ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into countless languages, but in the summer of 1989 an experimental production of Romeo and Juliet was staged in the Swiss town of Fribourg/Freiburg in which the relationships between languages and between language communities were presented as the central theme: the Montague family spoke German, the Capulets French, and the Prince English, while the monks (in their important function as go-betweens) were bilingual in French and German. The producers denied that the production was intended as an allegory of the Swiss situation, but the audience in this bilingual town, where die Deutschschweiz meets la romandie, might have been forgiven for thinking otherwise (see pp. 22-34).
