‘Two Households’ — Origin of the Feud

Nearly 20 years ago, I was ramping up for my first time directing Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. I had performed in it several times, but this was to be my first outing at the helm, and I was obsessively reading and re-reading the script, watching other productions, even visiting Verona as a lark. Not that Shakespeare ever went there, but for the past hundred years or so the city has become, at least partially, an industry town for the play. Shakespeare’s Italian Disneyland.

Used to looking at a play through the eyes of a single character, this was the first time since Mr. Tobin’s ninth grade English class that I was forced to explore the play as a whole. I took a look at all the questions, including the perennial ‘What caused the feud?’ Not technically vital to either an actor’s or audience’s understanding of the show because, at the top of Act One, the feud is an established fact. But still, worth pondering.

Cutting a script is still my least favorite chore. Back then, it drove me mad. What to keep, what to lose? I was nearly done, working on the final scene — Paris is slain, Romeo and Juliet are both dead, we’re firmly into the denouement — when suddenly a line jumped out at me.

Capulet and his wife have just found their daughter’s bleeding body. Romeo’s father, Lord Montague, enters, and the Prince addresses him:

Come, Montague, for thou art early up
To see thy son and heir now early down.