Strictly Shakespeare? Dead Letters, Ghostly Fathers, and the Cultural Pathology of Authorship in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

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[M]an can create only in continuity, by making the potential actual; he is excluded, by his nature, from originality and innovation. But this difference is an adaptation. ¹

What's in a name?" That is the question begged by Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet, which claims to be not merely an adaptation of this legendary story of star-crossed lovers but rather the thing itself--an authorial gambit announced in the film's title: William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. ² Not surprisingly, given the seemingly un-Shakespearean appearance of the film, most reviewers have labeled Luhrmann's Shakespearean aspirations audacious. "William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is deceptively titled," writes one reviewer, "because it is really Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet." ³ Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers observes, "It's a good thing that Shakespeare gets his name in the title, or you might mistake the opening scenes for Quentin Tarantino's Romeo and Juliet." ⁴ Still another review offers a striking echo of this sentiment: "Good thing Shakespeare's name is included in the title. Otherwise, you might mistake this audacious version of his tale of star-crossed teen lovers for an extended music video." ⁵ That these critics all go to the same linguistic well to describe the film's titular strategy reveals the uncanny power of the legend with which both Luhrmann and Shakespeare contend in attempting to produce their own "original" versions of the Romeo-and-Juliet story. ⁶ Indeed, before it was a play by William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet was a legend, a genre that, as Linda Charnes has argued, confronts would-be authors with the paradox of their belated arrival at the very scene of the narratives they presume to originate. In other words, the legendary fosters the desire to "escape . . . prior encoding" even as it exposes the dead letter at the core of this authorial ambition. ⁷

In titling his film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, however, Luhrmann suggests his consent to "prior encoding," a gesture perfectly in keeping with the cultural pathology of postmodern aesthetic production. ⁸ According to Fredric Jameson, one of the "essential messages" of the postmodern aesthetic involves, paradoxically, "the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, [and] the imprisonment in the past." ⁹ Yet even the past remains recalcitrant to representation, for "we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach." ¹⁰ Missing this "essential message," critics have been quick to dismiss Luhrmann's film as "postmodern tomfoolery," ¹¹ mourning losses in the name of Shakespearean textuality and Elizabethan history without realizing the extent to which the film itself mourns these "losses" as symptomatic of the madness of its own mode of production. William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet is unabashedly replete with "postmodern razzmatazz," ¹² but the critical reception of Luhrmann's film tends to rest too easy with this complex cultural category, drowning any discussion of the film's provocative negotiation of its own historical dilemma in a self-indulgent, hipper-than-thou inventory of its aesthetic failures. A more productive project would involve calibrating the degree to which Luhrmann's film resists easy insertion into this postmodern "legend" which, as we shall see, brings us back to the early modern struggle embedded in William Shakespeare's own Romeo and Juliet.

Before exploring how Luhrmann's film facilitates this provocative historical intersection of postmodern and early modern, it is first necessary to establish how William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet qualifies as specifically postmodern, since this is a label that the film's detractors have taken for granted. From its opening moments, Luhrmann's film announces its apparent overdetermination by the modus...