Goodbye Dolly

Dolly Parton’s mother, Avie Lee, often told her, “To thine own self be true.” The quote from Hamlet became a lifelong mantra. “When people ask me for advice,” Parton said, “that’s kind of what I tell them.” But, as scholar Paul Menzer shares, it was another Shakespeare play that inspired Dolly as a songwriter.

Depending on how you count and whom you trust, Dolly Parton wrote over 3,000 songs and recorded over a 1,000. “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” are probably the best known, though “9 to 5” and “Islands in the Stream” have their admirers.

But of all those songs, her 1993 “Romeo” is almost certainly one of the worst. It also bottoms out the list of Romeo and Juliet inspired pop songs. Not nearly as catchy as Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” nowhere near as pretty as Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” or gritty as Lou Reed’s “Romeo Had Juliette.” And it definitely doesn’t bring it like the Arctic Monkey’s “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” which, amazingly, rhymes “Montagues and Capulets” with “banging tunes and DJ sets.” Roll over Shakespeare.

Parton’s “Romeo” appeared on her album Slow Dancing with the Moon and is credited to “Dolly Parton and Friends” since it includes Tanya Tucker, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kathy Mattea, and Pam Tillis as her female chorus. The video features Billy Ray Cyrus as “Romeo” in a mullet that beggars belief. (If a mullet is “business in the front, party in the back,” then Cyrus has made short work of his business and gone long on the party.)

The lyrics don’t really bear repeating, but there’s at least one good line. During a break in the song, Dolly and friends trade innuendos. Dolly quips of “Romeo” that, “I’m old enough to be that boy’s lover.”

Dolly was 47 at the time, Cyrus was 32, so at 15 years his senior she was both young enough to be his lover and old enough to be his mother. (As Lady Capulet puts it to the fourteen-year-old Juliet, “Girls younger than you / … are already made mothers.”) Dolly aged better than her “Romeo” did, but the forgettable tune recalls an ironic tradition. Over the centuries, productions of Romeo and Juliet have often turned a play about young love into one about the intergenerational kind.

The National Theatre’s 2011 update of Dion Boucicault’s 1841 comedy, London Assurance, gathered the whole tradition into a single joke. Sir Harcourt Courtly breaks the news to Cool, his servant, that he’s to marry a rich girl of eighteen, which prompts a cool reply:

SIR HARCOURT: You do not approve of her relative youth?

COOL: On the contrary, there can be no fault with her youth sir. Love is the domain of the young. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen

SIR HARCOURT: How old was Romeo?

COOL: Fifty seven.⁠

Theater has often preferred an obsolescent Romeo to an adolescent one. In 1744, the forty-one-year-old Theophilus Cibber played Romeo opposite a Juliet performed by a fourteen-year-old actress named Jenny. David Garrick wrote that he had “never heard so vile and scandalous a performance in my life….” John Hill went even farther, pitying poor Jenny for playing opposite a Romeo “too old for her choice, too little handsome to be in love with, and, into the bargain, her father.”

I should have mentioned that.

There have been a lot of old Romeos across the years, but in 1805 Covent Garden found a young one. They cast a thirteen-year-old prodigy against the fifty-year-old Sarah Siddons. William Betty’s Romeo prompted a review that found him “not quite ‘at home’ in the love-scenes.” It was hardly his fault. The kid was barely house-broken.

There was probably something unsettling about a thirteen-year-old boy paired with a fifty-year-old woman—old enough to be his mother but too old to be his lover—though the stage had often been comfortable with the reverse. The double standard at work here is almost too obvious to point out. An older woman who chases a young man is called a “cougar.” An older man who does the same with a young woman is often called a “husband.”

One of theater’s tiredest canards is that, in a line credited to Ellen Terry: “No actress can play Juliet until she is old enough to play the Nurse.” Tell it to Dolly. Unlike Sarah Siddons, Parton was young enough to be her Romeo’s lover and old enough to be his mother (or his nurse for that matter). Her wink and smile made it patently clear she intended to play Juliet.

Just before Dolly delivers her delicious entendre, one of her friends suggests that “Shakespeare would roll over in his grave.” I doubt it. There’s a place in Parnassus for Dolly Parton, and Shakespeare would, I think, be glad to make space for an artist of infinite variety, one whom age cannot wither.

About the author

Paul Menzer is Executive Director and professor of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences and as Provost. A renowned Shakespeare scholar, he has written several biographies of the playwright. He is the inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies.