Sophie Duncan did not call her book Looking for Juliet, possibly because that was the name of a Pirelli calendar featuring film stars posed as exquisite, death-obsessed goths. This is just one of the artefacts Duncan, a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, analyses in her invigorating cultural investigation of Shakespeare’s heroine, reaching back to his source texts, forward to Taylor Swift’s song Love Story, and beyond.
Juliet enacts a “stunning rebellion against a society that deems her the property of her parents” when she marries Romeo. Shakespeare had never written a heroine like her before, and Duncan believes he created the juicy role for a particular actor, Robert Gough. Gough probably also played Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all determined, diminutive brunettes beset by patriarchal forces.
