by Shaun Wing

Created on: March 30, 2010

If daggers could come out of eyes, she would have used them to strike me down in the grounds of Reading University Campus. I'd only had a mouthful of watered down 'Campus draught lager,' before the works of Shakespeare were discussed and frosted the ambiance. I found that Post Graduate Theorists got rather theatrical about their faithful subjects, especially when realism, provocation mixed with conflicting views, marked a stand-off at dawn charade. I wasn't alone in my announcement that our beloved William Shakespeare was actually a 'pot head,' and allegedly stole much of Dante's work from Verona, Italy, that was written over three hundred years before Shakespeare's period. Romeo and Juliet, was the English translation. 'Juliet' was not spelt 'Juliette.' Not at any point from the Italian translation. The name 'Romeo' is profoundly 'Italian' yet the young heroine 'Juliet' is an English spelling. This brings me to the notion the greatest play ever written is most definitely a translation from Latin, when the Roman Empire were the leaders of the arts and literature, all of which were rife with rich content from bold atrocities, to the most beautiful love stories. Thanks to the most famous of them all Dante.

Dante had supposedly fallen in love at first sight; at a tender age of nine years old, and proceeded to greet her in the street after the age of eighteen. He only started to write about his experiences more when he went to Verona. All very coincidental, as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet stage is set in Verona, just as fore-told by Dante. Opium was a major trade in Portugal and in the Latin countries at the end of the 16th century and just like 'honey to a bee,' Shakespeare used the maritime transport to initially get a slice of the pie to bring over to the British Empire to trade, but got seduced in the drug world and cavorted with drug barons; he would steal literature artefacts while glazed-eyed on dope and stowed it away until the next Opium instalment. Shakespeare may have been a promising young writer, but the talent was extinguished due to his dependence for Opium. The dependence stemmed a more obvious character matter, that of deceitfulness, and stark cold manipulation; his peers were afraid of his wrath.

*Meanwhile in Verona*

The feud between the Capulets and the Montagues at the centre of the blighted, sad tale only fermented itself in a mere kafuffle when it comes to stage and on screen antics. The writing is nevertheless a far different agenda,

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