“For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”
In William Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet we are asked to consider a modern tale of forbidden love as two teenagers instantly fall in love at first sight and, though they barely know one another, they decide to secretly marry, sleep together, and elope without their parents’ knowledge. It is the kind of story that young readers find immediately attractive, owing both to its impassioned romance as well as its unbridled eroticism, but above all, modern readers find themselves enraptured by the play’s spiritually-infused portrayal of love as a form of passion throughout the play. Upon first glance, Romeo and Juliet bears all the hallmarks of being a silly comedy tale about two young lovers who attempt to outwit their parents and overcome various customary obstacles in the way of consummating their love, and if not for the looming specter of death throughout the play, this might have been the case (Shakespeare announces the morbid conclusion of the play in the play’s prologue which ultimately renders Romeo and Juliet a most weighty and sorrowful tragedy from the start).
In the classical tradition, young love was often treated as the subject of ridicule. The wayward whims of teenagers were mostly trivial concerns when contrasted with grander epic struggles portrayed in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles for example. And as far as ancient Greek comedy was concerned, in contrast to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes –which was often political and philosophic in nature– the New Comedy of Menander quickly became the fashionable form of comedic writing in the ancient world (see Menander’s only surviving play Dyskolos for reference). Among the ancients like Menander, sex and sexuality, despite being a natural part of life, were often referred to dismissively as the mere sickness of youth in need of inoculation, akin to a plague of eros sent in order to distract young people away from more important things. In many of Ovid’s tales, for example, love was described as a kind of disease from which one must be cured, the idea being to move beyond suffering in love, and to gratify the human (albeit ridiculous) experience of erotic attraction without letting the feeling consume you. In other words, youthful eroticism in classical antiquity was not met with the same kind of existential and moral despair wrestled with by St. Augustine in his Confessions. Ancient Greek New Comedy spread widely and traveled throughout the Hellenistic world to Rome where it was later adopted by the likes of Plautus and Terence. Their plays typically featured two young people falling in love against the wishes of their parents, followed by the ensuing comic struggle to overcome various obstacles and outwit their families in order to live a happy life together –this is also notably the formulation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Indeed, Shakespeare inherited this tradition of New Comedy which he then adopted and explored from a modern Renaissance viewpoint in his own comedies. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare borrows a standard New Comedy plot and turns it on its head, making it a tragic rather than comic tale, and he fills it with youthful angst and a burdensome sense of unbearable suffering. The experience of being in love becomes a heroic struggle, a democratized experience that anyone can undergo in the pursuit of their own self-sacrificial or heroic passion. Both Romeo and Juliet believe themselves to be divinely fated “star-cross’d lovers,” as if all the cosmos happen to be perfectly arranged for their own private tryst, and the consummation of their love becomes a deeply spiritual activity. In this way, Romeo and Juliet are shackled to a uniquely modern conceit about the world. The most tragic elements in the play emerge starkly in the speeches of these two young lovers, speeches which are utterly saturated with modern religious language, giving their love a sense of otherworldly spirituality and divine significance that was not present in the works of Old Comedy in Athens and Rome. In order to more fully understand the true extent of this religious dynamic in Romeo and Juliet, we must first examine the literary tradition of medieval poetry in which it arose.
*****
Sometime in the 12th or 13th centuries, a new form of Christian love poetry –courtly love– began to spring forth from the medieval courts of Europe. Although the phrase “courtly love” did not surface until the 19th century, it was nevertheless a literary trend that proliferated in Provence, Toulouse, and the Languedoc region of Southern France. Courtly love was not exactly a popular literary tradition of the working classes (i.e. of the bakers and the fishermen for example), but instead courtly love emerged from within the medieval European aristocracy as a boastful heroic celebration of itself, a mythological re-imagining of medieval Europe as a world of crusading knights defending their ladies. These tales began as products of the troubadours; they were often poems of a lone man celebrating his chosen virtuous woman from afar, and they were rife with similes of Christian ideals (though, as a whole, they undermined the Church’s rigid restrictions with respect to human sexuality at the time). These poems often portrayed women as wholly pure and divine, comparing mistresses to heavenly angels, while suggesting time apart from them was akin to hell and so on. In Southern France in the late 12th century, Marie de France wrote her own brand of courtly love poetry and chivalric romances from the perspective of a woman. Her poems or “lais” often portrayed complex love triangles, fairyland adventures, adultery, and love as a unique human experience associated most strongly with suffering which only ended in grief. They displayed women in erotic situations, such as virginal love, or the seduction of older men, as well as situations of women escaping repressive, loveless marriages. Notably, her poetry was openly defiant of the Church at the time. Then Chrétien de Troyes, writing within the burgeoning Arthurian tradition of the time, wrote the first Lancelot poem (“Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart”) in the 1170s and the first Perceval poem around the same time (“Perceval, the Story of the Grail”). The latter marked the first story of the quest for the holy grail. These were the first chivalric romances, which would soon take European courts by storm. As chivalric romances came to England, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was published, and as this literary trend expanded into Austria, Tristan and Isolde was also published. These typically featured a knight who falls in love with a lady, whom he worships (primarily from afar), and she becomes his goddess, his champion in tournaments –as in the case of Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde—and their love is very often is adulterous, such as a knight falling in love with his queen (or the wife of his feudal lord).
Courtly love grew out of Catholic Europe and it became increasingly spiritualized by the likes of Dante and Petrarch. Dante latched onto this trend around 1300 when he created the story of Beatrice, an eight-year-old girl he first glimpsed from a distance at the age of nine, and, according to him, it was love at first sight (or at least an all-consuming infatuation with the idea of a love of Beatrice). She was to become Dante’s pure life’s devotion, as depicted in La Vita Nuova. In his poems, he fashioned himself as a heroic knight dedicating his life to Beatrice from afar (though he was more akin to a shy, admiring poet, believing himself to be a version of a chivalric knight). However, Beatrice died young, and Dante, having only seen her twice in his life, transformed her into an idealized memory as his literary muse, his guide into paradise, ever leading him upward to philosophy in his “Divine Comedy.” Alongside Dante, Petrarch also continued this trend with the object of his admiration, Laura, who also died young (incidentally, in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio mentions Petrarch as if to contrast Romeo’s infatuation with Rosaline against Petrarch’s love for Laura). At any rate, the explosion of Arthurian literature as well as Petrarchan sonnets expanded across the continent, with men writing glowing, flowery, worshipful sonnets to their beloved paramours. And in Shakespeare’s day, Edmund Spenser also wrote his own sonnets to his wife, known as the Amoretti, though this practice of writing sonnets to a spouse was somewhat frowned upon as courtly love typically concerned erotic satisfaction found outside the bonds of marriage (affairs, infidelities, and trysts). Shakespeare wrote his own widely celebrated sonnets, however unlike most other poets of his day, Shakespeare’s sonnets tended to be playful and experimental, challenging long-established conventions, even critical of the rather silly inheritance of courtly love poetry –consider Sonnet 130 in which Shakespeare declares his “mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun,” her cheeks are not red like roses, her breath “reeks,” and unlike a goddess, she walks firmly on the ground so that she is not “belied with false compare.” In rejecting the overly spiritualized courtly love poetry of old Europe, Shakespeare, a man of the Renaissance, represents a praiseworthy turn away from the endless wistful pining found within the long-suffering pages of medieval poetry. Around the same time, we are also greeted by a similar effort to ridicule the tradition of courtly love poetry and chivalric romances in Miguel Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote, which is the comic tale of a Spanish gentleman who reads too many chivalric romances causing his brain to dry up, and his life to becomes a mess when he attempts to live the life of a knight errant in the real world. With his sidekick Sancho Panza, this hilariously mad Don Quixote claims to be defending the honor of his fictional lady Dulcinea (a woman he never actually meets), yet everywhere he goes, he is mocked and harangued by common people who cannot believe such a cartoonish fool exists in the world. In this way, Don Quixote shows us a vast gulf that exists between the high-minded, otherworldly poetry of courtly love, and the true experience of being-in-the-world or experiencing life as it truly exists, rather than as heaven might it imagine it to be. Courtly love lacked honesty and realism. In other words, there was a desperate need to bring the practice of love back to earth, and what better way to end something than by ridiculing it? In both Shakespeare and Cervantes, we find a shared critique of this overly romantic, spiritualized, hyper-idealized poetry, the likes of which were unrealistic, unrelatable, and unproductive. The poems of Dante and Petrarch, for example, celebrated a love that was never actually consummated, instead it was an unhealthy obsession from a distance, a sickly hunger that was distinct from the mere passing erotic attraction of a teenaged boy to a girl, but rather it represented the summum bonum of life’s purpose, a divine quest, the work of a knightly poet pining from the shadows in sorrow and despair, addicted to the joys that come from suffering for the sake of love, entranced by an ideal, but not actually in love with a human being.
It is worth noting that courtly love emerged around the same time as a radical religious movement, the Cathars (or the “pure” ones, whose name was derived from the same root as “cathartic”). The Cathars represented a form of Gnosticism –a heretical movement found in ancient religions, such as Jewish and pagan Gnostics, as a way of reviving an existing religion by turning it upside down, and inverting its values (i.e. making the devil a god, or the serpent a hero). The Gnostics also often denied the incarnation of Jesus, a gravely punishable offense according to the Church. For some of the Gnostics, Jesus came to earth to warn humanity that God is actually a demonic force who is not to be trusted. The Cathars believed themselves to be the only true Christians, and they rejected the rule of Catholicism. They were centered in the town of Albi, and thus became known as Albigensians. In some respects, these were the same people who produced the first courtly love poetry –which deified women– and this was also the birthplace of holy grail myths. It was in this confluence of heretical Christianity and nascent courtly love poetry, that we first start to encounter the Church’s justification for the “Albigensian Crusade” (1209-1229), a vicious and violent genocide perpetrated by Pope Innocent III in alliance with the King of France in order to exterminate the newly flowering civilization in Southern France. To be clear, this region was not yet under the control of the French King in Paris, and it arguably shared more cultural affinity with Barcelona at the time. Its citizens spoke Occitan, which was the primary language of courtly love. The goal of the Albigensian Crusade was not land conquest, but rather pure religious genocidal fanaticism –to wipe out an entire group of people. Indeed, there were mass public executions, very few Cathars survived, and it gave birth to centuries of Catholic Inquisition which left an indelible stain on the Church to this day. Some groups retreated underground to escape the rising fanaticism –in many ways, the holy grail myths came about in this milieu as a retreat from public view and into secret societies and groups cloistered behind high-walled castles, protecting secrets from the official Church.
At any rate, the history of courtly love, chivalric romance, modern love and the Christian Church is a helpful frame of reference in illuminating the context in which Shakespeare crafted Romeo and Juliet, a play which can be interpreted as a firm critique of the Middle Ages, and a continuation of the ideas explored in Shakespeare’s History plays –the central problem being chivalry, or the problem of Christian politics as a universalist, trans-political theocratic regime which is saturated with divine authority while lending itself easily to fanaticism (as in the case of the Crusades or the Inquisition). While courtly love emerged within this milieu of Catholic Europe, an argument is to be made that it actually arose in reaction against the Church’s repressive doctrines. However, in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare shows us the many troubling ways in which eros manifests itself in the modern mind and all worldly action is intended to have a spiritual component. It is precisely this radical, all-encompassing, tragic notion of spiritualized love that we have inherited today, a concept that Shakespeare witheringly critiques in his sonnets and which he examines as a tragic force in Romeo and Juliet.
*****
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, a modern Italian city ruled by a prince perhaps during the 13th or 14th century. Historically, this was a period of flourishing for the city under the rule of the della Scala family. This was prior to when Verona was conquered and occupied by the Republic of Venice from the 15th to the 18th centuries, though the exact timeframe of Romeo and Juliet remains unclear. Notably, the city of Verona is also featured prominently in Shakespeare’s other plays, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Even though dating the play has proven to be difficult, Romeo and Juliet can be safely placed within a modern context –it features a European prince who rules Verona against the backdrop of the Christian Church which is personified in the questionably trustworthy figure of a Franciscan Friar. Unlike Shakespeare’s comedies, which often take place in vaguely familiar, ancient dreamlike counter-historical settings, we know that Romeo and Juliet is distinctly modern. Geographically, the city of Verona lies in Northern Italy about halfway between Venice and Milan. It is contrasted with the nearby city of Mantua which sits nearly 50 miles south (Mantua is the only other city we learn about in the play). Mantua appears to be more competently governed than Verona since it does not face the same civil strife plaguing its aristocratic families. Mantua is also apparently more concerned about the health and welfare of its citizens as evidenced in its enforcement of strict quarantine houses for travelers like Friar John during an outbreak of the plague. As in ancient Sparta, Mantua is shown to be superior with regard to limiting an outbreak of the plague. Mantua is not a house divided the way Verona is. In Romeo and Juliet, the city of Mantua serves as a place of refuge and hope for the protagonists.
Notably, Romeo and Juliet is the only one of Shakespeare’s ten tragedies wherein war is not featured as a chief backdrop to the play (though the city of Verona is arguably on the verge of a kind of civil war). With no grand external conflict brewing nor any political succession dilemma facing its regime, Romeo and Juliet is as close to a domestic, or middle-class tragedy as Shakespeare ever penned. This is a world of thumotic young men, spirited teenagers who want to fight, they are hungry by nature for conflict (throughout the play, there is a fascinating interplay between eros and thumos). In Shakespeare’s History plays, thumos serves in a central role in order to highlight a central challenge for politics, as fiery young boys can be a very disruptive force for the city, but their energy is nevertheless a necessity for the city’s defense. The goal of a wise leader is to channel thumos into foreign wars in order to prevent the dangerous self-destructive impulse, however in the modern world of Romeo and Juliet Christianity has shown itself hostile to the natural human experience of thumos. It calls this natural human impulse “pride,” the deadliest of deadly sins, and it instructs aggressiveness to yield and turn the other cheek. Shakespeare explores this problem of Christian kingship throughout his history plays –consider the failures of the Christian kings like Henry VI alongside the dangerous medieval world of the Christian Church which harnesses thumos for the volatile goal of Crusade and militant fanaticism, one of the great dangers the world has ever known (Christian fanaticism was still a deep concern in Shakespeare’s day).
Shakespeare shows us that high-minded, ethereal politics runs the risk of being completely out of touch with the real world –it ironically breeds cynicism as citizens find the real world to be deficient, ugly, and bad in contrast to heavenly ideals. A singular most heavenly God necessitates belief in the darkest, most evil Satan –revealing an extreme polarity in the modern human imagination which runs counter to Aristotle’s moderate view of the world. This form of politics demands an extreme level of idealism that an honest life simply cannot bear. Similarly, a high-minded, otherworldly Christian view of eros leads to equally tragic circumstances, as Christian-infused ideas of love end in tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet begins with a Chorus in the classical tradition, modeled on the moral “Argument” laid out in Arthur Brooke’s original 1562 poem, but unlike Arthur Brooke, Shakespeare’s sonnet structure is Italian in construction rather than English. Once again, Shakespeare takes extraordinary labors to situate his play within its proper context.
“Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend” (Prologue).
Lest we get swept up in the humor of the play in its early scenes, Shakespeare opens with a Chorus giving an introduction/prologue. He notes an “ancient grudge” which has given way to a “new mutiny” between the two feuding aristocratic households in “fair Verona” –notably, Shakespeare likens the love of Romeo and Juliet to a “mutiny.” The suicide of these two teenagers is identified at the start as the catalyst which will bury their parents’ mutual strife, though despite laying out the play’s plot from the beginning, Shakespeare nevertheless invites those of us “with patient ears attend” to the true teaching of the play. What exactly does Shakespeare wish to impart in Romeo and Juliet?
The play proper begins with a group of bawdy young men roaming the streets, talking of sex and starting fights. Gregory and Samson (of the Capulet household) boast of their sexual prowess and virility in a string of double entendres about conquering the house of Montague and bedding their women. Samson pledges to be a “tyrant” and in an act of provocation, he thumbs his nose at a pair of men from the Montague household, and while initially fearful of breaking the law and starting a fight, greater numbers arrive when Benvolio appears (Romeo’s cousin and a Montague), along with Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin and a Capulet). The boys draw their swords and fight until a mob of citizens armed with clubs enters the foray, followed by the clumsy old Capulet in his nightgown and finally Prince Escalus arrives (note the similar pronunciation of “Aeschylus”). He threatens the penalty of death for anyone who perpetuates violence –“Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, profaners of this neighbor-stained steel” –we learn this is the third time in recent memory that the peace has been breached on the streets of Verona. Almost immediately, we can see the problem of young men in Verona who have nothing to do but wander the streets and instigate fights. Verona is a city ruled by aging men who seem to be entirely out of touch with the lives of their young children –“old folks, many feign as they were dead, unwieldly, slow, heavy, and pale as lead.”
We first meet Romeo, not in the heat of conflict, but rather far away, with a “troubled mind” pacing underneath a sycamore grove “with tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew, adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs into the dawn, hope to find a cure for his sorrow and heaviness.” Romeo is lovesick over a young girl he barely knows, Rosaline, because she has decided to live a chaste life. Benvolio counsels Romeo to forget about Rosaline and simply “examine other beauties” but the tragic weight of Romeo’s love compels him to declare that he will never forget Rosaline. All of this bears a light, comedic tone at the start of the play, as Romeo seems to be little more than an eminently silly figure, while his good-natured friends like Benvolio lament Romeo being plagued by Cupid’s arrow:
“Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof” (1.1.167-168).
“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet” (1.1.188-192).
Even before he meets Juliet, Romeo’s view of love oozes with modern religious imagery:
“When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,
And these who, often drowned, could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars.
One fairer than my love! The all-seeing sun
Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun” (1.2.89-94).
In Romeo and Juliet, Verona is experiencing a blisteringly hot summer, and much of the play takes place in the disorienting darkness of night, often beneath twinkling stars in the night sky, giving us a cosmic glimpse of young lovers displayed before the heavens. In his plays, Shakespeare often uses the natural environment to convey his chief themes –in his comedies, we often see lush, green forests filled with hope, surplus, and fertility (consider the forest of Arden in As You Like It); whereas his tragedies are often set in dark, barren landscapes characterized by deprivation (consider the storm-drenched “barren heath” in King Lear). In Romeo and Juliet, the characters are often ensconced in the darkness of night, in need of torchlight or illumination under the stars. Similarly, characters like Romeo and Juliet are tragically deprived of an illuminating presence in the play, or a wise counsel that might guard them against acting rashly, leaving them at the mercy of eros while wandering in the dark, aided by clumsy characters like the Friar and the Nurse. Therefore, despite being a very funny play (especially in the opening acts), Romeo and Juliet shares more in kinship with Shakespeare’s tragedies than his comedies.
At any rate, we are invited into the Capulet household where we learn that Verona is a fortnight “and odd days” away from celebrating Lammastide, a harvest festival beginning on August 1 (Lammas Eve is close to Juliet’s birthday). Juliet is not yet fourteen years old, “a stranger in the world,” yet she already has a suitor named County Paris, an aristocratic count aligned with prince Escalus who is eager to wed Juliet. Paris speaks not with Juliet, but rather with her father, in seeking approval for her hand in marriage (note that aristocratic characters like Paris and Prince Escalus mirror names from classical antiquity, whereas the lower-class servants echo biblical names like Peter, Samson, and Gregory). In response to Paris’s request, Capulet proffers that Paris let two more summers pass so that Juliet will be ready to be a bride. Capulet further announces that he will host “an old accustomed feast” –a masque wherein Paris might have the chance to woo Juliet.
Within the Capulet household we meet Juliet, the only child of the Capulets, and her twenty-six-year-old mother, Lady Capulet (who has little respect for her much older husband whom she calls a “mouse-hut” because is long “past his dancing days” which ended years ago at the wedding of Lucentio who is now about thirty, perhaps a nod to The Taming of the Shrew). Lady Capulet gave birth to Juliet around the age of thirteen. We also meet young Juliet’s attendant Nurse, a crass working-class woman who recounts a story about losing her virginity at the age of twelve. She once had a daughter named Susan who later died as well as a husband who also died. Her name may be “Angelica” since Capulet mentions it a single time in the play. She was once a wet nurse for Juliet, and she describes a bawdy story about weaning Juliet as a baby while in Mantua, and she recounts a memory about baby Juliet being unwittingly party to a sexual joke –this Nurse is a teller of ribald stories. She curiously recalls an “earthquake” that occurred eleven years ago (some scholars suggest this was a popular reference in Shakespeare’s day to an earthquake that struck southern England in 1580).
Later, Romeo’s friends –Benvolio and Mercutio– drag him along to sneak into the Capulet masque in the hopes of taking his troubled mind off Rosaline. Despite having a foreboding dream about the party, Romeo agrees to attend anyway (Romeo and Juliet is a play wherein numerous characters experience puzzling dreams –“the children of an idle brain”– which they believe are divine signs of grave significance, such as Mercutio’s extraordinary dream about Queen Mab). In the course of friendly banter, Mercutio reveals himself to be a very lusty young bachelor, and he displays some questionably homosexual interest in Romeo, but very quickly at the party, Romeo spots Juliet from afar and suddenly seems to forget about Rosaline entirely.
Romeo spots Juliet from across the room:
“What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?” (1.5.41-42).
“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (1.5.43-52).
Filled with religious imagery, Romeo approaches Juliet and they touch hands as if in a “holy shrine,” his lips protrude forth like “blushing pilgrims” and they embrace like “saints” in “holy palmers’ kiss” and in “prayer” to “purge” the “gentle sin” through erotic activity. Their love is ensconced in Christian symbolism, much like the works of courtly love poetry. It is love at first sight, not unlike the kinds of disastrous tales of instant love as featured throughout Jane Austen’s novels. Suddenly, Tybalt recognizes the true identity of Romeo under his mask and threatens to kill him, but the elder Capulet stops Tybalt because “Verona brags of him [Romeo] to be a virtuous and well-governed youth” since Romeo is the only son and “heir of old Tiberio” (both Romeo and Juliet are only children). Embittered and disrespectful, Tybalt relents. For some reason, no one seems to remember the origins of the “ancient feud” between the Capulets and the Montagues, and while hostilities are allowed to linger, any outbreak of violence is strictly prohibited.
The love of Romeo and Juliet is a rebellion against their parents –as forbidden fruit often tastes the sweetest. The youth of Verona behave in all sorts of chaotic, unpredictable ways within this city which has no political outlet for young ambitions. In their “mutiny” against the ruling families, Romeo and Juliet find themselves allied with Friar Laurence and the Nurse. The breakdown of order and civic virtue in Verona extends beyond simply the young men at odds with one another. For example, the Friar, with his ideal of Christian chastity, poses a challenge to political life because politics relies on regulated eroticism to a certain degree which allows for a regime’s continuation, but the Friar serves as a friendly mutineer with eros against nomos if it means sowing chaos in his own city (in other words, he is not an ally of civic virtue). At any rate, after the masque Romeo sneaks away from his friends and hides in the Capulet orchard outside Juliet’s balcony like a “madman, passion, lover.”
“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick ad green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off” (2.2.2-9).
At the same time, Juliet wrestles aloud with her infatuation for Romeo, despite the fact that his name as a Montague is marred, being her family’s political enemy. Love longs to transcend political boundaries, hence why eros, like thumos, poses a challenge to politics. However, a successful ruler, unlike Prince Escalus, will channel these deeply human impulses toward the needs of the city –thumos being directed outward in defense of the city, and eros being directed inward toward the marital union and the production of children. Therefore, civil strife in Verona threatens to destabilize the city in more ways than one. At any rate, Juliet’s love for Romeo beckons her wish that he deny his father and refuse his own name, questioning cultural customs and norms, searching for an anatomical justification for his name:
“O Romeo, Romo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And ill no longer be a Capulet” (2.2.33-36).
“’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyseslf, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is neither hand nor foot,
Nor arm or face or any other part
Belonging to a man. O be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself” (2.2.38-49).
Again, Romeo’s thoughts in response are overwhelmed with Christian imagery –Juliet’s eyes are compared to stars in the heavens as if she is a “bright angel” and a “dear saint,” glorious as a “winged messenger of heaven” who does “call me but love and I’ll be new baptized” in an “infinite” brand of love. Shakespeare goes to great lengths to put every kind of courtly love cliché in the mouth of Romeo, and he quickly comes to light as an eminently ridiculous young boy, acting rash and recklessly. Within minutes of meeting Juliet, he has confessed his undying love for her as well as his desire to be married immediately.
The following day, Romeo pays a visit to the Franciscan Friar, Friar Laurence, whom we first meet in his garden struggling to identify which plants are medicinal or poisonous. Similarly, he is unsure of what is either healing or toxic to the body politic, he has trouble distinguishing between virtue and vice. The Friar is a morally ambiguous character who, when asked by Romeo, readily agrees to assist the incautious teenager in his unwise decision to secretly elope without informing their respective families. He is an ally in their rebellion against the ruling Veronese regime –joining with eros and thumos, Christian theology poses a grave threat to political order if not channeled appropriately, as well. Despite not being particularly fond of Romeo’s urgent desire to sleep with Juliet, Friar Laurence agrees to marry Romeo and Juliet (as a Christian man of the cloth, he places a premium on chastity as a more holy –and therefore superior– way of life). He serves the romantic passions of youthful eros, against his duty to the prince. Friar Laurence can therefore be added to the list of friars in Shakespeare’s works who possess questionable morals.
Juliet plans to send for Romeo the following day at nine o’clock to test if his love is actually true while Romeo visits his “ghostly sire’s cell.” As in many of Shakespeare comedies, there is a love test in Romeo and Juliet in an effort for Juliet to secretly discover if her prospective future husband will remain true to his word, though in truth this is a pretty flimsy test devised here (contrast it with Rosalind’s test of Orlando in As You Like It). Juliet sends her Nurse to find Romeo. The Nurse is somewhat cautious at first, claiming their marriage is “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning which doth cease to be ere one can say ‘it lightens.’” And she suggests they sleep so that “summer’s ripening breath” may yield a “beauteous flower.” However, the following day the Nurse relents to Juliet’s request anyway and she takes three hours to track down Romeo, despite promising Juliet she would return in half an hour –where has she been? Is she trustworthy? The Nurse eventually tracks down Romeo carrying Juliet’s ring for presentation alongside her “fan” Peter and agrees to send Juliet to Friar Laurence’s cell that evening for their marriage and to let down a cord stair from Juliet’s balcony to grant their wedding night. After promising to tell Juliet everything Romeo has said, the Nurse later returns to Juliet –comically fatigued from traveling across the city—and she claims (contrary to Romeo’s request) that he is physically attractive but “he is not the flower of courtesy.” She warns Juliet but still agrees to facilitate their elopement. Similarly, Friar Laurence calls Romeo and Juliet’s after-hours marriage a “holy act” under the cover of secrecy, though he is not a fool because he realizes that their union is ominous –“These violent delights have violet ends”– but he still marries them anyway.
Another fight breaks out in the streets as Tybalt threatens Romeo after what he witnessed at the masque, fighting as a “pricksong,” who keeps time, distance and proportion” like a “duellist,” and “a gentleman of the very first house,” a tall man with “a very good blade,” “fashionmonger,” and “a very good whore!” When Romeo refuses to fight, Mercutio draws swords with Tybalt, but Tybalt slays Mercutio (“A plague a’ both houses!” says Mercutio three times before he dies) and in horror, Romeo realizes that his love for Juliet has made him “effeminate” and he grows enraged, ultimately killing Tybalt. “O, I am fortune’s fool” says Romeo, and when Prince Escalus arrives, Romeo is banished from Verona for the killing of Tybalt (even though at the start of the play, the Prince declared that the punishment for more fighting in the streets would be death). The Prince’s gentleness and forgiveness may be his own undoing. However, Romeo is nevertheless concealed by the Friar and then helped in his efforts to consummate his marriage to Juliet that very night by Juliet’s Nurse. Romeo then flees to neighboring Mantua.
Juliet continues to lie to her parents about her marriage to Romeo, while her mother, Lady Capulet, remains in hysterics over the death of Tybalt (some scholars have noted a possible romantic relationship between Tybalt and Lady Capulet). The Nurse also curiously calls Tybalt the best friend she ever had –what is the extent of their relationship? Also for some reason, Juliet’s father suddenly experiences an urgency in allowing Paris to marry Juliet –has he been informed of Juliet’s secret romantic liaison with Romeo? In walking back his earlier claim that Paris should wait two years before marrying his daughter, Capulet suddenly permits Paris to wed Juliet immediately. This leads to a wild turn of events in which Friar Laurence concocts a scheme whereby Juliet drinks a vial of potion that makes her appear to be dead, and when she is buried in her family tomb, the good friar and Romeo will plan to rescue her so the young lovers can escape to Mantua. Juliet wisely wonders if she can truly trust the Friar –wouldn’t it make sense for him to poison Juliet and thereby erase any memory of the fact that he secretly married the couple? Nevertheless, Juliet goes along with the plan, but things quickly go awry. In the ruse she avoids her planned wedding to Paris, but Friar Laurence sends a fellow churchman, Friar John, to Mantua to deliver a letter to Romeo, but Friar John fails due to being locked in a quarantine house as a result of the “infectious pestilence.” Do we trust his story? Romeo receives a false story about Juliet’s death from his servant, Balthasar, so he pays a visit to an apothecary to acquire poison for himself, and even though the apothecary refuses to break the law, with enough money he sells Romeo the poison anyway. Everyone seems doomed to a world of helpfulness and good intentions in this play. Later, Romeo arrives at the Capulet family crypt where he battles and slays County Paris, before pulling out his own dagger and committing suicide beside his beloved’s body. But when Juliet awakens from her potion, she spots Romeo’s corpse and decides to do the same thing, falling on the same dagger Romeo used to ram through himself.
When the Prince arrives on the scene, he curiously accepts the “holy man” Friar and his account of things rather than punishing him for intransigence. Both Montague (whose wife dies of grief) and Capulet embrace and agree to erect gold statues of Romeo and Juliet while the Prince declares that “some shall be pardoned and some punished” –is he referring to the Nurse and the Friar? “For never was a story of more woe, Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Despite the fact that the Friar had initially recognized Romeo as a “waverer,” he nevertheless agreed to assist him in an “alliance” to turn the “households’ rancour to pure love,” but in the end his actions helped cause the suicide of the only heirs to Verona’s leading families, thus bringing about an end to the feud –and also an end to the city itself, which will soon be conquered by the Republic of Venice.
*****
Romeo and Juliet is tragic because it is a cautionary tale –a warning about the dangers of eros. When teenagers believe they are fulfilling a divine purpose by jointly killing themselves for the sake of love, Shakespeare exposes a grave and dangerous element of modern love, especially when it becomes subsumed with Christian spirituality and a fanatical feeling of self-righteousness, as if lovers have something to prove in dying for their love. Whereas in Shakespeare’s history plays, where the chief subject was thumos, in Romeo and Juliet (as well as his comedies) eros is the dominant theme. Or, to put it another way, in the History plays Shakespeare examines medieval ideas of politics, but in Romeo and Juliet he examines medieval ideas of love.
Romeo and Juliet serves as a natural bridge to Shakespeare’s other comedies, where love is often the playful subject of ridicule. His comedies tend to abstract from politics, whereas his tragedies are immersed deeply into the world of politics. The comedies have a kind of a-historical, neverland, utopian quality to them (consider As You Like It, Twelfth Night, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and in them we are repeatedly shown that courtly love is as out of touch with reality as is medieval chivalry from the world of politics.
Notably, the one person who makes the love of Romeo and Juliet possible is the Friar, a character who stands against the political community in agreeing to arrange a secret marriage ceremony. The Friar claims he can run the city better than the Prince. He is allied with Romeo and Juliet against the city. While he condemns their young eroticism, he is granted the religious power to marry them independent of the political community –he acknowledges that there is something higher than Verona. As the personification of Christianity in the play, the Friar shows his religion to be a-political or perhaps trans-political, a religion not of this world, fundamentally oriented toward another world –an afterlife– hence why antiquity was often cast aside by Christians for being “pagan,” implying the world of antiquity was only focused on this world and this life, rather than a fabled afterlife. In Romeo and Juliet, Christianity comes into direct conflict with the city as the salvation of one’s soul –the redemption afforded through spiritualized love– becomes vastly more important than civic virtue.
Shakespeare inherited the story of Romeo and Juliet mostly from Arthur Brooke’s poem “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet” (1562) which is filled with classical echoes of Pyramus and Thisbe (see Ovid’s story in the Metamorphoses). In Ovid’s tale, Pyramus is described as a handsome young boy and Thisbe is the “loveliest of all the Eastern girls” both living in Babylon which was “built by Semiramis.” In time, they fall in love but their parents forbid them from marrying even though “you know how fire suppressed burns all the fiercer.” However, in time they discover a way to speak through a “chink” in the wall and sneak out in the darkness of night to meet at the tomb of Ninus beneath a mulberry tree of snow-white berries. Thisbe arrives first but suddenly a lioness appears with “jaws a crimson froth” and so Thisbe flees the scene and hides in a cave while accidentally dropping her veil, which the lioness chews with its bloody jaws before returning to the woods. Then Pyramus arrives and finds the bloody veil. He blames himself for what appears to be Thisbe’s death. Pyramus laments that he has become a coward and calls upon the lions to devour him, as well, before plunging his own dagger into his body, causing blood to spout forth from his body, coloring the nearby mulberry tree red with blood. The roots, soaked in crimson, died all the berries red. Thisbe then returns to the scene and, upon spotting her dead Pyramus, promptly kills herself with the same dagger so the two lovers can lie in the same tomb together with their ashes collected in a common urn –the mulberry tree was thus to become a sign and symbol of their mournful deaths as this tale explains why its fruit reddens at its ripeness.
In addition to Ovid’s account, The story of Pyramus and Thisbe also appears in Giovanni Boccaccio’s On Famous Women as biography number twelve (or sometimes thirteen), and a version appears in his Decameron (in the fifth story on the seventh day), where a desperate housewife falls in love with her neighbor, and communicates with him through a crack in the wall, attracting his attention by dropping pieces of stone and straw through the crack. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe also appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a performance which the “mechanicals” act out. And Dante gave an account of the Montagues and Capulets as examples of civil strife for the new Holy Roman Emperor, Albert I of Hapsburg (1298) –he shared the story of Giulietta Cappelletti and Romeo Montecchi which was told by Luigi da Porto in 1530 and again by Matteo Bandello in 1554, set in Verona during the reign of Bartolomeo della Scala, Dante’s patron. Shakespeare likely also read the story of “Rhomeo and Julietta” from William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567). Other versions of this story of forbidden love can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, among others.
Notably, in Brooke’s original poem (which Shakespeare likely used as his chief source for the play), the Friar is portrayed as a whoremonger and a traitor, licentious in his youth and nefarious in his old age. For the play, Shakespeare slightly revised characters like Tybalt and Benvolio while greatly expanding upon Mercutio (the most carnal and sexualized of the young men in the play), and Paris is shown to be something of a sympathetic character in Shakespeare’s version. Romeo and Juliet was likely written around the same time as Richard II and A Midsummer Night’s Dream –which are sometimes grouped together and called the three most poetic of Shakespeare’s plays. They are three of his most lyrical plays, with all three being about characters with poetic temperaments, about dreamers and lovers (strangely, Romeo and Juliet was noticeably absent from A.C. Bradley’s famous study of Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904).
On the one hand, the union of Romeo and Juliet might have solved a great deal of the problems afflicting the city of Verona by uniting the two feuding families once and for all. However, the problems in Verona as shown in Romeo and Juliet clearly extend much further than a forbidden marriage of two teenagers. For example, Prince Escalus seems inept and unfit for his title, he is facing a rebellion on three fronts –young men roaming the streets looking for fights because they have little to do, a new generation of youth in search of salacious sexual gratification, and the presence of people like the Friar and the Nurse who only serve to aid the rising spirit of rebellion. This is not to mention anything about the plague for which Verona seems ill-equipped to handle –a house divided simply cannot stand. By the end of the play, the future of Verona seems unclear –the two leading families in the city have no clear heirs to continue their lineage, and the leading replacements, like Paris, have also been killed. Verona has been gravely weakened and it is ripe for conquest by another city like the Republic of Venice.
For this reading I used the impressive Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet along with Paul Cantor’s excellent lectures, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Rolfe Humphries. Copyright 1955 by Indiana University Press.