We hear the uncredited voice of Laurence Olivier speaking the first words of the play’s chorus, telling us about star-crossed lovers and what is going to happen, and then at the end he borrows the words of the Prince of Verona. The opening and closing of the film are more comfortable than anything in it.

Zeffirelli’s film shows us that those two adjectives can get along with each other improbably well. The second publication, in 1599, had the title The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. When Romeo and Juliet was first published, in 1597, some two or three years after it was written, it was described as ‘an excellent conceited tragedy’ – where ‘conceited’ means full of fantastic thoughts and expressions, but could easily apply to most of the characters, perhaps all of them except the hero and heroine. Or closer to a certain Shakespeare, the one who loves terrible jokes and cheerfully allows them to accompany violence and distress. The movie wears well, and is certainly better than I remembered, but time has also made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare than it used to be or was probably meant to be. A real story is not the same as a realistic story, the characters and costumes look a little late for the Middle Ages, and the city is more than plausible, since much of the film was shot on location in Italy. A casual remark, no doubt, but one that invites interpretations or qualifications. F ranco Zeffirelli said of his 1968 film Romeo and Juliet, now about to appear in a digital restoration by the Criterion Collection, that he wanted it to tell ‘a real story in a plausible medieval city’.

Shakespeare by michael wood