Romeo and Juliet, oral lele

ORAL LELE

Today, I am going to talk about adaptations and fanfictions. And to illustrate my presentation, i will talk about Romeo and Juliet, which is a very famous play written by William Shakespeare. This play has inspire a lot of authors, movie directors, to do adaptations, sometimes to change the ending, sometimes to show a different point of view, or sometimes, to be loyal as possible to the canon and pay homage to Shakespeare’s work. In my presentation, i will focus on the fact that all the adaptations that i will present you still areloyal in their own way to the canon even if, sometimes, it is not that obvious. Of course i am going to talk about the canon in a first time, then i am going to talk about R+J which is a movie by Luhrmann that we studied in class, and finally, i am going to present you a comics named Julia and Roem by Enki Bilal.

So, as i said, the original play has inspire a lot of artists, because of, of course the tragic story of those two star-crossed lovers, but also because of the quality of the text, which greatly influences the success of the play. I will talk about the meeting scene at the Capulet’s party and the balcony scene.

In the canon, those scenes are surely some of the most important scenes of the play. Shakespeare wrote them in his own style, which is mostly poetry ; so in the original play, Romeo appears like a very courteous man while flirting with Juliet because of the quality of his lines, and because of all the imagery he uses like metaphores, comparisons… That’s partly why Juliet fells in love with him at the party, but even after, they keep flirting in the balcony scene, and it is highlighted by their dialogues.

But obviously, all adaptations can’t fit with the original script, so now i am going to talk about R+J by Luhrmann, this movie was released in 1996, so there is almost 400years between this movie and the original play. So even if Luhrmann was forced to change a part of the script, he has tried to respect as much as possible the imagery of Shakespeare, and he added a modern touch in the story by doing a movie. I think it helps us, from the 21st century, to understand better the story, because Shakespeare’s English is of course not the easiest to understand.

Finally, I will talk about Julia qnd Roem, here it’s obvious that the characters have changed because of their names, and the story is totally different : it talks about apocalyptic events that happened on earth, Julia and Roem are both survivorsbut from different clans, so when they fell in love, Roem’s friend discovers their relationship and forces Roem to leave the shelter. Even if it’s totally different, i feel like it also shows star crossed lovers with an impossible love, it ends in a better way than the canon, with the same system of fake suicide but here, it worked and they are finally safe from apocalypse.

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