Romeo and Juliet: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

• Author: Skwire, Sarah

n ninth grade, like high school freshmen all over America, I was assigned Romeo and Juliet to read for my English class. As a longtime literature geek even at the age of 14, I was thrilled to be entering the big leagues. We'd read some Charles Dickens and a little John Steinbeck. But this? This was William Shakespeare. This was serious, complicated stuff.

You'll have to imagine my excitement as I took the book home to show it to my father, a professor of American literature. The look of irritation on his face as I passed him the book is something I'll never forget.

We had been given a textbook version of Romeo and Juliet--an expurgated, shortened, made-appropriate-for-schoolchildren version. Some pettifoggers had decided that the play's boisterous sexuality, raunchy puns, and panting young lovers needed to be toned down for the students who would be reading it.

As my father pointed out, cutting all that material renders the play exceptionally dull and, in some places, barely comprehensible. Mercutio, for example, could barely appear at all in such a version. That turns his death into a minor side plot rather than a tragedy that spurs much of the play's violence.

Romeo and Juliet is a story driven by passion, in all its sexual, physical, and "embodied" aspects. It revels in jokes about blood and...