Welcome to the third installment of TWIL (This Week I Learnt). I have succeeded in making another blog post with a song name as the tittle. You can see the song below:

This week as we continued our journey through what is arguably, Shakespeare’s most famous play (Romeo and Juliet), we reached Act 3. Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet is possibly the most dramatic thing I have ever read/watched tied only with The Godfather. In this part of the play there were deaths, plans made, people deceived and most importantly a wedding.

Rome and Juliet got married! Yay? (They were basically children I don’t fully approve of this). You can see two examples of the wedding scene below:

Baz Luhrmann’s version of Romeo and Juliet:

The 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet:

Now, in both of those versions the wedding scene was featured. However, Shakespeare didn’t actually write in a part where Romeo and Juliet got married on stage. He couldn’t really because a) the actor playing Juliet would inevitably be a man and b) marriages were sacred, they still are, but back then you just didn’t mess around with the church or god and you didn’t fake a marriage. It was just a no no. But in today’s film versions or play versions of Romeo and Juliet we can have the marriage scene.

The question I am attempting to answer in this blog post is: “What is gained or lost from having the wedding scene included? What would you do (as a director)?

To provide a thoughtful answer that wasn’t boring to read through I have made a podcast which you can listen to below:

I hope you enjoyed the podcast! If you have any comments leave them below. I hope you learnt something and I will see you next week with our 4th TWIL post.