From The Metro:
The director of Romeo And Juliet at Shakespeare's original theatre will meet police today over fears that it glamorises violence. Bill Buckhurst is preparing a free production of the tragic love story for 10,000 teenagers at the Globe Theatre in central London. The 16th century play centres on one of the best known bloody gang wars in English literature...
UPDATE: TDK (in the comments) has tracked down the bit in Nineteen Eighty Four where he predicted this:
The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.
Vile Hatred
58 minutes ago
9 comments:
There's certainly plenty of violence in it; Shakespeare was evidently very familiar with the period's most fashionable tool for violent mayhem - the rapier - and assumed that his audience would be also.
Still, the statists responsible for the nonsense you mention are scoundrels and villains.
But if you edit out the underage love affair/sex, the violence/gang warfare and the suicide at the end, then there's not much left, is there?
Perhaps This
The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.
Or perhaps this
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
TDK, thanks, I have updated.
Have they nothing better to do? You might also question the intelligence of whoever it is in the police who thinks the feral youth on the streets is goingt o be influenced by a Shakespeare play. Good job it's not Coriolanus or MacBeth.
They should just put on Baz Lurhman's version instead... ;)
You've not mentioned all the drugs, one of which puts Juliet in a stone-cold coma.Is n't the point of the film that the lovers manage to transcend the violence and the under-age sex? (All the women have sex before fourteen and nearly all the young men end up dead.)
Having once taught the play to some
really wild youths, a turning point was when one of the real hard men was found to be weeping at the end of the Zefferelli film.Yesss!
Last year, London mayor Boris Johnson referenced the play when discussing knife violence.
Speaking to the Commons home affairs committee, Mr Johnson said: "My heart sinks when I hear and read of some of the language used to describe some of the victims of knife crime by other members of gangs.
"This stuff about 'You were a good soldier' or 'Fallen soldier'; we do need as repeatedly as possible as a society to detonate the myth that there is anything romantic or glamorous about these tragic episodes."
He added: "This is not the death of Mercutio taking place on the streets of London".
Whatever Boris wants the met will deliver. Remember what happenned to their last chief.
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