Before Romeo fell in love with Juliet, he was head over heels in love with Rosaline, Juliet’s cousin. He shared with his companions that she was stunning (he said, “The all-seeing sun/never saw her match since the beginning of the universe”) and that she had rejected him (he said, “She has forsworn to love, and in that vow/I live dead that live to tell it now”) in the same breath.
Romeo’s relatives advise him to attend a supper hosted by the Capulet family in order to coax the melodramatic Montague heir out of his state of melancholy. It is then that he meets Juliet, and the beginning of their legendary love tale. There have been several initiatives taken to bring Rosaline out of the shadows and turn her into a fully realised character.
Some adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedy, such as Romeo & Juliet (2013) by Carlo Carlei, devote more than a passing mention to her character than others do. In some of them, the fact that she is present is the main focus. On October 14, Rosaline will become available to stream on Hulu.
It is one of the rare works that shifts the focus and makes Romeo’s first love the main character, like Sharman Macdonald’s play “After Juliet” and Shonda Rhimes’ ABC miniseries “Still Star-Crossed.”
The film Rosaline, which was directed by Karen Maine, retells the story of its main character as an easy-to-understand coming-of-age story and gives her the outspoken but watered-down feminist attitude of modern Disney heroines. The film was based on the book of the same name by Madeleine L’Engle.
In the film, Rosaline, portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever, is a woman who defies the norms that were expected of women during the time period in which the story takes place in Verona. She is straightforward, obstinate, and quick to disagree with her father (Bradley Whitford), who has grown weary of the search for a suitable spouse for his daughter.
Rosaline is adamant on marrying for love, which both she and her father find difficult to comprehend and find distasteful. She is a Capulet, but at the beginning of the action-packed movie, she is sneaking around with Romeo, who is a Montague and is played by Kyle Allen.
They tease each other while the moon watches over them, and Romeo takes a chance on being seen by the Capulet guards so that he can see Rosaline on her balcony. Their incompatible characteristics destroy their attempt at a romantic partnership. Romeo is a romantic who makes decisions on the spur of the moment, whereas Rosaline is a realist who dwells too much on her thoughts.
When Romeo tells Juliet that he loves her, she is unable to reciprocate his feelings at that moment. However, Rosaline does not want to lose Romeo, either because she loves him or perhaps because she craves his attention too much. Either way, she does not want to lose him. She sends a message to the embarrassed guy, inviting him to join her at the Capulet masquerade ball. There, the two of them will be able to apologise to one another and work to improve their uneasy relationship.
However, on the evening of the celebration, Rosaline’s father arranged for her to meet a dashing sailor by the name of Dario (Sean Teale). Rosaline is uninterested, and her contempt for this sharp-tongued man only intensifies as a result of the fact that she fails to catch the ball.
The authors of “500 Days of Summer,” Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, make a fast-paced narrative based on the book “When You Were Mine” by Rebecca Serle. The love triangle that took place between Romeo, Rosaline, and Juliet (who was portrayed by Isabela Merced in the movie) is recounted in the book written by Serle as a localised feud that takes place in present-day Southern California.
Neustadter and Weber put the plot in the past, but they don’t make any attempt to make the language sound like it was written by Shakespeare. Instead, the characters use current English in their dialogue. Juliet is the object of Rosaline’s envy, but the growing love she has for Juliet helps to temper her resentment of her rival.
She initially takes care of her younger cousin in an effort to convince her to end her relationship with Romeo; nevertheless, as time passes, the two of them get close, which causes Rosaline to feel guilty about the lies she told. It was obvious from the start that they would wind up being friends with one other, thus the backstabbing felt more like filler than anything else.