Da Porto's novel was published posthumously at Venice without date, about the year 1530. It is substantially the story familiar to us,[1] but there are variations in detail, and certain personages of the drama are wanting. Romeo masks not as a pilgrim but as a nymph; the lovers touch hands and whisper their passion in the torch-dance; the wooing and winning are not swiftly accomplished; the sentence of banishment is not pronounced until after some happy bridal days and nights have followed the secret marriage; the nurse has not yet appeared in the story; for Paris we have here the Count of Lodrone; Juliet awakens from her drugged sleep in the tomb before the poison has quite overcrowed the spirit of her husband, and a dialogue ensues, the motive of which has been idealised and exalted in the opera of Gounod. This form of the tragic scene was unknown to Shakespeare, who could have conveyed into it the beauty and dignity of passion; when Otway, and subsequently Garrick, with Otway as his guide, varied from the Shakespearian close, they struck false notes and fell into the phrases of convention and pseudo-pathos.[2]
Adrian Sevin's French transformation of the story of Romeo and Juliet into the story of Halquadrich and Burglipha (1542) has little interest, and does not take a place in the direct line of the development of the tale
- ↑ The reader will find both the Italian text and an English translation in The Original Story of Romeo and Juliet, by G. Pace-Sanfelice, 1868. Mr. Rolfe has reproduced Brydges' rare translation, with the addition of omitted passages: Juliet and Romeo, Boston, 1895. For short accounts, see Daniel or my article already mentioned.
- ↑ It is needless here to give any account of Otway's strange appropriation and transformation of Shakespeare's play in his Caius Marius.
