Romeo and Juliet on screen of the protagonists, and ending with their tragic deaths. The conceit of dramatising Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet has been used several times. The oddball 1944 B-movie "Time Flies" features the comedy duo Susie and Bill Barton, who, time travelling, encounter a Shakespeare struggling for words for his balcony scene, which Susie (Evelyn Dall) supplies from memory, while Bill interrupts with quips. John Madden's 1998 "Shakespeare in Love" depicts Shakespeare's process in composing "Romeo and Juliet" against the backdrop of his own doomed love affair. Writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard exploited another commonplace of Shakespeare-related films, which scholar Tony
Romeo and Juliet Betterton Mercutio, and Betterton's wife Mary Saunderson Juliet: she was probably the first woman to play the role professionally. Another version closely followed Davenant's adaptation and was also regularly performed by the Duke's Company. This was a tragicomedy by James Howard, in which the two lovers survive. Thomas Otway's "The History and Fall of Caius Marius", one of the more extreme of the Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare, debuted in 1680. The scene is shifted from Renaissance Verona to ancient Rome; Romeo is Marius, Juliet is Lavinia, the feud is between patricians and plebeians; Juliet/Lavinia wakes from her potion before Romeo/Marius