On Romeo and Juliet and Civic Crisis in Contemporary Verona.

This piece provides a discussion of the possibilities for civic Shakespeare in Verona as a privileged Shakespace, or Shakespeare-influenced space of text, performance, and culture (Donald Hedrick and Brian Reynolds, Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, Palgrave 2000). The delicate balance between civic institutions and fringe loci of cultural and political interaction related to Shakespeare is apparent in the combination of official festivals, such as the Shakespeare Summer Festival, and a number of different civic events including professional and unprofessional performances as well as spontaneous initiatives associated with the fictitious reconstruction of Romeo and Juliet’s locations as a living environment for people to experience the ‘real thing’. This reanimation of the city around the Romeo and Juliet myth since the late 1930s, with architectural redecoration and monumentalisation of the two lovers into statue, balcony and tomb, has triggered a number of different reactions, including people from all over the world writing to Juliet as a ‘therapeutic consultant’ for grievances and cares, a phenomenon which has gradually established itself as a global social issue (and tourism-oriented marketing initiative), known as “Letters to Juliet”. This led, in 1985, to the official foundation of a Juliet Club for replying to epistles coming from all over the world. Within such an urban and civic context reanimated artistically and culturally at different levels of intellectual, political, economic, and civic engagement in the name of Shakespeare, ever new experiments are carried out today, such as the workshop on Romeo and Juliet run by Lindsay Kemp in 2013, an event situated at the crossroads between impromptu performance and rehearsals open to the citizenship, and a further similar project which took place in 2016 on the same issue of crisis and reconciliation in Romeo and Juliet in contemporary Verona. The chapter discusses the civic and political repercussion of these new ways of conceiving ‘performing Shakespeare’ in Verona as an overtly Romeo-and-Juliet-space, where all initiative is itself theatrical, whether in traditional ways or via alternative forms of civic performance, pointing at the creation of a civic space of interaction that encompasses both private issues and their public management.