Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays it has become a modern myth, endlessly adapted, imitated, and parodied – from the classic 1957 musical West Side Story, which turned the rival families into rival New York street gangs, to the 2013 zombie romcom Warm Bodies or the garden-gnome cartoon Gnomeo and Juliet. Two great 20th century films captured its mass appeal – Franco Zeffirelli’s lushly romantic 1968 version, which for my generation summed up the “make love not war” idealism of the 60s, and Baz Luhrmann’s edgier 1996 version, which did the same for millennials. Abandoning the harsh moralism of his source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, which presented the story as an awful warning against “the lusts of wanton flesh”, Shakespeare made his lovers sympathetic and heroic figures whose tragic deaths have the potential to redeem their world.įor obvious reasons, Romeo and Juliet has always been popular with young audiences. YA, as its aficionados matily abbreviate it, is a fairly recent genre, introduced by publishers and booksellers in the 1960s to cater to the rising teenage market SE Hinton’s The Outsiders is sometimes called the first YA novel, others trace the origin of the genre back to The Catcher in the Rye.īut Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the mid 1590s (apart from being a play rather than a novel) has the germ of the genre: a story with teenage protagonists, their passion and idealism pitted against a corrupt and dystopian adult society.

You could make a case that Shakespeare, on top of all his other literary innovations, was the inventor of young adult fiction.

Geoff Miles, a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and YA, reviews New Zealand writer Chloe Gong’s bestselling duology These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends.

These violent delights book review