Romeo and Juliet in the 21st Century

By Katia Nierle, Romeo and Juliet: A Facebook Tragedy

Romeo and Juliet in the 21^st Century

The English 149 class at UCSB, Literature +, consists of several groups of students working on different projects.  These projects are an attempt to rethink literature through a different approach than the typical English-major reading.  The author’s team decided to place a work of Shakespeare into the online environment of social networking and experiment with nonlinear storytelling.  However, the translation of  Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into the realm of Facebook turned out to be more difficult than the team thought.  Through trying to form personalities and traits for each character, the author learned that Shakespeare’s work was unconcerned with such things, and focused on dialogue about events.  Because the characters are so two-dimensional, it was hard for the group to create Facebook web pages for them. 

Shakespeare’s plays differ from novel literature in that characters and their personalities are largely ignored.  In plays like Macbeth, the title character’s mental state is explored in-depth during the play, his status in life, actions, and tendency towards aggression and brutality are made known to the audience, but Macbeth’s actual personality, his likes and dislikes, are never discussed.  Romeo and Juliet contains even less of the characters’ actual character.  Shakespeare concentrates his work on the characters’ dialogue; he focuses on the characters’ discussion of events with little, if any, discussion about their personal traits and habits.  This makes character analysis very difficult and subjective—the characters’ identities are left up to the reader/actor.  The group thought it would be interesting to try and do this in an online setting, through the social networking site Facebook.

Facebook.com is a self-titled “social utility” that acts as a virtual version of the user.  The system produces an environment where users can, through describing their interests and themselves, establish familiarity and trust with others in a few short minutes.  Becoming friends with someone on Facebook can be done in a fraction of the time it normally takes to establish a friendship, making Facebook an easy and fun way to meet people.  Additionally, users each have their own web page on Facebook, dedicated to expressing their identity and individuality.  Users fill in their hobbies, interests, favorite books, TV shows, and movies, favorite quotes, and an About Me section.  The page also has space for the user to upload photos of himself, to fill in his current Status (i.e., John is at the library), to Friend other people, and to add decorative applications.  Each page comes with a Wall, which is essentially a message board dedicated to that user that his friends write messages on.  The Wall is useful in 2-person dialogue, but not helpful for a scene in a play with multiple characters speaking.  For that, the team first created a group called The Streets of Verona and had each character join it.  Facebook Group pages are equipped with a tool to create Discussion boards, which are similar to chat rooms but are not instantaneously replied to.  Any number of characters could then use these discussion boards to talk to each other in the same space, just like they would on a stage.  The team decided to use both Shakespeare’s original dialogue and their own modernized language in the characters’ conversation, using the modern as an extra way to describe the character’s personality.

The social qualities of Facebook made the site an ideal place for the team to recreate Romeo and Juliet; interpersonal communication is the foundation for the site as it is for the play.  The Romeo and Juliet story depends on interpersonal relationships for most of its action, with the relationship between the two title characters being the basis of the play.  The play’s scenes and dialogue all revolve around Romeo and Juliet’s interaction with each other, with other characters helping or hindering that interaction through their own actions and conversations.  Because the play depends so much on Romeo and Juliet’s relationship, and focuses almost exclusively on them, one might think that the play would offer a lot in the way of these two characters’ personalities.  However, Shakespeare gives us almost nothing pertaining to their personal traits and such things.  Instead, he fills the play completely with dialogue about actions and events.  The characters do not speak to one another about themselves, but about what is going on in the environment around them.  The reader gets almost no information about what each character in the play is like, personality-wise.  As a team, the students were interested in trying to discover these personalities through the Facebook medium.

Facebook.com offered the team a unique venue for re-enacting Romeo and Juliet, and the site’s focus on each user’s individual personality gave the team a fantastic backdrop for experimentation.  Because Shakespeare does not give his reader personal information about the characters, the reader (or actor, if such is the case) is at liberty to decide this information for himself, based on the character’s way of speaking, general mannerisms, and the like.  This has both bad and good points—although it is of course fun and amusing to create characters, it is difficult to create them correctly.   The team liked the idea of using the online community of Facebook to create the characters of Romeo and Juliet because Facebook’s communication features, like The Wall, Person-to-Person Messaging, and Group Discussion boards, offer fast and efficient venues for the play’s dialogue, while Facebook’s individual user pages give each character name in the play a place to come alive and become a personality.

Choosing how to portray each character as a person turned out to be more difficult than the team expected.  Personal traits that users of Facebook are asked for, like Interests, Hobbies, Favorite Movies, and Favorite Quotes, are not only irrelevant in the play, but are not alluded to at all—the team had a hard time picking up clues to these traits based on each character’s dialogue.  For example, the character of Lord Capulet is in the play’s character list only as “Capulet, [Juliet’s] father” (Holland 2), and the only information about him that the audience gets is that he throws a party for his friends and family, is averse to feudal violence at said party (I.v) but not to violence in Verona’s streets (I.i), is at first wary of allowing Paris to marry Juliet (I.ii), and then after conceding to Paris becomes incensed by Juliet’s “whining” refusal to marry him (III.v).  These few actions had to be used by the team to create Capulet as an entire person as a user on Facebook.  One can imagine the difficulty of this, while added to it the team had to deal with Facebook’s refusal to allow the username “Lord Capulet.”  Apparently, because “Lord” is a title and not a first name, Facebook found it an unacceptable nomenclature, and the team had to come up with a full name for Capulet (eventually going with Lord Alphonsus Capulet) in order to create a page for him.