Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is often called the greatest love story ever told, but Sophie Duncan asks who Juliet really is. Is she a demure ingenue, or a dangerous Mediterranean madwoman? This book follows Shakespeare's Juliet Capulet through four centuries of history, theatre, and film, across several continents, to show how the character has been imagined and reimagined.

The material ranges widely. It takes in tearstained copies of the First Folio and fanfiction from the Civil War era. It also covers Juliet's cultural afterlife among enslaved African girls in the British Caribbean and among the real-life Juliets of sectarian violence in Bosnia and Belfast.

Duncan, an Oxford Shakespeare scholar, argues that our dangerous fascination with the beautiful dead teenager, together with Juliet's rise as a defiant sexual icon, has come to shape the Western ideal of romance. The tone is wry and inventive, and the book serves as a tribute to fiction's most famous teenage girl, who died young but has never stopped being retold.