Quarrel In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

Luhrmann’s portrayal of the quarrel in the first scene of Romeo and Juliet is characterized by its fragmentary nature. Shakespeare’s play is sampled and remediated in multiple forms, extending from labels on weapons to text on signboards to both diegetic and extradiegetic music. Rapid cuts and mixing of the text in this scene serve to translate the fight for a modern audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare while simultaneously paying homage to the Bard.

The film dialogue jumps from “The quarrel is between our masters and us their men” (Shakespeare 1.1.19), to “here comes two of the house” (1.1.32), cutting out Gregory and Sampson’s puns on maiden’s heads. Luhrmann remediates this missing passage in multiple ways to retain the sexual nature of the scene. Most obvious is the sampling of Sampson’s line

One Inch Punch contributed a song with this line as the title, and the story and text of Romeo and Juliet remixed as the lyrics. Like a new edition of Shakespeare, the song selects certain lines from the play to create their own version of the scene. The repetitious lyrics sample and thus emphasize certain words such as “you’re dogs”, “a weak slave goes to the wall”, and of course “I am a pretty piece of flesh”. Luhrmann goes further, fragmenting and remediating the song itself. A few seconds of the song, centering on the chorus of “I am a pretty piece of flesh”, exist diegetically in the film as they are heard over the radio in the Montague’s car. Repetition of the sexual line underscores the Montague boys’ leering towards the nuns. Their crude advances substitute for the crude boasts of the original dialogue, showing a young audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s