Searching for Juliet by Sophie Duncan review – the many faces of a heroine

An engaging guide to Shakespeare’s most famous female role – and how it has been misread and misplayed for centuries

Sophie Duncan did not call her book Looking for Juliet, possibly because that was the name of a Pirelli calendar featuring film stars posed as exquisite, death-obsessed goths. This is just one of the artefacts Duncan, a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, analyses in her invigorating cultural investigation of Shakespeare’s heroine, reaching back to his source texts, forward to Taylor Swift’s song Love Story, and beyond.

Juliet enacts a “stunning rebellion against a society that deems her the property of her parents” when she marries Romeo. Shakespeare had never written a heroine like her before, and Duncan believes he created the juicy role for a particular actor, Robert Gough. Gough probably also played Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all determined, diminutive brunettes beset by patriarchal forces.

The character represents a break from its most immediate source, Arthur Brooke’s 1562 Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet, where she was as much in love with death as with Romeo. Shakespeare made her three years younger, the age his eldest daughter was at the time, an age Elizabethan audiences would have found “scandalously, recklessly young”. He also scraps Brooke’s moral condemnation of Juliet. We are on her side.

But for all the life Shakespeare gives Juliet, he also leaves space for audiences to fixate on her death. As Duncan points out, when Romeo sees her corpse “his first thought is how sexy she is”, while her father, finding her apparently dead, imagines that death has “deflowered” her. In the 18th century, abusive impresario Theophilus Cibber played Romeo opposite his own teenage daughter, turning the rebellious protagonist into a docile girl victimised by her lewd father. Cibber’s rival, David Garrick, was disgusted and responded by casting Cibber’s ex-wife as Juliet in his own production and giving her a dashing Romeo. He also gave Juliet a balcony, a funeral featuring bells, bridesmaids, torches and a song, and cut the text to make her more demure.

Garrick’s sanitised production crossed the Atlantic while other Juliets were making darker, more violent crossings; Duncan explores the dehumanising practice of renaming enslaved people, and whether Juliet was such a popular choice because enslavers liked using the name of a girl who is sexualised, victimised, persecuted and ends up dead.

Duncan is an engaging guide to Juliet’s complex afterlives. In Verona she is disturbed by tourists groping a statue of Juliet and by the way the tourist experience was shaped by Italian fascists. It was an ex-soldier of Mussolini’s who had the idea of replying to letters the lovelorn sent to Juliet, and the advice he gave women was straight out of the fascist playbook, urging them to be good, fanatical wives who would even kill themselves for love – a rather depressing reading of the play. There are now a team of secretaries who seemingly give better advice.

Scrutinising stories told about “real life” Romeo and Juliets, Duncan refuses to call their tragedies inevitable; after all, even in the play, Juliet dies because of “a series of bad decisions made by men: Romeo kills Tybalt, which leads to his banishment; her father emotionally abuses her and accelerates her forced, bigamous marriage. These events prompt Friar Laurence’s chaotic and ultimately derailed plan”. Considering the adage that “by the time an actress understands Juliet, she’s too old to play her” (sometimes misattributed to Ellen Terry, who inspired the suffragettes by playing Juliet at 35), she writes movingly about what much older actors might bring to the role.

This book is crammed with interesting nuggets. Did you know that West Side Story started with a Catholic Romeo and a Jewish Juliet, complete with an onstage seder? That in the 1840s Charlotte Cushman “ravished” audiences by playing Romeo, giving the play new life as a secret queer romance? Or that Franco Zeffirelli’s first choice for Romeo was Paul McCartney? What makes Searching for Juliet so thrilling is the way Duncan weaves all these threads into a compelling history of a singular heroine.

Samantha Ellis is the author of How to Be a Heroine and Take Courage (Vintage). Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine by Sophie Duncan is published by Sceptre (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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