Part 1. Retracing the Antecedents

The paper scrutinizes originality – the little-investigated core of art creativity. Any genuine piece of art must be original. At that, a work is thought to be the more original the more its newness. However, what kind of novelty and to what extent it ought to contain to claim originality still remains an obscurity. And the making of the tale about Romeo and Juliet is used as a “set of empirical data” whose detailed and systematic analysis may allow of solving the riddle. In the first part, four stories published prior to that of Shakespeare and built on the same material are considered. Are revealed and displayed in relief their missions, leitmotifs, chief heroes, main amendments made by the authors, and the key links round which other elements have been organized. It is shown that changes brought about by each author are not too significant. However, despite the almost full identity of the material employed and the likeness in structure and composition, the tales are far from tallying with each other, any of them being a unique contribution to literature. But if so and the originality of a piece of art does not depend directly on the material out of which the author moulds his progeny and even the structural or compositional iterations or recurrences do not deprive it of being original whence its newness comes? That is the key question to be answered in the second part.

Keywords: novelty, originality, creativity, love, “Romeo and Juliet”, Shakespeare.

The Journal of Aesthetic Education. 2000. Vol. 54. No. 1. P. 101 – 118.

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