Reading Romeo and Juliet’s Illustrations as Paratext: A Close-up on the Balcony Scene

Abstract

"Reading “Romeo and Juliet”’s Illustrations as Paratext: A Close-up on the Balcony Scene. Paratextual elements, particularly illustrations, play a crucial role in how the texts they accompany are understood by their readers. As instances of intersemiotic translation—the result of transfer of linguistic signs into visual ones—, they direct the readers’ meaning-making process by encapsulating not only the illustrators’ own artistic vision, but also by bringing to the fore socio-cultural elements of both the historical context and its contemporary readership. The range of intersemiotic translation techniques in use to do this lead to the creation of illustrations whose degree of faithfulness to the text varies. This article considers a number of illustrations corresponding to the balcony scene in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that were produced in a time span between the 18th century and the present. It looks in more detail at how these illustrations faithfully connect to the original play and to the broad historical context in which it was written or, rather, use them as input only to reflect other attitudes, points of view, socio-cultural tendencies, etc. Keywords: illustrations as paratext, interesemiotic translation, the balcony scene, William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” text re-creation"