Among the contenders for “most popular Taylor Swift song of all time,” the tune “Love Story” ranks high on the list. The 2008 song quickly topped charts, garnered accolades across the genres of pop and country, and emerged as one of the defining tracks of the early 2000s. Swift capitalized on its momentum in 2008 and has since ensured that the song would persist in cultural memory long after its late-aughts peak. For example, she included “Love Story” in her AMA Artist of the Decade performance and shared her rerecording of it in advance of the Fearless (Taylor’s Version) release, enshrining the song as one for the ages— with the same staying-power as Beatles hits.
A Swift classic of unrivaled fame, “Love Story” echoes the universal appeal of Romeo and Juliet. The song explicitly draws on Shakespeare’s play, with Swift, in the role of Juliet, pining after Romeo despite parental disapproval. Though the song follows the basic framework of Shakespeare’s play-- young love-at-first sight, prohibited romance, and plans for an attempted escape to live happily-ever-after-- it does not end with Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, but instead with Romeo proposing, “Marry me, Juliet/ You’ll never have to be alone/ I love you and that’s all I really know/ I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress/ It’s a love story, baby, just say ‘Yes,’” With parental approval sealed, Swift’s rendition of the classic play gives the pair a happily-ever-after.
In alluding explicitly to the Romeo and Juliet narrative-- adopting Shakespeare’s characters and relying on the prohibited young love framework-- even while writing the story in a different medium and with a different ending, Swift joins a long line of artists who have adapted the Romeo and Juliet framework. Works ranging from the heart-rending West Side Story to LMNT’s excruciating “Hey Juliet” position themselves in the context of Romeo and Juliet, using the play’s framework and characters as allusions to develop new narratives about love and romance.
These works stand T.S. Eliot’s test of craft. As T.S. Eliot argues, “One of the surerest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” By drawing on the framework of Romeo and Juliet, modern pop singers and playwrights have stolen the plot and characters from Shakespeare to craft art that articulates new narratives and perspectives about young love.
For some reason, artists have been stealing from Romeo and Juliet for ages. The play is practically synonymous with romantic narratives. Even Shakespeare stole from an older Romeo and Juliet style story-- that of Pyramus and Thisbe-- when he wrote the play. Pyramus and Thisbe-- an ancient tale of prohibited love that ends in mutual suicides as one lover believes the other dead in an everything-gone-wrong attempt to escape parental repression-- inspired Romeo and Juliet, echoing the way contemporary artists steal from the play and reconfigure its characters and plot into romantic, comedic, or tragic narratives that grapple with the nature of romance. This framework has become so ingrained in our culture that Romeo and Juliet transcends any one narrative.
Not only have references to the play become ubiquitous across cultural works-- providing a vehicle through which to craft romantic narratives by referencing the framework, plot, and characters of Romeo and Juliet— allusions to the play itself serve as universally understood references in literature. For example, J.D. Salinger relied on allusions to the play to characterize Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. When Holden stumbles across some nuns in Grand Central, they end up chatting about the play: “Oh, Romeo and Juliet! Lovely! Didn’t you just love it?” One of the nuns asks him. Holden thinks, “To tell you the truth, it was sort of embarrassing, in a way, to be talking about Romeo and Juliet with her. I mean that play gets pretty sexy in some parts, and she was a nun and all, but she asked me, so I discussed it with her for a while.” Salinger assumes that every reader will have a strong enough knowledge of Romeo and Juliet to understand the significance of Holden’s comments as emblematic of his fear of sex, romance, and relationships, an early sign that helps readers make sense of the angsty character.
It’s worth considering why the Romeo and Juliet (or the OG Pyramus and Thisbe) framework and characters have persisted as fundamental components of canonical literature and popular culture. While other stories may be equally famous-- everyone is forced to read Hamlet and The Odyssey in high school, too-- no other work seems to generate and inspire so much pop culture and new media.
One potential answer: Even though the age of duels had disappeared, and the mandate for parental consent does not apply to marriage anymore, the play offers tropes about romance that are universally relevant. As norms about romance-- what romance means, how courtship works, and which perspectives matter in a romantic entanglement-- evolve in a rapidly changing world, Shakespeare’s characters and plot structures offer signposts to make sense of universal and timeless struggles in romance.
A far cry from the “serious” topics-- those of loss and suffering-- that are more obvious in other classics, Romeo and Juliet is one of the few famous works relevant to the subject of romance that characterizes popular culture. Romance defines popular media. After all, romantic questions and realities are top-of-mind for most people, making love stories and breakup songs more relevant, on the surface, to a popular audience. Romeo and Juliet easily connects to these questions, whereas the ties between a play like Hamlet and modern romantic struggles are harder to identify. And so, unabashedly romantic, Romeo and Juliet has endured because it’s been co-opted by popular media due to its relevance, creating a cycle that keeps the play in the spotlight as new popular art becomes ingrained in culture.