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Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with , is one of his most frequently performed. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. The plot is based on an Italian tale written by Matteo Bandello and translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. The text of the first quarto version was of poor quality, however, and later editions corrected the text to conform more closely with Shakespeare's original.

Shakespeare's use of poetic dramatic structure (including effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, the expansion of minor characters, and numerous sub-plots to embellish the story) has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play.

Romeo and Juliet has been adapted numerous times for stage, film, musical, and opera venues. During the English Restoration, it was revived and heavily revised by William Davenant. David Garrick's 18th-century version also modified several scenes, removing material then considered indecent, and Georg Benda's Romeo und Julie omitted much of the action and used a happy ending. Performances in the 19th century, including Charlotte Cushman's, restored the original text and focused on greater realism. John Gielgud's 1935 version kept very close to Shakespeare's text and used Elizabethan costumes and staging to enhance the drama. In the 20th and into the 21st century, the play has been adapted in versions as diverse as George Cukor's 1936 film Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, and most recently, Carlo Carlei's 2013 film Romeo and Juliet.

Characters

Ruling house of Verona

House of Capulet

Capulet is the patriarch of the house of Capulet.

Lady Capulet is the matriarch of the house of Capulet.

Juliet Capulet, the 13-year-old daughter of Capulet, is the play's female protagonist.

Tybalt is a cousin of Juliet, the nephew of Lady Capulet.

The Nurse is Juliet's personal attendant and confidante.

Rosaline is Lord Capulet's niece, Romeo's love in the beginning of the story.

Peter, Sampson, and Gregory are servants of the Capulet household.

House of Montague

Montague is the patriarch of the house of Montague.

Lady Montague is the matriarch of the house of Montague.

Romeo Montague, the son of Montague, is the play's male protagonist.

Benvolio is Romeo's cousin and best friend.

Abram and Balthasar are servants of the Montague household.

Friar Laurence is a Franciscan friar and Romeo's confidant.

Friar John is sent to deliver Friar Laurence's letter to Romeo.

An Apothecary who reluctantly sells Romeo poison.

A Chorus reads a prologue to each of the first two acts.

The play, set in Verona, Italy, begins with a street brawl between Montague and Capulet servants who, like the masters they serve, are sworn enemies. Prince Escalus of Verona intervenes and declares that further breach of the peace will be punishable by death. Later, Count Paris talks to Capulet about marrying his daughter Juliet, but Capulet asks Paris to wait another two years and invites him to attend a planned Capulet ball. Lady Capulet and Juliet's Nurse try to persuade Juliet to accept Paris's courtship.

Meanwhile, Benvolio talks with his cousin Romeo, Montague's son, about Romeo's recent depression. Benvolio discovers that it stems from unrequited infatuation for a girl named Rosaline, one of Capulet's nieces. Persuaded by Benvolio and Mercutio, Romeo attends the ball at the Capulet house in hopes of meeting Rosaline. However, Romeo instead meets and falls in love with Juliet. Juliet's cousin, Tybalt, is enraged at Romeo for sneaking into the ball but is stopped from killing Romeo by Juliet's father, who does not wish to shed blood in his house. After the ball, in what is now famously known as the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of the Montagues. Romeo makes himself known to her, and they agree to be married. With the help of Friar Laurence, who hopes to reconcile the two families through their children's union, they are secretly married the next day.

Tybalt, meanwhile, still incensed that Romeo had sneaked into the Capulet ball, challenges him to a duel. Romeo, now considering Tybalt his kinsman, refuses to fight. Mercutio is offended by Tybalt's insolence, as well as Romeo's "vile submission", and accepts the duel on Romeo's behalf. Mercutio is fatally wounded when Romeo attempts to break up the fight, and declares a curse upon both households before he dies. ("A plague o' both your houses!") Grief-stricken and racked with guilt, Romeo confronts and slays Tybalt.

Montague argues that Romeo has justly executed Tybalt for the murder of Mercutio. The Prince, now having lost a kinsman in the warring families' feud, exiles Romeo from Verona, under penalty of death if he ever returns. Romeo secretly spends the night in Juliet's chamber, where they consummate their marriage. Capulet, misinterpreting Juliet's grief, agrees to marry her to Count Paris and threatens to disown her when she refuses to become Paris's "joyful bride". When she then pleads for the marriage to be delayed, her mother rejects her.

Juliet visits Friar Laurence for help, and he offers her a potion that will put her into a deathlike coma or catalepsy for "two and forty hours". The Friar promises to send a messenger to inform Romeo of the plan so that he can rejoin her when she awakens. On the night before the wedding, she takes the drug and, when discovered apparently dead, she is laid in the family crypt.

The messenger, however, does not reach Romeo and, instead, Romeo learns of Juliet's apparent death from his servant, Balthasar. Heartbroken, Romeo buys poison from an apothecary and goes to the Capulet crypt. He encounters Paris who has come to mourn Juliet privately. Believing Romeo to be a vandal, Paris confronts him and, in the ensuing battle, Romeo kills Paris. Still believing Juliet to be dead, he drinks the poison. Juliet then awakens and, discovering that Romeo is dead, stabs herself with his dagger and joins him in death. The feuding families and the Prince meet at the tomb to find all three dead. Friar Laurence recounts the story of the two "star-cross'd lovers", fulfilling the curse that Mercutio swore. The families are reconciled by their children's deaths and agree to end their violent feud. The play ends with the Prince's elegy for the lovers: "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

Romeo and Juliet borrows from a tradition of tragic love stories dating back to antiquity. One of these is Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which contains parallels to Shakespeare's story: the lovers' parents despise each other, and Pyramus falsely believes his lover Thisbe is dead. The of Xenophon of Ephesus, written in the 3rd century, also contains several similarities to the play, including the separation of the lovers, and a potion that induces a deathlike sleep.

One of the earliest references to the names Montague and Capulet is from Dante's Divine Comedy, who mentions the Montecchi ( Montagues) and the Cappelletti ( Capulets) in canto six of Purgatorio:

Come and see, you who are negligent,
Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi
One lot already grieving, the other in fear.

Masuccio Salernitano, author of Mariotto & Ganozza (1476), the earliest known version of Romeo & Juliet tale

However, the reference is part of a polemic against the moral decay of Florence, Lombardy, and the Italian Peninsula as a whole; Dante, through his characters, chastises German King Albert I for neglecting his responsibilities towards Italy ("you who are negligent"), and successive popes for their encroachment from purely spiritual affairs, thus leading to a climate of incessant bickering and warfare between rival political parties in Lombardy. History records the name of the family Montague as being lent to such a political party in Verona, but that of the Capulets as from a Cremonese family, both of whom play out their conflict in Lombardy as a whole rather than within the confines of Verona. Allied to rival political factions, the parties are grieving ("One lot already grieving") because their endless warfare has led to the destruction of both parties, rather than a grief from the loss of their ill-fated offspring as the play sets forth, which appears to be a solely poetic creation within this context.

The earliest known version of the Romeo and Juliet tale akin to Shakespeare's play is the story of Mariotto and Ganozza by Masuccio Salernitano, in the 33rd novel of his Il Novellino published in 1476. Salernitano sets the story in Siena and insists its events took place in his own lifetime. His version of the story includes the secret marriage, the colluding friar, the fray where a prominent citizen is killed, Mariotto's exile, Ganozza's forced marriage, the potion plot, and the crucial message that goes astray. In this version, Mariotto is caught and beheaded and Ganozza dies of grief.

Luigi da Porto (1485-1529) adapted the story as Giulietta e Romeo and included it in his Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (A Newly-Discovered History of two Noble Lovers), written in 1524 and published posthumously in 1531 in Venice. Da Porto drew on Pyramus and Thisbe, Boccaccio's , and Salernitano's Mariotto e Ganozza, but it is likely that his story is also autobiographical: He was a soldier present at a ball on 26 February 1511, at a residence of the pro- Venice Savorgnan clan in Udine, following a peace ceremony attended by the opposing pro- Imperial Strumieri clan. There, Da Porto fell in love with Lucina, a Savorgnan daughter, but the family feud frustrated their courtship. The next morning, the Savorgnans led an attack on the city, and many members of the Strumieri were murdered. Years later, still half-paralyzed from a battle-wound, Luigi wrote Giulietta e Romeo in Montorso Vicentino (from which he could see the "castles" of Verona), dedicating the novella to the bellisima e leggiadra (the beautiful and graceful) Lucina Savorgnan. Da Porto presented his tale as historically factual and claimed it took place at least a century earlier than Salernitano had it, in the days Verona was ruled by Bartolomeo della Scala (anglicized as Prince Escalus).

Title page of Arthur Brooke's poem, Romeus and Juliet

Da Porto presented the narrative in close to its modern form, including the names of the lovers, the rival families of Montecchi and Capuleti (Cappelletti) and the location in Verona. He named the friar Laurence ( frate Lorenzo) and introduced the characters Mercutio ( Marcuccio Guertio), Tybalt ( Tebaldo Cappelletti), Count Paris ( conte (Paride) di Lodrone), the faithful servant, and Giulietta's nurse. Da Porto originated the remaining basic elements of the story: the feuding families, Romeo-left by his mistress-meeting Giulietta at a dance at her house, the love scenes (including the balcony scene), the periods of despair, Romeo killing Giulietta's cousin (Tebaldo), and the families' reconciliation after the lovers' suicides. In da Porto's version, Romeo takes poison and Giulietta keeps her breath until she dies.

In 1554, Matteo Bandello published the second volume of his Novelle, which included his version of Giuletta e Romeo, probably written between 1531 and 1545. Bandello lengthened and weighed down the plot while leaving the storyline basically unchanged (though he did introduce Benvolio). Bandello's story was translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559 in the first volume of his Histories Tragiques. Boaistuau adds much moralising and sentiment, and the characters indulge in rhetorical outbursts.

In his 1562 narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Arthur Brooke translated Boaistuau faithfully but adjusted it to reflect parts of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. There was a trend among writers and playwrights to publish works based on Italian novelle-Italian tales were very popular among theatre-goers-and Shakespeare may well have been familiar with William Painter's 1567 collection of Italian tales titled Palace of Pleasure. This collection included a version in prose of the Romeo and Juliet story named "The goodly History of the true and constant love of Romeo and Juliett". Shakespeare took advantage of this popularity: The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Romeo and Juliet are all from Italian novelle. Romeo and Juliet is a dramatization of Brooke's translation, and Shakespeare follows the poem closely but adds detail to several major and minor characters (the Nurse and Mercutio in particular).

Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Dido, Queen of Carthage, both similar stories written in Shakespeare's day, are thought to be less of a direct influence, although they may have helped create an atmosphere in which tragic love stories could thrive.

Date and text

Title page of the first edition

It is unknown when exactly Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's Nurse refers to an earthquake she says occurred 11 years ago. This may refer to the Dover Straits earthquake of 1580, which would date that particular line to 1591. Other earthquakes-both in England and in Verona-have been proposed in support of the different dates. But the play's stylistic similarities with A Midsummer Night's Dream and other plays conventionally dated around 1594-95, place its composition sometime between 1591 and 1595. One conjecture is that Shakespeare may have begun a draft in 1591, which he completed in 1595.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was published in two quarto editions prior to the publication of the First Folio of 1623. These are referred to as Q1 and Q2. The first printed edition, Q1, appeared in early 1597, printed by John Danter. Because its text contains numerous differences from the later editions, it is labelled a so-called ' bad quarto'; the 20th-century editor T. J. B. Spencer described it as "a detestable text, probably a reconstruction of the play from the imperfect memories of one or two of the actors", suggesting that it had been pirated for publication. An alternative explanation for Q1's shortcomings is that the play (like many others of the time) may have been heavily edited before performance by the playing company. However, "the theory, formulated by [Alfred] Pollard," that the 'bad quarto' was "reconstructed from memory by some of the actors is now under attack. Alternative theories are that some or all of 'the bad quartos' are early versions by Shakespeare or abbreviations made either for Shakespeare's company or for other companies." In any event, its appearance in early 1597 makes 1596 the latest possible date for the play's composition.

The title page from the First Folio, printed in 1623

The superior Q2 called the play The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. It was printed in 1599 by Thomas Creede and published by Cuthbert Burby. Q2 is about 800 lines longer than Q1. Its title page describes it as "Newly corrected, augmented and amended". Scholars believe that Q2 was based on Shakespeare's pre-performance draft (called his foul papers) since there are textual oddities such as variable tags for characters and "false starts" for speeches that were presumably struck through by the author but erroneously preserved by the typesetter. It is a much more complete and reliable text and was reprinted in 1609 (Q3), 1622 (Q4) and 1637 (Q5). In effect, all later Quartos and Folios of Romeo and Juliet are based on Q2, as are all modern editions since editors believe that any deviations from Q2 in the later editions (whether good or bad) are likely to have arisen from editors or compositors, not from Shakespeare.

The First Folio text of 1623 was based primarily on Q3, with clarifications and corrections possibly coming from a theatrical prompt book or Q1. Other Folio editions of the play were printed in 1632 (F2), 1664 (F3), and 1685 (F4). Modern versions-that take into account several of the Folios and Quartos-first appeared with Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition, followed by Alexander Pope's 1723 version. Pope began a tradition of editing the play to add information such as stage directions missing in Q2 by locating them in Q1. This tradition continued late into the Romantic period. Fully annotated editions first appeared in the Victorian period and continue to be produced today, printing the text of the play with footnotes describing the sources and culture behind the play.

Themes and motifs

Scholars have found it extremely difficult to assign one specific, overarching theme to the play. Proposals for a main theme include a discovery by the characters that human beings are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but instead are more or less alike, awaking out of a dream and into reality, the danger of hasty action, or the power of tragic fate. None of these have widespread support. However, even if an overall theme cannot be found it is clear that the play is full of several small thematic elements that intertwine in complex ways. Several of those most often debated by scholars are discussed below.

" Romeo
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

Romeo and Juliet is sometimes considered to have no unifying theme, save that of young love. Romeo and Juliet have become emblematic of young lovers and doomed love. Since it is such an obvious subject of the play, several scholars have explored the language and historical context behind the romance of the play.

On their first meeting, Romeo and Juliet use a form of communication recommended by many etiquette authors in Shakespeare's day: metaphor. By using metaphors of saints and sins, Romeo was able to test Juliet's feelings for him in a non-threatening way. This method was recommended by Baldassare Castiglione (whose works had been translated into English by this time). He pointed out that if a man used a metaphor as an invitation, the woman could pretend she did not understand him, and he could retreat without losing honour. Juliet, however, participates in the metaphor and expands on it. The religious metaphors of "shrine", "pilgrim", and "saint" were fashionable in the poetry of the time and more likely to be understood as romantic rather than blasphemous, as the concept of sainthood was associated with the Catholicism of an earlier age. Later in the play, Shakespeare removes the more daring allusions to Christ's resurrection in the tomb he found in his source work: Brooke's Romeus and Juliet.

Watercolor by John Masey Wright of Act II, Scene ii (the balcony scene).

In the later balcony scene, Shakespeare has Romeo overhear Juliet's soliloquy, but in Brooke's version of the story, her declaration is done alone. By bringing Romeo into the scene to eavesdrop, Shakespeare breaks from the normal sequence of courtship. Usually, a woman was required to be modest and shy to make sure that her suitor was sincere, but breaking this rule serves to speed along the plot. The lovers are able to skip courting and move on to plain talk about their relationship-agreeing to be married after knowing each other for only one night. In the final suicide scene, there is a contradiction in the message-in the Catholic religion, suicides were often thought to be condemned to Hell, whereas people who die to be with their loves under the " Religion of Love" are joined with their loves in Paradise. Romeo and Juliet's love seems to be expressing the "Religion of Love" view rather than the Catholic view. Another point is that, although their love is passionate, it is only consummated in marriage, which keeps them from losing the audience's sympathy.

The play arguably equates love and sex with death. Throughout the story, both Romeo and Juliet, along with the other characters, fantasise about it as a dark being, often equating it with a lover. Capulet, for example, when he first discovers Juliet's (faked) death, describes it as having deflowered his daughter. Juliet later erotically compares Romeo and death. Right before her suicide, she grabs Romeo's dagger, saying "O happy dagger! This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die."

Fate and chance

"O, I am fortune's fool!"

Scholars are divided on the role of fate in the play. No consensus exists on whether the characters are truly fated to die together or whether the events take place by a series of unlucky chances. Arguments in favour of fate often refer to the description of the lovers as " star-cross'd". This phrase seems to hint that the stars have predetermined the lovers' future. John W. Draper points out the parallels between the Elizabethan belief in the four humours and the main characters of the play (for example, Tybalt as a choleric). Interpreting the text in the light of humours reduces the amount of plot attributed to chance by modern audiences. Still, other scholars see the play as a series of unlucky chances-many to such a degree that they do not see it as a tragedy at all, but an emotional melodrama. Ruth Nevo believes the high degree to which chance is stressed in the narrative makes Romeo and Juliet a "lesser tragedy" of happenstance, not of character. For example, Romeo's challenging Tybalt is not impulsive; it is, after Mercutio's death, the expected action to take. In this scene, Nevo reads Romeo as being aware of the dangers of flouting social norms, identity, and commitments. He makes the choice to kill, not because of a tragic flaw, but because of circumstance.

Duality (light and dark)

"O brawling love, O loving hate,
O any thing of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!"

Scholars have long noted Shakespeare's widespread use of light and dark imagery throughout the play. Caroline Spurgeon considers the theme of light as "symbolic of the natural beauty of young love" and later critics have expanded on this interpretation. For example, both Romeo and Juliet see the other as light in a surrounding darkness. Romeo describes Juliet as being like the sun, brighter than a torch, a jewel sparkling in the night, and a bright angel among dark clouds. Even when she lies apparently dead in the tomb, he says her "beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence full of light." Juliet describes Romeo as "day in night" and "Whiter than snow upon a raven's back." This contrast of light and dark can be expanded as symbols-contrasting love and hate, youth and age in a metaphoric way. Sometimes these intertwining metaphors create dramatic irony. For example, Romeo and Juliet's love is a light in the midst of the darkness of the hate around them, but all of their activity together is done in night and darkness while all of the feuding is done in broad daylight. This paradox of imagery adds atmosphere to the moral dilemma facing the two lovers: loyalty to family or loyalty to love. At the end of the story, when the morning is gloomy and the sun hiding its face for sorrow, light and dark have returned to their proper places, the outward darkness reflecting the true, inner darkness of the family feud out of sorrow for the lovers. All characters now recognise their folly in light of recent events, and things return to the natural order, thanks to the love and death of Romeo and Juliet. The "light" theme in the play is also heavily connected to the theme of time since light was a convenient way for Shakespeare to express the passage of time through descriptions of the sun, moon, and stars.

"These times of woe afford no time to woo."

Time plays an important role in the language and plot of the play. Both Romeo and Juliet struggle to maintain an imaginary world void of time in the face of the harsh realities that surround them. For instance, when Romeo swears his love to Juliet by the moon, she protests "O swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb, / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable." From the very beginning, the lovers are designated as "star-cross'd" referring to an astrologic belief associated with time. Stars were thought to control the fates of humanity, and as time passed, stars would move along their course in the sky, also charting the course of human lives below. Romeo speaks of a foreboding he feels in the stars' movements early in the play, and when he learns of Juliet's death, he defies the stars' course for him.

Another central theme is haste: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet spans a period of four to six days, in contrast to Brooke's poems spanning nine months. Scholars such as G. Thomas Tanselle believe that time was "especially important to Shakespeare" in this play, as he used references to "short-time" for the young lovers as opposed to references to "long-time" for the "older generation" to highlight "a headlong rush towards doom". Romeo and Juliet fight time to make their love last forever. In the end, the only way they seem to defeat time is through a death that makes them immortal through art.

Time is also connected to the theme of light and dark. In Shakespeare's day, plays were most often performed at noon or in the afternoon in broad daylight. This forced the playwright to use words to create the illusion of day and night in his plays. Shakespeare uses references to the night and day, the stars, the moon, and the sun to create this illusion. He also has characters frequently refer to days of the week and specific hours to help the audience understand that time has passed in the story. All in all, no fewer than 103 references to time are found in the play, adding to the illusion of its passage.

Criticism and interpretation

Critical history

Portrait of the earliest recorded critic of the play, Samuel Pepys, by John Hayls. Oil on canvas, 1666.

The earliest known critic of the play was diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote in 1662: "it is a play of itself the worst that I ever heard in my life." Poet John Dryden wrote 10 years later in praise of the play and its comic character Mercutio: "Shakespear show'd the best of his skill in his Mercutio, and he said himself, that he was forc'd to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him." Criticism of the play in the 18th century was less sparse but no less divided. Publisher Nicholas Rowe was the first critic to ponder the theme of the play, which he saw as the just punishment of the two feuding families. In mid-century, writer Charles Gildon and philosopher Lord Kames argued that the play was a failure in that it did not follow the classical rules of drama: the tragedy must occur because of some character flaw, not an accident of fate. Writer and critic Samuel Johnson, however, considered it one of Shakespeare's "most pleasing" plays.

In the later part of the 18th and through the 19th century, criticism centred on debates over the moral message of the play. Actor and playwright David Garrick's 1748 adaptation excluded Rosaline: Romeo abandoning her for Juliet was seen as fickle and reckless. Critics such as Charles Dibdin argued that Rosaline had been included in the play in order to show how reckless the hero was and that this was the reason for his tragic end. Others argued that Friar Laurence might be Shakespeare's spokesman in his warnings against undue haste. At the beginning of the 20th century, these moral arguments were disputed by critics such as Richard Green Moulton: he argued that accident, and not some character flaw, led to the lovers' deaths.

Dramatic structure

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare employs several dramatic techniques that have garnered praise from critics, most notably the abrupt shifts from comedy to tragedy (an example is the punning exchange between Benvolio and Mercutio just before Tybalt arrives). Before Mercutio's death in Act III, the play is largely a comedy. After his accidental demise, the play suddenly becomes serious and takes on a tragic tone. When Romeo is banished, rather than executed, and Friar Laurence offers Juliet a plan to reunite her with Romeo, the audience can still hope that all will end well. They are in a "breathless state of suspense" by the opening of the last scene in the tomb: If Romeo is delayed long enough for the Friar to arrive, he and Juliet may yet be saved. These shifts from hope to despair, reprieve, and new hope serve to emphasise the tragedy when the final hope fails and both the lovers die at the end.

Shakespeare also uses sub-plots to offer a clearer view of the actions of the main characters. For example, when the play begins, Romeo is in love with Rosaline, who has refused all of his advances. Romeo's infatuation with her stands in obvious contrast to his later love for Juliet. This provides a comparison through which the audience can see the seriousness of Romeo and Juliet's love and marriage. Paris' love for Juliet also sets up a contrast between Juliet's feelings for him and her feelings for Romeo. The formal language she uses around Paris, as well as the way she talks about him to her Nurse, show that her feelings clearly lie with Romeo. Beyond this, the sub-plot of the Montague-Capulet feud overarches the whole play, providing an atmosphere of hate that is the main contributor to the play's tragic end.

Shakespeare uses a variety of poetic forms throughout the play. He begins with a 14-line prologue in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, spoken by a Chorus. Most of Romeo and Juliet is, however, written in blank verse, and much of it in strict iambic pentameter, with less rhythmic variation than in most of Shakespeare's later plays. In choosing forms, Shakespeare matches the poetry to the character who uses it. Friar Laurence, for example, uses sermon and sententiae forms and the Nurse uses a unique blank verse form that closely matches colloquial speech. Each of these forms is also moulded and matched to the emotion of the scene the character occupies. For example, when Romeo talks about Rosaline earlier in the play, he attempts to use the Petrarchan sonnet form. Petrarchan sonnets were often used by men to exaggerate the beauty of women who were impossible for them to attain, as in Romeo's situation with Rosaline. This sonnet form is used by Lady Capulet to describe Count Paris to Juliet as a handsome man. When Romeo and Juliet meet, the poetic form changes from the Petrarchan (which was becoming archaic in Shakespeare's day) to a then more contemporary sonnet form, using "pilgrims" and "saints" as metaphors. Finally, when the two meet on the balcony, Romeo attempts to use the sonnet form to pledge his love, but Juliet breaks it by saying "Dost thou love me?" By doing this, she searches for true expression, rather than a poetic exaggeration of their love. Juliet uses monosyllabic words with Romeo but uses formal language with Paris. Other forms in the play include an epithalamium by Juliet, a rhapsody in Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, and an elegy by Paris. Shakespeare saves his prose style most often for the common people in the play, though at times he uses it for other characters, such as Mercutio. Humour, also, is important: scholar Molly Mahood identifies at least 175 puns and wordplays in the text. Many of these jokes are sexual in nature, especially those involving Mercutio and the Nurse.

Psychoanalytic criticism

Early psychoanalytic critics saw the problem of Romeo and Juliet in terms of Romeo's impulsiveness, deriving from "ill-controlled, partially disguised aggression", which leads both to Mercutio's death and to the double suicide. Romeo and Juliet is not considered to be exceedingly psychologically complex, and sympathetic psychoanalytic readings of the play make the tragic male experience equivalent with sicknesses. Norman Holland, writing in 1966, considers Romeo's dream as a realistic "wish fulfilling fantasy both in terms of Romeo's adult world and his hypothetical childhood at stages oral, phallic and oedipal" - while acknowledging that a dramatic character is not a human being with mental processes separate from those of the author. Critics such as Julia Kristeva focus on the hatred between the families, arguing that this hatred is the cause of Romeo and Juliet's passion for each other. That hatred manifests itself directly in the lovers' language: Juliet, for example, speaks of "my only love sprung from my only hate" and often expresses her passion through an anticipation of Romeo's death. This leads on to speculation as to the playwright's psychology, in particular to a consideration of Shakespeare's grief for the death of his son, Hamnet.

Feminist criticism

Feminist literary critics argue that the blame for the family feud lies in Verona's patriarchal society. For Coppélia Kahn, for example, the strict, masculine code of violence imposed on Romeo is the main force driving the tragedy to its end. When Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo shifts into a violent mode, regretting that Juliet has made him so "effeminate". In this view, the younger males "become men" by engaging in violence on behalf of their fathers, or in the case of the servants, their masters. The feud is also linked to male virility, as the numerous jokes about maidenheads aptly demonstrate. Juliet also submits to a female code of docility by allowing others, such as the Friar, to solve her problems for her. Other critics, such as Dympna Callaghan, look at the play's feminism from a historicist angle, stressing that when the play was written the feudal order was being challenged by increasingly centralised government and the advent of capitalism. At the same time, emerging Puritan ideas about marriage were less concerned with the "evils of female sexuality" than those of earlier eras and more sympathetic towards love-matches: when Juliet dodges her father's attempt to force her to marry a man she has no feeling for, she is challenging the patriarchal order in a way that would not have been possible at an earlier time.

Queer theory

The playbill from a 1753 production at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane starring David Garrick

A number of critics have found the character of Mercutio to have unacknowledged homoerotic desire for Romeo. Jonathan Goldberg examined the sexuality of Mercutio and Romeo utilising queer theory in Queering the Renaissance (1994), comparing their friendship with sexual love. Mercutio, in friendly conversation, mentions Romeo's phallus, suggesting traces of homoeroticism. An example is his joking wish "To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle ... letting it there stand / Till she had laid it and conjured it down." Romeo's homoeroticism can also be found in his attitude to Rosaline, a woman who is distant and unavailable and brings no hope of offspring. As Benvolio argues, she is best replaced by someone who will reciprocate. Shakespeare's procreation sonnets describe another young man who, like Romeo, is having trouble creating offspring and who may be seen as being a homosexual. Goldberg believes that Shakespeare may have used Rosaline as a way to express homosexual problems of procreation in an acceptable way. In this view, when Juliet says "...that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet", she may be raising the question of whether there is any difference between the beauty of a man and the beauty of a woman.

The balcony scene

The balcony scene was introduced by Da Porto in 1524. He had Romeo walk frequently by her house, "sometimes climbing to her chamber window", and wrote, "It happened one night, as love ordained, when the moon shone unusually bright, that whilst Romeo was climbing the balcony, the young lady ... opened the window, and looking out saw him". After this they have a conversation in which they declare eternal love to each other. A few decades later, Bandello greatly expanded this scene, diverging from the familiar one: Julia has her nurse deliver a letter asking Romeo to come to her window with a rope ladder, and he climbs the balcony with the help of his servant, Julia and the nurse (the servants discreetly withdraw after this).

Nevertheless, in October 2014, Lois Leveen pointed out in The Atlantic that the original Shakespeare play did not contain a balcony; it just says that Juliet appears at a window. The word balcone is not known to have existed in the English language until two years after Shakespeare's death. The balcony was certainly used in Thomas Otway's 1679 play, The History and Fall of Caius Marius, which had borrowed much of its story from Romeo and Juliet and placed the two lovers in a balcony reciting a speech similar to that between Romeo and Juliet. Leveen suggested that during the 18th century, David Garrick chose to use a balcony in his adaptation and revival of Romeo and Juliet and modern adaptations have continued this tradition.

Shakespeare's day

Richard Burbage, probably the first actor to portray Romeo

Romeo and Juliet ranks with as one of Shakespeare's most performed plays. Its many adaptations have made it one of his most enduring and famous stories. Even in Shakespeare's lifetime, it was extremely popular. Scholar Gary Taylor measures it as the sixth most popular of Shakespeare's plays, in the period after the death of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd but before the ascendancy of Ben Jonson during which Shakespeare was London's dominant playwright. The date of the first performance is unknown. The First Quarto, printed in 1597, reads "it hath been often (and with great applause) plaid publiquely", setting the first performance before that date. The Lord Chamberlain's Men were certainly the first to perform it. Besides their strong connections with Shakespeare, the Second Quarto actually names one of its actors, Will Kemp, instead of Peter, in a line in Act V. Richard Burbage was probably the first Romeo, being the company's chief tragedian; and Master Robert Goffe (a boy), the first Juliet. The premiere is likely to have been at The Theatre, with other early productions at the Curtain. Romeo and Juliet is one of the first Shakespeare plays to have been performed outside England: a shortened and simplified version was performed in Nördlingen in 1604.

Restoration and 18th-century theatre

All theatres were closed down by the puritan government on 6 September 1642. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two patent companies (the King's Company and the Duke's Company) were established, and the existing theatrical repertoire was divided between them.

Mary Saunderson, probably the first woman to play Juliet professionally

Sir William Davenant of the Duke's Company staged a 1662 adaptation in which Henry Harris played Romeo, Thomas Betterton Mercutio, and Betterton's wife Mary Saunderson Juliet: she was probably the first woman to play the role professionally. Another version closely followed Davenant's adaptation and was also regularly performed by the Duke's Company. This was a tragicomedy by James Howard, in which the two lovers survive.

Thomas Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius, one of the more extreme of the Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare, debuted in 1680. The scene is shifted from Renaissance Verona to ancient Rome; Romeo is Marius, Juliet is Lavinia, the feud is between patricians and plebeians; Juliet/Lavinia wakes from her potion before Romeo/Marius dies. Otway's version was a hit, and was acted for the next seventy years. His innovation in the closing scene was even more enduring, and was used in adaptations throughout the next 200 years: Theophilus Cibber's adaptation of 1744, and David Garrick's of 1748 both used variations on it. These versions also eliminated elements deemed inappropriate at the time. For example, Garrick's version transferred all language describing Rosaline to Juliet, to heighten the idea of faithfulness and downplay the love-at-first-sight theme. In 1750, a "Battle of the Romeos" began, with Spranger Barry and Susannah Maria Arne (Mrs. Theophilus Cibber) at Covent Garden versus David Garrick and George Anne Bellamy at Drury Lane.

The earliest known production in North America was an amateur one: on 23 March 1730, a physician named Joachimus Bertrand placed an advertisement in the Gazette newspaper in New York, promoting a production in which he would play the apothecary. The first professional performances of the play in North America were those of the Hallam Company.

19th-century theatre

The American Cushman sisters, Charlotte and Susan, as Romeo and Juliet in 1846

Garrick's altered version of the play was very popular, and ran for nearly a century. Not until 1845 did Shakespeare's original return to the stage in the United States with the sisters Susan and Charlotte Cushman as Juliet and Romeo, respectively, and then in 1847 in Britain with Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre. Cushman adhered to Shakespeare's version, beginning a string of eighty-four performances. Her portrayal of Romeo was considered genius by many. wrote: "For a long time Romeo has been a convention. Miss Cushman's Romeo is a creative, a living, breathing, animated, ardent human being." Queen Victoria wrote in her journal that "no-one would ever have imagined she was a woman". Cushman's success broke the Garrick tradition and paved the way for later performances to return to the original storyline.

Professional performances of Shakespeare in the mid-19th century had two particular features: firstly, they were generally star vehicles, with supporting roles cut or marginalised to give greater prominence to the central characters. Secondly, they were "pictorial", placing the action on spectacular and elaborate sets (requiring lengthy pauses for scene changes) and with the frequent use of tableaux. Henry Irving's 1882 production at the Lyceum Theatre (with himself as Romeo and Ellen Terry as Juliet) is considered an archetype of the pictorial style. In 1895, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson took over from Irving and laid the groundwork for a more natural portrayal of Shakespeare that remains popular today. Forbes-Robertson avoided the showiness of Irving and instead portrayed a down-to-earth Romeo, expressing the poetic dialogue as realistic prose and avoiding melodramatic flourish.

American actors began to rival their British counterparts. Edwin Booth (brother to John Wilkes Booth) and Mary McVicker (soon to be Edwin's wife) opened as Romeo and Juliet at the sumptuous Booth's Theatre (with its European-style stage machinery, and an air conditioning system unique in New York) on 3 February 1869. Some reports said it was one of the most elaborate productions of Romeo and Juliet ever seen in America; it was certainly the most popular, running for over six weeks and earning over $60,000 (equivalent to $1,000,000 in 2022). The programme noted that: "The tragedy will be produced in strict accordance with historical propriety, in every respect, following closely the text of Shakespeare."

The first professional performance of the play in Japan may have been George Crichton Miln's company's production, which toured to Yokohama in 1890. Throughout the 19th century, Romeo and Juliet had been Shakespeare's most popular play, measured by the number of professional performances. In the 20th century it would become the second most popular, behind .

20th-century theatre

In 1933, the play was revived by actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic and was taken on a seven-month nationwide tour throughout the United States. It starred Orson Welles, Brian Aherne and Basil Rathbone. The production was a modest success, and so upon the return to New York, Cornell and McClintic revised it, and for the first time the play was presented with almost all the scenes intact, including the Prologue. The new production opened on Broadway in December 1934. Critics wrote that Cornell was "the greatest Juliet of her time", "endlessly haunting", and "the most lovely and enchanting Juliet our present-day theatre has seen".

John Gielgud, who was among the more famous 20th-century actors to play Romeo, Friar Laurence and Mercutio on stage

John Gielgud's New Theatre production in 1935 featured Gielgud and Laurence Olivier as Romeo and Mercutio, exchanging roles six weeks into the run, with Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet. Gielgud used a scholarly combination of Q1 and Q2 texts and organised the set and costumes to match as closely as possible the Elizabethan period. His efforts were a huge success at the box office, and set the stage for increased historical realism in later productions. Olivier later compared his performance and Gielgud's: "John, all spiritual, all spirituality, all beauty, all abstract things; and myself as all earth, blood, humanity ... I've always felt that John missed the lower half and that made me go for the other ... But whatever it was, when I was playing Romeo I was carrying a torch, I was trying to sell realism in Shakespeare."

Peter Brook's 1947 version was the beginning of a different style of Romeo and Juliet performances. Brook was less concerned with realism, and more concerned with translating the play into a form that could communicate with the modern world. He argued, "A production is only correct at the moment of its correctness, and only good at the moment of its success." Brook excluded the final reconciliation of the families from his performance text.

Throughout the century, audiences, influenced by the cinema, became less willing to accept actors distinctly older than the teenage characters they were playing. A significant example of more youthful casting was in Franco Zeffirelli's Old Vic production in 1960, with John Stride and Judi Dench, which would serve as the basis for his 1968 film. Zeffirelli borrowed from Brook's ideas, altogether removing around a third of the play's text to make it more accessible. In an interview with , he stated that the play's "twin themes of love and the total breakdown of understanding between two generations" had contemporary relevance.

Recent performances often set the play in the contemporary world. For example, in 1986, the Royal Shakespeare Company set the play in modern Verona. Switchblades replaced swords, feasts and balls became drug-laden rock parties, and Romeo committed suicide by hypodermic needle. Neil Bartlett's production of Romeo and Juliet themed the play very contemporary with a cinematic look which started its life at the Lyric Hammersmith, London then went to West Yorkshire Playhouse for an exclusive run in 1995. The cast included Emily Woof as Juliet, Stuart Bunce as Romeo, Sebastian Harcombe as Mercutio, Ashley Artus as Tybalt, Souad Faress as Lady Capulet and Silas Carson as Paris. In 1997, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre produced a version set in a typical suburban world. Romeo sneaks into the Capulet barbecue to meet Juliet, and Juliet discovers Tybalt's death while in class at school.

The play is sometimes given a historical setting, enabling audiences to reflect on the underlying conflicts. For example, adaptations have been set in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the apartheid era in South Africa, and in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt. Similarly, Peter Ustinov's 1956 comic adaptation, Romanoff and Juliet, is set in a fictional mid-European country in the depths of the Cold War. A mock-Victorian revisionist version of Romeo and Juliet's final scene (with a happy ending, Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, and Paris restored to life, and Benvolio revealing that he is Paris's love, Benvolia, in disguise) forms part of the 1980 stage-play The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Shakespeare's R&J, by Joe Calarco, spins the classic in a modern tale of gay teenage awakening. A recent comedic musical adaptation was The Second City's Romeo and Juliet Musical: The People vs. Friar Laurence, the Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet, set in modern times.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Romeo and Juliet has often been the choice of Shakespeare plays to open a classical theatre company, beginning with Edwin Booth's inaugural production of that play in his theatre in 1869, the newly re-formed company of the Old Vic in 1929 with John Gielgud, Martita Hunt, and Margaret Webster, as well as the Riverside Shakespeare Company in its founding production in New York City in 1977, which used the 1968 film of Franco Zeffirelli's production as its inspiration.

21st-century theatre

In 2013, Romeo and Juliet ran on Broadway at Richard Rodgers Theatre from 19 September to 8 December for 93 regular performances after 27 previews starting on 24 August with Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad in the starring roles.

The best-known ballet version is Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Originally commissioned by the Kirov Ballet, it was rejected by them when Prokofiev attempted a happy ending and was rejected again for the experimental nature of its music. It has subsequently attained an "immense" reputation, and has been choreographed by John Cranko (1962) and Kenneth MacMillan (1965) among others.

In 1977, Michael Smuin's production of one of the play's most dramatic and impassioned dance interpretations was debuted in its entirety by San Francisco Ballet. This production was the first full-length ballet to be broadcast by the PBS series " Great Performances: Dance in America"; it aired in 1978.

Dada Masilo, a South African dancer and choreographer, reinterpreted Romeo and Juliet in a new modern light. She introduced changes to the story, notably that of presenting the two families as multiracial.

"Romeo loved Juliet
Juliet, she felt the same
When he put his arms around her
He said Julie, baby, you're my flame
Thou givest fever ..."

At least 24 operas have been based on Romeo and Juliet. The earliest, Romeo und Julie in 1776, a Singspiel by Georg Benda, omits much of the action of the play and most of its characters and has a happy ending. It is occasionally revived. The best-known is Gounod's 1867 Roméo et Juliette (libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré), a critical triumph when first performed and frequently revived today. Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi is also revived from time to time, but has sometimes been judged unfavourably because of its perceived liberties with Shakespeare; however, Bellini and his librettist, Felice Romani, worked from Italian sources-principally Romani's libretto for Giulietta e Romeo by Nicola Vaccai-rather than directly adapting Shakespeare's play. Among later operas, there is Heinrich Sutermeister's 1940 work Romeo und Julia.

Roméo et Juliette by Berlioz is a "symphonie dramatique", a large-scale work in three parts for mixed voices, chorus, and orchestra, which premiered in 1839. Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture (1869, revised 1870 and 1880) is a 20-minute symphonic poem, containing the famous melody known as the "love theme". Tchaikovsky's device of repeating the same musical theme at the ball, in the balcony scene, in Juliet's bedroom and in the tomb has been used by subsequent directors: for example, Nino Rota's love theme is used in a similar way in the 1968 film of the play, as is Des'ree's " Kissing You" in the 1996 film. Other classical composers influenced by the play include Henry Hugh Pearson ( Romeo and Juliet, overture for orchestra, Op. 86), Svendsen ( Romeo og Julie, 1876), Delius (A Village Romeo and Juliet, 1899-1901), Stenhammar ( Romeo och Julia, 1922), and Kabalevsky ( Incidental Music to Romeo and Juliet, Op. 56, 1956).

The play influenced several jazz works, including Peggy Lee's " Fever". Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder contains a piece entitled "The Star-Crossed Lovers" in which the pair are represented by tenor and alto saxophones: critics noted that Juliet's sax dominates the piece, rather than offering an image of equality. The play has frequently influenced popular music, including works by The Supremes, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, and Taylor Swift. The most famous such track is Dire Straits' " Romeo and Juliet".

The most famous musical theatre adaptation is West Side Story with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. It débuted on Broadway in 1957 and in the West End in 1958 and was twice adapted as popular films in 1961 and in 2021. This version updated the setting to mid-20th-century New York City and the warring families to ethnic gangs. Other musical adaptations include Terrence Mann's 1999 rock musical William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, co-written with Jerome Korman; Gérard Presgurvic's 2001 Roméo et Juliette, de la Haine à l'Amour; Riccardo Cocciante's 2007 Giulietta & Romeo and Johan Christher Schütz; and Johan Petterssons's 2013 adaptation Carnival Tale (Tivolisaga), which takes place at a travelling carnival.

Literature and art

Romeo and Juliet had a profound influence on subsequent literature. Before then, romance had not even been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. In Harold Bloom's words, Shakespeare "invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death". Of Shakespeare's works, Romeo and Juliet has generated the most-and the most varied-adaptations, including prose and verse narratives, drama, opera, orchestral and choral music, ballet, film, television, and painting. The word "Romeo" has even become synonymous with "male lover" in English.

Romeo and Juliet was parodied in Shakespeare's own lifetime: Henry Porter's Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1598) and Thomas Dekker's Blurt, Master Constable (1607) both contain balcony scenes in which a virginal heroine engages in bawdy wordplay. The play directly influenced later literary works. For example, the preparations for a performance form a major plot in Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby.

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's most-illustrated works. The first known illustration was a woodcut of the tomb scene,[182] thought to be created by Elisha Kirkall, which appeared in Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition of Shakespeare's plays. Five paintings of the play were commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in the late 18th century, one representing each of the five acts of the play. Early in the 19th century, Henry Thomson painted Juliet after the Masquerade, an engraving. of which was published in The Literary Souvenir, 1828, with an accompanying poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The 19th-century fashion for "pictorial" performances led to directors' drawing on paintings for their inspiration, which, in turn, influenced painters to depict actors and scenes from the theatre. In the 20th century, the play's most iconic visual images have derived from its popular film versions.

David Blixt's 2007 novel The Master Of Verona imagines the origins of the famous Capulet-Montague feud, combining the characters from Shakespeare's Italian plays with the historical figures of Dante's time. Blixt's subsequent novels Voice Of The Falconer (2010), Fortune's Fool (2012), and The Prince's Doom (2014) continue to explore the world, following the life of Mercutio as he comes of age. More tales from Blixt's Star-Cross'd series appear in Varnished Faces: Star-Cross'd Short Stories (2015) and the plague anthology, We All Fall Down (2020). Blixt also authored Shakespeare's Secrets: Romeo & Juliet (2018), a collection of essays on the history of Shakespeare's play in performance, in which Blixt asserts the play is structurally not a Tragedy, but a Comedy-Gone-Wrong. In 2014 Blixt and his wife, stage director Janice L Blixt, were guests of the city of Verona, Italy for the launch of the Italian language edition of The Master Of Verona, staying with Dante's descendants and filmmaker Anna Lerario, with whom Blixt collaborated on a film about the life of Veronese prince Cangrande della Scala.

Lois Leveen's 2014 novel Juliet's Nurse imagined the fourteen years leading up to the events in the play from the point of view of the nurse. The nurse has the third largest number of lines in the original play; only the eponymous characters have more lines.

The play was the subject of a 2017 General Certificate of Secondary Education ( GCSE) question by the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations board that was administered to c.  14000 students. The board attracted widespread media criticism and derision after the question appeared to confuse the Capulets and the Montagues, with exams regulator Ofqual describing the error as unacceptable.

Romeo and Juliet was adapted into manga format by publisher UDON Entertainment's Manga Classics imprint and was released in May 2018.

Romeo and Juliet may be the most-filmed play of all time. The most notable theatrical releases were George Cukor's multi- Oscar-nominated 1936 production, Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version, and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 MTV-inspired Romeo + Juliet. The latter two were both, in their time, the highest-grossing Shakespeare film ever. Romeo and Juliet was first filmed in the silent era, by Georges Méliès, although his film is now lost. The play was first heard on film in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which John Gilbert recited the balcony scene opposite Norma Shearer.

Leslie Howard as Romeo and Norma Shearer as Juliet, in the 1936 MGM film directed by George Cukor

Shearer and Leslie Howard, with a combined age over 75, played the teenage lovers in George Cukor's MGM 1936 film version. Neither critics nor the public responded enthusiastically. Cinema-goers considered the film too "arty", staying away as they had from Warner's A Midsummer Night's Dream a year before: leading to Hollywood abandoning the Bard for over a decade. Renato Castellani won the at the Venice Film Festival for his 1954 film of Romeo and Juliet. His Romeo, Laurence Harvey, was already an experienced screen actor. By contrast, Susan Shentall, as Juliet, was a secretarial student who was discovered by the director in a London pub and was cast for her "pale sweet skin and honey-blonde hair".

Stephen Orgel describes Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet as being "full of beautiful young people, and the camera and the lush technicolour make the most of their sexual energy and good looks". Zeffirelli's teenage leads, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, had virtually no previous acting experience but performed capably and with great maturity. Zeffirelli has been particularly praised, for his presentation of the duel scene as bravado getting out-of-control. The film courted controversy by including a nude wedding-night scene while Olivia Hussey was only fifteen.

Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet and its accompanying soundtrack successfully targeted the " MTV Generation": a young audience of similar age to the story's characters. Far darker than Zeffirelli's version, the film is set in the "crass, violent and superficial society" of Verona Beach and Sycamore Grove. Leonardo DiCaprio was Romeo and Claire Danes was Juliet.

The play has been widely adapted for TV and film. In 1960, Peter Ustinov's cold-war stage parody, Romanoff and Juliet was filmed. The 1961 film West Side Story-set among New York gangs-featured the Jets as white youths, equivalent to Shakespeare's Montagues, while the Sharks, equivalent to the Capulets, are Puerto Rican. In 2006, Disney's High School Musical made use of Romeo and Juliet's plot, placing the two young lovers in different high-school cliques instead of feuding families. Film-makers have frequently featured characters performing scenes from Romeo and Juliet. The conceit of dramatising Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet has been used several times, including John Madden's 1998 Shakespeare in Love, in which Shakespeare writes the play against the backdrop of his own doomed love affair. An anime series produced by Gonzo and SKY Perfect Well Think, called Romeo x Juliet, was made in 2007 and the 2013 version is the latest English-language film based on the play. In 2013, Sanjay Leela Bhansali directed the Bollywood film Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela, a contemporary version of the play which starred Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone in leading roles. The film was a commercial and critical success. In February 2014, BroadwayHD released a filmed version of the 2013 Broadway Revival of Romeo and Juliet. The production starred Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad.

Modern social media and virtual world productions

In April and May 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Mudlark Production Company presented a version of the play, entitled Such Tweet Sorrow, as an improvised, real-time series of tweets on Twitter. The production used RSC actors who engaged with the audience as well each other, performing not from a traditional script but a "Grid" developed by the Mudlark production team and writers Tim Wright and Bethan Marlow. The performers also make use of other media sites such as YouTube for pictures and video.

Two of Uranus's moons, Juliet and Mab, are named for the play.

Scene by scene

Notes and references

1. ^ Levenson defines "star-cross'd" as "thwarted by a malign star".

2. When performed in the central yard of an inn and in public theaters such as the ^ Globe Theatre the only source of lighting was daylight. When performed at Court, inside the stately home of a member of the nobility and in indoor theaters such as the Blackfriars theatre candle lighting was used and plays could be performed even at night.

3. The five more popular plays, in descending order, are ^ Henry VI, Part 1, Richard III, Pericles, Hamlet and Richard II.

4. 1634-1699: ^ McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700-1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800-present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800-".

5. Booth's ^ Romeo and Juliet was rivalled in popularity only by his own "hundred night Hamlet" at The Winter Garden of four years before.

6. Levenson provides the quote from the 1960 interview with Zeffirelli in ^ The Times.

7. Brode cites Anthony West of ^ Vogue and Mollie Panter-Downes of The New Yorker as examples.

References

All references to Romeo and Juliet, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare second edition (Gibbons, 1980) based on the Q2 text of 1599, with elements from Q1 of 1597. Under its referencing system, which uses Roman numerals, II.ii.33 means act 2, scene 2, line 33, and a 0 in place of a scene number refers to the prologue to the act.

Editions of Romeo and Juliet

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External links

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Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with , is one of his most frequently performed. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

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Annelies Marie Frank (German: [ˈanə(liːsmaˈʁiː)ˈfʁaŋk] , Dutch: c.[ˌɑnəˈlismaːˈriˈfrɑŋk,ˈɑnəˈfrɑŋk] ; 12 June 1929 -  February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution. She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl (originally lit. 'the back house'; English: Het Achterhuis in Dutch, The Secret Annex), in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1934, when she was four and a half, her family moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. She spent most of her life in or around Amsterdam. By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, they went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked. Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944, Anne kept a diary she had received as a birthday present, and wrote in it regularly.

Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (probably of typhus) a few months later. They were originally estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has suggested they died in February or early March.

Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. He decided to fulfil Anne's greatest wish to become a writer and publish her diary in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 70 languages.

Anne Frank at the 6th Montessori School, 1940

Frank was born Annelies or Anneliese Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 at the Maingau Red Cross Clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith ( née Holländer) and Otto Heinrich Frank. She had an older sister, Margot. The Franks were liberal Jews, and did not observe all of the customs and traditions of Judaism. They lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions. Edith and Otto were devoted parents, who were interested in scholarly pursuits and had an extensive library; both parents encouraged the children to read. At the time of Anne's birth, the family lived in a house at Marbachweg 307 in Frankfurt- Dornbusch, where they rented two floors. In 1931, the family moved to Ganghoferstrasse 24 in a fashionable liberal area of Dornbusch, called the Dichterviertel (Poets' Quarter). Both houses still exist.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election and Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, Edith Frank and the children went to stay with Edith's mother Rosa in Aachen. Otto Frank remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, he moved there to organize the business and to arrange accommodation for his family. He began working at the Opekta Works, a company that sold the fruit extract pectin. Edith travelled back and forth between Aachen and Amsterdam and found an apartment on the Merwedeplein (Merwede Square) in the Rivierenbuurt neighbourhood of Amsterdam, where many more Jewish-German refugees settled. In November 1933, Edith followed her husband and a month later Margot moved to Amsterdam. Anne stayed with her grandmother until February, when the family reunited in Amsterdam. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.

After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot Frank were enrolled in school-Margot in public school and Anne in the 6th Montessori School. Despite initial problems with the Dutch language, Margot became a star pupil in Amsterdam. Anne soon felt at home at the Montessori school and met children of her own age, like Hanneli Goslar, who would later become one of her best friends.

In 1938, Otto Frank started a second company, Pectacon, which was a wholesaler of herbs, pickling salts, and mixed spices, used in the production of sausages. Hermann van Pels was employed by Pectacon as an advisor about spices. A Jewish butcher, he had fled Osnabrück with his family. In 1939, Edith Frank's mother came to live with the Franks, and remained with them until her death in January 1942.

In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the occupation government began to persecute Jews by the implementation of restrictive and discriminatory laws; mandatory registration and segregation soon followed. Otto Frank tried to arrange for the family to emigrate to the United States-the only destination that seemed to him to be viable-but Frank's application for a visa was never processed, because the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed in the German bombing on 14 May 1940, resulting in the loss of all the paperwork there, including the family's visa application.[unreliable source? ]

After the summer holidays in 1941, Anne learned that she would no longer be allowed to go to the Montessori School, as Jewish children had to attend Jewish schools. From then on Anne, like her sister Margot, went to the Jewish Lyceum, an exclusive Jewish secondary school in Amsterdam opened in September 1941.

1929: Anne Frank's birthplace, the Hospital Maingau of the Red Cross, in 1929 still known as Vaterländisches Krankenhaus (the hospital of the "Patriotic Women's Association") in Frankfurt- Nordend

1929-1931: Stele in front of Anne's home from 1929 to 1931 at Marbachweg 307 in Frankfurt- Dornbusch, where Anne's parents moved from the Westend with Margot in 1927

1931-1933: Ganghoferstraße 24 in the Poets' Quarter of Frankfurt-Dornbusch, the Franks' residence from 1931 to 1933

1933-1934: Pastorplatz 1 in Aachen, where Anne's maternal grandmother Rosa Holländer (née Stern) lived until 1939. Anne stayed with her from July 1933 to February 1934.

1934-1942: July 22, 1941: the only known occasion Anne was filmed, during the wedding of one of her neighbours. She is seen at 0:09 watching from the Franks' apartment at Merwedeplein 37 in Amsterdam, where they lived from 1934 to 1942

Period chronicled in Anne's diary

Before going into hiding

For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Anne received an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front. Frank decided she would use it as a diary, and had named it Kitty. She began writing in it almost immediately. In her entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.

In mid-1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Netherlands started. Otto and Edith Frank planned to go into hiding with the children on 16 July 1942, but when Margot received a call-up notice from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) on 5 July, ordering her to report for relocation to a work camp, they were forced to move the plan ten days forward. Shortly before going into hiding, Anne gave her friend and next-door neighbor Toosje Kupers a book, a tea set, and a tin of marbles. On 6 July, the Frank family left a note for the Kupers, asking them to take care of their cat Moortje. As the Associated Press reports: "'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands,' Kupers said Anne told her. 'Could you keep them for me for a little while?'"

Reconstruction of the bookcase that covered the entrance to the Secret Annex, in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam

On the morning of Monday, 6 July 1942, the Frank family moved into their hiding place, a three-story space entered from a landing above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht, where some of Otto Frank's most trusted employees would be their helpers. This hiding place became known as the Achterhuis (translated into "Secret Annex" in English editions of the diary). Their apartment was left in a state of disarray to create the impression that they had left suddenly, and Otto left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland. The need for secrecy forced them to leave behind Anne's cat, Moortje. As Jews were not allowed to use public transport, Otto, Edith and Anne walked several kilometres from their home. Margot cycled to the Prinsengracht with Miep Gies. The door to the Achterhuis was later covered by a bookcase to ensure it remained undiscovered.

Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the people in hiding. Along with Gies' husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl, they were the "helpers" for the duration of their confinement. The only connection between the outside world and the occupants of the house, they kept the occupants informed of war news and political developments. They catered to all of their needs, ensured their safety, and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Frank wrote of their dedication and of their efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that, if caught, they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.

On 13 July 1942, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family, made up of Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter, and then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family. Frank wrote of her pleasure at having new people to talk to, but tensions quickly developed within the group forced to live in such confined conditions. After sharing her room with Pfeffer, she found him to be insufferable and resented his intrusion, and she clashed with Auguste van Pels, whom she regarded as foolish. She regarded Hermann van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer as selfish, particularly in regard to the amount of food they consumed. Some time later, after first dismissing the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she recognized a kinship with him and the two entered a romance. She received her first kiss from him, but her infatuation with him began to wane as she questioned whether her feelings for him were genuine, or resulted from their shared confinement. Anne Frank formed a close bond with each of the helpers, and Otto Frank later recalled that she had anticipated their daily visits with impatient enthusiasm. He observed that Anne's closest friendship was with Bep Voskuijl, "the young typist... the two of them often stood whispering in the corner."

The young diarist

In her writing, Frank examined her relationships with the members of her family, and the strong differences in each of their personalities. She was closest emotionally to her father, who later said, "I got on better with Anne than with Margot, who was more attached to her mother. The reason for that may have been that Margot rarely showed her feelings and didn't need as much support because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne did." The Frank sisters formed a closer relationship than had existed before they went into hiding, although Anne sometimes expressed jealousy towards Margot, particularly when members of the household criticized Anne for lacking Margot's gentle and placid nature. As Anne began to mature, the sisters were able to confide in each other. In her entry of 12 January 1944, Frank wrote, "Margot's much nicer... She's not nearly so catty these days and is becoming a real friend. She no longer thinks of me as a little baby who doesn't count."

The Secret Annex with its light-coloured walls and orange roof (bottom) and the Anne Frank tree in the garden behind the house (bottom right), seen from the Westerkerk in 2017

Frank frequently wrote of her difficult relationship with her mother, and of her ambivalence towards her. On 7 November 1942, she described her "contempt" for her mother and her inability to "confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hard-heartedness," before concluding, "She's not a mother to me." Later, as she revised her diary, Frank felt ashamed of her harsh attitude, writing: "Anne, is it really you who mentioned hate, oh Anne, how could you?" She came to understand that their differences resulted from misunderstandings that were as much her fault as her mother's, and saw that she had added unnecessarily to her mother's suffering. With this realization, Frank began to treat her mother with a degree of tolerance and respect.

The Frank sisters each hoped to return to school as soon as they were able, and continued with their studies while in hiding. Margot took a course 'Elementary Latin' by correspondence in Bep Voskuijl's name and received high marks. Most of Anne's time was spent reading and studying, and she regularly wrote and edited (after March 1944) her diary entries. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she wrote about her feelings, beliefs, dreams and ambitions, subjects she felt she could not discuss with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more abstract subjects such as her belief in God, and how she defined human nature.

Frank aspired to become a journalist, writing in her diary on Wednesday, 5 April 1944:

I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write ..., but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent ...

And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! ...

I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

She continued writing regularly until her last entry of 1 August 1944.

A partial reconstruction of the barracks in the Westerbork transit camp where Anne Frank was housed from August to September 1944

On the morning of 4 August 1944, the Achterhuis was stormed by a group of German uniformed police (Grüne Polizei) led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst. The Franks, Van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters, where they were interrogated and held overnight. On 5 August, they were transferred to the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans. Two days later they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, through which more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, had passed. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labour.

Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were arrested and jailed at the penal camp for enemies of the regime at Amersfoort, in the province of Utrecht. Kleiman was released after seven weeks, but Kugler was held in various Dutch concentration and prison camps until the war's end. Miep Gies was questioned and threatened by the Security Police but not detained. Bep Voskuijl managed to escape with a few documents that would have incriminated their black market contacts. During the following days, the two female secretaries returned to the Achterhuis and found Anne's papers strewn on the floor. They collected them, as well as several family photograph albums, and Gies resolved to return them to Anne after the war. On 7 August 1944, Gies attempted to facilitate the release of the prisoners by confronting Silberbauer and offering him money to intervene, but he refused.

Source of discovery

In 2015, Flemish journalist Jeroen De Bruyn and Joop van Wijk, Bep Voskuijl's youngest son, wrote a biography in which they alleged that Bep's younger sister Nelly (1923-2001) could have betrayed the Franks. Nelly was a Nazi collaborator from the age of 19 to 23. She had run away to Austria with a Nazi officer, and returned to Amsterdam in 1943 after the relationship ended. Nelly had been critical of Bep and their father, Johannes Voskuijl, for helping the Jews; Johannes was the one who constructed the bookcase covering the entrance to the hiding place and remained as an unofficial watchman of the hideout. In one of their quarrels, Nelly shouted to them, "Go to your Jews." Karl Josef Silberbauer, the SS officer who made the arrest, was reported to have said that the informer had "the voice of a young woman".[unreliable source? ]

In 2016, the Anne Frank House published new research pointing to an investigation over ration card fraud, rather than betrayal, as a possible explanation for the raid that led to the arrest of the Franks. The report stated that other activities in the building may have led authorities there, including activities of Frank's company; however, it did not rule out betrayal.

In January 2022, some investigators proposed Arnold van den Bergh, a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council who died in 1950, as the suspected informant. The investigators postulated that van den Bergh gave up the Franks to save his family. The investigation is chronicled in Rosemary Sullivan's book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Evidence was also claimed to have been found that Anne Frank's father later knew this but did not reveal it after the war. According to the BBC, these investigators "spend six years using modern investigative techniques to crack the 'cold case...'." However, according to The New York Times, several World War II and Holocaust scholars have doubted the methods and conclusion of the investigation, calling the evidence "far too thin".

Shortly after the publication of The Betrayal of Anne Frank, after criticism from scholars Bart van der Boom, David Barnouw and Johannes Houwink ten Cate, publisher Ambo Anthos, via an internal email, apologized for the publication of the Dutch translation. They said they should have been more critical and announced that they are "await(ing) the answers from the researchers to the questions that have emerged and are delaying the decision to print another run". In response, Pieter van Twisk, one of the investigators used in the book, said that he was "perplexed by the email" and that the investigators had never claimed to have uncovered the complete truth. In March 2022, a group of World War Two experts and historians published their analysis of the argumentation and use of historical sources in The Betrayal of Anne Frank, contending the central claim that the Amsterdam Jewish council even had a list of Jewish hiding places that Van den Bergh could draw on, and concluding that the accusation of Van den Bergh was based on weak assumptions and lack of historical knowledge. As a result, the Dutch language version of the book was recalled by the publisher.

On 19 August 2022, the Dutch researcher Natasha Gerson published an 80-page report of an annotation check, which argued that the theory in the book was not only flawed but the product of source fraud. In Rosemary Sullivan's book, Otto Frank's agenda, a letter Otto received from helper Johannes Kleiman and several statements were proven to be distorted to suit the outcome. Several negative claims about notary van der Bergh had Anton Schepers, a Nazi adversary who was diagnosed twice as insane and who had taken over Van der Bergh's practice, as the only source. This included the claim of Nazi contacts and a commission of 200,000 guilders paid on the sale of Goudstikker's art business. While the book said Van den Bergh enjoyed the protection of two high-up Nazis, the CCT and Sullivan omitted statements that the named Nazis had not known Van den Bergh. The German edition, previously postponed, was soon afterwards discontinued.

Deportation and life in captivity

On 3 September 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrived after a three-day journey; on the same train was Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Amsterdam native who had befriended Margot and Anne in the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. Bloeme saw Anne, Margot, and their mother regularly in Auschwitz, and was interviewed for her remembrances of the Frank women in Auschwitz in the television documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1988) by Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer and the BBC documentary Anne Frank Remembered (1995).

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the SS forcibly split the men from the women and children, and Otto Frank was separated from his family. Those deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labour were immediately killed. Of the 1,019 passengers, 549-including all children younger than 15-were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne Frank, who had turned 15 three months earlier, was one of the youngest people spared from her transport. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival and never learned that the entire group from the Achterhuis had survived this selection. She reasoned that her father, in his mid-fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated.

With the other women and girls not selected for immediate death, Frank was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved, and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. By day, the women were used as slave labour and Frank was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod; by night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks. Some witnesses later testified Frank became withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers; others reported that more often she displayed strength and courage. Her gregarious and confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother, sister, and herself. Disease was rampant; before long, Frank's skin became badly infected by scabies. The Frank sisters were moved into an infirmary, which was in a state of constant darkness and infested with rats and mice. Edith Frank stopped eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters and passing her rations to them through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.

Memorial for Margot and Anne Frank at the former Bergen-Belsen site

In October 1944, the Frank women were scheduled to join a transport to the Liebau labour camp in Lower Silesia. Bloeme Evers-Emden was scheduled to be on this transport, but Anne was prohibited from going because she had developed scabies, and her mother and sister opted to stay with her. Bloeme went on without them.

On 28 October, selections began for women to be relocated to Bergen-Belsen. More than 8,000 women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transported. Edith Frank was left behind and died of disease and starvation. Tents were erected at Bergen-Belsen to accommodate the influx of prisoners, and as the population rose, the death toll due to disease increased rapidly.

Anne Frank was briefly reunited with two friends, Hanneli Goslar and Nanette Blitz, who were also confined in the camp. Blitz had been moved from the Sternlager to the same section of the camp as Frank on 5 December 1944, while Goslar had been held in the Sternlager since February 1944. Both women survived the war, and later discussed the conversations they had with Frank, Blitz in person and Goslar through a barbed wire fence. Blitz described Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering, remarking: "[The] shock of seeing her in this emaciated state was indescribable." Anne told her that she hoped to write a book based on the diary when the war ended. Goslar noted Auguste van Pels was with Anne and Margot Frank, and was caring for Margot, who was severely ill. She also recalled she did not see Margot, as she was too weak to leave her bunk, while Blitz stated she met with both of the Frank sisters. Anne told Blitz and Goslar she believed her parents were dead, and for that reason she did not wish to live any longer. Goslar later estimated their meetings had taken place in late January or early February 1945.

Anne Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. The specific cause is unknown; however, there is evidence to suggest that she died from a typhus epidemic that spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners. Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, knew Anne at the camp. In 2015, she told the British newspaper : "Her bed was around the corner from me. She was delirious, terrible, burning up." She said she had brought Frank water to wash. Turgel, who worked in the camp hospital, said that the epidemic took a terrible toll on the inmates: "The people were dying like flies-in the hundreds. Reports used to come in-500 people who died. Three hundred? We said, 'Thank God, only 300.'" Other diseases, including typhoid fever, were rampant.

Witnesses later testified Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died a day after Margot. The dates of Margot's and Anne's deaths were not recorded. It was long thought that their deaths occurred only a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, but research in 2015 indicated that they may have died as early as February. Among other evidence, witnesses recalled that the Franks displayed typhus symptoms by 7 February, and Dutch health authorities reported that most untreated typhus victims died within 12 days of their first symptoms. Additionally, Hanneli Goslar stated her father, Hans Goslar, died one or two weeks after their first meeting;[better source needed ] Hans died on 25 February 1945. After the war, it was estimated that only 5,000 of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944 survived. An estimated 30,000 Jews remained in the Netherlands, with many people aided by the Dutch underground. Approximately two thirds of this group survived the war.

Otto Frank survived his internment in Auschwitz. After the war ended, he returned to Amsterdam in June 1945 where he was sheltered by Jan and Miep Gies as he attempted to locate his family. He learned of the death of his wife, Edith, during his journey to Amsterdam, but remained hopeful that his daughters had survived. After several weeks, he discovered Margot and Anne had also died. He attempted to determine the fates of his daughters' friends and learned many had been murdered. Sanne Ledermann, often mentioned in Anne's diary, had been gassed along with her parents; her sister, Barbara Ledermann, a close friend of Margot's, had survived. Several of the Frank sisters' school friends had survived, as had the extended families of Otto and Edith Frank, as they had fled Germany during the mid-1930s, with individual family members settling in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Publication

Het Achterhuis (literally, "the rear house"), the first Dutch edition of Anne Frank's diary, published in 1947, later translated into English as The Diary of a Young Girl

In July 1945, after the sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who were with Anne and Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen, confirmed the deaths of the Frank sisters, Miep Gies gave Otto Frank Anne's notebooks (including the red-and-white checkered diary) and a bundle of loose notes that she and Bep Voskuijl had saved in the hope of returning them to Anne. Otto Frank later commented that he had not realized Anne had kept such an accurate and well-written record of their time in hiding. In his memoir, he described the painful process of reading the diary, recognizing the events described and recalling that he had already heard some of the more amusing episodes read aloud by his daughter. He saw for the first time the more private side of his daughter and those sections of the diary she had not discussed with anyone, noting, "For me it was a revelation... I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings... She had kept all these feelings to herself". Moved by her repeated wish to be an author, he began to consider having it published.

Frank's diary began as a private expression of her thoughts; she wrote several times that she would never allow anyone to read it. She candidly described her life, her family and companions, and their situation, while beginning to recognize her ambition to write fiction for publication. In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein-a member of the Dutch government in exile, based in London-who said that when the war ended, he would create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under German occupation. He mentioned the publication of letters and diaries, and Frank decided to submit her work when the time came. She began editing her writing, removing some sections and rewriting others, with a view to publication. Her original notebook was supplemented by additional notebooks and loose-leaf sheets of paper. She created pseudonyms for the members of the household and the helpers. The Van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella, and Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. In this edited version, she addressed each entry to "Kitty," a fictional character in Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels that Anne enjoyed reading. Otto Frank used her original diary, known as "version A", and her edited version, known as "version B", to produce the first version for publication. Although he restored the true identities of his own family, he retained all of the other pseudonyms.

Otto Frank gave the diary to the historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, who tried unsuccessfully to have it published. She then gave it to her husband Jan Romein, who wrote an article about it, titled "Kinderstem" ("A Child's Voice"), which was published in the newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946. He wrote that the diary "stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together." His article attracted attention from publishers, and the diary was published in the Netherlands as Het Achterhuis ( The Annex) (literally, "the back house") in 1947, followed by five more printings by 1950.

It was first published in Germany and France in 1950, and after being rejected by several publishers, was first published in the United Kingdom in 1952. The first American edition, published in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, was positively reviewed. The book was successful in France, Germany, and the United States, but in the United Kingdom it failed to attract an audience and by 1953 was out of print. Its most noteworthy success was in Japan, where it received critical acclaim and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first edition. In Japan, Anne Frank quickly was identified as an important cultural figure who represented the destruction of youth during the war.

A play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett based upon the diary premiered in New York City on 5 October 1955, and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was followed by the film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), which was a critical and commercial success. Biographer Melissa Müller later wrote that the dramatization had "contributed greatly to the romanticizing, sentimentalizing and universalizing of Anne's story." Over the years the popularity of the diary grew, and in many schools, particularly in the United States, it was included as part of the curriculum, introducing Anne Frank to new generations of readers.

The diary has been praised for its literary merits. Commenting on Anne Frank's writing style, the dramatist Meyer Levin commended Frank for "sustaining the tension of a well-constructed novel", and was so impressed by the quality of her work that he collaborated with Otto Frank on a dramatization of the diary shortly after its publication. Levin became obsessed with Anne Frank, which he wrote about in his autobiography The Obsession. The poet John Berryman called the book a unique depiction, not merely of adolescence but of the "conversion of a child into a person as it is happening in a precise, confident, economical style stunning in its honesty".

In her introduction to the diary's first American edition, Eleanor Roosevelt described it as "one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read." John F. Kennedy discussed Anne Frank in a 1961 speech, and said, "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank." In the same year, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of her: "one voice speaks for six million-the voice not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl."

As Anne Frank's stature as both a writer and humanist has grown, she has been discussed specifically as a symbol of the Holocaust and more broadly as a representative of persecution. Hillary Clinton, in her acceptance speech for an Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award in 1994, read from Anne Frank's diary and spoke of her "awakening us to the folly of indifference and the terrible toll it takes on our young," which Clinton related to contemporary events in Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda. After receiving a humanitarian award from the Anne Frank Foundation in 1994, Nelson Mandela addressed a crowd in Johannesburg, saying he had read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much encouragement from it." He likened her struggle against Nazism to his struggle against apartheid, drawing a parallel between the two philosophies: "Because these beliefs are patently false, and because they were, and will always be, challenged by the likes of Anne Frank, they are bound to fail." Also in 1994, Václav Havel said "Anne Frank's legacy is very much alive and it can address us fully" in relation to the political and social changes occurring at the time in former Eastern Bloc countries.

Primo Levi suggested Anne Frank is frequently identified as a single representative of the millions of people who suffered and died as she did because "One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live." In her closing message in Müller's biography of Anne Frank, Miep Gies expressed a similar thought, though she attempted to dispel what she felt was a growing misconception that "Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust", writing: "Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over. Anne cannot, and should not, stand for the many individuals whom the Nazis robbed of their lives... But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust."

Otto Frank spent the remainder of his life as custodian of his daughter's legacy, saying, "It's a strange role. In the normal family relationship, it is the child of the famous parent who has the honour and the burden of continuing the task. In my case the role is reversed." He recalled his publisher's explaining why he thought the diary has been so widely read, with the comment, "he said that the diary encompasses so many areas of life that each reader can find something that moves him personally". Simon Wiesenthal expressed a similar sentiment when he said that the diary had raised more widespread awareness of the Holocaust than had been achieved during the Nuremberg Trials, because "people identified with this child. This was the impact of the Holocaust, this was a family like my family, like your family and so you could understand this."

In June 1999, magazine published a special edition titled " Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century". Anne Frank was selected as one of the "Heroes & Icons", and the writer, Roger Rosenblatt, described her legacy with the comment, "The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world-the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings." He notes that while her courage and pragmatism are admired, her ability to analyse herself and the quality of her writing are the key components of her appeal. He writes, "The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition."

Denials of authenticity and legal action

After the diary became widely known in the late 1950s, various allegations against the veracity of the diary and/or its contents appeared, with the earliest published criticisms occurring in Sweden and Norway. In 1957, ("Free Words"), the magazine of the Swedish neofascist organization National League of Sweden, published an article by Danish author and critic Harald Nielsen, who had previously written antisemitic articles about the Danish-Jewish author Georg Brandes. Among other things, the article claimed that the diary had been written by Meyer Levin.

In 1958, at a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal was challenged by a group of protesters who asserted that Anne Frank had never existed, and who challenged Wiesenthal to prove her existence by finding the man who had arrested her. Wiesenthal indeed began searching for Karl Silberbauer and found him in 1963. When interviewed, Silberbauer admitted his role, and identified Anne Frank from a photograph as one of the people arrested. Silberbauer provided a full account of events, even recalling emptying a briefcase full of papers onto the floor. His statement corroborated the version of events that had previously been presented by witnesses such as Otto Frank.

In 1959, Otto Frank took legal action in Lübeck against Lothar Stielau, a school teacher and former Hitler Youth member who published a school paper that described the diary as "a forgery". The complaint was extended to include Heinrich Buddegerg, who wrote a letter in support of Stielau, which was published in a Lübeck newspaper. The court examined the diary in 1960 and authenticated the handwriting as matching that in letters known to have been written by Anne Frank. They declared the diary to be genuine. Stielau recanted his earlier statement, and Otto Frank did not pursue the case any further.

In 1976, Otto Frank took action against Heinz Roth of Frankfurt, who published pamphlets stating that the diary was "a forgery". The judge ruled that if Roth were to publish any further statements he would be subjected to a fine of 500,000 German marks and a six-month jail sentence. Roth appealed against the court's decision. He died in 1978, and after a year his appeal was rejected.

Otto Frank mounted a lawsuit in 1976 against Ernst Römer, who distributed a pamphlet titled "The Diary of Anne Frank, Bestseller, A Lie". When a man named Edgar Geiss distributed the same pamphlet in the courtroom, he too was prosecuted. Römer was fined 1,500 Deutschmarks, and Geiss was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. The sentence of Geiss was reduced on appeal, and the case was eventually dropped following a subsequent appeal because the time limit for filing a libel case had expired.

With Otto Frank's death in 1980, the original diary, including letters and loose sheets, was willed to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, which commissioned a forensic study of the diary through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice in 1986. They examined the handwriting against known examples and found that they matched. They determined that the paper, glue, and ink were readily available during the time the diary was said to have been written. They concluded that the diary is authentic, and their findings were published in what has become known as the "Critical Edition" of the diary. In 1990, the Hamburg Regional Court confirmed the diary's authenticity.

In 1991, Holocaust deniers Robert Faurisson and Siegfried Verbeke produced a booklet titled " The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical Approach", in which they revived the allegation that Otto Frank wrote the diary. Purported evidence, as before, included several contradictions in the diary, that the prose style and handwriting were not those of a teenager, and that hiding in the Achterhuis would have been impossible. In 1993, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel filed a civil lawsuit to prohibit further distribution of Faurisson and Verbeke's booklet in the Netherlands. In 1998, the Amsterdam District Court ruled in favour of the claimants, forbade any further denial of the authenticity of the diary and unsolicited distribution of publications to that effect, and imposed a penalty of 25,000 guilders per infringement.

Censored sections

Since the original publication, several sections of Anne's diaries which were initially edited out have been revealed and included in new editions. These contain passages relating to her sexuality, exploration of her genitalia, and her thoughts on menstruation. Following the conclusion of an ownership dispute in 2001, new editions have also incorporated pages removed by Otto Frank prior to publication which contain critical remarks about her parents' strained marriage and discuss her difficult relationship with her mother. Two additional pages which Anne had pasted over with brown paper were deciphered in 2018, and contained an attempt to explain sex education and a handful of "dirty" jokes.

On 3 May 1957, a group of Dutch citizens, including Otto Frank, established the Anne Frank Stichting in an effort to rescue the Prinsengracht building from demolition and to make it accessible to the public. The Anne Frank House opened on 3 May 1960. It consists of the Opekta warehouse and offices and the , all unfurnished so that visitors can walk freely through the rooms. Some personal relics of the former occupants remain, such as movie star photographs glued by Anne to a wall, a section of wallpaper on which Otto Frank marked the height of his growing daughters, and a map on the wall where he recorded the advance of the Allied Forces, all now protected behind acrylic glass. The House provides information via the internet and offers exhibitions. From the small room which was once home to Peter van Pels, a walkway connects the building to its neighbors, also purchased by the Foundation. These other buildings are used to house the diary, as well as rotating exhibits that chronicle aspects of the Holocaust and more contemporary examinations of racial intolerance around the world. One of Amsterdam's main tourist attractions, it received an average of 1.2 million visitors between 2011 and 2020.

Statue of Anne Frank, by Mari Andriessen, outside the Westerkerk in Amsterdam

In 1963, Otto Frank and his second wife, Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits, set up the Anne Frank Fonds as a charitable foundation, based in Basel, Switzerland. Upon his death, Otto willed the diary's copyright to the Fonds, on the provision that the first 80,000 Swiss francs in income each year was to be distributed to his heirs. The Anne Frank Fonds represents the Frank family and administers the rights, inter alia, to the writings of Anne and Otto Frank and to the letters of the Frank family. It is the owner of the rights to translations, editions, compilations, and authorised books about Anne Frank and her family. The Fonds educate young people against racism, and loaned some of Anne Frank's papers to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for an exhibition in 2003. Its annual report that year outlined its efforts to contribute on a global level, with support for projects in Germany, Israel, India, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In 1997, the Anne Frank Educational Centre (Jugendbegegnungsstätte Anne Frank ) was opened in the Dornbusch neighbourhood of Frankfurt, where Frank lived with her family until 1934. The centre is "a place where both young people and adults can learn about the history of National Socialism and discuss its relevance to today."

The Anne Frank School in Amsterdam

The Anne Frank tree in the garden behind the Anne Frank House

The Merwedeplein apartment, where the Frank family lived from 1933 until 1942, remained privately owned until the 2000s. After featuring in a television documentary, the building-in a serious state of disrepair-was purchased by a Dutch housing corporation. Aided by photographs taken by the Frank family and descriptions in letters written by Anne Frank, it was restored to its 1930s appearance. Teresien da Silva of the Anne Frank House and Frank's cousin, Bernhard "Buddy" Elias, contributed to the restoration project. It opened in 2005. Each year, a writer who is unable to write freely in their own country is selected for a year-long tenancy, during which they reside and write in the apartment. The first writer selected was the Algerian novelist and poet El-Mahdi Acherchour.

Anne Frank is included as one of the topics in the Canon of the Netherlands, which was prepared by a committee headed by Frits van Oostrom and presented to the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Maria van der Hoeven, in 2006. The Canon is a list of fifty topics that aims to provide a chronological summary of Dutch history to be taught in primary schools and the first two years of secondary school in the Netherlands. A revised version, which still includes her as one of the topics, was presented to the Dutch government on 3 October 2007, and approved in 2020.

In June 2007, "Buddy" Elias donated some 25,000 family documents to the Anne Frank House. Among the artefacts are Frank family photographs taken in Germany and the Netherlands and the letter Otto Frank sent his mother in 1945, informing her that his wife and daughters had perished in Nazi concentration camps.

In November 2007, the Anne Frank tree-by then infected with a fungal disease affecting the tree trunk-was scheduled to be cut down to prevent it from falling on the surrounding buildings. Dutch economist Arnold Heertje said about the tree: "This is not just any tree. The Anne Frank tree is bound up with the persecution of the Jews." The Tree Foundation, a group of tree conservationists, started a civil case to stop the felling of the horse chestnut, which received international media attention. A Dutch court ordered city officials and conservationists to explore alternatives and come to a solution. The parties built a steel construction that was expected to prolong the life of the tree up to 15 years. However, it was only three years later, on 23 August 2010, that gale-force winds blew down the tree. Eleven saplings from the tree were distributed to museums, schools, parks and Holocaust remembrance centres through a project led by the Anne Frank Center USA. The first sapling was planted in April 2013 at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Saplings were also sent to a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, the scene of a desegregation battle; Liberty Park (Manhattan), which honours victims of the September 11 attacks; and other sites in the United States. Another horse chestnut tree honouring Frank was planted in 2010 at Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama.

Over the years, several films about Anne Frank appeared. Her life and writings have inspired a diverse group of artists and social commentators to make reference to her in literature, popular music, television, and other media. These include The Anne Frank Ballet by Adam Darius, first performed in 1959, and the choral works (2005) and The Beauty That Still Remains by Marcus Paus (2015). The only known footage of the real Anne Frank comes from a 1941 silent film recorded for her newlywed next-door neighbor. She is seen leaning out of a second-floor window in an attempt to better view the bride and groom. The couple, who survived the war, gave the film to the Anne Frank House.

In 1999, named Anne Frank among the heroes and icons of the 20th century on their list The Most Important People of the Century, stating: "With a diary kept in a secret attic, she braved the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight for human dignity". Philip Roth called her the "lost little daughter" of Franz Kafka. Madame Tussauds wax museum unveiled an exhibit featuring a likeness of Anne Frank in 2012. Asteroid 5535 Annefrank was named in her honour in 1995, after having been discovered in 1942.

As of 2018, there are over 270 schools named after Anne Frank worldwide. 100 of them are in Germany, 89 in France, 45 in Italy, 17 in the Netherlands (among them the 6th Montessori School in Amsterdam which Frank herself attended until 1941), 4 in Brazil, 4 in the United States (among them the Anne Frank Inspire Academy), 2 in Bulgaria and one each in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, Spain, Hungary, Israel, Nepal, Uruguay and Sweden. In 2020, the first of a series of Anne Frank Children's Human Rights Memorials was placed adjacent to a high school in Maaleh, Adumim, outside of Jerusalem. In 2021, the second memorial was unveiled in Antigua, Guatemala, and another is in fabrication in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to be opened on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January 2022.

On 25 June 2022, a slideshow Google Doodle was dedicated in the honour of Anne Frank marking the 75th anniversary of the publication of her diary.

References

Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography

Books

Berryman, John (2000) [1999]. "The Development of Anne Frank". In Enzer, Hyman Aaron; Solotaroff-Enzer, Sandra (eds.). Anne Frank: Reflections on her life and legacy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0252068232.

Enzer, Hyman Aaron; Solotaroff-Enzer, Sandra, eds. (1999). Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0252068232.

Frank, Anne (1995) [1947]. Frank, Otto H.; Pressler, Mirjam (eds.). Het Achterhuis [The Diary of a Young Girl - The Definitive Edition] (in Dutch). Massotty, Susan (translation). Doubleday. ISBN 0553296981.; This edition, a new translation, includes material excluded from the earlier edition.

Frank, Anne; Holmer, Per (2005). Anne Franks dagbok : den oavkortade originalutgåvan : anteckningar från gömstället 12 juni 1942 - 1 augusti 1944 [Anne Frank's Diary: The Unabridged Original Edition: Notes From the Hiding Place] (in Swedish). Stockholm: Norstedt. ISBN 978-9113014029.

Lee, Carol Ann (2000). The Biography of Anne Frank - Roses from the Earth. London: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0708991749.

Lindwer, Willy (1988). The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. Netherlands: Gooi & Sticht.

Müller, Melissa (1999) [1998]. Das Mädchen Anne Frank [Anne Frank: The Biography] (in German). Kimber, Rita and Robert (translators). New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0747545231. OCLC 42369449.; With a note from Miep Gies

Prose, Francine (2009). Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0061430794.

van der Rol, Ruud; Verhoeven, Rian (1995). Anne Frank - Beyond the Diary - A Photographic Remembrance. Langham, Tony & Peters, Plym (translation). New York: Puffin. ISBN 978-0140369267.

Online

"Anne Frank House, Annual Report 2005" (PDF). Anne Frank House. March 2006. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 February 2008.

Barnauw, David; van der Stroom, Gerrold (25 April 2003). "Who Betrayed Anne Frank?" (PDF). Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 March 2010.

Clinton, Hillary (14 April 1994). "Remarks by the First Lady, Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Awards, New York City". Clinton4.nara.gov. Archived from the original on 7 May 2011.

Feldman, Ellen (February-March 2005). "Anne Frank in America". American Heritage. 56 (1). Archived from the original on 31 July 2013.

Mandela, Nelson (15 August 1994). "Address by President Nelson Mandela at the Johannesburg opening of the Anne Frank exhibition at the Museum Africa". African National Congress. Archived from the original on 3 December 2007.

Michaelsen, Jacob B. (Spring 1997). "Remembering Anne Frank". Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought. 46 (2).

Romein, Jan. "The publication of the diary: reproduction of Jan Romein's Het Parool article Kinderstem". Anne Frank Museum. Archived from the original on 29 April 2007.

Further reading

External links

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Annelies Marie Frank (German: [ˈanə(liːsmaˈʁiː)ˈfʁaŋk] , Dutch: c. [ˌɑnəˈlismaːˈriˈfrɑŋk,ˈɑnəˈfrɑŋk] ; 12 June 1929 -  February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution. She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic.

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Read 4,718 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black ...