Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear,
So soon forsaken? young men’s love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
If you’ve read or seen Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, you’ll remember Rosaline as the girl Romeo was infatuated with before meeting and falling in love with Juliet. We never actually meet Rosaline in the text of the play but her role is still important because she is the reason why Romeo attends the Capulet ball where he sees Juliet for the first time. In Natasha Solomons’ new novel, she gives Rosaline a voice of her own and tells the story of her relationship with Romeo Montague.
Rather than a simple retelling of Romeo and Juliet, Fair Rosaline is what the publisher has described as a ‘subversive, powerful untelling’. It wasn’t really what I had been expecting and I was quite surprised by the way Solomons chose to approach this novel.
First of all, as Shakespeare provides us with almost no information on Rosaline’s appearance and personality, Solomons has taken inspiration from some of his other characters with a similar name – Rosalind in As You Like It and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost – so that the woman we meet at the beginning of Fair Rosaline is a fully formed character. We join her just after the death of her mother, Emelia Capulet, when her father informs her that she is going to be sent to a nunnery. The horrified Rosaline suspects that he just wants to avoid having to pay a dowry if she marries, but he insists that it was actually her mother’s dying wish.
Granted a twelve day reprieve before being sent to join the nuns, Rosaline is determined to make the most of her last days of freedom. When she meets Romeo Montague and falls in love, she begins to hope that there’s still a chance of a happier future – until she makes a shocking discovery about him and breaks off their relationship. However, it seems that Romeo has turned his attentions to her younger, more vulnerable cousin Juliet. Can Rosaline save Juliet or will she be unable to prevent things from ending in tragedy?
I’ve always loved Romeo and Juliet – it contains some of the most beautiful language in all of Shakespeare’s work – and I’ve never questioned its position as one of the greatest tragic love stories of all time. Fair Rosaline, though, looks at the play through a completely different lens. Here, Romeo is not a romantic hero but a villain, a sexual predator who targets young girls and discards them when he loses interest in them. Solomons uses Juliet’s extreme youth (thirteen in the play) and the fact that Romeo’s exact age is not given, to suggest that he is an older man than we usually assume and to give their relationship a much darker tone than in the play. I think how much you’ll enjoy this book will depend on how much you can accept this new version of Romeo. Personally, I prefer characters in retellings to at least bear some resemblance to the originals and this Romeo didn’t, which was a big problem for me.
I’ve loved some of Natasha Solomons’ previous novels, particularly House of Gold and The Novel in the Viola, so I’m sorry I didn’t enjoy this one more. There were plenty of things I liked, such as the portrayal of Tybalt, who is also quite different from Shakespeare’s depiction – he is still the proud, impetuous and hot-tempered character we know, but seeing him through the eyes of his cousin Rosaline makes him much more sympathetic. I also found the setting interesting; as Solomons explains in her author’s note, there’s no evidence that Shakespeare ever visited Italy so she tried to capture the same feel, writing about Italy as though she had never been there and blending 14th century Verona with the Elizabethan England that would have been familiar to Shakespeare. I just wish she could have found a way to create a story for Rosaline and explore the difficulties facing medieval women without completely destroying Romeo’s character in the process.
Have you read any good retellings of Romeo and Juliet? O, Juliet by Robin Maxwell is another that left me slightly disappointed, so I would be interested in any other recommendations.
Thanks to Manilla Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.
This is book 10/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2023
This is book 32/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.
She Reads Novels 
What a shame. I began reading this quite excited that here was a thoughtful and convincing imagining of this unknown young woman. I think I’d probably share your misgivings about Romeo. Nevertheless, I’m interested enough to maybe sample it. I see it’s available in my library, so it would be an easy enough experiment (apart from the toppling TBR of course!)
Well, it seems to be getting mainly positive reviews, so the portrayal of Romeo obviously hasn’t bothered everyone. It could be worth trying it to see what you think.
I’m planning to give it a whirl.
The premise did sound promising, but like you I’m no fan of retellings or even alternate versions which stretch things too much beyond the original, like she’s done here with Romeo.
The portrayal of Romeo was much too big a stretch for me. It’s disappointing because this could have been a great book.
I think Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights was marketed as a retelling of R&J, but set in 1920s gangland Shanghai (and queer!) Malorie Blackman has also said that Noughts and Crosses was inspired by R&J.
I love the idea of a Romeo and Juliet retelling set in Shanghai. Thanks!
This sounded great at the beginning, I’ve never thought about Rosaline but it would make for a good story but I’m with you I’d rather keep Romeo where he is in my imagination.
I loved the idea of a book about Rosaline, but this was so disappointing. Turning Romeo into practically a paedophile just seemed ridiculous to me.
Shakespeare doesn’t mention Romeo’s exact age but I think it is made pretty clear that he is a young man, just a few years older than Juliet. So if she is 13 than he must be 15 or 16. Count Paris is definitely older and that’s partly why Juliet is reluctant to marry him.
I agree that the idea of turning Romeo into a sexual predator really seems like a stretch.
Yes, he definitely seemed like a young man to me in Shakespeare’s version – even the quote I’ve used here would support that (“young men’s love then lies, Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes”), yet Solomons makes him a man in his thirties. I don’t like the way she portrays him at all – it feels so wrong!
Huh. I think the recharacterization of Romeo would bother me, but this approach does sound interesting. However, I think Solomons is missing the fact that girls of 13 were considered marriageable (although young) in Medieval Italy. This seems like a case of projecting a 21st century sensibility onto a work written during the English Renaissance.
Yes, I think she decided she wanted to portray Romeo in a certain way, then twisted the facts to fit that narrative.
Sounds like it. Unfortunate.
I don’t like that she makes Romeo the villain. Definitely makes me not want to read this one.
I suppose she was trying to do something different, but I really didn’t like this version of Romeo.
Retellings can be great, but they can also be not great!
Thanks for sharing your review with the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge!
This one just wasn’t for me!