Letty Garcia, PhD student in drama, is lead student researcher in “Romeo and Juliet in Mexico” project.

The UCI Shakespeare Center has received a grant from the Committee on Research and Libraries to build a performance bibliography on Romeo and Juliet in Mexico. Letty Garcia, Ph.D. student in Drama at UCI, will take the lead in this research, with additional support from Danilo Caputo (English) and Chris Dearner (English). Julia Lupton is Principal Investigator.

Project Rationale
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has a long history of enrichment by and interaction with Hispanic performance traditions in a global geopolitical horizon that includes Europe, the Americas, and the Philippines in its slave-, sugar- and gold-crossed orbit. Shakespeare’s play, the most famous but by no means the first or the only version of the widely-disseminated story of ill-fated lovers from rival households, drew liberally from Latin (Roman and Italian) sources. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was composed and first performed around the same time as the Spanish Golden Age dramatist Lope de Vega was penning his version of the same Italian tale, Los Castelvines y Monteses. In the racially-colored literary and dramatic criticism of the nineteenth century, Romeo and Juliet was considered Shakespeare’s most “Southern” play (in contrast with the Nordic Hamlet). In the twentieth century, the decision to stage West Side Story as a conflict between Anglo and Puerto Rican gangs tapped the Spanish potential of Shakespeare’s play in an act of cultural translation that continues to reverberate on US and global stages today.

Globally Romeo and Juliet has inspired an abundance of adaptations, which often employ the story of the feud to explore ethnic, religious and caste tensions and use Shakespeare’s semi-ethnographic engagement of dance, festival and holiday to draw local performance traditions into the frame of Western drama. The relative autonomy of many adaptations (with new names, settings, endings, and more) and the return of earlier European sources in later Continental and inter-American retellings bear witness to the tenacity, resilience and reach of the Romeo and Juliet phenomenon, which swirls around its definitive Shakespearean articulation but continues to gather energy from multiple sources, later media forms, and global variations. Performances of the play in Spanish and “Spanglish” speak to issues around machismo, urbanism, immigration and globalization, and provide concentrated images of Latin American life through vibrant, ethnographically “sticky” street-, fight-, party-, church-, and love-scenes.

Research team
Romeo y Julieta por favor is the first phase of a detailed digital performance history of Romeo y Julieta in Latin contexts. This first phase focuses on Mexico. The project is part of Julia Lupton’s larger research agenda on the history and futures of Romeo and Juliet, as evidenced in The Arden Critical Guide to Romeo and Juliet, edited by Lupton and forthcoming in 2016. Lupton has been appointed as a Clark Professor at the Clark Library in Los Angeles in 2016-17, where she will convene a conference entitled “Cut Them Out in Little Stars: Romeo and Juliet in Diaspora” in Winter 2017. Catherine Benamou, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, is a specialist in Latin America and Latino/a Cinema and Media, and the author of Orson Welles’ Pan-American Odyssey. Lupton and Benamou collaborated on an Orson Welles event in Winter, 2015 and share joint interests in Shakespeare’s Spanish and filmic afterlives. Ian Munro, Associate Professor in Drama, wrote the performance history of Romeo and Juliet for the Arden Critical Guide to Romeo and Juliet edited by Lupton. He brings key expertise in theatrical history and performance bibliography to the project.

The primary research assistance for Romeo y Julieta por favor will be carried out by Leticia Garcia, Ph.D. student in Drama, working under the supervision of Julia Lupton and under the auspices of the new UCI Shakespeare Center, as one of the Center’s inaugural research projects. Garcia is completing a dissertation on Shakespeare in Mexico, and this bibliographic research is a key supplement to and extension of one of her chapters. Lupton, Benamou and Garcia will go to Mexico City in September 2015 and consult key archives there, including the Centro de Investigacion Teatral Rodolfo Usigli, a branch of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. They will also interview practitioners in the classical theater scene. Danilo Caputo, a first-year Ph.D. student in English who is fluent in Spanish and Italian, will assist with translation and further culling of information. Christopher Dearner, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in English who has IT skills, will help build the database.

The UCI Shakespeare Center
The UCI Shakespeare Center (launch date April 23, 2015) will house the project and help sustain it by seeking outside funding and engaging future cohorts of graduate students in ongoing research and data input. The Shakespeare Center will also use the project as a teaching tool and community engagement opportunity. Our findings will be housed in a database using Scalar, a digital humanities platform that is becoming the industry standard in multi-media open source enterprises like this one. (Lupton, Garcia, Dearner and Caputo attended a Scalar training on April 24, 2015 and are on board with the software.) The project will include links to video clips, reviews, scripts, photographs, and any other available documentation on Romeo y Julieta in Mexico. Integrating literary scholarship, theatrical practice, digital humanities, and public humanities, the database will of use to scholars of Shakespearean adaptation; to Latino/a theater practitioners; and to educators working in intercultural, multicultural, and bilingual learning environments. Romeo y Julieta por favor will enhance the scholarly and public understanding of Latin American culture, Latino/a and Chicano/a theater, and the local and global aspirations of Shakespearean drama from its inception to the present.

Subsequent phases of the project will likely include:

1) Romeo y Julieta in Venezuela, Brazil and the Philippines
2) Romeo y Julieta in California
3) English-language productions of Romeo and Juliet that are substantially influenced by Hispanic languages and culture