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The Pleasures of Recognition: Two Recent Finnish Appropriations of Romeo and Juliet

ABSTRACT This essay examines two Finnish appropriations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Jari Juutinen’s monologue Juliet, Juliet! (2007) and Lauri Sipari and Liisa Urpelainen’s play for two characters, Romeo vs. Juliet (2014). Both plays rewrite the story, Juutinen by layering it onto a real life event, where a Finnish woman murdered her husband and children after she got into debt; and Sipari and Urpelainen by imagining what might have happened had Romeo and Juliet made it to Mantua and got married. Both plays are also interested in the cultural resonances of Shakespeare’s original language, juxtaposing textual allusions to (Finnish translations of) Shakespeare’s original with modern text, sometimes for deliberately jarring, but also comic, effects. Both plays also question the modern-day implications of star-crossed love and tragic catharsis, and their use in contemporary Finnish theatre. The essay adds to our knowledge of Shakespearean afterlives, showing how recent Finnish writers have responded to this most canonical of plays.