A FUN, CURRENT TAKE ON SHAKESPEARE ROMANCE
Romeo and/or Juliet brings gaming sensibility to the classic tale
Across more than a decade of his celebrated web comic, Dinosaur Comics, his years writing for award-winning comic series such as Adventure Time and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and his occasional forays into wonderfully absurd side projects (like a page-by-page review of the Back to the Future novelization), Ryan North has never exactly had trouble pleasing people. He has been the kind of writer who could go viral before we even had a word for it, or who could drum up the most successful Kickstarter project in the crowdfunding site’s history.
It was that project, though — To Be Or Not To Be, his celebrated, choose-your-own-adventure take on Hamlet — that brought him to the kind of audience he could get worried about: Shakespeare scholars.
“You think of a Shakespeare scholar, and you picture a dusty room with a very dour-looking octogenarian in there, scowling at you,” North explains, joking in the way of a certain type of person who jokes about his gut-level fears. “But they’ve been big into it. And I think it’s because Shakespeare’s plays ... were written as entertainment. They were supposed to be fun. And then we study them in school, when they become literally homework, you kind of lose the sense of fun. This brings some of it back.”
The “this” is not just Hamlet, but also its spiritual successor, the newly released Romeo and/or Juliet, a similarly expansive trip through one of Shakespeare’s, and therefore the world’s, most famous plays. It jumps off from the story of star-crossed lovers into a world where Romeo is infinitely excited about getting breakfast, Juliet is a six-packed shut-in with muscles that could cut glass, and every conversation has the potential to take you to a tragic ending — or maybe just one where you get to hang out with a T-Rex.
As might be apparent, a considerable part of the fun comes from North’s playfully off-kilter sense of humour, which begins even on the title page: tongue-in-cheek, it sticks Shakespeare’s writing credit in the bottom corner of the back cover (one of the meta running jokes of the two books is that Shakespeare’s celebrated originals are the result of him plagiarizing from the choose-your-own-adventure version).
From a quarrelsome narrator who is more than happy to disparage your choices, to more than one ending that devolves into projectile puking, there is humour here that doesn’t require a high-school teacher and a handbook to decode.
Like most of North’s work, the fun also comes from more subtly brilliant touches — little treats that wrestle with what a text, and especially a choose-your-own text, even is. In the same way that, say, Dinosaur Comics quietly forces you to deal with the fact that it’s a comic where the panels never change, lending a neat intricacy to even the dumbest of jokes, Romeo and/or Juliet is a restlessly formalist book, one that helps pick apart even our ideas of books are.
“I’m probably using the term ‘game’ liberally, but it’s a book where you make choices and decide what happens next, and games are situations where you make choices and decide what happens next,” North explains. “The difference between a computer game and book like this is the idea that stakes change. In a game you’re making a lot of small choices: Should I shoot this guy? Should I pick up this ammo? And they tend to be pretty easy, and they tend to be on rails. There’s always one ending: you beat the boss or you die. In the book, stakes are expensive. You
In the book, stakes are expensive. You don’t get to make any small choices, but the big choices will throw you in a lot of different directions.
don’t get to make any small choices, but the big choices will throw you in a lot of different directions.”
It’s not just the matter of choice, though. As North points out, the falseness of the choices in a choose-your-own-adventure are part of the contract between reader and writer: “I’m giving you choices, but they’re choices I’ve engineered out; they’re all Ryan-approved,” he notes.
To North, it’s just another expectation to be played with, the same way that Romeo and Juliet is a linear story with a sad ending that can be played with. So we get unique puzzles: an in-book mini game that has you tromping across Verona pulling levers just to advance the story, or a riddle that seems to let you choose any number you want, but always dumps you on the same page. The most clever, though, might be the book’s “unlockable character,” Rosaline, who you can get by following the original story to its conclusion.
“Rosaline’s story ends up investigating the death of these two teens. The neat thing about that is, it’s a choice, but it’s hidden in the book. The only way to know about it is to play through it in the past,” he explains. “So you’re actually changing the state of the reader.”
To Be Or Not To Be featured something similar in the form of a sideline story that you would only know existed if you followed, and marked, every possible path from the outset. Romeo and/or Juliet delves far deeper into those kind of Easter eggs, with North not just as a smirking puzzle maker, but someone eager to figure out what, even hundreds of years past their artistic peak, books can still do.
“Some forms of reading are more fun than others,” he says. “To me, reading a book with pictures is more fun than without. And reading a book that you have agency over what happens next is always more fun than just straight prose. The narrator in the book sort of rags on straight prose a couple times, calling them ‘baby books’: only one story, that someone has chosen for you.
“I like the idea of that ridiculous hierarchy. It’s intrinsically fun, in a way that other ways aren’t.”