Free Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan by Paula Marantz Cohen Page B

poetry evaporated when the first assignment was from Romeo and Juliet , a play that, despite the passage of over four hundred years, still speaks eloquently to the hormone-driven sentimentality of early adolescence. It didn’t hurt that Stephanie was given the Juliet portion of the balcony scene to memorize, and that Kyle Chapin, seventh-grade heartthrob, was assigned the part of Romeo.
    Stephanie had commandeered Jessie to help her with this assignment. Since moving in, Jessie was usually game to drill her granddaughter on vocabulary words and math formulas, and so it seemed only a short step to ask her to read the part of Romeo in the assigned scene.
    In that first session, grasping the book tightly in her hands, Jessie had listened with rapt attention as Stephanie launched forth in Juliet’s immortal words:

    O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

    This was Jessie’s cue, but, enthralled by Stephanie’s recitation, she had lost her place. Stephanie patiently pointed out to her grandmother where they were in the text.
    â€œâ€˜Aside,’” said Jessie.
    â€œYou don’t say ‘aside,’” Stephanie stopped her to explain. “It means that you speak the next lines directly to the audience. Juliet isn’t supposed to hear them.”

    Jessie nodded in apparent comprehension and turned to address the wardrobe across the room: “‘Shall I hear more or shall I speak …’” She paused here, as this was the end of the line, and then abruptly added the words that began the next line: “‘At this?’”
    Stephanie intervened again: “You don’t have to pause at the end of the line if there isn’t any punctuation,” she explained carefully. “Just read it like ordinary speech.” (Jessie’s mistake was one committed by half of Stephanie’s class.)
    â€œOkay,” said Jessie, who appeared to grasp this more quickly than most of her granddaughter’s peers. She turned toward the wardrobe again: “‘Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?’”
    Stephanie nodded and now embarked on the meat of Juliet’s speech—that portion that packed a romantic wallop guaranteed to spark love in Kyle Chapin (or whatever romantic feeling a seventh-grade boy is capable of). Stephanie placed her hand on her heart as she recited the famous lines:

    â€™Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou are thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face.

    (Here, Stephanie gestured to each of the bodily parts enumerated in what she took to be an original piece of dramatic business.)

    O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

    â€œBeautiful,” murmured Jessie, and took up Romeo’s next line with apparent ease: “‘I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.’”
    Here, however, she paused, as if the line had sparked an unforeseen rumination. Then, she read the line again:
    â€œâ€˜Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.’”
    â€œGram, you said that already. Go on to the next line: ‘Henceforth—’” she prompted.
    But Jessie seemed confused and Stephanie finished off the line herself—“‘Henceforth I never will be Romeo’”—then closed the book. It was the end of the assigned passage, and she sensed she had strained her grandmother’s attention beyond its limits—a fact she understood, since her own attention was often so strained. She thanked Jessie for her help and