“Romeo and Juliet is always greeted by the young with immediate sympathy, somehow expressing the essence of love, what it ought to be, a permanent possibility, a fulfillment of every hope and a thing to be admired” –so begins Allan Bloom’s definitive essay on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (which appears in both his collections entitled Love & Friendship and also Shakespeare on Love & Friendship).
According to Bloom, Romeo and Juliet transcends the Romantic novels which are often rife with artificiality, prejudices, and which are infinitely distant in the way they approach sexual relations. Shakespeare’s women, for example, “have a range and diversity that make us forget the constrained and constructed women of the Romantics” (5). Shakespeare serves as a middle ground between the ancient poets whose tragedies hardly spoke of love and the Romantic poets whose sad tales are concerned only with love. “Serious writers in antiquity, with the strange exception of Plato, did not present men and women in love as the most serious of beings facing the most serious problems. The reasons for this should be investigated further, but we may say that it has something to do with the primacy of virtue and reason over the classical view, whereas the Romantics made their theme precisely because of their preference for the passions over virtue and reason. Christian Europe, of course, has an ambivalent and ambiguous history so far as love goes, but certainly the official position depreciates erotic love in favor of Christian love or agape. This is a question that interests Shakespeare deeply” (6).
Two of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra) feature two names in their titles indicating a shared tragic fate for both lovers. Eroticism features prominently in Shakespeare’s comedies, and love appears in a couple of his tragedies, however, Bloom states that Shakespeare’s tragedies are less tragic than either Aeschylus or Sophocles (what of Euripides?), and his comedies are less comic than those of Aristophanes. Shakespeare takes tragedy less seriously and comedy more seriously than the ancients, blurring the delineation between tragedy and comedy as Socrates once encouraged of both Agathon and Aristophanes at the end of Plato’s Symposium. “Love appears to be a link between the high and low in man, and Shakespeare devotes much of his talent to looking into this. Love is surely not the whole meaning of life for Shakespeare, but it just as surely flatters some of man’s deepest aspirations. What could be more wonderful than uniting one’s most intense pleasure with the highest activity and the most noble and beautiful deeds and words? Such is the promise of love” (7).
Bloom argues that Romeo and Juliet are a perfect pair of lovers –they are beautiful, young, noble, and rich. Yet people from all stations in life tend to find themselves as partisans in favor of these young lovers. Mankind naturally craves a perfection it cannot attain, says Bloom, and great literature, like Shakespeare, allows us to better identify the dearest longings of our nature.
Unlike the downfall of a great man as in Macbeth –wherein a classical warrior’s modern ambition leads him ineluctably toward a career of crime and death– Romeo kills himself only because he believes Juliet is dead. Here, Bloom pauses and considers a central “mystery” of the play: “How does that difference between appearance and reality follow necessarily from the lover’s nature?” This question highlights the authority, or even, tyranny of parents and families which induce the classical conflict between inclination and duty. “The family, which has its roots in erotic necessities, is profoundly anti-erotic. It surrounds young people with all kinds of noes, and, in the grand tradition of the family, it uses sexual alliances for the sake of property, status, and political arrangements” (8). However, Romeo and Juliet believe in the superiority of their love, superseding any commandment that might forbid it. The pair represent the natural rights of love, rather than conventional or customary inheritance. Romeo is aware that his parents would disapprove of their love, and Juliet is a natural actor at the art of deception with her family, unhesitatingly lying to her parents again and again. But Shakespeare does not argue for the dignity of the family, readers are instead intended to side unqualifiedly with the lovers. And still, love, like all idealisms, must come to terms with the familial, religious, and political demands of an age. This is the great struggle for lovers –for love knows no bounds of propriety, and has a natural orientation toward cosmopolitanism. It breeds a kind of fanaticism in the hearts of young characters like Romeo and Juliet. “Treachery of every other kind seems merely despicable, and it is a great tribute to love that it can provide a passport, recognized by so many, for travel beyond the boundaries. But loyalists have their day too” (9).
Bloom describes the political problem in Romeo and Juliet as “typical of Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Italy also incidentally serves as the seat of Shakespeare’s modern love writing. Shakespeare was very likely well familiar with the writings of Machiavelli, who writes voluminously about family quarrels that racked the independent cities of Italy, many of them connected to tyrants and various political and religious factions. And the problem of faction is something that all modern thinkers have wrestled with. According to the ancient political philosophers, cities could only be founded when they had enough power to suppress the rule of the fathers –the blood-tie of clans often needed to be ended violently. However, in Italy the code of the clan reasserted itself due to the feebleness of its political rulers. Machiavelli blames this effect on the Italian princes being too gentle and too merciful –a notion Shakespeare also explores extensively. “The difficulty is less any lack of brute force than a spiritual weakness, an infection apparently stemming from the attraction of mercifulness” (9). This does not necessarily mean that in a less corrupt political climate, Romeo and Juliet might have avoided the need to overcome parental resistance, but rather that their struggle might not have been rendered tragic by civil war. It is Friar Laurence, after all, who uses these two young love birds in attempt to restore civil peace, but he ultimately fails. Only in their deaths is peace achieved, but it means the end of the two leading families in Verona since their only two heirs have died.
Romeo serves as the “protoype of the Romantic lover and poet” –in a state of perpetual despair and longing, he experiences both moodiness and melancholy. But he is not a Romantic hero because he does not dominate the stage. He also has a ridiculous side that is properly ridiculed throughout the play, “he is passion without reflection or calculation… he thinks that love is sufficient unto itself, self-justifying, and that it has to make no compromises with men or gods.” He is a bit of a bore and a pest to his friends, with his attention often drawn elsewhere, toward his erotic fixation first on Rosaline and then on Juliet (both Rosaline and Juliet are linked to the Capulets which seems to have the only eligible girls in town). The three scenes in which we see Romeo fulfilling his wishes occurs at his initial encounter with Juliet, their avowal of love in the garden, and their one night together –the latter may be Romeo’s only experience of sexual love, and it certainly is Juliet’s. We watch as Romeo’s “eternal love” quickly moves from one girl to another, leading us to speculate that if Juliet died and Romeo lived, would he have simply found other girls to fall madly in love with? He is in love with love, and believes that his love is unique and irreplicable in the world, and he also believes that love must be reciprocal, unlike the love directed at a god or goddess. Yet love for Romeo is a religion, or “the devout religion of mine eye” and if his eyes were to look upon another they would be “transparent heretics.” It bears all the markings of fanaticism.
“Love is a very strange thing, this powerful desire to be together with another that gets in the way of life’s serious activities, such as providing for one’s preservation or governing men and nations. It creates an almost unbearable dualism in life unless, by giving oneself to it completely and forgetting the rest, one unifies life… Love is a substitute for the comparatively burdensome and dull practice of the virtues, because it at least seems to substitute for those virtues” (11). Love overcomes justice and the passions, not to mention wisdom and moderation. Romeo might have been a great warrior were it not for his love of beauty which predominates his ambition (consider his easy victory over Tybalt in battle). In many respects, he is a perfect youth –“He is all enthusiasm, imagination, and faith, without any appreciation of the sobriety of age” (12).
Juliet, however, lacks any of the ambiguity in Romeo, she is “beauty as the promise of virtue fulfilled.” She has an innocent eroticism about her, a brief show of modesty, before she is eager to gratify physical bodily longing. “Perhaps she represents what Rousseau prescribed in his attempt to reunify man after original sin split him, but it is only Shakespeare who can fill that prescription.” Still Juliet is treated with “astounding brutality” in the play, her sufferings much surpassing those of Romeo. Whereas Romeo is surrounded by friends, Juliet is isolated. Romeo has the friar as a confidant, but Juliet only has her Nurse (who is hardly a good faith interlocutor). Juliet is forced to confront the effects of Romeo’s killing of her cousin, the fury of her parents, and she is the one who must feign death by consuming the potion and thereby experience the horrors of being buried alive.
Love is a powerful and somewhat elusive form of human attachment. Whereas familial attachment depends on the accident of bloodline and political attachment is bound by the constraints of convention, duty, or law; love uniquely knows no masters. It is comparable only to friendship of the higher kind, as described by Aristotle. “Friendship, however, is a much calmer thing and can give a better account of itself inasmuch as one chooses a friend for his proved virtue. Friendship is a consequence of deliberate choice, whereas love is a kind of possession that requires so much faith, accompanies by a spectacular apprehension of the beautiful. A friend is good, while a beloved is beautiful. The beautiful has it all over the good in attractiveness. The appeal of the good is rational, that of the beautiful is passionate. Friendship is human, while love is divine” (13-14).
Romeo and Juliet offers an extraordinarily strange mating of love and death –it literally culminates in the tomb. “The illusion of eternal life and beauty, the delicious, fleshy bodies that embrace and will never decay, is the opposite of the skeletons in the tomb. Shakespeare’s joining of the two in this play is what is most shocking about it, the contrast between the hopes of love and the reality of death. Perhaps he is teaching us that the eros for the beautiful is the hopeless attempt to overcome the ugliness of the grave, an attempt of the unwise to adorn a very questionable world” (14). Unlike the Greek gods who were carefully carved into marvel to remain always young and beautiful, Romeo and Juliet both lack wisdom and live in the passing world of the passions. Like all “youngsters” they require supervision. “Thus wisdom’s superiority, which none of the character’s illustrate, is restored by the message of the play as a whole” (15). The terrible consequences of their young love could have been avoided had either lover been moderate or reflective, “but this would have been like cutting the wings of birds and still expecting them to fly” (15).
According to Bloom, the problem of the play is that there is no character who serves as a sufficient counter-weight to the charm of love, with the possible exception of Mercutio. Friar Laurence is hardly a source of wisdom and moderation in the play –quite the contrary– and neither is Juliet’s Nurse. But would we really wish to see moderation performed onstage? Audiences attend performances to see idealism celebrated over realism –like Achilles choosing to live a brief but bold life, Romeo and Juliet also choose the same reckless path, but in a uniquely modern context.
Bloom compares the instant love of Romeo and Juliet to that of Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, whose families are also at war (the King of Naples versus the duke of Milan). Prospero serves as the wise craftsman who artfully brings Ferdinand and Miranda together to fulfill a political project, allowing Shakespeare to show us the impossible: a genuinely wise man demonstrating his art as neither a buffoon, a knave, nor a bore. It is the same problem explored by both Plato and Rousseau –how to dramatize the philosophic. Prospero, whose name literally means happiness, is portrayed as a magician –a naturally attractive and delightful figure to general audiences—and he reminds us that life may not be quite as tragic as our modern beliefs seem to indicate.
In The Tempest, Prospero solves many of the problems of love and politics as explored elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays –he successfully orchestrates a courtship, a test of love, and marital union that will end the war and allow for Prospero’s own political succession. He is a political philosopher par excellence. The Tempest is Romeo and Juliet without all the tragic despair. Prospero ends the play happily claiming that he will retire to Milan where his every third thought will be of his grave, thus allowing for two of his thoughts to be unaccounted for, both of which are, presumably, far more happy than thoughts of his grave.
The sole embodiment of comic happiness in Romeo and Juliet is Romeo’s close friend and confidante, Mercutio, whose lines are filled with dirty erotic jokes. However, he also shows himself to be supremely loyal to Romeo and filled with spiritedness as evidenced in his decision to fight Tybalt for the sake of Romeo’s honor. Had he not died, Mercutio might have served as a trusted future advisor to Romeo. But once he departs from the play, so too does all the good humor, wit, and obscenity. From then on, Romeo becomes entirely isolated and grim.
Like Falstaff in the history plays, and Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, Mercutio is a mostly invented character by Shakespeare, and therefore he is of great importance to Shakespeare’s message in the play. His character shows the natural tension between love and obscenity –“Love and anger have in common that one does not joke about their objects, and if one does, the passions are either doused or are transformed into something else. Both love and anger require belief, and laughter liberates from belief. Only Romeo and Juliet love in the play, and all the others, with the exception of Friar Laurence, are in one way or another obscene” (19).
“Obscenity changes love’s transcendence into a fascination with the bodily needs and effects of eroticism. Somehow the disproportion between what we think love should be and what we actually are is laughable. So much of the comedy turns on the unmasking of boasting, beginning from the pompous ass who slips on a banana peel and comes back to the level, or beneath it, of ordinary humanity, all the way to the highest claims of love and justice and love of God. We laugh because we are released from pieties in which we cannot entirely believe. This release may be a satisfaction because it allows our natures to go about their business without constantly measuring themselves against our pieties. But our need to laugh, the spirit of comedy, is as mysterious as our need to cry, the spirit of tragedy. Shakespeare never lets us give ourselves completely to either one of these two temptations” (21).
Contrast the Aristotelian idea of moderation in both tragedy and comedy with the modern Christian Church which presents itself in an immensely austere aesthetic, saturated with solemnity and sacred sorrow. Churches are not places of laughter or joy, but rather echoing tombs to honor a long ago tortured and crucified savior.
At any rate, in examining Leo Strauss’s four categories of Aristophanes’s comedies –blasphemy (which undermines belief in the gods), slander (which attacks the rulers of the city), parody (which mocks the tragic poets), and obscenity (which goes against the root of the family)—Bloom asserts that Shakespeare’s works are predominated by obscenity, the “gentlest of the four.” Obscenity is not entirely useless when taking a critical stance toward the myths of the family and the erotic desires that lead us to the family. It is a low form of comedy, but Shakespeare places obscenity in the mouths of characters who are neither the lowest nor the least interesting, like Falstaff. Here, Bloom offers a fascinating discussion of contemporary obscene language, such as the popular use of vulgarity as a release of sexual repressiveness, as well as scientific technical terminology, which are both cut from the same cloth and yet find themselves lacking. “The success of a modern theoretical point of view removes imagination from the realm of eros. It is another chapter in the history of modern timidity: love is made undangerous, and those who do the deed think they are intellectually honest or authentic… The problem is not that we have too much obscenity. What we lack is an imaginative obscenity. There are no words available for the richness of possible erotic experience… It is amazing, in contrast, how many words and expressions in Shakespeare call to mind that part of our nature which is so dear to us. Not only can he teach us how to talk beautifully and amusingly about sex but he can also help us study the phenomenon much more seriously because it has not been sterilized in advance for us or put through the strainers of various ideologies. His obscenity is never reductionist. It does not dismiss the imaginative overlay of the facts. Rather, it expresses admiration for and wonder at all the strange things that happen to us in the grip of sexual passion” (22-23).
Returning to the play, Bloom notes the tenderness between Romeo and Juliet who desire one another fully for their bodies without shame –but their erotic obsession is not obscene. Instead, they glory in the wonder of their senses. There is no indication in Shakespeare that eroticism is intended to be sinful in the modern Christian sense, although there is plenty of indication that it reflects an incoherence and dividedness in human nature itself as portrayed in Shakespeare (hence, the tension between the high and low in life, or love and obscenity).
Bloom makes note of all the well-intentioned characters in the play, with characters like Benvolio who remind us that gentleness in a prince is a vice. But none are more gentle and well-intentioned than Friar Laurence, who understands all of nature in relation to man, whether it is beneficent or harmful. He asserts that the conflicting principles in nature are grace and rude will. He is explicitly Christian –in other words, God is responsible for good and man is responsible for evil. With his pharmaceutical science, the Friar believes he can spread the goodness of God, curing the ill will he sees all around him. In some respects, he views himself as a magician akin to Prospero, albeit a deeply flawed imitation. His slightly sinister political conspiracy begins with his secretly officiated marriage between Romeo and Juliet, uniting the two warring households of Verona, doing what he believes the prince should have done a long time ago. However, he cannot directly do so because he is timid and lacks earthly power. Thus, his conspiracy is forced to become ever more complex and covert. Ultimately the peace and harmony he achieves is a peace of earthly death, a deeply pious peace. As in the case of the compassionate prince, Friar Laurence comes to represent what Machiavelli harshly criticizes in Christian Italy. “Earthly peace, according to Machiavelli, can be brought about only by harshness and war, not by compassion and love, and he strongly criticizes the priests for their condemnation of worldly ambition and for their spiritual weakness. They have just enough influence over the minds of men to create chaos but not enough power over their bodies to bring order” (25).
The Friar offers feeble counsel to the wayward young teenagers, and he is amusingly praised for his “good counsel” by the Nurse –his typical audience– an ignorant peasant woman who is portrayed as a crude and coarse buffoon throughout the play. Were he a more bold or serious strategist, and not relying on the great goddess Fortuna, the Friar might have simply encouraged Juliet to flee Verona and unite with Romeo in Mantua. The other option might have been for the Friar to come forth to the families of Verona and explain that, like it or not, Romeo and Juliet are now husband and wife. However, this might have ended in a fairly unpleasant situation for the Friar. Unsurprisingly, the Friar chooses the timid path. He devises a potion to induce a miracle of sorts. Aided by the help of his botany study, he hopes that everyone in Verona will somehow be impressed by witnessing a “resurrection,” and thereby forget everything that has happened –in other words, the Friar is counting on the credulity of everyone in the city (indeed, he organizes Juliet’s “resurrection” to occur within the exact span of time between Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection: forty-two hours). However, thankfully Shakespeare does not permit this miracle to occur, though we might wish to speculate as to what the opinion of the people might have been had the Friar succeeded. “A combination of fortune and lack of foresight, perhaps due to Friar Laurence’s timidity in not wanting to communicate the contents of the letter or its urgency to Friar John, results in the tragedy” (27). The Friar is the cause of the tragedy. In the end, like a lowly coward, the Friar flees the scene out of fear of being spotted by the watch, but not before promising to Juliet that he will sneak her away to a nunnery. “This is the final statement about the combination of power and weakness that defines his character. His plain confession seems candid, but he apparently thinks that his good intentions exculpate him. And he takes his being scared of the arrival of the watch to be a sufficient reason for leaving Juliet. The friar is a rich study in ecclesiastical politics, and the traditional interpretation of him as a kindly old wise man will not suffice. He maintains a strange and self-contradictory view of the relation between love and death, an either/or that fails to persuade one that his ‘every third thought’ has been the grave” (28).
These two lovers –Romeo and Juliet– wanted to live on love alone, but it ended in mutual suicide. And perhaps Shakespeare shows us something here about the troubling conditions of happiness for lovers who cannot adjust their natures to the conventions of the day. But the play also offers sufficient evidence that there is something specific to modern Italy to consider, with its imperial past, its weak but brutal independent cities, its Church (reproduced exactly as Machiavelli described it), which affects the permanent aspects of human nature revealed in it. The role of Friar Laurence and the harsh contrast between the gorgeous bodies in a garden and decaying skeletons inside a tomb only serves to cast light on this impression. Prospero knows this modern Italy well. If Ferdinand and Miranda had met in Italy, and not on Prospero’s mythic island, they would have been just another Romeo and Juliet. But they are never present in a real Italy. Mercutio, with all his irreverence and obscenity, serves as a useful antidote to the madness as long as he lasts, but after he departs in the play, the fatal alliance between love and the priest is formally fixed (in his essay immediately following this, Bloom explores Shakespeare’s ancient image of the tragic love affair between Antony and Cleopatra, which is filled with its own sets of problems, but is devoid of the timidity and vulnerability permeating Romeo and Juliet).
Bloom, Allan. Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (originally appearing in Love and Friendship which was dictated from his deathbed). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000 (originally published in 1993).