The ‘pre-Shakespearean’ balcony and outdoor spaces from the European sources to Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

This article shows how the balcony scene has been represented in Romeo and Juliet's narrative sources and how it has been treated by Shakespeare and on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stages. It focuses on the absence of any balcony in Shakespeare's play and on the actual presence of a balcony in one of the Italian indirect sources of the play, Luigi Da Porto's novella; it also explores how all the spatial, gender, and power connotations of the balcony have been ‘translated’ from the sources to Shakespeare, where they are conveyed by the use of a ‘window’ and an ‘orchard’. The article shows how, thanks to the SENS: Shakespeare's Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and their European Dissemination digital archive a comparison of multiple texts at a time, focusing on the words ‘balcony’, ‘window’, ‘garden’, and ‘orchard’, favours the investigation of the way in which these liminal spaces are represented.