‘O, Juliet’ by Robin Maxwell

William Shakespeare’s works have taken on so many forms. As the centuries passed and the world changed, his genius remained—but it began to morph, began wearing different clothes and appealing to new age groups. O, Juliet by Robin Maxwell is a creative retelling of the play Romeo and Juliet, written as a romance novel. A few characters’ names are changed, along with some world-building details, to make it feel like a well-rounded story.

When Juliet meets Romeo in Maxwell’s novel, they fall immediately into a romance that is both energetic and irrational. It is not uncommon for a teenager’s first love to feel this way, and here there is the added pressure that their love is forbidden, as both of their families are locked in a generational feud. We all know that it can do little good to forbid something to someone; it only makes them more determined to have it. No words of wisdom or caution will open the eyes of a person caught in the mire of infatuation. Youth is, and always will be, impulsive.

As I read Maxwell’s iteration of the story, I felt torn. I really enjoyed the book, as I don’t often find novels about love—purely and simply about that flirty feeling—that are gripping and also well-written.

I have never actually read Romeo and Juliet as a play, but whenever I have encountered the story through adaptations and spin-offs, what strikes me is how the story, while common enough (young love is not a new concept), is driven by so much passion—and, in my view, it is not the romantic kind. How can you love a person if you barely know them? Is it love if so much of it is fueled by fear and violence?

I believe that true love should make a person feel peaceful. Of course, it would bring with it romance and happy feelings, but it does not seem sustainable to me that a love affair should thrive on constant struggle and anxiety. If Romeo and Juliet’s families had not despised one another, would this ever have happened at all? Could it be that part of this attachment was due only to the fact that their love was forbidden?

Juliet knows nothing about Romeo at first. What is immediately clear is that her family and his have long been in disagreement. Yet she is completely lost in this first love, captivated by Romeo physically and because he shares with her a deep love for literature, particularly Dante, who is to them what Shakespeare is to us. Now, I can understand this: while I have never had physical crushes on men, I could always appreciate meeting a gentleman who can participate in literary discussions that engage my mind.

Page 3 says of Juliet:

“But of all my furnishings, those that I most cherished were my wooden desk and my chair. Unremarkable as they were, they were sacred to me. Some girls took great pleasure in their prettily painted marriage chests that grew fuller every year with linen and baby clothes, gold plate, and fine pieces of glass they would one day take with them into their husband’s house…. But for me the center of the world, the universe itself, was my desk. For here it was that I read and I wrote, and more than in my bed and sleep, did here I dream.”

This passage is a beautiful ode to the sacredness of a writing desk. Virginia Woolf wrote of how a woman needs “a room” of one’s own to be successful; it’s not a stretch to imagine she’d feel the same sort of reverence for a desk. And it does not even need to be a grand desk: Jane Austen famously wrote on a desk so small that it just barely had room for pages, ink, and quill. Any space set aside for creation is sacred, and in this passage, we see that Juliet understands this.

Page 58 features a beautiful, breathless monologue by Juliet as she speaks of Romeo:

“I’ve been wild with such longings since I met him. I have not slept except pitifully, and then I dream of him. And I dream in verse, words flowing into words, streams and rivers of them, and all with the theme of love. When I wake, I try to remember the poems, but they’re gone, disappeared. And all I have left are memories of the feel of his hand, the sound of his voice, the shape of his lips.”

All things considered, I found O, Juliet to be a beautiful book—perhaps one of my favorites this year—because it is a book about love that, with magical prose and high stakes, makes us feel as if we, too, are involved in the forbidden affair. It soothes an ache that many of us feel, a wish to be so taken by another person that it changes the very colors of the world in which we live.

There will always be a place for love stories—forbidden love, doomed love, even troubled love. Humanity needs love. This might explain the timelessness of Romeo and Juliet, which has continued to inspire creatives for centuries since the Bard wrote it.