This hypertext project is a wide-reaching and ever-expanding attempt to understand why a story of two teenaged lovers written centuries prior is still so prolific and transcendent today. It is also an attempt to ponder why remix culture plays such a significant role within Romeo & Juliet’s many remakes.

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When I was first introduced to Romeo & Juliet, I was a teenager in an English classroom. We were assigned to do a dramatic reading that stretched over the month of October of that year, to dissect and understand why the star-crossed lovers were so doomed, and why the tragedy of poor Romeo and Juliet was such a significant cautionary tale. I vied and fought for the role of Juliet, because I was a year younger than she was, and her naïve hopeless romantic matched mine. As we explored the text, I lingered far longer between the pages than my other classmates. We watched both the 1986 and 1998 versions, and I found myself poring over my copy of the text as the rest of the class was perfectly content to sit back, zone out, and focus on the faces onscreen.

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My love for Romeo & Juliet—and Shakespeare in general—remained prominent long after eighth grade was over. While I haven't touched on every edition, most of this list has been circulated in multiple classes and personal projects. Over the course of my academic career, I revisited the text in a multitude of ways—plays, the Bowdler version of the text, more movies, music and lyrics, modern retellings—and the same locus was laced throughout almost every single version—Romeo and Juliet’s star-crossed love was so doomed because of their adolescence, because being a young teenager makes you think you’re both invincible and completely the captain of your own fate. The story, I hypothesized, wasn’t a tragedy because these poor teenagers fell fast into love and died almost entirely of their own hand—it was because of the way adolescence is viewed retroactively as melodramatic from adulthood, and because their parents were too blinded by their own feud to realize how it was destroying their children.

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My thesis, then, in no uncertain terms is as follows: Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet is so transcendent because of the way adolescence is inherently tied to the allure of forbidden love, and the remixes included within this project are especially relevant and well-made because they marry earnest youth with fated death.

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Remix culture, as introduced by Lawrence Lessig, is a beast made up of a multitude of things. Focusing primarily in his research on the laws and statutes of copyright vs. creative commons, Lessig discusses at length how copyright culture has shifted over the past few centuries. Citing the Licensing Act of 1664, as well as the precedent set by the Statute of Anne, Lessig argues that copyright culture gave more freedom than it did restriction. His question was why one would limit copyrights? What is the purpose of doing so? Lessig goes on in his fascinating talk to suppose that most publishers throughout history, and certainly ones in the modern digital age, have been inspired by the love of the public around works both in and out of the public domain. Copyright, initially, was for protection of the author’s rights. While Lessig stresses that author’s rights and subsequent monopolies is just as crucial within the modern publishing industry, I would argue that the freedom of works within the public domain today—including, but certainly not limited to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet—adds to the original work, not subtracts from it. Each new version of Shakespeare’s original tale adds its own spin, but it also follows down the original message and warning of the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet. Lessig, in his talk, hypothesizes that transformative works that are remixed instead of remade are not derivative, but are instead a continued narrative of the original story. The Digital Age allows work that has been around for centuries to get a modernized and updated version that still explicitly hones in on the original author’s point. Each example within this project is a remix that takes a different route to arrive at the same ending: that Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy is wrapped up in their adolescence, which in turn leads them to their early demise.

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There are countless remixes of Shakespeare’s famous Romeo & Juliet—primarily adaptations that are modernized or updated from the original 1597 version—but the ones I’ve chosen within this project follow that same thread of Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy hinging upon their adolescence. In each of these remixes, the allure of having a forbidden love isn’t just within rebelling against their parents—it seems to be an essential part of their adolescence. When Leo and Claire’s versions appear onscreen, earnest and young, it’s easy to get caught up in the flashiness and color of gang violence and ignore how their youth is a main driving factor. When Taylor Swift initially made her video for "Love Story" back in 2009, she was still a teenager herself, and the lyrics of “you were Romeo / you were throwing pebbles / and my daddy said ‘stay away from Juliet’” in the bridge point to the reckless abandon of adolescence. In the chorus, her refrain of  “Romeo, save me / they’re trying to tell me how to feel / this love is difficult / but it’s real” lays bare the inherent youth of her speaker, and how easy it is to get caught up in a romance when you’re in your adolescence; how the forbidden nature of being with someone you shouldn’t is inherently alluring to the young. When R and Julie begin a strange relationship of human and inhuman set against the post-apocalyptic backdrop of their own fair (war-torn) Verona, it’s clear that their romance stays so bright and fortified because they’re younger and more malleable than the adults around them. And, finally, in "Now or Never", the audience watches as Luna and Solis’ quiet, light scenes clash drastically with the flashy, violence-ridden ones of when their families find out about their forbidden love. Through this, too, the audience sees a genuine earnestness of every version of Romeo and Juliet, and how their fate-marked love is illustrated through both characters at the height of their dramatic adolescence. Therefore, all these versions are showcasing how Shakespeare’s tragedy is still prevalent—because the divide between adulthood and adolescence is so vast, and because once one has left their teenage years, it’s so easy to forget how vivid and real young love is. No matter the situation, regardless of how the Capulets and Montagues are displayed onstage, whether it be in the violent streets of a new Verona, in a music video that shows how love can transcend both time and space, or in a post-apocalyptic city with humans and zombies, Shakespeare’s tale of our star-crossed lovers is so prevalent because forbidden love is so alluring to adolescents—because there is nothing more romantic and truer than being young, in love, and willing to die for it.

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This project, then, is transcendent as well. So many elements and specifics of these examples are ones that cannot be explored within a strictly linear format. A hypertext project allows all of these connecting themes to be held together—but not limited to—Shakespeare’s iconic, sustained narrative of poor Juliet and her Romeo. In exploring this fair Verona, you will travel to the apocalypse and aftermath, gun-stricken Los Angeles, a time of magic and wonder, and the criminal underbelly of a city that could be anywhere on Earth. One major affordance of hypertext, as George P. Landow showcases in his book Hypertext 3.0, is that it grants the reader more power than in any other example of writing or print. Just as the Digital Age allows for remix culture, it also allows for readers in the modern era to interrogate and immerse themselves in work that is centuries old and continue its transcendence. Landow stresses not only how important hypertext is for the understanding of multiple subjects, but also supposes that electronic linking of lexias is a connection only the modern, digital world has (109). In this project, I’d like to think that I’m undertaking the best of both worlds—Lessig’s idea of transformative remixing of an original work, and Landow’s hypothesis that hypertext is an all-encompassing form of continuing storytelling in a non-linear format—to make Romeo & Juliet’s many adaptations into something starry and transcendent of my own.