S6: E1: Sophie Duncan on Searching for Juliet

Sophie Duncan discusses her book, Searching for Juliet — a love letter to this wonderful and beloved heroine.

For a complete episode transcript, http://www.womenandshakespeare.com

Interviewer: Varsha Panjwani
Guest: Sophie Duncan 

Researchers: Irene Hao and Rose Hayward
Producer: Tayphath Thyagaraj
Transcript: Benjamin Poore
Artwork: Wenqi Wan

Suggested Citation:  Duncan, Sophie in conversation with Panjwani, Varsha (2025). Sophie Duncan on Searching for Juliet. Women & Shakespeare [podcast], Series 6, Ep.1. http://womenandshakespeare.com/

Insta: earlymoderndoc
Email: earlymoderndoc@gmail.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Varsha: Hello and welcome to the brand new and shiny series six of Women and Shakespeare, the podcast where we learn from the women who shape Shakespeare. Today, I'm your host, Dr. Varsha Panjwani, and I wanted to begin the new series by telling you about my first encounter with Shakespeare. And it all began with Juliet.

Varsha: I didn't learn about Juliet in a classroom. I saw her on the vibrant, melodramatic and utterly intoxicating screen of Bollywood. Films like Ek Duje Ke Liye and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, which adapted Romeo and Juliet for the Indian screen, introduced me to a Juliet who was witty, flirty, bold, and fought to be in charge of her own destiny.

Varsha: As a young teenage girl growing up with the [00:01:00] constant curtailing of freedom, Juliet felt like a power surge. She had an independent mind. She was so young and full of promise, and she was let down by the world. It was so unfair. When I later discovered that this heroine with the oh-so-relatable feelings was from a Shakespeare play.

Varsha: When I later discovered that this heroine with the oh-so-relatable feelings was from a Shakespeare play, it was like a window flung open. I began to seek out his works, so Juliet, via Bollywood, led me to Shakespeare. Therefore, it is a true pleasure to welcome this episode's guest, Dr. Sophie Duncan, who writes with such insight and empathy about Juliet in her book, Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare's First Tragic Heroine.

Varsha: Sophie is a Research Fellow and Dean for Welfare at the University of Oxford. Although we mainly talked about Juliet, we also touch on her [00:02:00] earlier and brilliant books, Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle and Shakespeare's Props: Memory and Cognition, especially as they relate to Juliet. 

Varsha: Hello, Sophie. I have finished reading your book just a couple of days ago, and I am carrying it with me physically everywhere, so it is absolutely lovely to have you on the podcast. Welcome to Women and Shakespeare. 

Sophie: Thank you so much. I'm completely delighted to be here. 

Varsha: Sophie, when did you first encounter Shakespeare, and what was the nature of that encounter?

Sophie: I grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is where Shakespeare was born, and my parents met working for the Royal Shakespeare Company. My father was a Deputy Stage Manager. My mother was Senior Wig and Makeup Artist. So Shakespeare had a lot to do with how I came into being. My first memory of kind of knowing about Shakespeare was we had a big [00:03:00] copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in the living room.

Sophie: And I was very interested in this big book because it was the biggest, the thickest book in the house. And I remember getting videos of the plays when I was five or six and being taken to the theatre quite a lot. So there isn't a single revelatory moment, but I don't really remember not knowing about Shakespeare.

Sophie: And I was hugely lucky to be in Stratford to go to the theatre a lot, because I don't think it gave me the time to develop hangups about it that you can have if you encounter Shakespeare later in the classroom, and it can seem very difficult. Whereas my primary school, so the school I started when I was four, was very close to the centre of Stratford.

Sophie: I think for a lot of children in Stratford, it feels [00:04:00] quite normal for there to be a lot of Shakespeare about the place. 

Varsha: How lovely is that? I just love the story of your parents meeting at the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Sophie: Yeah, no, it, it is lovely. It's also, as you can see, very overdetermined. 

Varsha: Totally. It was in the stars. 

Sophie: And then later on I worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company as well, and I worked for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who are obviously two of Stratford's major employers. So as well as being a student, in terms of the jobs I had, Shakespeare was important from the start.

Varsha: Oh, fantastic. And you then obviously have studied Shakespeare.

Sophie: Yes.

Varsha: And you've published multiple books studying Shakespeare's heroines. We are going to be talking about Juliet mostly, but could you tell us a bit more about one of your earliest books, Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle? So what made you want [00:05:00] to study Shakespeare's women, particularly at the turn of the century?

Sophie: This goes back to another fabulous teacher, tutor I had at university. So I was an undergraduate at Oxford and I knew I wanted to pursue graduate study, and I'd assumed it would be Shakespeare because I'd always assumed I would work on Shakespeare. And then in my third year, I just went to an amazing series of lectures by Sos Eltis, who's a specialist in Victorian drama.

Sophie: And I was quite dismayed because she made this sound like the most interesting topic in the world. And so I remember sitting in a lecture hall and thinking, well, how can I do this and Shakespeare? Oh, I'll have to do Victorian Shakespeare. I'm not saying base your academic trajectory on one lecture, but it worked for me.

Sophie: And the more I looked at Shakespeare's heroines in that period, the thing that fascinated me was the way that the 19th century uses them as a [00:06:00] crucible for thinking about what women are like, what they should be like, what they could be like. So it just brought together lots of things I was fascinated by.

Sophie: So in that book, which is the book of my PhD, essentially, you have Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth – for the benefit of the tape, I'm miming – it's in the Sargent portrait where she's crowning herself and she's in the beetle-wing dress. That production was on the stage in London at the same time as the Jack the Ripper murders were happening, an unsolved series of murders of women in London's East End.

Sophie: And a lot of the reviews put that production in conversation with the atmosphere of true crime, if you like, and the gothic culture that was so prevalent. And at the same time, I was fascinated in how the suffragettes used Shakespeare and how they adopted some characters as role models, but also created a real feminist [00:07:00] poetics of responding to Shakespeare. 

Sophie: Hermione in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione goes to prison and delivers her baby there, the suffragettes understood Hermione as a political prisoner. So what's not to love? I mean, to me was completely fascinating. I adored doing my PhD and then turning it into a book. 

Varsha: Oh, how fantastic. And a dream of having such influence, a lecture, turning people into finding these fascinating subjects. 

Sophie: Well, Sos Eltis, she's completely fantastic. I suspect I'm not the only one, but it really made me obsessed with Victorian theatre in a way that's never left me. 

Varsha: Also love learning about lineages of women inspiring women to do work on women. It often happens that way, but we rarely get to really hear all of those histories. 

Sophie: Oh, definitely. And I should say as well in my PhD, I was co-supervised by [00:08:00] Laurie Maguire, who is of course one of the world's great Shakespeareans, and somebody I then I went on to work with and write with.

Sophie: And she's been just the most fantastic influence on my work. And also both of them as models of how to be academics, which I think is so important. But I'm aware, I've been very lucky in the tutor and supervisor relationships I've had, and it just makes all the difference. 

Varsha: Oh, a hundred percent. You've also written a book, which is all about Shakespeare's stage properties, and you argued that we should think about these props as detachable parts of the mind.

Varsha: Is there a prop that is most associated with Juliet and how can we think about Juliet in relation to that? 

Sophie: I think there's probably two. So the bottle of, the vial of poison and the dagger, although of course it's not her dagger, it's Romeo's dagger in the end when she [00:09:00] actually takes her own life. The bottle of the drug is a fascinating one because she sees it in so many different ways, and there's a remarkable writer on props called Andrew Sofer, and he talks about the difference between an object and a prop is that an actor triggers the object and makes it a prop.

Sophie: And I'm very interested in how objects embody and enact bits of minds, bits of relationships, and the way Juliet sees the drug as potentially as poison, potentially as a kind of lifesaving way out, fascinates me. She tends to be, I think, pictured more with the dagger, which I suspect is because in pictorial and cinematic representations of Juliet, there tends to be more interest in the suicide than in [00:10:00] what we call the potion speech, and it usually gets reduced in adaptation, but they are both fascinating props.

Sophie: There's all sorts of stage anecdotes as well about both of them going wrong. The vial of poison breaking or leaking, and the dagger if it's a trick dagger and that kind of thing.

Sophie: So you get with both of them there's the potential for disaster, which I quite like in props as well, that they can misfire and go wrong and they're unpredictable. I don't totally subscribe to the idea that objects have agency, but at the same time, they do make things happen. 

Varsha: I am also quite disappointed about that vial speech being reduced because there we really clearly see her as a thinker, don't we? And to reduce that is to reduce her power and prowess as thinking with this object.

Sophie: Completely. And it's one of two really fantastic speeches she has, the other one being ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’. [00:11:00] They're both very difficult because they're both speeches in which – in a ‘gallop apace’ she has to come in at 60 miles an hour. In the other one, she has to go from nought to 60 in a way that very few Shakespeare characters do. 

Sophie: And I was struck by how drawn actresses in the 19th century are to that speech because of its sort of gothic bravura potential. In the book, I talk about a number of 19th century actresses, including say, Helena Faucit and Mary Anderson, who all really adored the kind of graveyard skeletons, bones, gruesomeness of that speech. 

Sophie: And I think that's another reason it's a pity when it gets cut. I think in cinema it's often because the film is a vehicle for Romeo, and so Juliet tends to be trimmed.

Varsha: Let's therefore shift our gaze back to Juliet. And you have written this gem of a book. Out of all Shakespeare's heroines, what made you decide to write [00:12:00] a book on Juliet Capulet?

Sophie: When I worked as a tour guide at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which I did between my masters and my PhD – I recommend the tour – the tour finished in the gardens and there were some actors there, and they would perform any scene on request. Hugely impressive. There were a lot of big tour groups. People were coming from all over the world. Some were literally on a pilgrimage.

Sophie: The scene that was most requested, even if people knew very little about Shakespeare, had very little English – Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. 

Varsha: Wow.

Sophie: Which fascinated me, and I was cheered it wasn't Hamlet because I'd thought it would be. 

Varsha: That's what I thought it would be too.

Sophie: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But at the same time, I've always been quite struck that the absolute zenith of Western heterosexual literary romance is 13-year-old girl goes to a party, [00:13:00] sees one boy four days later, they're both dead. Not the course of action that has ever been endorsed by culture, but the idea of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, it's a storyline that every soap opera will do at some point.

Sophie: It's a storyline that's in many novels. It's a storyline that was in the BBC children's series about animals that I was obsessed with when I was seven. You know, it's a trope that turns up everywhere and Juliet's the centre of it. Also, I think she's amazing. This is a child who is so sheltered, she only leaves her parents' house to go to church, sometimes because she's having a funeral.

Sophie: But she manages to fall in love with her family's enemy, essentially propose marriage. I don't think Romeo is rushing to set a date, um, lose her virginity under her parents' noses in their house. Lie to her parents and attempt to [00:14:00] fake her own death. She also has other good ideas such as let's elope, which is one of the things she says in the so-called balcony scene, which would be a much better idea. Well done, Juliet. 

Varsha: Yes, so much in four days’ time. 

Sophie: Indeed. Yes, indeed. 

Varsha: You mentioned that you worked as a tour guide at Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, and then you write about your visit to Juliet's house, Casa di Giulietta, in Verona. How has inhabiting these tourist hubs influenced your research on this book?

Sophie: I should start by saying I have a very, very high tolerance for literary tourist towns. I think they're a great thing. Judi Dench wrote a book called Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. Well, I think Shakespeare's paid a lot of rent and mortgages in both Stratford and Verona. 

Sophie: I adored visiting Verona. You can buy every kind of Juliet, [00:15:00] knickknack, every kind of food stuff. You can go to a slightly dodge virtual reality experience in a very damp basement on Romeo and Juliet, and you can go to her house. I think there's something adorable and sublime about the way reality and fiction blur there. 

Sophie: When I was in – see, I'm doing it, ‘when I was in her bedroom’. It's not her bedroom. She's not real. She never existed. I heard a mum say to her daughter, ‘Look the actual bed’, and there is a bed and it's the actual bed from the Zeffirelli film. But that's not what anyone means in that moment. Now, at the same time, I found out the route round Casa di Giulietta and to the tomb that we visit today is entirely the product of fascist Italy and the Mussolini era.

Sophie: Verona, very much an early adopter of fascism, and there's a [00:16:00] kind of middle management chap fascist called Antonio Avena who loved how Hollywood did – so I should backtrack – in the thirties, an almost entirely Jewish creative team, for what it's worth, put together a film of Romeo and Juliet: Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer.

Sophie: And they come over and they do lots and lots of stills photography in Italy and Antonio Avena is just so excited. And when it's screened in Verona, it's very lavish, it's very beautiful. And he likes how it looks so much that he copies the Hollywood version. 

Sophie: The tomb is at this point, quite a sort of shabby little tomb. So there's a sort of empty casket, huge Jesus symbolism there, but it was a little shabby crypt. And so he builds a brand new 14th century crypt, and the house doesn't have a balcony, so he [00:17:00] finds a medieval sarcophagus from one of the churches and bungs it on the side of the house, so it's got a balcony.

Sophie: So the version we see today is this astonishing mashup of Hollywood sensibilities, fascist cinema-going, but also the desire to make Juliet the patron saint of Verona as part of local northern Italian identity. 

Varsha: I absolutely love how fiction and reality meet in these kinds of scenarios because it's very Shakespearean, right?

Varsha: Sort of making us question our notion of what is true. And in a way, if we go to Juliet's house today and we say it is her bed, does it even matter if she was not real if we are behaving as if she were?

Sophie: No. Quite. And complicating that and intensifying it even further, when we go to the tomb, we are in a [00:18:00] religious building. It was a monastery and it's very much set up as a kind of religious experience.

Sophie: Equally, in the courtyard of her house, there's a statue of Juliet and people rub her breast or really any bit of her for luck. And the sculptor who made her also made statues for the local churches. So Juliet does look an awful lot in the face, a lot like Mary and other female saints that you see in the churches. So again, that's another kind of blurring between the literary and the supernatural.

Varsha: And even the mythic, the religious and the literary. 

Sophie: Yes, definitely, definitely. 

Varsha: Oh, fantastic. We are talking about Juliet resembling patron saints, but in a more theatrical fashion, I loved how you connected Juliet with a network of other women characters in Shakespeare's plays, especially Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Rosaline in Love’s Labor's Lost. So could you please unpack that for our [00:19:00] listeners? 

Sophie: Definitely. Shakespeare in the mid-1590s writes two plays in which it seemed to me he's unusually specific about his heroines. He's very specific that Juliet is extremely young. She's thirteen. That is shockingly young by early modern standards and younger than the sources.

Sophie: He also writes, I think slightly before, some people think slightly after, A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Hermia is small and dark. And when I'd noticed that and you know, vested interest in Hermia, although it is not obvious from the podcast, but I'm extremely short. So I played short girl parts and Hermia is the ultimate short girl part.

Sophie: And I noticed then that both before and after this 1595-6 moment, he's very interested in having a dynamic between two women [00:20:00] where one is smaller and darker than the other and often wittier. So Rosaline is darker than the Princess of France. Hermia is darker and smaller than Helena. Juliet, of course, she's interesting because although she has the nurse and her mother, she's much more isolated than the other young girl heroines before and after.

Sophie: But if you go the other side of her, you have Hero, who Benedick helpfully tells us is smaller and browner than Beatrice; Celia, who's smaller than Rosalind; and Maria, who's smaller than Olivia. And I thought, well, that's interesting as a kind of distinct sweep in Shakespeare's writing, where the figure of this small, dark, accomplished, rebarbative leading lady character, often in comedy, applies.

Sophie: And I started to look into the personnel, and I think the candidate is Robert Gough. And I think Robert Gough was the [00:21:00] first Juliet. I don't know who his Princess of France, et cetera were. But then I think it's also interesting that over that period, the small dark girl character goes from being the lead to the second fiddle.

Sophie: And I think that's with the arrival of Alexander Cook. So it was a lovely way for me to think about Robert Gough’s career as well. 

Varsha: This is such a triumph for all the short girls out there. Yeah. And it's not obvious from the podcast, but I am a short girl myself. So there we are. Yeah, here we are. Absolutely overjoyed to listen to that.

Varsha: You really touched a nerve in your chapter titled, ‘Everybody Loves a Dead Girl’. In our seminars, we have been furious about how the corpse of Ophelia has been aestheticised and fetishised. And in your chapter you talk about the way in which young Juliet's corpse has played into this trope as well. So could you say a bit more about that?

Sophie: [00:22:00] Definitely. It's a topic with which I am obsessed. If you've been working on representations of Ophelia, and thinking about the way it extends into our culture, so much of western literary and visual culture centres on a girl, preferably young, preferably pretty preferably white, ideally blonde, and scantily clad, being dead. And how very sexy and exciting that is because she stays young and beautiful and passive.

Sophie: And in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo sees his dead wife, the first thing he thinks is how sexy she is. And when Lord Capulet finds his daughter, his only child, dead on her wedding day, again, the metaphor he reaches for is that death has come in and had sex with her.

Sophie: It is profoundly troubling, but it's also so conventional. It is absolutely a convention to link sex and death and it's deeply rooted. I [00:23:00] mean, the idea of death and the maiden from the medieval period, certainly, but with Juliet, I think it also plays into the idea that the romance would be less romantic without the suicide.

Sophie: And in the 19th century, I think it also really resonates with that culture because what do Victorian authors do with a problematic woman? Well, they kill her, or she kills herself. And as with the 17th century witch trials, there was always a sense, isn't there, that if a rebellious or problematic lady, um, doesn't want to live, that that proves she was all right all along.

Sophie: There's an amazing 1893 play called The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, in which Paula Tanqueray, who's a fallen woman, as in she's had sex outside marriage, marries a man and they try to make a respectable go of it, but obviously Paula's terrible past catches up with her. And everybody is repulsed by her as this unclean woman and then [00:24:00] she kills herself, which is such a demonstration of finer feelings that everyone's very sorry and wishes they'd behaved differently, but they can all then get on with their lives without the problem of her.

Sophie: You know, see also, Tess of the D’Urbervilles with Angel Clare and Liza-Lu, or Dracula, we have to behead and stab Lucy Westenra because she's a sexy vampire lady, and where will it all end? So I think that's why Juliet has really resonated in different ways at different times. Obviously with the advent of cinema, you can hugely go to town on the death scene. If you think of the Baz Luhrman film. 

Varsha: Gosh, yeah.

Sophie: Yes. Where, I mean, it's not even a grave, it's just a bed. It's just a double bed at the front of a church. And when, I mean, Romeo thinks of dying with Juliet as an embrace and dying with a kiss, but if you actually pop them on a bed, not only does it aestheticise the suicide, which [00:25:00] if it were done properly, it ought to be very nasty.

Sophie: Um, but it really reifies that they are together in death, which I don't think Juliet actually believes. 

Varsha: No, and I think that one of the things you've said is how aestheticised it is, but in the text, if we imagine the stabbing, then actually Juliet makes a mess, right? Like she isn't taking poison, she's stabbing herself. So in the text it ought to be nasty. Like, do you know somebody needs to clean up this mess because she's made one? But we don't get that in movies, right? 

Sophie: No, and not always on stage either. And certainly not in in forms like ballet, usually. And I think I'd sort of also got the idea that they die together because in images of it, it's always just them, no blood. And in fact, well, there's two other corpses on stage.

Sophie: There's Paris and Tybalt before you even get going. [00:26:00] So many people are coming in and out. The sort of security forces of – I'm waving my arms about, it won't come across – but the security forces of the city are massing. You know, we have these speeches, people saying the Capulets and the Montagues are running to the cemetery.

Sophie: And whereas Romeo has a bit of a plan, he's come to be very sad about Juliet and to die in her arms, and he has to kill Paris for getting in the way, but he manages it. Juliet is improvising and the Friar deserts her appallingly. I think perhaps the saddest thing of all is that she knows the Capulets are coming, but she can't face her parents.

Sophie: She scrabbles about, and whereas Romeo sees himself as dying with Juliet, she doesn't mention him. Once she's established that there's no poison, which is typically delivered in a kind of tone of loving chagrin and forgiving melancholy, but I [00:27:00] think she's furious and desperate, and it's impulsive, and as you say, messy.

Sophie: She's so totally alone and she knows she has very limited time. And I, I want to see the scene like that. But yeah, I think the most tragic thing is she's not going to throw herself on her parents' mercy. She sees no way back. No way out. It's just tragic. It's not beautiful. 

Varsha: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And I think that talking about it is also something that we need to bear in mind and we need to revive rather than a rather romantic – 

Sophie: – or the idea of it as inevitable.

Varsha: Yes. 

Sophie: The thing I always really wonder is how often did they do the prologue? It's one of the most famous bits of Shakespeare, ‘Two households, both alike in dignity/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene’, that goes on to spell out that the kids are going to die. The kids are going to die, and it's the parents' fault, which is a change [00:28:00] from Shakespeare's sources, in which it's very much the kids' fault that they're going to die.

Sophie: But it sets this up and if the prologue isn't there, would the audiences have felt that sufficient foreshadowing that they're definitely going to die? The prologue isn't always there in the print history. So in the First Folio in 1623, the collection that is put together by two of Shakespeare's colleagues of the majority of his plays, the prologue isn't included.

Sophie: At the same time, we know that some early readers thought it was essential. If you Google Milton's copy of the First Folio, which is in the Free Philadelphia Library, you can see that he wrote the prologue in at the start of the play. So for him, obviously it was indispensable, but on stage, if you just went to see it and the prologue wasn't there, it might have felt like a really different play.

Sophie: And I just wonder, without the prologue, even with the kind of foreshadowings, even with the sort of [00:29:00] proleptic moments where Romeo talks about the star that begins with the night of the party and will end with his death, and Juliet looks down on Romeo when he's leaving and says, it looks as though you're in a tomb.

Sophie: But given the kind of resemblance to the classic new comedy plot of boy meets girl, they have unreasonable parents, but the young people's impulse overcomes the irascibility of the elderly, I just wonder how inevitable or otherwise it would've felt to the first audiences. 

Varsha: Mm-hmm. It's sort of, you forget. It's so funny, it's so like, um, going well, I feel, that you sort of forget it's going to be –  

Sophie: And a good production should make you feel like that. You should be hoping against hope that maybe this time, maybe this time there'll be no plague. She'll wake up a bit sooner. Since the 18th century composers and adapters have done that, they've satisfied that urge to have it all be okay.

Varsha: [00:30:00] Talking about productions, I love Juliet, and one of the things that has attracted me to her is how philosophical she is. She utters what I think are the most philosophical lines, when she says, ‘What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. And yet I have never seen Juliet played as a thinker and a philosopher.

Varsha: I have seen her played as a rebel. I've seen her be given agency. I have obviously seen her played as flirty and seductive. Have you discovered any productions where she's presented as a thinker? 

Sophie: That's such a good question. I've never seen a production that does that, which I suspect raises all sorts of things about the need for Juliet to be very beautiful and sexy and young, and the ways in which maybe that's not seen as being compatible with being a thinker [00:31:00] and a philosopher.

Sophie: But I have seen some kind of early 20th century reviews actually of various Juliets, which do use the dreaded word blue stocking. 

Varsha: Right?

Sophie: And that seems to very much come under the heading of not sexy or passionate enough. It's a really interesting one, and I would like that to be the next Juliet we have.

Sophie: I love a transformative work of adaptation, but I do think it's a pity that in order to situate an intelligent, observant, philosophical female voice in that story, you have to centre it on Rosaline. And so when people are doing actually really interesting feminist things with the story, they have to do it by finding a female character who's an, inverted quotes, ‘not like other girls’ on the basis that Juliet is like other girls. She is other girls.

Sophie: And there's a kind of, I was gonna say Barbiefication [00:32:00] but that's not fair because the Barbie film is amazing, but a sort of simplification of Juliet into being all love all the time, and not thinking about the really fascinating and radical things she articulates thinking through love, thinking about love, which are far better than the things Romeo comes up with.

Varsha: Yeah. It's also a pity, isn't it, that people think that thinking women are not all love and sexy in that it can't go together, obviously. 

Sophie: Obviously. 

Varsha: And talking about disturbing ways in which Juliet is portrayed or contained, one of the after lives of Juliet that you uncover is that Juliet was the name given to a lot of enslaved women in 19th century Jamaica. So why was that the case? 

Sophie: This was an element of the book which did really, really shock [00:33:00] me, and I think it's had a really interesting reception. It's a chapter people want to talk about and I can see why. So just to kind of sketch, I discovered that in British colonised Jamaica on plantations there, there seems to have been a fashion for enslavers or their attorneys or their overseers, but I think quite often it was the enslavers themselves to ‘theme’ the names of their enslaved people, and literary names are popular.

Sophie: Shakespearean names are extremely popular. Juliet is by far the most popular Shakespearean name for women. Ophelia's pretty popular as well, as is Desdemona. I think if one remembers that these enslavers were operating in a world where slavery to them was uncontroversial and good for the economic benefits, it's a way to [00:34:00] demonstrate your literary sensibilities and your cultural interests.

Sophie: So you might have some enslaved people who have classical names and some of them who have Shakespearean names, and they cluster as generational markers. From the documentation you can see that some people have arrived from Africa at a particular moment, and they all have Shakespearean names.

Sophie: There is of course, a terrible irony in that these Shakespearean names obliterate for official purposes, all trace of their real identity, but it's because of their very striking Shakespearean names – as opposed to diminutives like Anne, Nan, Bet – that enable me to find them. It's because they're tied into this literary tradition entirely against their will that I can track them through the documentation.

Varsha: Mm-hmm.

Sophie: And that's something to grapple with. I suspect there's also a fair amount of sexualising of young African and mixed race women [00:35:00] by doing this. I noticed that several of the women who were called Juliet, that sometimes in the documentation there's a place to describe their appearance, and often there's language which indicates that they were attractive.

Sophie: I suspect there's something important that's underlying that about the benefits of fictionalising and theatricalising, the people who you've enslaved. Because if you give them names of fictional people, particularly fictional people with predetermined, tragic ends, well they're star cross’d. It's all part of a story. It's both less real and more justified if you can tie them into larger, grander narrative. 

Varsha: Mm. Lots of disturbing notions there of how Shakespeare is often, um, I mean. Don't get me wrong, I love Shakespeare, but also we have to really reckon with how Shakespeare filters through colonial pasts. 

Sophie: Oh, [00:36:00] completely. Um, it's, it's a big export. It's always been a big British export, and I think it's really important to be able to have these conversations in a clear-eyed way. There's no point pretending it didn't happen. It's part of the story of Shakespeare's reception. And just as Shakespeare has been a crucible for how different cultures have thought and felt about women, it's a crucible for how the British Empire enacted its imperialism. 

Varsha: Absolutely. I do want to finish at a very different note. So Romeo and Juliet in popular culture seems to be read as the pinnacle of heterosexual love, but as you write in your book, people have been welcoming more queer interpretations of the role. 

Sophie: Well, my absolute favourite, who is actually a [00:37:00] queer Romeo who through her queerness necessarily queers, Juliet, Charlotte Cushman, the American actress and performer, who was hugely successful as Romeo, and she was part of what's often called an artistic circle.

Sophie: It's actually web of outrageous lesbian drama between many artists and writers and sculptors. Do read a biography of her. She's wonderful. Where she falls in love with one of her Juliets, and she has lots of female fans who want to be her Juliette and write to her about this, and it's this wonderful – 

Sophie: We've just talked about the ways in which Shakespeare can legitimise incredibly evil, toxic, dark parts of the past, but also with Charlotte Cushman, It's the opposite story. It's the story of how the conventions of theatre allowed women to see two women in love on stage. And that is what they were seeing.

Sophie: If you look at the accounts of [00:38:00] her fans, her audiences, they're always like very metacognitively aware that, that she's a woman and that's the point. And wonderfully, a lot of the male reviewers are saying, well a male Romeo would never get away with being so outrageously amorous with a woman on stage, but because it's a woman, it's fine. And there's this sort of ripple of delightful confusion running through the responses.

Sophie: Equally, and this is not on the stage at all, when I went to Verona, there is a phenomenon called the Juliet Club. If you've ever seen the film Letters to Juliet, Amanda Siegfried, Vanessa Redgrave, it's bonkers, but enjoyable.

Sophie: It's a true story. You can write to Juliet in Verona with your romantic woes. I'm not assuming you have them, but if you do, you can write to her and the secretaries of Juliet will write back with advice. And I did this for a [00:39:00] bit as well. 

Sophie: And one of the things I found really charming and slightly surprising, because Verona is a stronghold of quite conservative Italian politics, to put it mildly, is the wonderful response from young girls who are writing in from all over the world to Juliet about their feelings for young girls. And there is something lovely about, you know, Juliet supposedly writing to her contemporaries, offering them the love and support that they don't get.

Sophie: But also there was a girl from India, there were some girls from America, that they respond to the story strongly enough and with enough kind of confidence in what they're feeling to make their own love story into a story that can be in conversation with Juliet's. And I think it's, there's all sorts of lovely things happening there with canonicity.

Sophie: That [00:40:00] these young writers – and you also get boys writing in about boys, but it's more girls writing about girls – that these young writers are responding in such a positive way, and also, I should say not in a like death driven, depressing way. And so the Juliet Club becomes a kind of archive of all that is impulsive and very earnest and for me, beautifully nostalgic about being that age and being in love.

Sophie: There's a girl, I can't remember her name, but her crush is moving states and she's in agony, which she expresses with many colours of gel pen and hearts and capital letters, and, oh, just how wonderful. I can't be cynical about it because it's so earnest and I think if this story can call out all that is most earnest and heartfelt in first love, but crucially also get good advice, you know, make people not be on their own with [00:41:00] it, I think that's wonderful. 

Varsha: Oh, I love that. Thank you for sharing that with us. 

Sophie: Thank you so much for having me.

Varsha: That was Dr. Sophie Duncan speaking about her book, Searching for Juliet, a love letter to this wonderful and beloved heroine. And with that, I bid you adieu, adieu, adieu. But remember to tune in to Women and Shakespeare, streaming at Apple Podcasts and Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you want to listen to the podcast with a full transcript, head over to the website, www.womenandshakespeare.com.

Varsha: Until then, keep smashing the patriarchy.