Cibber’s rival, David Garrick, was disgusted and responded by casting Cibber’s ex-wife as Juliet in his own production and giving her a dashing Romeo. In the 18th century, abusive impresario Theophilus Cibber played Romeo opposite his own teenage daughter, turning the rebellious protagonist into a docile girl victimised by her lewd father. As Duncan points out, when Romeo sees her corpse “his first thought is how sexy she is”, while her father, finding her apparently dead, imagines that death has “deflowered” her. We are on her side.īut for all the life Shakespeare gives Juliet, he also leaves space for audiences to fixate on her death. He also scraps Brooke’s moral condemnation of Juliet. Shakespeare made her three years younger, the age his eldest daughter was at the time, an age Elizabethan audiences would have found “scandalously, recklessly young”. The character represents a break from its most immediate source, Arthur Brooke’s 1562 Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet, where she was as much in love with death as with Romeo.
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