The first adaptations of the myth of Romeo and Juliet in Catalan Literature

Abstract

The first adaptations of the Romeo and Juliet theme in Catalan literature are Víctor Balaguer's "Les esposalles de la morta" (1878) and Josep Maria Codolosa's "Les ventalles de la porta" (1881). Balaguer's title alludes to the state of the 'dead' Catalan language with which he engages. After centuries of Spanish-language prevalence, Balaguer writes one of the first tragedies in Catalan literature by resorting to the Romeo and Juliet myth, grafting it with the Romantic motif of the living dead and writing in a highly rhetorical, archaic language. Codolosa's work is a parody of Balaguer's tragedy: the readers' expectations of sublimity clash with the ridiculous situations in which the local working-class characters get involved, and the language used is 'the Catalan that is now spoken'. Each writer uses the Romeo and Juliet theme for his own literary and linguistic agenda. In the case of Balaguer, he sows the seeds for the construction of a Catalan tragic literary tradition. In the case of Codolosa, his purpose is to entertain through lowbrow literature, and he does so by recurring both to popular language and to intertextual parody, which includes not only Balaguer's text, but also the comic and parodic Catalan literary tradition as well as the Spanish and Catalan parodies of Shakespeare's tragedies that were in vogue at the time.