Card 9.
The endings of Romeo and Juliet , have oscillated, from Da Porto to Titanic , in the degree to which the lovers share a final scene -- whether actually (as they do in Da Porto and Bandello, in Otway's Caius Martius of 1660, and in Garrick's adaptation) or in intimations of spiritual reunion in the tomb or after death. The heart must go on.
In Shakespeare Romeo dies before Juliet wakes, but First Quarto suggests a reunion like that of Antony and Cleopatra -- "rest in my bosom, thus I come to thee," while Second Quarto is bleaker: "Unhappy dagger, this is thy sheath, there rust and let me die."
Stanley Wells, in Shakespeare Survey, notes a number of recent productions in which, Juliet shows signs of life before Romeo dies. Looked at in the context of the whole tradition, the Luhrmann version is notable for how early Juliet wakes and for its refusal of mutually shared last moments (there are pages of goodbyes in Bandello). The pair are brought together, but not reunited; they are taken off screen on gurneys in separate bodybags, but even before that the distance between Verona and Mantua has been, in a sense, internalized. In despair, Romeo cannot attend to Juliet enough to see her move and wake; the wide-eyed close-ups of recognition ironically allude to the meeting of Romeo and Juliet in Zeffirelli; Romeo is almost instantly paralyzed; he whispers "thus, with a kiss, I die," but cannot manage a kiss or even a smile.
In this rapid account, I have tried to suggest the ways in which alternative spaces and performance modes are suggested and developed, but are appropriated by or collapse into the center, and in which the lovers' move toward direct, unmediated affection ends in horrifying isolation and despair. The final sequence in the church, in which the lovers seem to be floating as if in a Baroque illusionist ceiling painting, suggests apotheosis but may also be read as the triumph of the spectacle. To end with this kind of balance between utter bleakness and the invocation of a transcendence that may be false is however, one way of honoring Shakespeare's tragic practice and completing a powerful interpretation of the play in which the source of tragedy is the domination of life by illusion.