforth [he] never will be called Romeo” (2.2.50-51).  This scene is
significant because in Elizabethan England the man, in all instances, retained
his family name whilst the woman he married abdicated her family name in
favour of her husband’s.  Here, however, Romeo takes on the feminine role
and is willing to resign his own name for the relationship.  This passage,
though, is absent from the film.  In an earlier scene, Romeo concedes to his
helpless state by admitting “that Cupid has so wounded him that he is
temporarily immobile” (Brown, 335) stating: “I am too sore enpierced with
[Cupid’s] shaft/ To soar with his light feathers” (1.4.19-21).  This scene is also
excluded from the film.  In the balcony scene, however, Romeo asserts the
opposite, stating that he was able to topple the orchard walls into Juliet’s
garden with the assistance of “love’s light wings” (2.2.66).  This passage,
which is far more flattering to Romeo, is included by Luhrmann (Chapter 14). 
It seems the passages which demonstrate Juliet’s power over Romeo have
been excluded from the film along with the passages where Romeo
demonstrates his self-deprecating nature.  The passages that demonstrate
Romeo’s strengths, in contrast, have been left in, diluting Juliet’s presence
and affirming Romeo’s ‘masculinity’.
 

Throughout the play, Romeo seems to be more enamoured with romantic

notions of love than with love itself, and in turn lacks a substance that is very
much present in Juliet.  Nathaniel Wallace notes that in the marriage scene,
“Juliet counters Romeo’s fondness for Petrarchan eloquence and its
metaphors with a preference for a direct, unornate discourse” (Wallace, 339). 
This is made clear in the shared sonnet where Romeo begins the poem by
trying to quantify his love and speaks of “imagined happiness” (2.6.27).  Juliet
outstrips Romeo’s words as she completes the sonnet, suggesting that a
conceit “more rich in matter than in words/ Brags of his substance, not of
ornament”, going on to state that they “are beggars that can count their worth”
and that her “love is grown to such excess/ [that she] cannot sum up… half”
(30-34) her wealth.  This poetic duel suggests that Juliet’s notion of love are
far more grounded than Romeo’s, and that her rhetorical skills far exceed that
of Romeo’s.  She is offering to yield her chastity based on substance, not
poetic conceit.  The entire exchange, however, is absent from the film.  By
excluding Romeo’s half of the sonnet, Luhrmann hides Romeo’s flawed
Petrarchan notions from the audience.  In omitting the second half of the
sonnet, Luhrmann supresses Juliet’s superior rhetorical skill whilst also failing
to allow Juliet to articulate why she is willing to offer up her chastity to
Romeo.  Such exclusion serves to maintain Romeo’s masculinity at the
expense of a fully formed Juliet, leaving her as an inferior to Romeo, or at the
very best an equal, rather than Romeo’s rhetorical and emotive superior.
 
After the consummation of their marriage, Juliet and Romeo share a
prolonged exchange regarding the dire circumstances that have arisen;
namely Romeo’s banishment from Verona.  Paul Kottman notes that when
Shakespeare displays the young lovers, there “is no resigned, tearful
acceptance of the necessity of saying goodbye” (Kottman, 29).  Kottman
observes that Juliet is defiant (29) when she pronounces: “stay yes; thou
need’st not to be gone” (3.5.16).  Here Juliet affirms her commitment to
Romeo, and Luhrmann even includes this line in his film (Chapter 22).  Juliet
makes an even more pronounced commitment, though, when she suggests
that she will endure Romeo’s banishment with him and “be to [Romeo]… a
torchbearer” (3.5.14).  We see here that Juliet recognizes Romeo’s need for
guidance and that she is willing and confident enough to provide this
guidance, even if it means sacrificing her familial ties and standard of living. 
This line is not revealed to Luhrmann’s audience however.  Juliet proceeds to
dissuade Romeo from leaving, employing the metaphor of the lark who “some
say makes sweet division” (29).  Juliet makes it clear that she is chaste in her
commitment to Romeo and claims that the lark is not sweet because “she
divideth” (30) the title characters.  The lamentation of their departure is
reduced from ten lines in the source material, to two lines in the film, reducing
Juliet’s pleading to a couplet that consists of: “Hie hence, be gone away” and
“O, now be gone!  More light and light it grows” (26, 35).  These lines make it
seem as though Juliet were prompting Romeo’s hasty departure when in fact
she is affirming her resolution to maintain her chastity.  Excluding these lines
dilutes Juliet’s loyalty to Romeo and fails to display her fortitude.
 
 
Romeo, in this scene, is full of despair so far as the source material is
concerned.  He had, before arriving to consummate his marriage to Juliet, just
half-heartedly attempted to stab himself only to be too easily thwarted
(3.3.107) by the Nurse who is so old that all she has is but four teeth left in her
mouth (1.3.14).  This scene, which displays Romeo’s utter futility, is
predictably excluded from Romeo + Juliet.  When alone with Juliet, Romeo
says: “Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death” and goes on to invite death to
come and take him, passive-aggressively claiming that “Juliet wills it so”
(3.5.24), despite the fact that the optimistic Juliet had not even so much as
hinted at this alternative.  These lines are in the film, but Luhrmann’s direction
defuses the sombre/passive-aggressive weight of the words as he has
Leonardo DiCaprio, unconvincingly, deliver the lines in a jovial manner.  Such
exclusion and manipulation hides Romeo’s supplicating and fatalistic
defeatism from the audience, preserving his masculinity.

When confronted with a marriage match from her parents, Juliet endures a
great deal of abuse from both of her parents whilst trying to preserve her
chastity by remaining faithful to Romeo.  Upon hearing her mother tell her of a
planned marriage, Juliet courageously defies her mother, first proposing
“wonder at [such] haste” and the asserting that she “will not marry… and
when [she] do[es]… It shall be Romeo” (118-122).  This assertiveness does
not make the final cut of Luhrmann’s film however, so Luhrmann’s audience
does not get to see Juliet defend her chastity.  Even before her father she is
defiant, albeit meekly.  Juliet calls to her father: “I beseech you on my knees”
(158), but not even this brief display of humility and loyalty could find its way
into Romeo + Juliet.  As the scene comes to a close, Juliet chastises the
Nurse who tries to rationalize the proposed marriage between Juliet and
Paris, asking the Nurse: “Is it more sin to wish me this forsworn,/ Or to
dispraise my lord with that same tongue/ Which she hath praised him with”
(237-239)?  In this passage, Juliet notes that Romeo is her ‘lord’, making clear
to whom she is loyal, whilst also rejecting the Nurse’s rationalization.  Juliet
recognizes her limited autonomy in the scene, and concludes the scene by
asserting that if “all else fail, myself have power to die” (243), demonstrating
the extent of her loyalty and chastity to Romeo: she would sooner die than be
unchaste.  Again, though, this display of loyalty to Romeo on the part of Juliet
is excluded form Romeo + Juliet, and so Luhrmann’s audience again misses
out on the full range of strength which Juliet displays in the source material.
 
Juliet’s final scene is perhaps the most problematic.  After having asserted
that she would sooner die than break her chastity, Juliet fulfills the promise. 
As Weis notes, “Shakespeare’s Juliet has so far outgrown Romeo by the end
of the play that it seems entirely right that her final act of courage, a ‘Roman’
suicide unlike his gentler poisoning, should linger in our minds’ eye” (Weis,
61).  But by the end of Romeo + Juliet, the audience has not seen that Juliet
‘has far out grown Romeo’.  The film has spent far more time on Romeo’s
self-indulgence than on Juliet’s sacrifice, and even in the final scene Juliet is
robbed of her ‘Roman’ suicide.  Luhrmann does not afford Juliet the courage
to stab herself.  Instead of sheathing a knife into her chest, she dies via self-
inflicted gunshot.  Nor does Luhrmann allow Juliet the poetics of ending her
life by destroying the metaphorical source of her love: her heart.  Instead, she
shoots herself in the head.  The scene is the culmination of Juliet taking
ownership of her chastity.  She is dying rather than allowing her chaste body
be touched by a man other than her ‘lord’, but because Luhrmann does not
include Juliet’s monologue at the end of the third act, the audience does not
get a full sense of the purpose of Juliet’s suicide.  Juliet is allowed a slightly
more courageous ending than Romeo, who still dies via poison, but the
audience is robbed of the metaphorical drama that only a knife plunged in
heart a heart can allow, and, in turn, is denied the full range and motivation of
Juliet’s courage.
 
The omission of source material did not only impact the title characters, but
some peripheral characters as well.  There are masculine notions regarding
chastity in Romeo and Juliet that cast perhaps a negative light upon some of
the characters who people the source material.  The Nurse’s husband, for
example, who is only referenced in the play, had a lewd comment in regards
to the infant Juliet.  On an occasion when he witnessed the infant Juliet fall
forward, he commented: “‘dost thou fall upon thy face?/  Thou wilt fall
backward when thou hast more wit” (1.3.43-44).  This sexualization of Juliet in
her infancy indicates what little respect even servant men had for women,
especially when considering Juliet was of noble birth and his social superior. 
The Nurse’s husband sees women, even in their infancy, as an agent of the
sex act.  This passage, however, is absent from the film, and so Luhrmann
does not allow the audience to see this side of masculine notions on sexuality
and chastity.  Such disregard for the autonomy and chastity of women is on
display as early as the play’s first scene.  When Samson and Gregory speak
of their family’s feud with the Montagues, Samson boasts that he will forcibly
“thrust [the Montague] maids to the wall” (1.1.16-17).  When Gregory notes
that their quarrel is with the men, Samson reaffirms his position, bragging that
he will “show [himself] a tyrant” and “cut off the… heads” of the maids, going
on to clarify that he means their “heads… or their maidenheads” (20-24). 
With these blatant rape innuendos, it becomes clear that the men, regardless
of class, have little if any respect for the chastity of women.  Like the scene in
which the Nurse’s husband sexualizes the infant Juliet, this scene is also
omitted from the film, hiding the misogynistic overtones of some of the male
characters from the audience.  Both these omissions serve to whitewash
masculine misogyny, and fail to show the audience some of the masculine
views on chastity as they were presented in the source material.
 
By the end of the play it seems clear when examining both her actions and
her language that Juliet is emotively and philosophically superior to Romeo. 
Weis suggests the play’s “final couplet, with a strategically placed possessive
pronoun, says as much” (Weis, 7): “For never was a story of more woe/ Than
this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5.3.309-10).  The last four words invert the
order of the title and use a possessive pronoun to define Romeo as Juliet’s
possession, a far cry from the typical patriarchal notions of a romantic
relationship that culminates in marriage as the father usually gives the bride to
her husband, making the woman the property first of her father and then of
her husband.  The moments of the play that seem to most suggest Juliet is
worthy of such an inversion of patriarchal custom seem utterly lacking in

Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and so when the final couplet arrives on screen,
a viewer familiar with the source material might fairly expect for Luhrmann to
invert the possessive pronoun in the play’s final line.  Surprisingly, though,
Luhrmann leaves the original order, perhaps for not better reason than to
change it would break the rhyme scheme.  The spirit of the original departing
couplet, however, is simply not present in Luhrmann’s film adaptation, and so
the couplet does not reverberate with the film the way it does with the source
material.  Weis notes that the “play may have started out as ‘Romeo and
Juliet’ but it ends as ‘Juliet and Romeo’, a hierarchy more truly reflective of the
essence of the drama” (Weis, 7), but this is not the case in Romeo + Juliet. 
The Juliet of the source material, who is a strong, independent, assertive,
philosophical woman, is, through the exclusion of various texts, transformed
into an ever-weeping victim who is powerless and emotively delicate: a
clichéd damsel in distress.  Luhrmann’s film is entertaining and visually
stunning, but it dilutes Juliet’s character and so fails to display for its audience
the true spirit of the source material.