25 Years of Distorting Shakespeare

Baz Luhrmann's Directorial Infidelity in "Romeo + Juliet"

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Part 2: The Suicide Scene

Part 1: The Wedding Venue

Part 3: Five More Changes to the Final Scene

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Argument

While Luhrmann has the lovers take their lives in a big, beautiful, candlelit church, the reality in Shakespeare’s text is that they kill themselves in a dark, underground, corpse-filled burial chamber.

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Shakespeare had an amazing genius for capturing who we are and revealing it to us. My job is just to re-reveal it.

—Baz Luhrmann

In Part 1, we saw how Luhrmann transformed the wedding venue, making it far more attractive than it is in Shakespeare’s text. How he took a space that was barren and made it beautiful, a space that was cramped and made it capacious, and more than a little.

Here, I want to look at the director’s transformation of a still more important setting, that of the lovers’ suicides.

In commentary, this is often called the “tomb scene,” since it takes place at the Capulet family tomb.

What does Luhrmann do? I’ll tell you upfront.

Gets rid of the tomb part.

Cells, tombs: these aren’t the most romantic of spots. Not the best symbols of transcendent love. Shakespeare himself didn’t seem to grasp this. Thankfully, Baz is here to restore the poet’s intended meaning and share with the world what he really meant.

The Film

Do you recall how the wedding scene began? With a vertical panoramic, with a long-angle, ceiling-to-floor shot of the inside of the church.

The death scene begins the exact same way.

In the exact same place.

Romeo, having survived his confrontation with the police—an event you too might have trouble recalling from the pages of the play—opens the inner doors of the church. Looks up. And what does he see? The main body of the church in all its awe-inspiring immensity, including a massive statue of the Virgin Mary.

It was well-lit before. And it’s well-lit again. This time with hundreds of candles.

It’s spectacular. It’s beautiful. And that’s not just my word for it. As Luhrmann’s own screenplay reads,

As the door opens, it reveals an image of unexpected beauty. The velvety black cavern of the church is glowing warm with hundreds of lit candles (133).

A place that’s “velvety,” that’s “glowing,” that’s “warm.” An image of—“beauty.”

In addition to the candles, there are large, neon-lit blue crosses, as you can see below. There might be a lot of empty, ostentatious religiosity in Verona Beach, but here there’s no hint of irony. Rather, the crosses convey the sacrificial nature of the acts the lovers are about to commit, the next-worldly nature of their love.

Juliet’s body lies near the altar at the front. As such, the lovers take their lives right where they’d given their lives to each other. The spatial continuity makes their deaths the supreme testimony of their abiding, mutual commitment.

The Text

To this day, Luhrmann insists on his fidelity to the text. For example, here’s a recent tweet of his about the 25th anniversary of the film:

Baz Luhrmann @bazluhrmann

The whole creative team is very intense about research but we *always* start with the text. Costume designer, Kym Barrett, picked up on the reference of Romeo as the Knight and Juliet as the Angel. I thought it was a brilliant comic touch that Paris was an astronaut😂 #RJat25

We “*always* starts with the text,” says the director, suggesting he takes great care to produce something authentically Shakespearean.

In this, he succeeds admirably, according to scholars like Jonathan Bate. In Bate’s view,

One of the great achievements of our time is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which keeps the authentic text but updates the setting and makes Shakespeare familiar to a whole new generation. (DVD Extras: Director’s Gallery: Impact)

Not some unread impostor’s bastardization. The “authentic text.” Genuine “Shakespeare.” On the big-screen.

Here, then, at the climax of the play, the defining event of the story, Luhrmann must stay especially close to the text, updating the setting, but not transforming it altogether. After all, this isn’t Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s “Shakespeare’s” own, as the title so loudly proclaims.

In the play, as in the film, the circumstances of the lovers’ suicides must be “beautiful.”

In fact, the circumstances aren’t just different. It’s hard to imagine how they could be any more different. Hard to imagine what Baz would’ve done if he’d actually tried to be unfaithful.

For the cold empirical fact is this.

Shakespeare’s lovers aren’t inside the church when they take their lives.

They’re beneath it.

Aren’t in the bright, above-ground, holy edifice where they marry.

Are in the lightless, subterranean burial chamber that is the Capulet family tomb.

Aren’t on the main floor, but the basement. Not the nave. The cave. Not the chancel. The ossuary.

And just as Shakespeare seemed to stress the unattractiveness of the wedding venue, so he stresses the unattractiveness of the death venue. Except that the latter’s not merely barren or austere. It’s nightmarish. It’s ghastly.

To start with, it’s unambiguously underground. To enter, Romeo must “descend,” as he himself says at 5.3.28.

Shakespeare’s preferred terms for the burial chamber are, in order of frequency, “grave,” “vault” and “tomb.”

Grave appears well over a dozen times, including nine times in the final act alone.

Vault, denoting a “chamber beneath a church used for burials,” appears no fewer than eight times. For example, before taking the drug, Juliet fears she may be “be stifled in the vault” (4.3.34). Later, Balthazar reports that he saw Juliet “laid low in her kindred’s vault” (5.1.21). Romeo himself, once inside, speaks of “this vault” (5.3.86).

Finally, tomb appears about half a dozen times, including twice in the exact phrase, a “dead man’s tomb” (5.3.30, 209).

How many of these references does Luhrmann cut? Virtually all of them. For instance, while grave appears over fifteen times in Shakespeare’s text, it appears but once in the movie.

Luhrmann presents us with something “beautiful.” Shakespeare’s is one more tale from the crypt.

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A place of “death and night”

So it’s an underground burial site. But Shakespeare doesn’t just let us imagine that the place is ghastly. He practically compels us to do so.

He does so through extensive foreshadowing, several characters mentioning the tomb well before the final act. And not just mentioning it, but describing it in great detail.

For example, in a speech in Act 3, Juliet calls the site a

charnel house,
Overcovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls. (4.1.82)

Fibulas and femurs. Heads without jaws. Bones that clatter. A place that both looks and “reeks” of death.

That doesn’t just house such remains. That’s “overcovered” with them.

Etymologically, charnel is related to “carnal.” As such, charnel house conveys a house of flesh.

Subsequently, before taking the drug that’ll make her appear dead, Juliet gives a 25-line speech in which she fears waking up prematurely in the tomb and either suffocating to death or losing her mind and killing herself in a desperate rage.

“How if, when I am laid into the tomb, / I wake before the time that Romeo / Come to redeem me?” asks the Capulet girl,

Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled [before] my Romeo comes? (4.3.31-6)

In other words, won’t I asphyxiate from the noxiousness of the fumes?

She goes on,

Or, if I live, is it not very like
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place—
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle
Where for this many hundred years the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed;
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud…
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environèd with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefathers’ joints,
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains? (37-55)

Won’t I wake up, see all the body parts, go insane, reach for one of them—and bludgeon myself to death?

A place of “death and night,” Juliet calls it. Which is to say: about the worst place conceivable. Not just devoid of life and light. Defined by their antitheses. By pitch-black darkness. By the remains of people.

So there’s a lot of black and a lot of grayish yellow. But there’s red, too! There’s the still decomposing body of Romeo’s first murder victim, Tybalt, who is “bloody” and “mangled” and something worse still, “festering,” a term that, like “reeky,” adds an olfactory dimension to an already repulsive, sense-offending scene.

Earlier, Juliet called the place “overcovered” with bones. Now, she calls it “packed” with the same. She also pictures herself environed, that is, “surrounded” or “enclosed.”

As such, she says something about the number of carcasses occupying the space.

And something about the space itself.

Its narrowness.

Its compactness.

As if she were being buried alive.

Feeling a little claustrophobic just reading this? You’re supposed to! Supposed to now. And supposed to again at the end.

“Hideous,” “horrible,” a “place of terror,” the last place she’d want to find herself, last place she’d want to die—this is the tomb according to Juliet’s imagination.

A nightmare come true

It’s also the tomb—in actuality. That is, it’s the tomb as described by multiple characters in Act 5 itself, once the action moves there.

And no figure does more to draw attention to the place’s ghastliness than Romeo.

For example, in his first reference to the tomb in Act 5, he defines it in explicitly macabre terms. In particular, he begins a statement of intention to his man with,

Why I descend into this bed of death… (5.3.28)

Romeo’s going underground—and to a place defined by “death,” a term that instantly evokes all the grisly details Juliet had mentioned earlier.

And his language becomes more macabre still as he proceeds to force open the tomb. Personifying the opening as a monstrous, insatiable beast, he exclaims,

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food. (5.4.45-8)

A maw is the “mouth of a voracious animal” (Oxford English Dictionary, def. 3). This animal “gorges” on dead bodies, says Romeo. It’s “crammed” with such fare.

Together, these terms convey what Juliet had conveyed—that the site is stuffed full with bodies.

Romeo’s use of “rotten” also recalls Juliet’s use of such terms as “foul” and “festering” and “reeky,” reminding us of the stench emanating from the place and again compelling us to think not just of the sight of the bodies but their smell, too.

Inside, there aren’t just the long-deceased bodies of previous generations of Capulets. There are also the newly-deceased and still decaying bodies of the two young men killed by Romeo, Tybalt and Paris.

Romeo himself draws attention to the first. “Tybalt,” he asks Juliet’s cousin,

liest thou there in thy bloody sheet? (97)

He then mentions how he “cut [his] youth in twain” (99).

With these words, Romeo reminds us of Tybalt’s state. As Juliet had said, he’s “bloody” and “mangled,” not to mention “festering.”

Subsequently, the Friar arrives at the tomb, sees the ground covered in blood and exclaims,

Alack, alack, what blood is this which stains
The stony entrance of this sepulcher? (145-6)

What blood? The blood of the second young man Romeo has thrust through with a sword. This one for simply being in his way.

A few lines later, the Friar sees Paris “steeped in blood” (150).

Therefore, the lovers are surrounded alright. Not by candles. Corpses! Two of them blood-soaked.

Two reminders of Romeo’s murderousness.

Right as he murders himself.

Juliet had feared she’d wake up and find one bloodstained body there in the tomb, along with the other, older remains. Turns out she wasn’t apprehensive enough.

(Forgotten about this second homicide? That Romeo kills not just Tybalt but Paris? If so, it’s forgivable, the popular films all cutting this Act 5 killing. In itself, this is another highly significant change, one I’ll discuss separately.)

So the place is “packed” and “crammed” with bodily remains. But it also contains creatures that feed on those remains. The Friar asks Balthazar,

What torch is yon that vainly lends his light
To grubs and eyeless skulls? (5.3.125-6)

Grubs and skulls. That is, maggots and the corpses they deface. Literally.

It’s a morbid detail—and yet it isn’t only the Friar who draws attention to the tomb’s burrowing inhabitants. Rather, as Romeo insists on staying forever in the tomb, he tells Juliet,

Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids. (5.3.108-9)

In itself, this is one extremely unattractive image and implication. But it’s even more unattractive in the context of the larger play, Romeo’s words recalling Mercutio’s as he dies. Blaming his death on the feuding families, Romeo’s friend cries,

A plague o’ both your houses!
They have made worms’ meat of me. (3.1.112-3).

The Capulets and Montagues make worms’ meat of Mercutio, according to this line.

Their kids?

Make worms’ meat—of themselves.

Of course, in coming upon Romeo’s supremely off-putting reference to the corpse-consuming creepy-crawlies inside the tomb, you can stop and grapple with it. You can wonder whether your romantic notion of the play is valid, after all. You can decide to spend more time with the text, reading it more closely.

Or you can decide: it’s time to take this Love-story to the big screen! And cut, cut, cut away, expunging all such inconveniences. By the hundreds. The thousands.

Conclusion

Did the director know the scene ought to have taken place not above but below the earth? Yes, he did. How can we know? Because his published script specifically mentions Romeo entering not the church but its “cavern.” To requote the screenplay:

The velvety black cavern of the church is glowing warm with hundreds of lit candles.

A cavern is exactly right—and exactly not what we see in the film, Luhrmann evidently having changed his mind during production. And there’s no mystery why, his film doing everything it can to make the lovers as sympathetic as possible, their love as attractive as possible.

Kill themselves in the basement? No, not happening. Let’s move it to the main floor. Let’s do it in the main body of the church. I don’t care what the script says. My own script. It’s the biggest event of all! Let’s make it spectacular. Let’s make it sublime.

One more page of Shakespeare—straight to the floor.

Corpses to candles.

A charnel house to a church.

A house of flesh to a house of prayer.

That’s Shakespeare to Luhrmann.

And how did critics like Jonathan Bate respond, as the transmission ended?

By leading everyone in a standing ovation.