Original+Poem

=Romeus and Juliet - Arthur Brooke=

//There is beyond the Alps, a town of ancient fame, Whose bright renown yet shineth clear: Verona men it name; Built in a happy time, built on a fertile soil Maintained by the heavenly fates, and by the townish toil The fruitful hills above, the pleasant vales below, The silver stream with channel deep, that thro' the town doth flow, The store of springs that serve for use, and eke for ease, And other more commodities, which profit may and please, Eke many certain signs of things betid of old.//

Shakespeare based his play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on the narrative poem by Arthur Brooke ‘The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet’. Brooke's version of Romeo and Juliet was taken from the French poem by Pierre Boaistuau (1559) that was based on an Italian story by Matteo Bandello (1554), which was inspired by Luigi da Porto's ‘Giulietta e Romeo’ (circa 1530). Shakespeare’s version of the story was said to be an improved and very different version to that of Brooke’s who wrote in a completely different style to Shakespeare. Shakespeare has added intensity to the star crossed lovers by adding pressure on the entire sequence of events. In Brooke's poem, Romeus meets Juliet at Capulet's feast and then passes by Juliet's window "a weeke or two in vayne" before speaking to her again. Shakespeare has the two meet at the Capulet’s party, then again at Juliet’s balcony where they decide to marry all that same night. Not a day after they first meet, the lovers go to Friar Lawrence, where they are married in secret. After the two are married in Brooke’s version he gives Romeus and Juliet time to enjoy their marriage before tragedy strikes. They are married months before Romeus kills Juliet's cousin, Tybalt, and is banished by the Prince. In Shakespeare's play, the lover’s time together doesn’t last long before misfortune separates them. Romeo and Juliet get married just hours before Tybalt's death. In both the play and poem, Juliet receives a drug from Friar Lawrence that will create the illusion of death, and returns home to apologise to her father. Shakespeare also completely rewrote and restructured the beginning of the story in order to create a conflict between the two households. Unlike "Romeus and Juliet," the play opens with a fight. The other two times where he has altered the original poem is in the middle of the play, when Tybalt and Mercurio are murdered; and in the last scene, when Romeo kills Paris and the young lovers kill themselves. Although Shakespeare borrowed the original concept from Brooke’s poem many aspects of the original story have been altered to make Shakespeare’s version his own.
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