The story of "Romeo and Juliet" presented in the context of a play helps deliver emotional truths and Western sentiments of the time while capturing the audience's imagination. The title page of Arthur Brooke's poem "Romeus and Juliet."
Many poems, stories and plays were written on the subject in 15th- and 16th-century Italy, some of which were also translated into English. The tragic story of the young lovers from noble families was heavily studied during the Italian Renaissance. Meanwhile, there are other works that precede William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” The play takes its subject from Arthur Brooke's poem “The Tragic Story of Romeus and Juliet,” published in 1562. Although Fuzuli uses Nizami Ganjavi's story as a foundation, he interprets it in his own unique style, which is why Fuzuli comes to mind when “Layla and Majnun” is mentioned in Turkish literature. One of the most successful of these stories is by Azerbaijani-Turkish poet Fuzuli. A number of “Layla and Majnun” stories have been written in verse in the East, particularly by Arabian, Persian and Turkish poets. These poets, who had written countless poems on the subject of love, competed with one another to successfully capture and relay the essence of the story. The story stood apart from the works of the poets of the East at the time with its subject and storyline. For people of the East, mathnawis were a way to interpret their thoughts and emotions when it came to love.Ī miniature of Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi's narrative poem on Layla and Majnun. The oldest and the most holistic version of the story was written in Persian by Azerbaijani poet Nizami Ganjavi in the form of mathnawi, a poem based on independent, internally rhyming lines.
“Layla and Majnun” is an anonymous folk story told by Arabs. He argues that the story of “Layla and Majnun” is the source of immortal literary works such as “Aucassin et Nicolette” (“Aucassin and Nicolette”) and “Tristan et Yseult” (“Tristan and Iseult”) in French literature and “Floire et Blancheflor” (“Floris and Blancheflour”) in Hungarian literature as well as “Romeo and Juliet” in English literature. Literary historian Agah Sırrı Levend, in his research on “Layla and Majnun,” states that these Eastern love stories may have entered Western literature during the Crusades. The similarities between the stories have led researchers to examine whether there is an intertextual link between the two. A watercolor painting by English artist John Masey Wright depicts the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet."īoth stories tell human truths interpreted by the writers and conveyed to us.