Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Chronicles, where today we are going to be talking all about

Romeo and Juliet, which is here, of course, in my complete works of Shakespeare.

For those of you who've been watching this series since the beginning,

you'll know that one of the very early conversations that I had was an excellent one where I was able to sit down with AA and pick his brains all about Shakespeare in general, had a wonderful conversation about the histories, something of what tragedies, a little bit of the comedies.

It felt like a great introductory episode to Shakespeare.

But now I think it's time to return to Shakespeare

and we'll start focusing on each play individually.

And what better place to begin than Romeo and Juliet.

Of course, one of Shakespeare's most famous plays,

one of his most performed plays, I think it's regarded as like the second most performed Shakespeare play. Also, of course, one of the most famous love stories in all of literature.

Of course, like many of Shakespeare's other plays, he draws upon other texts, other versions of stories,

and obviously in many cases from actual histories, in order to create a more definitive

and remarkable version of the original. So in the case of Romeo and Juliet, back in 1562,

so about 35 years before we have the first performances of Romeo and Juliet in about 1597.

So in 62, you had a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, who wrote the tragical history of Romeo and Juliet.

That was an English, but that in itself was a translation of a French version of the story.

And that French telling of the story was itself inspired by Matteo Bandalo's Italian novella from 1554. And so you can see

the story of Romeo and Juliet carrying on from Italy, where of course the play is set into the

theatres of Tudor England.

But actually, the story of the Montague's and the Capulets is much, much older.

In fact, the first ever mention of these two families comes from Dante in his Divine

Comedy, specifically during the Purgatorio section, where Dante says,

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