Romeo and Juliet

by Shakespeare, William

  If we divide the play at Mercutio’s death, the death that generates all those that follow, it becomes apparent that the play’s movement up to this point is essentially comic. With the usual intrigues and go-betweens, the lovers overcome obstacles and unite in marriage. Their personal action is set in a broader social context, so that the marriage promises not only private satisfaction but renewed social unity:For this alliance may so happy prove

  To turn your households’ rancour to pure love.

  (2.3.91-92)

  The household’s rancor is set out in the play’s first scene. This Verona of the Montague-Capulet feud is exactly the typical starting point of a comedy described by Frye—“a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older characters.”17 The scene’s formal balletic structure, a series of matched representatives of the warring families entering neatly on cue, conveys the inflexibility of this society, the arbitrary barriers that limit freedom of action.

  The feud itself seems more a matter of mechanical reflex than of deeply felt hatred. Charlton noted the comic tone of its presentation in this part of the play.18 The “parents’ rage” that sounded so ominous in the prologue becomes in representation an irascible humour: two old men claw at each other, only to be dragged back by their wives and scolded by their prince. Charlton found the play flawed by this failure to plant the seeds of tragedy; but the treatment of the feud makes good sense if Shakespeare is playing on comic expectations. At this point, the feud functions in Romeo very much as the various legal restraints do in Shakespearean comedy. Imposed from outside on the youthful lovers, who feel themselves no part of it, the feud is a barrier placed arbitrarily between them, like the Athenian law giving fathers the disposition of their daughters which stands between Lysander and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—something set up in order to be broken down.

  Other aspects of this initial world of Romeo suggest comedy as well. Its characters are the gentry and servants familiar in romantic comedies, and they are preoccupied, not with wars and the fate of kingdoms, but with arranging marriages and managing the kitchen. More important, it is a world of possibilities, with Capulet’s feast represented to more than one young man as a field of choice. “Hear all, all see,” says Capulet to Paris, “And like her most whose merit most shall be” (1.2.30-31). “Go thither,” Benvolio tells Romeo, who is disconsolate over Rosaline, “and with unattainted eye / Compare her face with some that I shall show” (88-89) and she will be forgotten for some more approachable lady. Romeo rejects the words, of course, but in action he soon displays a classic comic adaptability, switching from the impossible love to the possible.

  Violence and disaster are not totally absent from this milieu, but they are unrealized threats. The feast again provides a kind of comic emblem, when Tybalt’s proposed violence is rendered harmless by Capulet’s festive accommodation.

  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. (1.5.73-76)

  This overruling of Tybalt is significant because Tybalt in his inflexibility is a potentially tragic character, indeed the only one in the first part of the play. If we recognize in him an irascible humour type, an alazon, we should also recognize that the tragic hero is an alazon transposed.19 Tybalt alone takes the feud really seriously. It is his inner law, the propeller of his fiery nature. His natural frame of reference is the heroic one of honor and death:What, dares the slave

  Come hither, cover’d with an antic face,

  To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?

  Now, by the stock and honour of my kin,

  To strike him dead I hold it not a sin. (57-61)

  Tybalt’s single set of absolutes cuts him off from a whole range of speech and action available to the other young men of the play: lyric love, witty fooling, friendly conversation. Ironically, his imperatives come to dominate the play’s world only when he himself departs from it. While he is alive, Tybalt is an alien.

  In a similar way, the passing fears of calamity voiced at times by Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Laurence are not allowed to dominate the atmosphere of the early acts. The love of Romeo and Juliet is already imaged as a flash of light swallowed by darkness, an image invoking inexorable natural law; but it is also expressed as a sea venture, which suggests luck and skill set against natural hazards and chance seized joyously as an opportunity for action. “Direct my sail,” says Romeo to his captain Fortune. Soon he feels himself in command:I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far

  As that vast shore wash’d with the farthest sea,

  I should adventure for such merchandise.20

  The spirit is Bassanio’s as he adventures for Portia, a Jason voyaging in quest of the Golden Fleece (MV 1.1.167-72). Romeo is ready for difficulties with a traditional lovers’ stratagem, one which Shakespeare had used before in Two Gentlemen: A rope ladder, “cords made like a tackled stair; / Which to the high top-gallant of my joy / Must be my convoy in the secret night” (2.4.183-85).

  But before Romeo can mount his tackled stair, Mercutio’s death intervenes to cut off this world of exhilarating venture. Shakespeare developed this character, who in the source is little more than a name and a cold hand, into the very incarnation of comic atmosphere. Mercutio is the clown of romantic comedy, recast in more elegant mold but equally ready to take off from the plot in verbal play and to challenge idealistic love with his own brand of comic earthiness.

  Nay, I’ll conjure too.

  Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!

  Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh;

  Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied;

  Cry but ‘Aye me!’ pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove’;

  I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,

  By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,

  By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,

  And the demesnes that there adjacent lie. (2.1.6-20)

  He is the best of game-players, endlessly inventive and full of quick moves and countermoves. Speech for him is a constant exercise in multiple possibilities: puns abound, roles are taken up at whim (that of conjuror, for instance, in the passage just quoted), and his Queen Mab brings dreams not only to lovers like Romeo but to courtiers, lawyers, parsons, soldiers, maids. These have nothing to do with the case at hand, which is Romeo’s premonition of trouble, but Mercutio is not bound by events. They serve him merely as convenient launching pads for his flights of wit. When all this vitality, which has till now ignored all urgencies, is cut off abruptly by Tybalt’s sword, it must come as a shock to a spectator unfamiliar with the play. In Mercutio’s sudden, violent end, Shakespeare makes the birth of tragedy coincide exactly with the symbolic death of comedy. The alternative view, the element of freedom and play, dies with Mercutio. Where many courses were open before, now there seems only one. Romeo sees at once that an irreversible process has begun:This day’s black fate on more days doth depend [hang over];

  This but begins the woe others must end. (3.1.121-22)

  It is the first sign in the play’s dialogue pointing unambiguously to tragic necessity. Romeo’s future is now determined: he must kill Tybalt, he must run away, he is Fortune’s fool.

  This helplessness is the most striking feature of the second, tragic world of Romeo. The temper of this new world is largely a function of onrushing events. Under pressure of events, the feud turns from farce to fate; tit for tat becomes blood for blood. Lawless as it seems to Prince Escalus, the feud is dramatically “the law” in Romeo. Before, it was external and avoidable. Now it moves inside Romeo to be his personal law. This is why he takes over Tybalt’s rhetoric of honor and death:Alive in triumph and Mercutio slain!

  Away to heaven respective lenity,

  And fire-ey’d fury be my conduct now!

  Now, Tybalt, take the ‘villain’ back again

  That
late thou gav’st me. (124-28)

  Even outside the main chain of vengeance, the world is suddenly full of imperatives. Others besides Romeo feel helpless. Against his will Friar John is detained at the monastery; against his will the Apothecary sells poison to Romeo. Urgency becomes the norm. Nights run into mornings, and the characters seem never to sleep. The new world finds its emblem not in the aborted attack but in the aborted feast. As Tybalt’s violence was out of tune with the Capulet festivities in Act 2, so in the changed world of Acts 3 and 4 the projected wedding of Juliet and Paris is made grotesque when Shakespeare insistently links it with death.21 Preparations for the wedding feast parallel those made for the party in the play’s first part, so as to make more wrenching the contrast when Capulet must order,All things that we ordained festival

  Turn from their office to black funeral:

  Our instruments to melancholy bells,

  Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,

  Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change. (4.5.84-88)

  The play’s last scene shows how completely the comic movement has been reversed. It is inherent in that movement, as we have seen, that the young get their way at the expense of the old. The final tableau of comedy features young couples joined in love; parents and authority figures are there, if at all, to ratify with more or less good grace what has been accomplished against their wills. But here, the stage is strikingly full of elders—the Friar, the Prince, Capulet, Lady Capulet, Montague. Their power is not passed on. Indeed, there are no young to take over. If Benvolio survives somewhere offstage, we have long since forgotten this adjunct character. Romeo, Juliet, Tybalt, Mercutio, and Paris are all dead. In effect, the entire younger generation has been wiped out.

  I have been treating these two worlds as separate, consistent wholes in order to bring out their opposition, but I do not wish to deny dramatic unity to Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare was writing one play, not two; and in spite of the clearly marked turning point we are aware of premonitions of disaster before the death of Mercutio, and hopes for avoiding it continue until near the end of the play. Our full perception of the world-shift that converts Romeo and Juliet from instinctive winners into sacrificial victims thus comes gradually. In this connection the careers of two secondary characters, Friar Laurence and the Nurse, are instructive.

  In being and action, these two belong to the comic vision. Friar Laurence is one of the tribe of manipulators, whose job it is to transform or otherwise get round seemingly intractable realities. If his herbs and potions are less spectacular than the paraphernalia of Friar Bacon or John a Kent, he nevertheless belongs to their brotherhood. Such figures abound in romantic comedy, as we have seen, but not in tragedy, where the future is not so manipulable. The Friar’s aims are those implicit in the play’s comic movement: an inviolable union for Romeo and Juliet and an end to the families’ feud.

  The Nurse’s goal is less lofty but equally appropriate to comedy. She wants Juliet married—to anyone. Her preoccupation with bedding and breeding reminds us of comedy’s ancient roots in fertility rites, and it is as indiscriminate as the life force itself. But she conveys no sense of urgency in all this. On the contrary, her garrulity assumes the limitless time of comedy. In this sense her circumlocutions and digressions are analogous to Mercutio’s witty games and, for that matter, to Friar Laurence’s counsels of patience. “Wisely and slow,” the Friar cautions Romeo; “they stumble that run fast” (2.3.94). The Nurse is not very wise, but she is slow. The leisurely time assumptions of both Friar and Nurse contrast with the lovers’ impatience, to create first the normal counterpoint of comedy and later a radical split that points us, with the lovers, directly towards tragedy.

  Friar Laurence and the Nurse have no place in the new world brought into being by Mercutio’s death, the world of limited time, no effective choice, no escape. They define and sharpen the tragedy by their very failure to find a part in the dramatic progress, by their growing estrangement from the true springs of the action. “Be patient,” is the Friar’s advice to banished Romeo, “for the world is broad and wide” (3.3.16). But the roominess he perceives in both time and space simply does not exist for Romeo. His time has been constricted into a chain of days working out a “black fate,” and he sees no world outside the walls of Verona (17).

  Comic adaptability again confronts tragic integrity when Juliet is forced to marry Paris—and turns to her Nurse for counsel, as Romeo has turned to Friar Laurence. In the Nurse’s response comedy’s traditional wisdom of accommodation is carried to an extreme. Romeo has been banished, and Paris is after all very presentable. In short, adjust to the new state of things.

  Then, since the case so stands as now it doth,

  I think it best you married with the County.

  O, he’s a lovely gentleman!

  Romeo’s a dishclout to him. (3.5.218-21)

  She still speaks for the life force, against barrenness and death. Even if Juliet will not accept the dishclout comparison, an inferior husband is better than no husband at all: “Your first is dead, or ’twere as good he were / As living here and you no use of him” (226-27).

  But her advice is irrelevant, even shocking, in this new context. There was no sense of jar when Benvolio, a spokesman for comic accommodation like the Nurse and the Friar, earlier advised Romeo to substitute a possible love for an impossible one. True, the Nurse here is urging Juliet to violate her marriage vows; but Romeo also felt himself sworn to Rosaline, and for Juliet the marriage vow is a seal on the integrity of her love for Romeo, not a separable issue. The parallel points up the move into tragedy, for while Benvolio’s advice sounded sensible in Act 1 and was in fact unintentionally carried out by Romeo, the course of action that the Nurse proposes in Act 3 is unthinkable to the audience as well as to Juliet. The memory of the lovers’ passionate dawn parting that began this scene is too strong. Juliet and her nurse no longer speak the same language, and estrangement is inevitable. “Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain,” Juliet vows when the Nurse has left the stage.22 Like the slaying of Mercutio, Juliet’s rejection of her old confidante has symbolic overtones. The possibilities of comedy have again been presented only to be discarded.

  Both Romeo and Juliet have now cast off their comic companions and the alternative modes of being that they represented. But there is one last hope for comedy. If the lovers will not adjust to the situation, perhaps the situation can be adjusted to the lovers. This is the usual comic way with obstinately faithful pairs, and we have at hand the usual manipulator figure to arrange it.

  The Friar’s failure to bring off that solution is the final definition of the tragic world of Romeo and Juliet. There is no villain, only chance and bad timing. In comedy chance creates that elastic time that allows last-minute rescues. But here, events at Mantua and at the Capulet tomb will simply happen—by chance—in the wrong sequence. The Friar does his best: he makes more than one plan to avert catastrophe. The first, predictably, is patience and a broader field of action. Romeo must go to Mantua and waittill we can find a time

  To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends,

  Beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back.

  (3.3.150-52)

  It is a good enough plan, for life if not for drama, but it depends on “finding a time.” As it turns out, events move too quickly for the Friar. The hasty preparations for Juliet’s marriage to Paris leave no time for cooling tempers and reconciliations.

  His second plan is an attempt to gain time: he will create the necessary freedom by faking Juliet’s death. This is, of course, a familiar comic formula. Shakespeare’s later uses of it are all in comedies.23 Indeed, the contrived “deaths” of Hero in Much Ado, Helena in All’s Well, Claudio in Measure for Measure, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale are more ambitiously intended than Juliet’s, aimed at bringing about a change of heart in other characters.24 Time may be important, as it is in Winter’s Tale, but only as it promotes repentance. Friar Laurence, more desperate th
an his fellow manipulators, does not hope that Juliet’s death will dissolve the Montague-Capulet feud, but only that it will give Romeo a chance to come and carry her off. Time and chance, which in the other plays cooperate benevolently with the forces of regeneration and renewal, work against Friar Laurence. Romeo’s man is quicker with the bad news of Juliet’s death than poor Friar John with the good news that the death is only a pretense. Romeo himself beats Friar Laurence to the tomb of the Capulets. The onrushing tragic action quite literally outstrips the slower steps of accommodation before our eyes. The Friar arrives too late to prevent one half of the tragic conclusion, and his essential estrangement from the play’s world is only emphasized when he seeks to avert the other half by sending Juliet to a nunnery. This last alternative means little to the audience or to Juliet, who spares only a line to reject the possibility of adjustment and continuing life: “Go, get thee hence, for I will not away” (5.3.160).

  The Nurse and the Friar show that one way comedy can operate in a tragedy is by its irrelevance. Tragedy is tuned to the extraordinary. Romeo and Juliet locates this extraordinariness not so much in the two youthful lovers as in the love itself, its intensity and integrity. As the play moves forward, our sense of this intensity and integrity is strengthened by the cumulative effect of the lovers’ lyric encounters and the increasing urgency of events, but also by the growing irrelevance of the comic characters.