Romeo and Juliet -- The East Side Story. A Note on Romania

Borrowing from two iconic stories, Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, this article acknowledges that adaptation lies at the centre of the play today as much as it did in the mid-1590s. It argues that stage productions approach it in a manner similar to Shakespeare’s, who took a story familiar to his contemporaries and “repeat[ed] it but without replication” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 173). Making the case for a broader study on the region, my chapter begins with a flashback to the story’s arrival in the eastern part of Europe and fast-forwards to its current state of affairs, offering a ‘note’ on Romania. In doing so, it argues that the popularity of Romeo and Juliet in the West has been matched by that in the rest of Europe, where it has proliferated in a plurality of, often, co-existing forms.