Caro-verse

Series Metadata

Creator:
Series Begun:
2011-05-27
Series Updated:
2011-10-21
Description:

Welcome to the Caro-verse! In a nutshell, the Caro-verse is a large, sprawling AU of Romeo and Juliet. It's built off of two major departures from the original play. The first departure is that Mercutio survives his Act III duel with Tybalt. The second departure is that Benvolio and Mercutio become lovers, and they spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to approach life in late-sixteenth-century Italy from that perspective.

Notes:

That was the nutshell description. The Caro-verse has become much more than that. It's swallowed several other Shakespeare plays -- The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Othello so far -- as well as Verdi's opera Rigoletto. It's semi-historical, but only semi; it's firmly set in the Fantasy Italy that Shakespeare used and that Franco Zeffirelli filmed in 1968, but real historical people and events do have . . . analogues, I guess, in this world. Most of the action takes place between roughly 1575 and 1635. I chose that period to fit with the original performance date of Romeo and Juliet, and as I researched, I learned to my delight that it was a time of exciting change in Europe, as Italy (which didn't exist as we know it) moved out of the Renaissance into the Early Modern era. There's a distinct generation gap between Romeo, Juliet, Benvolio, Mercutio, and their parents, and part of the fun comes from seeing how the kids deal with and explore the changing times and the changing philosophies of those times. The Caro-verse also has a somewhat Modernist sensibility, another legacy of Zeffirelli.

As of this writing (27 May, 2011), I've written quite a few Caro-verse stories. I'll post them here for archiving, and as new ones are completed, I'll add them.

Stats:
Words:
219,114
Works:
14
Complete:
No
Bookmarks:
62

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