Unlocking What’s Behind Romeo and Juliet
- Dorothea Dickerman
- Jul 8
- 6 min read
Part 1 of Unlocking the Mysteries Behind Romeo and Juliet - and the Secrets Shakespeare Didn’t Tell Us
But to himself so secret and so close,
So far from sounding and discovery.
- Romeo and Juliet, I.i
Did you know the origins of Romeo and Juliet – that iconic tale of forbidden love and teenage tragedy – contain an interlocking puzzle of literary riddles and Shakespearean sleights of hand?
Start digging into the backstory of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers’ story and you tumble into a maze of shadowy authors, multiple sources and plot twists that rival the play itself. In fact, Shakespeare has been keeping so many clues and secrets about Romeo and Juliet’s past to himself for 400 years that we’ll need two posts to cover them.
Let’s begin at the beginning of the poetic coverup.
🧩SPOILER: Shakespeare Didn’t Invent Romeo and Juliet
Spoiler 1: Romeo and Juliet isn’t original to Shakespeare.
Not even close. Versions of the doomed lovers’ tale had been breaking hearts around Europe for decades before he set quill point to rag paper. Shakespeare borrowed and re-imagined the tale - just like modern playwrights, screenwriters and fanfic writers still do today.
Spoiler 2: That boy-genius myth? Not who or the way we have been told.
Even Shakespeare’s Muse didn’t perform on command. He didn’t toss off Romeo and Juliet in one fevered bout of inspiration and publish it with the ink still wet. His first version debuted in 1597 in a “quarto”, like a slim paperback. Then an expanded and more polished version in 1599. Years after his death, the version we know appeared in the 1623 First Folio.
Spoiler 3: The play evolved. Like, really evolved.
Over multiple drafts. Over time. Over decades. Possibly over different identities.
The Secret Italian (and French) Roots of Romeo and Juliet
Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Giulietta e Romeo.
1530 - Luigi da Porto.
Drawing from even older Italian tales, Da Porto set his novella in fair Verona. Feuding families, a masked ball, a secret wedding, a duel, despair, poison – it’s all there. (Sappy. Sentimental. Not stage-worthy.)
1554 - Matteo Bandello.
Enter another Italian, who dialed up the novella’s drama. Bandello’s lovers flirt boldly at their masked ball. Their love is the stuff of destiny. His Giulietta is conflicted, especially when Romeo kills her cousin. It’s wildly popular. (Passionate. Bloody. So Italian. What’s not to like?)
Recognizing why Bandello’s works became 16th century best sellers, Shakespeare borrowed material, not just for Romeo and Juliet, but for Cymbeline, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing.
🤔 Mystery Alert: Da Porto’s version wasn’t translated into English until 1825. Bandello’s full works? Not available in English until the late 1800s. So how did Shakespeare borrow from them three centuries earlier? Did he read Italian . . . or French or both?
1559 - Pierre Boaistuau.
Boaistuau reworked Bandello’s tale into grim, moralizing French. He drained the lovers’ passione and substituted a big, sobering dollop of the dangers of disobedient teens and lusty sins. Gone are the masquerade ball, the bawdy nurse, the apothecary, the love at first sight and destiny-drenched romance of the Italian versions. In their place: divine punishment and stern finger-wagging. (Pious. Preachy. Definitely not date-night material.)
Another Frenchman, Francois de Belleforest, also translated Bandello’s work from Italian into French, but not until 1570 – after the first English version was published.
🤔 Mystery Alert Amended: How did the Italian details and characters that vanished in Boaistuau’s moral version re-appear magically in . . . (you guessed it) Shakespeare’s version?
📜 1562: Enter “Ar. Br.”, His Secret Life and a Whole New Set of Questions
Enter “Ar. Br.” Humble. Hopeful. Nervous. Oddly confessional. Later identified as “Arthur Brooke” and also as “Authur Brooke”.
Unaware of Da Porto’s 1530 version, Ar. Br. offered up the first English version, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell and nowe in English by Ar. Br”. Although fearful that it would be torn apart, Ar. Br. executed his 3,000-line narrative poem, meticulous rhymed and metered, far longer and more psychologically sophisticated than any prior version of the tale.
Shakespeare clearly knew it.
And Ar. Br. clearly knew French. And Italian. His version opens with a prose “To the Reader” that mirrors Boaistuau’s preachy distaste of “wanton flesh”, “foul desires”, and the lovers’ “neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends”. But there is a rebellious chaffing in Ar. Br.’s words, as if he were fulfilling a soul-stifling homework assignment. Through clenched teeth. The clue is Bandello’s name in Ar. Br.’s title; Ar. Br. grudgingly used the moralizing French version in his “To the Reader”, poured back into the story the Italian emotion, destiny and missing details and characters.
He confessed the staggeringly difficult nature of the task he was assigned, indeed, “commanded” to perform by “she . . . whose hest I must obey”. Wow. He calls his Romeus and Juliet a “youthfull woorke”, anticipates that “reproachful” criticism might overthrow it, but promises more “woorkes” when “time gives strength to meet and match in fight“.
🤔 Another Mystery Alert: Who was the woman who assigned him the mammoth task containing a moral lesson about non-compliant teens? A queen? His guardian’s terrifying wife? Extra homework as punishment?
Ar. Br. not only pulled off the feat with a rhythm and rhyme scheme that barely falters, he created a dramatic arc, employed conversation and expressed Juliet’s inner thoughts like he knew what it’s like to be a thoughtful, love-struck 13-year-old. It’s . . . uncanny.
👻 The Ghost of “Ar. Br.” - Arthur Brooke?
Like those of many of Shakespeare’s immediate sources, Ar. Br.’s biographical footprint is faint – even spectral. The admissions register at the Inner Temple shows that an Arthur Brooke was admitted to the Inns of Court on December 18, 1561 – just four days before our favorite Elizabethan bad boy, Robert Dudley, was also admitted. Out of the Tower but not yet Earl of Leicester [See these prior blogs for that story: 📌 The Untold Backstory of Robert Dudley,
📌 The Dudley Dynasty, 📌 Jane Guildford Dudley: The Mystery Master Negotiator], Dudley’s name appears directly below Brooke’s.
Anyone searching for Dudley’s name in the register – say in 1567 – would see Brooke’s name, too. In case they needed it. For any reason.
An Arthur Brooke appears to have attended certain plays for free at the Inns of Court during Christmas 1561, published a dreary translation of French scripture, drowned in a shipwreck in 1563 and been related to William Brooke, Lord Cobham.
🧩 1567 – When Coincidences Stop Being Mere Coincidences
Here’s where the trail gets spookier:
By 1567, Arthur Brooke had been dead for 4 years. That same year:
George Turberville identified Romeus’ “Ar. Br.” as “Authur Brooke” in an elegy, 5 years after the poem’s publication. Tuberville admits he worked from hearsay (a “good report”); he didn’t know Brooke personally.
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford - the most plausible candidate for using “William Shakespeare” as a pen name - enrolled at the Inns of Court to study law at age 17.
Romeus and Juliet was still being discussed very favorably, in the circles that mattered, but Brooke couldn’t cash in on his fame.
If Ar. Br. had written Romeus and Juliet while enrolled in the Inns of Court in late 1561 and 1562, or before at university, it would have been a remarkable achievement. But he couldn’t have. He said he was forced to write it at the “hest” of a woman whom he had to obey. In the 16th century, women were barred from physically crossing the thresholds of the universities and the Inns of Court, much less enrolling or instructing there. Whoever he was, Ar. Br. wrote that poem as a young teen-ager who embarrassingly confessed in the poem that he couldn’t write about the lovers’ wedding night together because he’d never had sex!
⏳ What Happens Next . .
More identities probed and your chance to decide how the pieces of the puzzle fit together after 400 years!
Stay tuned for Part II. The plot is just getting good.
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