Julian Fellowes rewriting Shakespeare should have yielded bold results.

This Romeo and Juliet has already been roundly panned in reviews for its leaden approach to adapting a story so overdone that it only works if it sings. Unfortunately, such naturalness never extends to the title characters. The more natural-sounding dialogue amplifies Manville’s performance. Her instructions to Juliet about meeting with Friar Laurence (Paul Giamatti) to marry Romeo in secret are stripped of the play’s old-fashioned flourish. In Fellowes’s screenplay, this becomes enjoyably jittery, maternal dialogue-the Nurse asks Juliet to wait until “after you’ve had a bath,” for instance. JULIET: Hie to high fortune!-honest nurse, farewell. I am the drudge, and toil in your delight īut you shall bear the burden soon at night. Must climb a bird’s nest soon, when it is dark: To fetch a ladder, by the which your love NURSE: …Hie you to church I must another way, I appreciated the brief moments in the new film that sparkled, such as the scene where the Nurse informs Juliet that Romeo has agreed to marry her. Fellowes, of Downton Abbey and Gosford Park fame, excels at writing interactions in period settings between servants and their employers, mining their dynamics for drama in just a few exchanged words. Their dialogue, no longer in iambic pentameter, sounds appropriately conversational. In this version, Juliet (Hailee Steinfeld) and her nurse (Lesley Manville) have a relationship that’s warmer and more familial than in most previous depictions. His dialogue alterations come in small scenes between the balcony and the tragic mix-up at the end. He retains virtually all the play’s most famous lines and leaves the main plot untouched. In fact, Fellowes’s changes in the 2013 film Romeo and Juliet, released last week, are subtle. But modernizing “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” No. Changing the setting? Acceptable, as long as you don’t change the story. Julian Fellowes has gone and broken one of the most sacred rules of adapting the Bard for the big screen: If you want to keep the play’s title, you cannot change the words. Shakespeare nuts have been dreading this day.

Romeo and juliet dialogue script