ebrity of Chaucer’s creation.But Shakespeare was to take a love tragedy and put it on a public stage; and it was to be a story that dealt not with lofty figures from the distant past or ancient epic, but with two adolescents in a recognisably modern city-state. Like Sidney’s sequence, and like the two brie comedies of these years, Romeo and Juliet hovers tantalisingly between fiction and actuality - in keeping with classical prescriptions, it is a tragedy based on a story that was believed to be true. In its ultimate Italian source, a novel by Masuccio Salernitano (published in 1576), the story of the lovers, Mariotto and Gianozza, is said to have taken place during the author’s lifetime. When Luigi da Porta published his version in 1530, with the names changed to Romeo and Giulietta, and their families identified as the Montecchi and Capelletti, he claimed that his tale was verifiable fact (although the historical Capelletti came from Cremona, and da Porta’s coupling of them was based on a very literal reading of a line in Dante). Corte, in his history of Verona (1594) accepted da Porta’s word and told the story as an illustration of the civil dissent of the time. To this day, tourists to Verona are directed to the major sites featured in the tragic story....
