What You Don't Know About Romeo and Juliet

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why were the holidays of the Druids of Scotland celebrated in medieval Italy and why we did not know anything about it …

Having started his own translation of the famous play by English authors who participated in the project of the XVI-XVII centuries. under the general title "Shakespeare" (which is actually quite a common phenomenon in literature, if you recall our Russian literary mask called "Kozma Prutkov"), in the 3rd scene of the 1st act with interest I came across a remarkable mistake in the original. Which you, by the way, will not find in any previous Russian translation. But let's go in order …

When was Juliet born? Two weeks before fourteen years before the described tragic events. The nanny at the beginning of the scene asks Juliet's mother, Mrs. Capulet, how much is left before the Lammas holiday, since Juliet, it turns out, was born the day before. According to the calendar of the Scottish and English Druids, Lammas, being the holiday of the beginning of the harvest, falls on August 1st.

His name is mentioned by the nanny as many as three times, from which we can conclude (and more than one, but more on that later) that Juliet's date of birth is important and meaningful. Indeed, the poor thing has about a week to live. That is, the scythe of Death will carry it away from this world at the time of harvesting the first harvest, almost allowing it to ripen.

According to the nanny, the birth of her ward falls on the night of the holiday, in other words, on July 31st. By the way, the very name of Juliet, if you haven't guessed yet, means "July" (Juliet from July). Had she been born a month later, she would have been named Augusta or something. However, the story of Romeo and Juliet is by no means original. It first saw the light of day somewhere around 1530, was called in Italian Historia di due nobili Amanti ("The story of two noble lovers") and belonged to the pen of a certain Luigi da Porto. The heroes were called Romeo and Giulietta (almost like Fiat's compact hatchback model of 2010). In 1562, it was this "History" that Arthur Brooke translated into English, calling it the old-fashioned The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. It was she who formed the basis of Shakespeare's tragedy.

Since the nanny talks about Lammas from the stage, we understand that the then English viewer could easily understand what was being discussed, and at the same time feel the aforementioned symbolism of the heroine's birth. Moreover, the nanny mentions that Juliet's own daughter, Susanna, who, alas, died in childhood was the same age as Juliet. Now we, together with the audience, must realize that those born on the eve of the Lammas holiday will face an unenviable fate. Moreover, the theme of fate and fate sounds in the text of the drama from the very beginning, because from the prologue we learn that our heroes in love were originally star-crossed lovers, that is, "lovers born under an unlucky star."

If you dig deeper and subtract the prescribed nine months from August 1, it turns out that poor Juliet was also conceived at the height of another Druidic holiday, Samhain, celebrated on November 1. Needless to say, Samhain is the opposite of Lammas, as it symbolizes the end of the harvest. By the way, the Christians who came to power in the British land quickly remade Samhain on All Saints Day, from which the holiday of all evil spirits, called Halloween, has organically formed today.

And now that you and I know the background, the promised mistakes.

Well, first of all, as you can imagine, the mistake of the authors of Romeo and Juliet is rather primitive. Fascinated by symbolism, they forgot that the action takes place in sunny Italy, where no one has ever heard of Lammas.

But the worst hit the Russian reader. Because literally in all previous translations (Radlova, Shchepkina-Kupernik, Pasternak), for some reason, Peter's day appears as Juliet's birthday (July 12). Which is especially common in the Slavic Christian tradition. Juliet was clearly not a Slav. Catholics, however, celebrate the Day of Peter and Paul, but not even in July, but on June 29. Therefore, for fans of "Shakespeare" who do not know the original English, everything that I wrote about at the beginning should be a wonder and all the more interesting.

The moral of the story is simple: Learn English, ladies and gentlemen. Or read classics in correct translations. I work hard on the latter in my free time from tutoring.