IN FAIR VERONA

A KINGDOM for a stage!" cried Shakespeare, but he could only dream and meanwhile curse the "unworthy scaffold" he must needs make do with. The stage, when Romeo and Juliet was first presented, was little more than a gangway shunted shoulder-high through a roaring mob.*Down these bare boards an actor strode, and with a wave of the arm required his hearers to believe they were "in fair Verona, where we lay our scene." In later centuries, notably toward the end of the 19th, productions of Shakespeare became almost as richly furnished as they were badly played; but not until some 335 years after Shakespeare's death did a producer find the wit and the way to take the playwright at his word--actually to give him a kingdom for a stage.

One day in 1951 Renato Castellani, an Italian moviemaker (Two Cents Worth of Hope), had an idea: since Shakespeare had laid the story of his "star-crossed lovers" in Verona, why not actually photograph it there and, where necessary, in other Italian cities whose stones are better preserved? Why not set a Renaissance passion in a Renaissance scene? And why not let all this young love be made, for a change, by young lovers?

Britain's J. Arthur Rank put up part of the cash, Castellani put together his company, including Cameraman Robert Krasker--who in Henry V matched Shakespeare's morning language with an early wonder in his light and color--and the youngest Romeo (26-year-old Laurence Harvey) and Juliet (20-year-old Susan Shentall) of recent date. For seven months the cameras pored over the choice beauties of Venice, Verona, Siena, and several smaller cities of the golden age. What they recorded is a living image--the curious mingling of the radiant with the sinister, the earthy beauty like a kind of exquisite filth, the spirit itself almost like a shimmer of lust--of the High Renaissance.

All through the film, as the moviegoer watches, there travels a troubling little ecstasy of recognition. The costumes, and even many of the scenic compositions, are copies from old masterpieces by Lippo Lippi, Pisanello, Carpaccio, Lorenzo. As the orchestra tunes up for the Capulets' ball, five little boys step up to sing, and suddenly are grouped, in lovely archaic rhythm, as a choir of cherubs in Raphael's style. Juliet, in the scene where she first sees Romeo, is dressed like Botticelli's Flora, and the lines of her head and neck might be a tracing from Veneziano's Portrait of a Young Lady.

The famous balcony scene was shot in a dreamlike little garden of the sumptuous Ca' d'Oro in Venice; the ballroom scene, all cressets gleaming on dark wood and in bright eyes, was done in an apartment of that palace. On the Venetian cloister of San Francesco del Deserto, where some of the monastery sequences were made, the light falls slow and bright as dust from a celestial censer. The swordplay between Romeo and Tybalt flashes through Siena's gracious Piazza del Duomo. When Romeo in the last act beats with unavailing hands at the church door, he strikes the great bronze portal, green and inscrutable, of San Zeno Maggiore at Verona.

Image by image, in short, Castellani's Romeo and Juliet is a fine film poem. Unfortunately, it is not Shakespeare's poem. In his obsession with the beautiful single frame, Castellani has ignored not only the rhythm of Shakespeare's scenes but has even failed to set a rhythm when he cuts from frame to frame. Furthermore, his continental ear could not catch the endless modulations of voice that are necessary to make Shakespeare's language intelligible--let alone affecting--to a modern audience.

As for the principals, Castellani has gained the full advantage of their youth--and also of their inexperience. As Romeo, Laurence Harvey fails to generate much glandular heat, and, like most Romeos, reads his lines with a kind of empty fervor. Susan Shentall, while reading hers without distinction, nevertheless has what is so rare and so right in a Juliet: a delicate haze of sensuality that clouds the clear child face with passion's promises. The scene in which Romeo and Juliet meet, in which she foots the galliard, and the two touch trembling hands in the dainty ballad of the masks, is a passage paced to the heartbeat of first love.

*"In our assemblies at plays in London," wrote Stephen Gosson in 1579, "you shall see such heaving, and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by women . . . such masking in their ears . . . such giving them pippins to pass the time: such playing at foot-saunt without cards: such tickling, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home"--that a Puritan preacher, Thomas White, was moved to reason how "The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well: and the cause of sin are plays: therefore the cause of plagues are plays."

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