Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1
Page 57
I'll lay fourteen of my teeth-
And yet to my teen [sorrow] be it spoken, I have but four-
She's not fourteen.
—Act I, scene iii, lines 12-14
The Nurse then launches into an irrelevant tale of Juliet's childhood that begins
… of all days in the year,
Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.
—Act I, scene iii, lines 16-17
Lammas Day is August 1. In early English times it was the day of a harvest festival, and the fruits of the field, symbolized by half loaves of bread, were consecrated at mass. The Anglo-Saxon term for half loaf was "hlaf-maesse" and this was distorted to "Lammas."
Earlier the Nurse had asked Lady Capulet how long it was to Lammas-tide and had been answered:
A fortnight and odd days.
—Act I, scene iii, line 15
We can therefore place the beginning of the play at about July 13. It is summer and the hot weather is referred to later in the play.
There must be some reason why Shakespeare harps so on Juliet's age.
… since the earthquake.. .
The Nurse has another way of dating Juliet's age, too, for she remembers the circumstances of the weaning. She says:
'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was weaned…
—Act I, scene iii, lines 23-24
This verse has sometimes been given special significance, for in 1580 there was a notable earthquake felt in London. The argument is therefore presented that this was referred to at this point and that the play was consequently written in 1591. This seems awfully thin, however, and most critics do not accept the reasoning at all.
The garrulous Nurse is finally persuaded to be silent and Lady Capulet begins to talk Juliet into marriage. She takes the opportunity at once to stymie any objections as to age, by saying:
By my count,
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid.
—Act I, scene iii, lines 71-73
Apparently, then, Lady Capulet is herself some twenty-eight years old. Juliet, however, seems unmoved by the thoughts of marriage and Lady Capulet tells her that Paris will be at the banquet that night and she can look him over and decide whether she can love him.
… 'tis no wit …
In the next scene it is later in the day and the Capulet feast will soon begin. In the street outside come Romeo and Benvolio, who plan to attend in masks.
This seems to give an impression that it is dangerous for the Montagues to invade the Capulet feast, but the presence of masks does not necessarily prove it. Masking at feasts was common and masked dances are featured in Henry VIII (see page II-761) and Love's Labor's Lost (see page I-440), for instance. Masks afforded young men and ladies a chance to flirt in semiconcealment.
To weaken the case for danger, Romeo does no more than wear a mask. He makes no attempt to disguise his voice, for instance, and is, in point of fact, readily recognized at the feast, as will soon be apparent.
To be sure, Romeo does express reservations about going. He says:
…we mean well in going to this masque,
But 'tis no wit to go.
—Act I, scene iv, lines 48-49
But when asked why, he can only say:
/ dreamt a dream tonight [last night].
—Act I, scene iv, line 50
If the feud were really alive and deadly, he could easily have said that it was "no wit to go" because discovery would mean death. To fall back on a dream, a mere presentiment of evil, shows how little importance Romeo attaches to the feud.
… Queen Mab…
With Romeo and Benvolio is a friend, Mercutio, who is of neither faction and is friendly with both, for he has been invited to the feast. He is, it appears, a relative of Prince Escalus.
Mercutio is, in essence, Shakespeare's invention. Da Porto had a minor character named Marcuccio, but Shakespeare took that and touched it with his own special gold even down to the small change in the name. Mercutio suggests Mercury, the winged messenger of the gods, who flits through the air with superhuman speed. Mercutio is mercurial, with a flashing wit that never leaves him.
Mercutio does not seem to think of the feud as a deadly thing either. He makes no attempt to dissuade the Montagues from going, as he might well have done if there were real danger. Rather, he is intent on rallying Romeo out of his melancholy and is so anxious to have him come to the feast that he eagerly turns dream presentiments into nonsense by advancing his own theory on the origin of dreams as the product of a tricky elf. He says:
O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she conies
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
—Act I, scene iv, lines 53-55
Queen Mab is out of Celtic mythology. The pagan Irish had a goddess named Meadhbh, who was the ruler of a group of the "little people." This may have contributed to the notion of Queen Mab.
Queen Mab need not be considered a fairy queen in the sense that Titania was in A Midsummer Night's Dream (see page I-26). She is the fairies' "midwife"; that is, she helps men and women give birth to dreams, and this is no task for a queen.
Here, in all likelihood, "Queen" is used in its original sense of "woman" and to speak of "Queen Mab" would be something like speaking of "Dame Mab" or "Mistress Mab." The word "queen" early split into two forms: one of them, "quean," degenerated to mean a degraded woman, a harlot; the other, "queen," rose to mean an elevated woman, the wife of a king. "Queen," in its ordinary original sense, neither depressed nor elevated, vanished altogether.
Mercutio's speech about Queen Mab presents the view that dreams are not messages of fate but the product of the routine thoughts of the day. Lovers dream of love, courtiers of curtsies, lawyers of fees; soldiers of war and drink, and so on. This is one of many examples of Shakespeare's modern-sounding rationalism.
Thus, when Romeo tries to stem the flow of Mercutio's brilliance and says:
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk'st of nothing.
—Act I, scene iv, lines 95-96
Mercutio answers at once, with stabbing relevance:
True, I talk of dreams.
—Act I, scene iv, line 96
… a Montague, our foe
Within the mansion the feast is in full progress. The masked dancers are enjoying themselves and Romeo sees Juliet for the first time. He falls immediately and hopelessly in love and completely vindicates Benvolio's promise that Romeo had but to look at other women to forget Rosaline. Romeo says:
Did my heart love till now:
Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
—Act I, scene v, lines 54-55
But his voice is overheard and instantly recognized-and by Tybalt, the only person of consequence in either faction who takes the feud seriously. He flares into mad rage at once and is prepared to kill. He says:
This, by his voice, should be a Montague.
Fetch me my rapier, boy.
—Act I, scene v, lines 56-57
Capulet is at once aware that Tybalt is in a passion and demands the reason. Tybalt says:
Uncle, this is a Montague, our foe,
A villain.. .
—Act I, scene v, lines 63-64
Capulet is not moved in the slightest. He recognizes Romeo at once and says to Tybalt:
… let him alone.
'A bears him like a portly [respectable] gentleman,
And, to say truth, Verona brags of him
To be a virtuous and well-governed youth.
—Act I, scene v, lines 67-70
Surely the feud is as good as dead when the leader of one side can speak so of the son and heir of the leader of the other side. Capulet speaks so highly of Romeo, in fact, that one could almost imagine that a prospective match between Montague's son and Capulet's daughter would be a capital way of ending the feud.
Then, when Tybalt objects to Capulet's tame endurance of the presence of a Montague, the old man isn't in the least shamed into taking a stronger stand. On the contrary, he turns savagely on Tybalt, crying:
You are a saucy boy. Is't so, indeed?
This trick may chance to scathe [harm] you.
-Act I, scene v, lines 85-86
Tybalt, trembling with frustrated rage, is forced to withdraw.
… my only hate
Meanwhile, Romeo has made his way to Juliet, who is as instantly struck with him as he by her. In fifteen lines he reaches the stage of kissing her. He must leave soon after and Juliet inquires his name of the Nurse. She finds out he is Romeo, the son of Montague, and says at once, dramatically:
My only love, sprung from my only hate!
—Act I, scene v, line 140
It turns out later in the play that she was particularly close to her cousin Tybalt. We can imagine, without too much trouble, young Juliet listening with awe and admiration to the tales told her by her paranoid cousin; of fights with the Montagues, of their disgraceful defeats and treacherous victories. Tybalt would surely have poured into her ears all the sick preoccupation with the feud that filled his own wrathful heart.
And she would have absorbed it all. That may well be the point of Shakespeare's stressing Juliet's extreme youth. She was young enough to absorb the feud in its full romanticism without any admixture of disillusionment that would have come with experience.
… King Cophetua. ..
Although Romeo has left the feast, he cannot really leave. He must have another sight of Juliet if he can. Slipping away from his companions, he climbs the wall bounding the Capulet estate and finds himself in the orchard.
Benvolio and Mercutio come seeking him, and Mercutio in mockery calls after him with all the cliches of lovers' tales. He asks of the hiding Romeo just one word about Venus or Cupid as a sign of his whereabouts, defining Cupid, ironically, as:
… he that shot so true
When King Cophetua loved the beggar maid!
—Act II, scene i, lines 13-14
This is another reference (see page I-431) to the famous tale of the happy love of a socially ill-assorted couple.
But Romeo remains in hiding, and Benvolio and Mercutio shrug and leave. Surely if the feud were alive and dangerous, they would never have left Romeo alone in the very center of enemy territory. Instead, they seem not a bit concerned.
… refuse thy name
Romeo's patience is rewarded, for Juliet (as lovesick as he) comes out on her balcony to sigh romantically.
Romeo, spying her, indulges in a long soliloquy in which he praises her beauty in the most extravagant terms, but never once mentions the fact that she is a Capulet. It does not seem to concern him that she is of the opposing faction any more than it concerned him that Rosaline was. But then, Romeo is not fourteen and he is old enough to know the feud is really on its last legs.
Not so Juliet. She speaks at last and all her talk is of the feud. She says:
O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
—Act II, scene ii, lines 33-36
It is irritating in the extreme that the first line of this passage, taken by itself, is so often treated in popular quotation as though Juliet were saying "Where are you, Romeo?" and were looking for him. Not only does it show a pitiful ignorance of the meaning of the archaic word "wherefore," but it rums a key point in the plot development. "Wherefore" means "why," and Juliet is asking the absent Romeo why he is a Montague. Oh, if only he weren't.
All she can talk about is his name. She says:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though [you were] not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face. O, be some other name
Belonging to a man.
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
—Act II, scene ii, lines 38-44
What can Romeo be thinking as he hears this? We might speculate that left to himself he might have approached his father and urged him to talk to Capulet, under a flag of truce if necessary, and try to arrange a reconciliating marriage. It is so easy to feel that this would work. Who but Tybalt shows any signs of anything but weariness with the feud, and he could be beaten into submission. To be sure, marriage had been spoken of with Paris, but nothing had yet been committed.
However, Romeo may well have recognized the romanticism of the young girl who feels the thrill of loving the family enemy; who loves the risk and danger and sadness of it; and perhaps he would not dream of throwing cold water on that feeling. So he makes himself known and dramatically denounces his name, saying:
I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
—Act II, scene ii, lines 49-51
Thus he commits himself to the full gamut of romantic folderol as seen through the eyes of a dramatic fourteen-year-old, and the catastrophe is under way.
… the place death…
Juliet is astonished at Romeo's sudden presence and makes the most of it in terms of the romantic version of the feud. She berates Romeo for having taken chances, saying:
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art, //
any of my kinsmen find thee here.
—Act II, scene ii, lines 63-65
Exaggeration, we might easily guess. To be sure, if Tybalt had made his appearance at this moment there would have been trouble. We can suspect, however, that if anyone but Tybalt had appeared, Romeo would have gotten away with nothing but some hard words. In fact, the subject of marriage might have been broached.
Is it possible that even Juliet considered the feud and its consequences only as an afterthought? Her first fear was that he might have hurt himself falling off the wall.
Romeo accepts Juliet's insistence on the danger of death, perhaps recognizing that it is part of his appeal to her and glad to take advantage of that. Still, he doesn't really seem to take it seriously, for he says:
Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye
Than twenty of their swords!
—Act II, scene ii, lines 71-72
With all that done, the two get down to the serious business of expressing their love.
Thy purpose marriage …
From words of love, they pass quickly to the thought of marriage. Juliet says:
// that thy bent of love be honorable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,
By one that I'll procure to come to thee,
—Act II, scene ii, lines 143-45
If Romeo had had the rational plan of trying to work a marriage settlement in an aboveboard fashion to the advantage of everyone, he abandons it. If romantic little Juliet wants secret messages, and clandestine word, and even an exciting forbidden marriage-then she shall have them.
The meeting comes to an end with Monday's dawn nearly upon the two. Romeo, thoroughly happy, says:
Hence will I to my ghostly [spiritual] friar's close cell,
His help to crave and my dear hap [good luck] to tell.
—Act II, scene ii, lines 188-89
With luck, the friar can arrange the secret marriage that Juliet longs for.
… the powerful grace …
The scene shifts at once to the cell of Friar Laurence ("Fra Lorenzo" in Da Porto's version) early Monday morning. He is an alchemist as well as a friar and is gathering herbs in order to extract their juices for his experiments, saying:
O, mickle [much] is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For naught so vile that on the eart
h doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
—Act II, scene iii, lines 15-18
Here is expressed the medieval view that all creation is made for the express good of man; that everything on earth has some property that makes it valuable to man.
… your households' rancor. ..
Romeo comes to the friar with his tale of love and Friar Laurence is more than a little confused at this sudden change from Rosaline to Juliet and clucks disapprovingly over the whole matter. He decides, however, to go along with the secret marriage for a clearly expressed reason; saying:
In one respect I'll thy assistant be;
For this alliance may so happy prove
To turn your households' rancor to pure love.
—Act II, scene iii, lines 90-92