by Emma Smith
So is tragedy the genre in which the human’s capacity to affect his or her situation is most undermined? Questions of agency in tragedy are discussed in more detail in the chapter on Macbeth. Maybe the popularity of tragedy as an early modern form reflects this cultural interest. At the time of Shakespeare’s writing, philosophies of causation were on the move. They began to shift away from the providential, theocentric views of medieval Christianity – broadly, things happen because God says so – via Machiavelli’s unsentimental stress on human ingenuity and significance in The Prince (circulated widely in the second half of the sixteenth century), and emerged somewhere about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (printed in 1651), where things happen because humans, individually and collectively, behave in particular self-interested ways. The fatalistic worldview of the Romeo and Juliet Prologue may have its own agenda: blaming some cosmic agency also lets humans off the hook, so that the death of the young lovers is less the fault of their pointlessly feuding elders and more some unavoidable and predestined tragedy. The Prince’s announcement at the end of the play that ‘Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd’ (5.3.307), suggests a judgement that can target responsible human agents. To put it another way, the play moves away from those mysteriously fatal loins and misadventured piteous overthrows to a more explicitly temporal and judicial explanatory framework. But, if it was all always going to be like this, it feels a bit harsh to pin the blame on any particular – and probably minor – character for making it happen. In a story of star-crossed lovers, is it really the apothecary who is at fault for selling Romeo the poison? Isn’t he just a cosmic plot device, the emaciated cat’s paw of fate?
So Romeo and Juliet has already happened, is already written, in some metaphysical sense, because that’s the genre of tragedy. And in a more local sense, it’s already written because, like pretty much every play he wrote, here the story pre-exists Shakespeare’s retelling. There are stories of doomed lovers on opposite sides of some human divide in cultures across the world, and long before the English Renaissance, but the direct source Shakespeare used for Romeo and Juliet was a long narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, translated from the Italian under the title of The tragicall history of Romeus and Juliet, and first published in 1562. Brooke’s poem also starts with a sonnet: perhaps that gave Shakespeare the idea. The comparison of the two is revelatory. Here’s Brooke:
Love hath inflaméd twain by sudden sight,
And both do grant the thing that both desire
They wed in shrift by counsel of a friar.
Young Romeus climbs fair Juliet’s bower by night.
Three months he doth enjoy his chief delight.
By Tybalt’s rage provokéd unto ire,
He payeth death to Tybalt for his hire.
A banished man he ’scapes by secret flight.
New marriage is offered to his wife.
She drinks a drink that seems to reave her breath:
They bury her that sleeping yet hath life.
Her husband hears the tidings of her death.
He drinks his bane. And she with Romeus’ knife,
When she awakes, herself, alas! she slay’th.
Brooke is absolutely clear that the blame for this is on the couple themselves. There’s a moment of seeming to personify the agency of ‘Love’, but the human decision is clear: ‘both do grant the thing that both desire’. Their lustful behaviour leads to their downfall. There’s none of that fated or star-crossed language of Shakespeare, and even Brooke’s particular version of the sonnet, the kind without a rhyming final couplet, has a less inexorable sense of form than that of his imitator. So Shakespeare changes the motivation or causation for the tragedy quite distinctly. Brooke’s prefatory material is all moralistic, and in particular, anti-Catholic. His take-away message is that young people should do what their parents say, or terrible consequences will ensue, and especially they should avoid gossipy old women and dodgy friars (Brooke’s poem as a whole is a bit more sympathetic to the lovers than this framework suggests, but it starts in very didactic mode). We can see that Shakespeare – as often – jettisons this moralistic notion. No one reading Romeo and Juliet could really generate from it the moral that children should obey their parents, since those parents have forfeited moral authority because of their unexplained and therefore unjustified family feud, and so are not presented as sources of moral authority.
On the other hand, it’s interesting to see that Shakespeare can change the framework for the tragedy, but he cannot transform it so completely that the lovers can escape their families and live happily ever after in Mantua. The tragedy retains its inexorable shape. The fatal law governing events here is not just one of genre in general, but of the source in particular. The standard line on how Shakespeare uses his sources is that he transforms them from prosaic dross into poetic gold (tweaking ‘Romeus’ to ‘Romeo’ – genius?). That may well be true, but it’s also the case that he is rarely able to reshape them significantly. The source for Shakespeare seems to trace out a narrative arc that is irresistible. (King Lear is an important exception here, as we will see in the chapter on that play.) The play is thus overburdened and overdetermined by many preceding structures, including those of genre and of source. No wonder it needs to blurt out in the Chorus at the beginning the shape of what is to come. It starts to look as if this issue of hobbled or restricted agency is as much a feature of the playwright as the characters: like his Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare too is playing out a cosmically preordained script, with little of that contingent or playful evitability that Snyder identifies as the roadmap for comedy.
The relation between the Prologue and the play, then, turns out to be something rather like that between Brooke and Shakespeare: in each pair, the first is proleptic or anticipatory, but also pre-emptive, setting out the course the second must follow. The Renaissance theorist George Puttenham defined the rhetorical term for this: a ‘manner of disordered speech … we call it in English proverb, the cart before the horse, the Greeks call it Hysteron proteron’. The English version of this term, putting the cart before the horse, suggests haste – and there is indeed a kind of premature quality to this play that is so shaped by youthful impatience and hurry, with its adolescent protagonists rushing towards their destiny, heedless of Friar Lawrence’s caution: ‘Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow’ (2.5.15).
Lots of elements of this play are about coming too soon, and the sexual pun is somehow unavoidable: Romeo and Juliet is shaped as the structural equivalent of premature ejaculation. If, as many theorists have conjectured, the pleasure we take in narrative is somehow paced like sexual pleasure – enjoying anticipation, foreplay and climax – then this play needs to learn to take its time. Consummation – sexual, but also narrative – is too quick, wrongly placed: the couple exit with the friar to be married in ‘short work’ (2.5.35) at the end of Act 2. What should be the end of the play, if it were to end like a comedy – in marriage – is brought into the middle, and so there’s nowhere good to go. It’s a structural hysteron proteron, as those Greeks would have it: it puts the cart before the horse. We might compare this briefly to the contemporaneous play which shares many surprising aspects with Romeo and Juliet: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the beginning of the comedy, Duke Theseus is impatient to be married. The whole play operates as a kind of pretext or a time-filler, so that the time until his marriage to Hippolyta and its nocturnal consummation can pass by more quickly. At the end of the play, the fairies bless the marriage bed, bride and groom leave the stage, and marital sex happens, presumably, outside the frame of the play.
By contrast, Romeo and Juliet is a play that can’t wait and has no truck with delayed gratification. The Chorus already spills out the story even before we’ve settled into our seats, and we learn in the first act that Juliet is not yet fourteen years old. Her father initially tells Paris to wait: ‘Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride’ (1.2.10–11). Then he r
elents: the marriage starts to be a matter of days rather than years away. What day is it? Juliet’s father asks Paris. Monday, is the reply. ‘Well, Wednesday is too soon’ (3.4.19), says Capulet, before setting the marriage day for Thursday. Paris wishes ‘Thursday were tomorrow’ (29); Capulet’s question ‘Do you like this haste?’ (3.4.22) seems merely rhetorical.
Juliet cannot wait for Romeo to arrive:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a waggoner
As Phaëton would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
(3.2.1–4)
Her rhythms here are impatient, breathless – the opening word ‘Gallop’ deploys an initial stressed syllable (like Richard III’s opening speech, this is technically called trochaic rather than iambic), so that even the language is in too much of a hurry for all that leisurely de-dum de-dum business. And Juliet’s own imagery for her impatience understands that it is not just that she is too eager for Romeo’s arrival, but that she is too eager for this adult experience:
So tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.
(3.2.28–31)
Her simile is from childhood experience, and it movingly captures the gap between the present and the hurried future to which she is committing herself.
We used to assume that Shakespeare intended this play to represent a high romantic love because early teenage was a normal time for Elizabethans to be married – an assumption based on some evidence of very young betrothals in noble families, where children were affianced to perpetuate long-term dynastic alliances. But the average age for marriage was probably only slighter lower at the end of the sixteenth century than it is now in Western countries – around the mid-twenties. It’s therefore clear that everyone who was watching the play would have thought that Juliet was too young for this, and although we don’t know Romeo’s age, there’s no particular sense of an age gap, so it is likely he was also seen as too immature for marriage. The fact that Juliet’s age is so emphasized by the Nurse, in a comic monologue fixing her age to the memory of ‘’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years, / And she was weaned’ (1.3.25–6), means that we are supposed to notice it. Only a tiny handful of Shakespearean characters are identified by precise age. To put the point another way, no actor of the actual age of Juliet could now perform this role professionally, as the producers of Baz Luhrmann’s iconic film version of the play from 1996 found, when they initially cast the fourteen-year-old Natalie Portman in the title role but realized she was required to act in ways technically illegal because of her age. Leonardo DiCaprio (then aged twenty-two) was cast as a Romeo who is likeably gawky and clumsy, a big, overgrown and uncoordinated teenager. It’s a clever cinematic attempt to humanize a character who can seem a bit two-dimensional, but it’s also a way to humanize a helter-skelter plot that is too quick and needs to slow down. As Friar Lawrence says, sagely: ‘Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast’ (2.2.94). Unfortunately, the friar is so beguiled by the anticipated honour of uniting the feuding families that in his other hand he brandishes the tragedy’s starting pistol. Puttenham’s inversion, that hysteron proteron, is here developmental as well as rhetorical and structural. The Chorus’s spoiler serves as a metonym – a rhetorical term for a part substituting for the whole – for a play which is always ahead of itself, precocious, impatient, too much too soon. Even that ‘two-hours’ traffic of our stage’ sets the clock ticking – it’s hard to think the play could ever have been over so fast, but somehow it adds to its hectic quality.
So far I’ve suggested that the play was always already tragic. But there’s an alternative reading. Perhaps that tumbling hectic pace overshoots comedy and brings Romeo and Juliet to its tragic conclusion. The play misses a comic redemption by a matter of minutes. It’s entirely appropriate to the play’s characteristic impatience that it ends with Romeo killing himself just that bit too quickly to realize that Juliet is not actually dead. Perhaps this is a play that becomes, rather than is, tragic. A Restoration adaptation performed it on alternate nights with a happy ending. Young people, programmed towards romantic love and sexual reproduction, really belong in a comedy. Disapproving parents also have a role as archetypal blocking figures in comedy, a genre that tends to see the young win out over their elders’ blinkered prejudices. A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Egeus, for instance, is another father dead set against his daughter’s choice in marriage, but his objections are simply overruled as the play comes to its multiply marital comic ending. In Romeo and Juliet it’s often Mercutio’s death – itself a consequence of Romeo’s awkward and hasty intervention in the fight with Tybalt – that is seen as a generic tipping point, the moment at which the play stops being a comedy and turns to the sombre choreography of tragedy. The play leaves the busy and social world of the play’s opening (Verona is the kind of Italian city in which Shakespeare sets his comedies), and the lovers must set aside their comic companions, the Nurse and Mercutio. The movement of the play is towards the lonely world of tragedy, which ends in the charnel-house claustrophobia of the Capulet tomb.
If, after all, this is a play that could have turned out differently – if only the friar’s messenger had not been quarantined by the plague, if only Juliet had woken seconds earlier – then perhaps the presence of the Prologue does something different. If this is a tragedy morphing out of a comic matrix, as Susan Snyder would put it, perhaps the purpose of the Chorus is more pointedly pre-emptive. It might look as if this could all turn out well, but you’ve already heard that it won’t. Don’t get your hopes up. These comic-looking elements are actually all foreclosed in a tragic narrative. Even if the play itself looks evitable rather than inevitable, the Prologue makes clear that there’s only one way it can end.
One last footnote to this story of tragic inevitability. Like others of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet exists in a couple of distinct early editions, with textual variations that speak to the life of the play on stage and in development. When it is printed in the First Folio, one other difference has crept in. No Prologue. Romeo and Juliet in the Folio edition – the one that its editors bragged presented the ‘perfect’ copies – begins with the street fight between the Montague and Capulet servants, without any tragic or star-crossed framing. Without that pre-emptive, deterministic Prologue, without the opening hysteron proteron, without that perverse relaxation Anouilh attributed to tragic inevitability – it’s quite a different play.
CHAPTER 6
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
With its fairies, funny ass’s head, rhythmic rhymes and magical woodland setting, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been considered to be Shakespeare at his most child-friendly. It’s often the play to which younger readers are first introduced in school, and generations of adaptations, from Charles and Mary Lamb’s at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the Walt Disney ‘House of Mouse’ cartoon at the end of the twentieth, have emphasized its accessibility and suitability for younger audiences. Take the character of Puck: we all know him, right? A sprite-like fellow, a fairy spirit, magical servant to the fairy king Oberon, he flits about the enchanted wood like a male Tinker Bell crossed with the traditions of the green or wild man. He’s usually wearing green tights to show off his light-footed quickness and dancer’s legs; he may well be youthful, and is usually bare-chested, smiling with a kind of cheeky innocence. He promises whimsically to ‘put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes’ (2.1.175–6) and ends the play with the apologetic Epilogue:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream …
(Epilogue 1–6)
He messes up
Oberon’s instructions, to be sure, but it was an easy mistake: how was he supposed to know that there were two youths in the wood, both wearing Athenian garments? He’s naughty, yes – the dictionary definition for the nineteenth-century adjective ‘puckish’ sums it up as ‘impish, mischievous, capricious’ – but never malign. He observes the human world with dispassionate wisdom: ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (3.2.115). Puck’s short, rhyming lines and playful physical jests place him centre stage in the imagination of a play that, since the Victorian period, has been seen as delightfully innocent and childlike.
In fact, Elizabethan ideas of Puck were far from this cheery, domesticated fairy trickster. Shakespeare actually calls his character Robin Goodfellow, a name that suggested to contemporary culture a frightening hobgoblin with a potentially diabolic lineage. The poet Edmund Spenser listed Puck among the ‘evil sprites’, and popular folklore was full of his ‘mad pranks and merry jests’, as a book of 1628 put it. This publication had a title page with a woodcut of Robin Goodfellow as a huge, torch-bearing dancing satyr with shaggy thighs and cloven feet, a man’s naked torso and a bearded head bearing horns. Most prominent of all is his huge, erect phallus. This Puck is indeed a ‘merry wanderer of the night’ (2.1.43), associated with rough sexual energy and fertility, not with the balletic magic tricks of a children’s party.
