age of Juliet from sixteen to fourteen, the age of Marlowe's Abigail, so heightening the miracle of love, which transforms her from a child to a heroic woman. He deepens her solitude by depriving Lady Capulet of a mother's tenderness, and showing her as a somewhat unsympathetic woman of the world. And he brings the lord-lover Paris, "a man of wax," to the churchyard, with his flowers and perfumed water, to die, and to illustrate the gentleness, the resolution, and the magnanimity of Romeo.
The Romeo and Juliet legend has a long history, and it is not necessary here to trace it in detail.[1] Almost at the moment when Shakespeare was writing his tragedy the Italian Girolamo de la Corte published his History of Verona (1594–96), and there recorded as matter of historical fact the story of the star-crossed lovers. He assigns the events to the year 1303, when Verona was ruled by Bartolomeo de la Scala. But imaginary history seems to have grown out of legend, and modern criticism has disenchanted the "Sepolcro di Giulietta e Romeo" at Verona. One of the incidents of the story—the escape from enforced marriage by the use of a sleeping potion—is as old as Xenophon of Ephesus, whose romance of the loves of Anthia and Abrocomas was first printed from the only existing manuscript in 1726.[2] A tale of much more
- ↑ See Alessandro Torri's Giulietta e Romeo (Pisa, 1821), the Baron de Guenifey's Histoire de Roméo Montecchi et de Juliette Cappelletti (Paris, 1836), Mr. Daniel's Introduction to the New Sh. Society's reprints of Brooke and Painter, and my article on "Romeo and Juliet" in Transcripts and Studies.
- ↑ It was at once translated into English by Mr. Rooke (1727). My acquaintance with the Ephesiaca is derived from the French version of 1736;
