Romeo and Juliet

by Shakespeare, William

  Get you to bed; faith, you’ll be sick tomorrow

  For this night’s watching,

  (4.4.6-8)

  the Nurse tells him; and the picture is filled in by his wife’s reminder that she has put a stop to his “mouse-hunting.” There is of course the prince’s word thatThree civil brawls, bred of an airy word,

  By thee, old Capulet, and Montague,

  Have thrice disturb’d the quiet of our streets.

  (1.1.92-94)

  But these brawls bred of an airy word are no manifestations of a really ungovernable feud. When Montague and Capulet are bound by the prince to keep the peace, old Capulet himself says’tis not hard, I think,

  For men so old as we to keep the peace.

  (1.2.2-3)

  and there is a general feeling that the old quarrel has run its course. Paris, suitor to Juliet, says it is a pity that the Capulets and the Montagues have lived at odds so long. And Benvolio, a relative of the Montagues, is a consistent peacemaker. He tries to suppress a brawl amongst the rival retainers and invites Tybalt, a Capulet, to assist him in the work. Later he begs his friends to avoid trouble by keeping out of the way of the Capulets, for it is the season of hot blood:I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire:

  The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,

  And if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl;

  For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.

  (3.1.1-4)

  When the hot-blooded Mercutio does incite Tybalt to a quarrel it is again Benvolio who tries to preserve the peace:We talk here in the public haunt of men:

  Either withdraw unto some private place,

  And reason coldly of your grievances,

  Or else depart.

  (51-54)

  Hence the jest of Mercutio’s famous description of Benvolio as an inveterate quarreler, thirsting for the slightest excuse to draw sword.

  Moreover, the rival houses have mutual friends. Mercutio, Montague Romeo’s close acquaintance, is an invited guest at the Capulets’ ball. Stranger still, so is Romeo’s cruel lady, Rosaline, who in the invitation is addressed as Capulet’s cousin. It is odd that Romeo’s love for her, since she was a Capulet, had given him no qualms on the score of the feud. When Romeo is persuaded to go gate-crashing to the ball because Rosaline will be there, there is no talk at all of its being a hazardous undertaking. Safety will require, if even so much, no more than a mask.7 On the way to the ball, as talk is running gaily, there is still no mention of danger involved. Indeed, the feud is almost a dead letter so far. The son of the Montague does not know what the Capulet daughter looks like, nor she what he is like. The traditional hatred survives only in one or two high-spirited, hot-blooded scions on either side, and in the kitchen folk. Tybalt alone resents Romeo’s presence at the ball, yet it is easy for all to recognize him; and because Tybalt feels Romeo’s coming to be an insult, he seeks him out next day to challenge him, so providing the immediate occasion of the new outburst. Naturally, once blood is roused again, and murder done, the ancient rancor springs up with new life. Even Lady Capulet has comically Machiavellian plans for having Romeo poisoned in Mantua. But prior to this the evidences of the feud are so unsubstantial that the forebodings of Romeo and Juliet, discovering each other’s name, seem prompted more by fate than feud. There will, of course, be family difficulties; but the friar marries them without a hesitating qualm, feeling that such a union is bound to be accepted eventually by the parents, who will thus be brought to amity.

  The most remarkable episode, however, is still to be named. When Tybalt discovers Romeo at the ball, infuriated he rushes to Capulet with the news. But Capulet, in his festive mood, is pleasantly interested, saying that Romeo is reputed to be good-looking and quite a pleasant boy. He tells Tybalt to calm himself, to remember his manners, and to treat Romeo properly:Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone:

  He bears him like a portly gentleman;

  And, to say truth, Verona brags of him

  To be a virtuous and well govern’d youth:

  I would not for the wealth of all the town

  Here in my house do him disparagement:

  Therefore be patient, take no note of him:

  It is my will, the which if thou respect,

  Show a fair presence and put off these frowns,

  An ill-beseeming semblance for a feast.

  (1.5.67-76)

  When Tybalt is reluctant, old Capulet is annoyed and testily tells him to stop being a saucy youngster:He shall be endured:

  What, goodman boy! I say, he shall: go to.

  And I the master here or you? Go to.

  You’ll not endure him! God shall mend my soul!

  You’ll make a mutiny among my guests

  You will set cock-a-hoop. You’ll be the man!

  . . . Go to, go to;

  You are a saucy boy: is’t so indeed?

  This trick may chance to scathe you, I know what:

  You must contrary me! marry, tis’ time.

  Well said, my hearts! You are a princox; go. (78-88)

  This is a scene which sticks in the memory; for here the dramatist, unencumbered by a story, is interpolating a lively scene in his own kind, a vignette of two very amusing people in an amusing situation. But it is unfortunate for the feud that this episode takes so well. For clearly old Capulet is unwilling to let the feud interrupt a dance; and a quarrel which is of less moment than a galliard is being appeased at an extravagant price, if the price is the death of two such delightful creatures as Romeo and Juliet;their parents’ rage,

  Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,

  (Prologue, 10-11)

  loses all its plausibility. A feud like this will not serve as the bribe it was meant to be; it is no atonement for the death of lovers. Nor, indeed, is it coherent and impressive enough as part of the plot to propel the sweep of necessity in the sequence of events. If the tragedy is to march relentlessly to its end, leaving no flaw in the sense of inevitability which it seeks to prompt, it clearly must depend for that indispensable tragic impression not on its feud, but on its scattered suggestions of doom and of malignant fate. And, as has been seen, Shakespeare harps frequently on this theme.

  But how far can a Roman sense of Fate be made real for a modern audience? It is no mere matter of exciting thought to “wander through eternity” in the wake of the mystery which surrounds the human lot. Mystery must take on positive shape, and half-lose itself in dread figures controlling human life in their malice. The forms and the phrases by which these powers had been invoked were a traditional part in the inheritance of the Senecan drama which came to sixteenth-century Europe. Fortuna, Fatum, Fata, Parcae: all were firmly established in its dramatis personae. Moreover their role in Virgilian theocracy was familiar to all with but a little Latin:Qua visa est fortuna pati Parcaeque sinebant

  Cedere res Latio, Turnum et tua moenia texi;

  Nunc iuvenem imparibus video concurrere fatis,

  Parcarumque dies et vis inimica propinquat.8

  For Roman here indeed were the shapers of destiny, the ultimate ἀ’ἀἀγκη which compels human fate, whether as the µοιρἀ of individual lot, or the ἐιµἀρµἐη of a world order. Horace himself linked Fortuna in closest companionship with Necessitas: “te semper anteit serva Necessitas,” he writes in his prayer to Fortuna.9 It was a note which reverberated through Senecan stoicism.

  But with what conviction could a sixteenth-century spectator take over these ancient figures? Even the human beings of an old mythology may lose their compelling power; “what’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” But the gods are in a much worse case; pagan, they had faded before the God of the Christians: Vicisti, Galilæe! Fate was no longer a deity strong enough to carry the responsibility of a tragic universe; at most, it could intervene casually as pure luck, and bad luck as a motive turns tragedy to mere chance. It lacks entirely the ultimate tragic ἀἀγκη. It fails to provide the indispensable inevitability.

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bsp; Is then Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet an unsuccessful experiment? To say so may seem not only profane but foolish. In its own day, as the dog’s-eared Bodley Folio shows, and ever since, it has been one of Shakespeare’s most preferred plays. It is indeed rich in spells of its own. But as a pattern of the idea of tragedy, it is a failure. Even Shakespeare appears to have felt that, as an experiment, it had disappointed him. At all events, he abandoned tragedy for the next few years and gave himself to history and to comedy; and even afterwards, he fought shy of the simple theme of love, and of the love of anybody less than a great political figure as the main matter for his tragedies.

  Nevertheless it is obvious that neither sadism nor masochism is remotely conscious in our appreciation of Romeo and Juliet, nor is our “philanthropy” offended by it. But the achievement is due to the magic of Shakespeare’s poetic genius and to the intermittent force of his dramatic power rather than to his grasp of the foundations of tragedy.

  There is no need here to follow the meetings of Romeo and Juliet through the play, and to recall the spell of Shakespeare’s poetry as it transports us along the rushing stream of the lovers’ passion, from its sudden outbreak to its consummation in death. Romeo seals his “dateless bargain to engrossing death,” choosing shipwreck on the dashing rocks to secure peace for his “sea-sick weary bark.” Juliet has but a word: “I’ll be brief. O happy dagger!” There is need for nothing beyond this. Shakespeare, divining their naked passion, lifts them above the world and out of life by the mere force of it. It is the sheer might of poetry. Dramatically, however, he has subsidiary resources. He has Mercutio and the Nurse.

  Shakespeare’s Mercutio has the gay poise and the rippling wit of the man of the world. By temperament he is irrepressible and merry; his charm is infectious. His speech runs freely between fancies of exquisite delicacy and the coarser fringe of worldly humor; and he has the sensitiveness of sympathetic fellowship. Such a man, if any at all, might have understood the depth of Romeo’s love for Juliet. But the camaraderie and the worldly savoir-faire of Mercutio give him no inkling of the nature of Romeo’s passion. The love of Romeo and Juliet is beyond the ken of their friends; it belongs to a world which is not their world; and so the passing of Romeo and Juliet is not as other deaths are in their impact on our sentiments.

  Similarly, too, the Nurse. She is Shakespeare’s greatest debt to Broke, in whose poem she plays a curiously unexpected and yet incongruously entertaining part. She is the one great addition which Broke made to the saga. She is garrulous, worldly, coarse, vulgar, and babblingly given to reminiscence stuffed with native animal humor and self-assurance. Shakespeare gladly borrowed her, and so gave his Juliet for her most intimate domestic companion a gross worldly creature who talks much of love and never means anything beyond sensuality. Like Romeo’s, Juliet’s love is completely unintelligible to the people in her familiar circle. To her nurse, love is animal lust. To her father, who has been a “mouse-hunter” in his time, and to her mother, it is merely a social institution, a worldly arrangement in a very worldly world. This earth, it would seem, has no place for passion like Romeo’s and Juliet’s. And so, stirred to sympathy by Shakespeare’s poetic power, we tolerate, perhaps even approve, their death. At least for the moment.

  But tragedy lives not only for its own moment, nor by long “suspensions of disbelief.” There is the inevitable afterthought and all its “obstinate questionings.” Our sentiments were but momentarily gratified. And finally our deeper consciousness protests. Shakespeare has but conquered us by a trick: the experiment carries him no nearer to the heart of tragedy.

  MICHAEL GOLDMAN

  Romeo and Juliet: The Meaning of a Theatrical Experience

  Everything in Romeo and Juliet is intense, impatient, threatening, explosive. We are caught up in speed, heat, desire, riots, running, jumping, rapid-fire puns, dirty jokes, extravagance, compressed and urgent passion, the pressure of secrets, fire, blood, death. Visually, the play remains memorable for a number of repeated images—street brawls, swords flashing to the hand, torches rushing on and off, crowds rapidly gathering. The upper stage is used frequently, with many opportunities for leaping or scrambling or stretching up and down and much play between upper and lower areas. The dominant bodily feelings we get as an audience are oppressive heat, sexual desire, a frequent whiz-bang exhilarating kinesthesia of speed and clash, and above all a feeling of the keeping-down and separation of highly charged bodies, whose pressure toward release and whose sudden discharge determine the rhythm of the play.

  The thematic appropriateness of these sensations to Shakespeare’s first great tragedy of the unsounded self is obvious enough, perhaps too obvious. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes usually pass from isolation to isolation. Romeo cannot be one of the boys or Hamlet one of his northern world’s competent, adaptable young men. At the beginning the isolation is that of the unsounded self, some form of self-sufficiency, remoteness, or withdrawal.From Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 33-44.

  The hero strikes us as a kind of closed structure. He very clearly carries a packaged energy; on first meeting him we recognize the container and the seal. (Think of Romeo or Hamlet for swift opening indications of these.) The ultimate isolation comes in the rupture of the package, the energy’s discharge. The drama marks the change. Romeo and Juliet are isolated by the sudden demands of love returned, and the world of their play reflects the violence of the transformation.

  The type of outline just given is useful but treacherous. It is useful because it sharpens our sense of the Shakespearean dramatic situation and gives us a reasonably pertinent norm by which to measure individual developments. But to follow it out in detail, to translate each tragedy back into the outline, to tell it like a story for any of the plays would be to lose exactly what makes the idea of the unsounded self important—that it is basic to drama, something far different from story or subject or theme. This is what is wrong with thinking about theatrical impressions in terms of thematic appropriateness, as a kind of varnish over the poetry and plot.

  What ideally has to be done and is perhaps more easily attempted for Romeo and Juliet than for later plays is to talk about what the experience of the whole amounts to. The impression is strong and distinctive; why do we mark it as we do? The problem is to take all the elements that affect us in the theater and examine them as they arrange themselves in our response, asking what relevance this configuration bears to our lives.

  If we try to see what the deep effect of the combination of these elements is, the crucial question is that of the relation that connects the plot, the visual spectacle, and the wordplay. Clearly they share a common busyness, suddenness, and violence. “These violent delights have violent ends” is enough to explain their congruence at least superficially. But it does not account for the richness of our response to the elaborate detail of the drama. Nor does it account for the peculiar aptness we sense in certain kinds of detail. Why are there so many puns and such obscene ones? Why should Mercutio and the Nurse be given long, digressive bravura speeches? Why is the balcony stressed, and the athleticism it entails? Why should certain lines like “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” or “What’s in a name?” or “A feasting presence full of light” stick in the memory? The last may be explained by its “beauty out of context”—always a doubtful procedure—but the other lines resist even that easy question-begging method, and consequently give us a good place to begin.

  “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” (2.2.33)

  Romeo’s name presents a problem to others besides Juliet but she characteristically sees more deeply into the difficulty. For it is not enough to decide whether Romeo should be called humors, madman, passion, lunatic, villain, coward, boy, Capulet, Montague, or even Romeo. The question is really why he must have a name at all. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of naming, a tragedy in which at times Romeo’s name seems to be the villain:As if that name,

  Shot from th
e deadly level of a gun,

  Did murder her, as that name’s cursed hand

  Murder’d her kinsman. O, tell me, friar, tell me,

  In what vile part of this anatomy

  Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack

  The hateful mansion.

  (3.3.102-8)

  But though this echoes Juliet’s other famous question and her insistence that a name is after all “nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face,” it is far different from “What’s in a name?” in even its immediate implications. The trouble with Romeo’s name here is not that it is a trivial attribute that raises accidental difficulties, but that “Romeo” now has a history, an inescapable reality of its own. It is the name of the man who has killed Tybalt; it is attached to a past and Romeo is responsible for it.

  It is Romeo who is banished for what Romeo has done. His anguish, though emotionally an intensification of Juliet’s in the balcony scene, is logically an answer to her question. This, among other things, is what’s in a name.

  Not only do names have a peculiar substantiality in the play (they can murder, die, be torn; every tongue that speaks “But Romeo’s name speaks heavenly eloquence”) but words themselves take on a namelike intensity. That is, they take on, usually by repetition, the importance and attributes of persons:Say thou but “I”