To watch the courtly love story in action, Romeo and Juliet seems like the best place to start.
In the first of a 3-part series, Sonja and Vanessa offer helpful historical and literary foundations that help us read/understand the play. Learn about original source material, Renaissance Italian government, marriage practices, and why, in William Shakespeare’s acting company, Juliet would have been played by a young man. After explaining why all shirts that say “Shakespeare was a plagiarist” should be burned, Vanessa offers some insights on how Shakespeare made the story very much his own…so much so that it is–far and away–the most read/performed/known version of the story.
If you read the play in high school or if you have never read it, this break down of the play will remind you of what you forgot–and might even explain some things you never knew. Keep in mind that Romeo and Juliet is the Shakespeare play with the most sexual references of any of his plays…and many American high schools teach censored/abbreviated versions, so you might find out the play was a little different than you thought.
Along the way, we find out that the original Juliet has a very original way to end her life, someone is famous for having cold hands, and men have fun, pointing pointy objects around.
REFERENCES:
We are using the Yale Press version of Romeo and Juliet, editor Burton Raffel, 2004.
Vanessa is on the search for the original article she read years ago arguing that boy players were used on the English Renaissance stage not because it was illegal for women to perform, but rather because of the male guild system.
If you want to check out Luigi da Porto's 1540 version of Romeo and Juliet, this is an easy to read online copy (Italian and English parallel texts, no less).
If you are interested in learning more from world-renowned Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, you could start with his famed volume, Renaissance Self Fashioning that is a classic in the field of Early Modern studies both in terms of history and literary criticism. He also has a wonderfully accessible biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
For the story on how two of Shakespeare’s friends saved many of his plays from being lost, seven years after his death, this is a highly-readable, relatively brief story of their work to gather the quarto editions of the plays, publish the plays, and how the Folger Library in DC would not exist if not for the First Folio: The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins