Did Romeo and Juliet really exist?

It is possibly the best known love story in history. The romance of Romeo and Juliet and the tragic end of it owe to the pen of William Shakespeare the world fame of him, but... did they really exist? What is reality and what is myth in this well-known story? Was the English playwright based on historical fact, or did it all come out of his imagination?

Well, oddly enough, there is a bit of everything. Join us to discover who the Capulet and the Montague were, and where he got shakespeare the inspiration for his most famous work.

Did Romeo and Juliet really exist?

Many are the visitors who come year after year to the famous House of Juliet, located in the city of Verona. Most of them, without a doubt, know that it is a fictional character, from the pen of William Shakespeare. So what's the point of visiting the house of a person who never existed?

They may be dragged by the force of a story that never dies and that exceeds the limits of time. Because Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare's is indeed the most famous work about lovers, but it is not the only one, as we will see below.

A tragic love story

Here is the first surprise: the story of Romeo and Juliet It was not invented by William Shakespeare.. That of the English poet was one of the many versions that circulated about the two lovers, some of them much earlier in time.

But before inquiring into these earlier versions, it is necessary to explain above the argument that has become famous, the one that came from Shakespeare's pen. Almost everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet by heart, but, in case you still don't know it, we must warn you that in this article you can find spoilers.

Based on this, we will summarize by saying that The story revolves around Romeo, belonging to the Montague family, and Juliet, from the Capulet family.. Both families live in Verona and are rivals. Despite this rivalry, young they fall in love and they want to get married, but Julieta's father has already planned the marriage of his daughter with another man. Juliet and Romeo secretly see each other and, with the help of a friar, manage to get married in secret.

Events precipitate and, in revenge for the death of his friend Mercutio, Romeo kills Juliet's cousin in a duel, for which he must flee the city. Meanwhile, the young woman has hatched a plan with the friar: she will drink a potion that will leave her in a coma for forty-two hours, long enough for them to believe her dead. As soon as Romeo returns to the city, she will wake up and they will both run, free.

But the message with the young woman's plan does not reach Romeo, so the boy believes that his wife has really died. So he, determined to follow her, buys a poison and takes it before the grave. When Juliet wakes up and sees the corpse of her lover, she takes her husband's dagger and plunges it into her heart.

That is, broadly speaking, the story that Shakespeare presents to us in his work. However, there are clear antecedents of it in texts prior to that of the English playwright, as we will see below.

The other versions of the legend

Actually, we can trace the story of romeo and juliet back to ancient greek, which gives us a clue about the inauthenticity of the events that she narrates. In the preface to the edition of Romeo and Juliet from the Austral collection (Espasa publishing house), Ángel-Luis Pujante comments that the ephesiacs de Xenophon presents a similar argument: the protagonist of this story, in order to escape from a man who desires her, takes a narcotic that makes her appear dead. The drug takes effect on her and the girl returns to the arms of her lover.

Perhaps it is one of the few versions that has a happy ending. Already in modern times, we find the story of Mariotto and Gianozza of Siena, narrated by Masuccio Salernitano in his work Fifty Novelle (1476). The plot is extraordinarily similar to that of William Shakespeare: young people who love each other are secretly married by a friar, since their families oppose the marriage. Mariotto, who has killed a man, must flee the city. To avoid an imposed marriage, the young Gianozza takes a fake potion that will make her appear dead. After being deposited in the tomb, the friar digs her up, and Gianozza goes to meet her lover. But he, aware of the death of his wife, has returned to Siena to mourn at his grave. Mariotto is promptly arrested and executed.

As you can see, the resemblance of the story is incredible. Much more similar is that of Giulietta and Romeo by Luigi da Porto, written in 1524 and whose title is already, in itself, quite explicit. Da Porto introduces some innovations in the story, such as the names of rival families, which he draws directly from the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Later, Matteo Bandello will write his version, also titled Romeo and Giulietta (here, curiously, with the order of the names already reversed), which will see the light of day in 1554. The story, the same. In 1562, the narrative was turned into a poem by Arthur Brooke (possibly the direct source for William Shakespeare), but he will also have time to visit Spain, where Lope de Vega himself will write his own version of the history, Castelvines and Monteses (1647).

As we can see, the path of Romeo and Juliet It is long. For our current mentality, this succession of works with the same plot is flagrant plagiarism; but it was not like that at the time. The concept of “plagiarism” is relatively modern., and prior to the 19th century, authors and artists "copied" each other without any problem. Thus, they took ideas from others, reworked them and introduced new elements, more in line with the reality of the public that was going to enjoy the work or, simply, more in line with the tastes of the author.

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The Cappelletti and the Montecchi of Dante

This list of works based on the story of Romeo and Juliet helps us to understand that Shakespeare was not it started from scratch, but it certainly does not clarify at all the riddle of whether Romeo and Juliet existed really. Perhaps the first authors were based on real characters?

We have already said that Luigi da Porto takes over the Divine Comedy from Dante Alighieri the names of the rival families in history. Indeed; in Canto VI of Purgatory the Cappelletti and the Montecchi are named. The mention is very brief and no further information is given about it. Who were these families? Why does Dante quote them in his Purgatory? Did they really exist?

It seems that the Cappelletti were a family originally from Cremona and belonged to the Ghibellines, the political faction of Dante's time that supported the Holy Roman Emperor in his dispute with the Pontificate. On the other hand, the Montecchi would come from Verona and would be Guelphs, that is, they would give their political support to the Pope. This would be, then, one of the possible explanations for the rivalry between the two families. But there is a detail that does not quite fit: of the two, only one of the families was from Verona, the city where the tragedy took place. Perhaps Luigi da Porto, seeing both names mentioned in the same sentence, assumed that they lived in the same town?

The enigmatic “Posada del Cappello”

Now we must go back to the 18th century, a time when Europeans from good families did what was known as the "Grand Tour", which was nothing more than a tour of the most interesting places in Italy. The trip was very popular among the artists of Romanticism (Goethe was one of their most enthusiastic travelers), and attracted crowds of restless young people to the most important and beautiful cities of Italy. Verona, of course, was one of them.

Among the travelers of the Grand Tour Word began to spread that a house in the city, known as Posada del Cappello, had been the home of the very famous Juliet.. The rumor was probably based on the name of the house, "Cappello", in which the travelers wanted to see a echo of the surname "Capulet", the family to which Juliet had belonged according to Shakespeare and Da Porto, among others. So, little by little, the inn began to fill with passionate romantics who wanted to spend the night in the house "where Juliet had lived."

But was that house really the home of the Capulet family? Was the name of the inn related to the surname of the Shakespearean heroine? Well, actually… no. The inn received the name of the family that ran it, the Cappello, and it has been documented since the 14th century. These Cappello are not the Cappelletti that Dante quotes nor did they have anything to do with them. However, the fame that the "House of Juliet" had acquired during the 18th century continued during the 18th century. following and reached the gates of the XX, to the point that, in 1905, the City of Verona bought the building. In 1973, and after a series of reforms (in which its Gothic style was "enhanced"), Verona opened "Juliet's House" for the general public.

A neverending story

Therefore, if we stick to the (scarce) historical documentation we have, we have to conclude that no, Romeo and Juliet never existed, and that their respective families (the Capulet and the Montague) are confusingly based on two families cited by Dante and of which little is known nothing.

The love story of young people has its roots in an ancient tradition of medieval stories, which were passed from mouth to mouth until, finally, they were embodied in writing by the different authors that we have previously cited. And the story did not die with William Shakespeare, since we find multiple versions for cinema and even musicals and operas, which only broaden the horizons of the famous story. A tragic story; beautiful, if you will, but that was never real.