ABSTRACT
It is night, she is above in her balcony; he is below in her garden. She is looking at the moon; he at her. Is there a more iconic theatrical tableau than this? Share this description with anyone walking down the street and they will tell you, without hesitation, that the characters depicted in the above sentence are none other than Romeo and Juliet. But this young ingénue and her inamorato are not the first stage lovers to be rendered in such a fashion, they hail from a long and illustrious pedigree that began with the dawning of the commedia dell’arte. Long before Romeo became Romeo he was Flávio, Ottavio, Orazio, Silvio, Leandro, Lelio, Mario, and Fulvio. And she, long before she became Juliet, went by the names of Isabella, Flaminia, Celia, Lidia, Lavinia, Auerelia, Valeria, Silvia, Graziosa, and even Ortennsia. 1 In other words, our Romeo and Juliet are the culmination of a veritable army of star-crossed lovers that graced the theaters and public squares of Italy. Now they find themselves transplanted on the stage of the Rose Theatre, trading in their innate Petrarchan octaves for Elizabethan iambics.
