Still, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” delights in the swift and fickle nature of love. Similarly, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” features four pairs of lovers, yet none is ranked as the closest pair by my algorithm. Olivia falls for Viola’s brother, Sebastian, after speaking a mere 23 lines to him, 12 of which are a marriage proposal. “Twelfth Night” is particularly egregious: Viola supposedly loves Orsino but spends more time talking to Olivia. Many famous Shakespearean lovers don’t spend much time in conversation. 2Īll this got me thinking: Do any of Shakespeare’s lovers actually, you know, talk to each other? If Romeo and Juliet don’t, what hope do the rest of them have?
(He spends only one-sixth of his time in conversation with the supposed love of his life.) One might be tempted to blame this on the nature of the plot of course the lovers have no chance to converse, kept apart as they are by the loathing of their families! But when I analyzed the script of a modern adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” - “West Side Story” - I found that Tony and Maria interacted more in the script than did any other pair. His reticence toward Juliet is particularly inexcusable when you consider that Romeo spends more time talking than anyone else in the play. Juliet speaks 155 lines to him, and he speaks only 101 to her. I’m blaming Romeo for this lack of communication. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) than he does from Juliet Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. Juliet speaks almost as much to her nurse as she does to Romeo Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together - if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis - but the math paid no heed to my desires. I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, 1 with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.
More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name.
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