(2008) Bloom's Shakespeare Through The Ages - Romeo and Juliet

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages
Antony and Cleopatra

As You Like It
Hamlet
Henry IV (Part I)
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
The Merchant of Venice
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
The Sonnets
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
STA_Romeo & Juliet.indd 1 4/3/08 10:15:59 AM

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages
rom e o and j u li e t
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Volume Editor
Janyce Marson

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: Romeo and Juliet
Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Romeo and Juliet / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom ; volume editor,
Janyce Marson.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s Shakespeare through the ages)
This study guide contains a selection of criticism through the centuries on the play, plus
an accessible summary, analysis of key passages, a comprehensive list of characters, and a
biography of Shakespeare.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9596-6 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616.
Romeo and Juliet—Examinations—Study guides. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Marson, Janyce.
PR2831.R638 2008
822.3’3—dc22 2007050854
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Contents
q
Series Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction by Harold Bloom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Biography of William Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Summary of Romeo and Juliet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Key Passages in Romeo and Juliet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
List of Characters in Romeo and Juliet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Criticism Through the Ages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

t Romeo and Juliet in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. . . . . . 37
1562—Arthur Brooke. “To the Reader,” from
The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
1635—John Swan. From the Speculum Mundi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1662—Samuel Pepys. From The Diary of Samuel Pepys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1672—John Dryden. From The Conquest of Granada.
Second Part. Defence of the Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
1680—Thomas Otway. “Prologue,” from History
and Fall of Caius Marius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
t Romeo and Juliet in the Eighteenth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

1767—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. From
Hamburgische Dramaturgie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
1768—Samuel Johnson. From Notes on Shakespear’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
1794—Charles Dibdin. From “Shakespear,” in A Complete
History of the Stage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

vi Contents
t Romeo and Juliet in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

1809—August Wilhelm Schlegel. From “Criticisms
on Shakspeare’s Tragedies,” from Lectures on Dramatic
Art and Literature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
1817—William Hazlitt. From “Romeo and Juliet,”
from Characters of Shakespear’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
1818—Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From “Romeo and Juliet,”
from Shakespeare with Introductory Remarks on Poetry,
the Drama, and the Stage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
1832—Anna Jameson. “Juliet,” from Shakespeare’s Heroines:
Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
1872—Edward Dowden. From “The First and
Second Tragedy: Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet,” from
Shakespere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
1895—Bernhard ten Brink. “Shakespeare as Dramatist,”
from Five Lectures on Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
1896—Frederick S. Boas. “Shakespere ‘Italianate’:
Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice,” from
Shakespeare and His Predecessors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
t Romeo and Juliet in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

1902—Walter de la Mare. “Juliet’s Nurse,” from Characters
from Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
1943—Robert Penn Warren. “Pure and Impure Poetry,”
from Kenyon Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
1951—Harold C. Goddard. “Romeo and Juliet,” from
The Meaning of Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
1960—Harry Levin. “Form and Formality in Romeo
and Juliet,” from Shakespeare Quarterly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
1964—Norman N. Holland. “Romeo and Juliet,” from
The Shakespearean Imagination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
1970—Francis Fergusson. “Romeo and Juliet,” from
Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
1970—Susan Snyder. “Romeo and Juliet: Comedy
into Tragedy,” from Essays in Criticism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

Contents vii
1973—James H. Seward. “The Height,” from

Tragic Vision in Romeo and Juliet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
1986—Northrop Frye. “Romeo and Juliet,” from
Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
1986—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from
Romeo and Juliet (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) . . . . . . . . . 254
1991—Thomas McAlindon. “Romeo and Juliet,”
from Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
1993—Maynard Mack. “The Ambiguities of
Romeo and Juliet,” from Everybody’s Shakespeare:
Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
1996—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from
Romeo and Juliet (Bloom’s Guides). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
t Romeo and Juliet in the Twenty-first Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

2001—John Russell Brown. “Romeo and Juliet:
An Innovative Tragedy,” from Shakespeare: The Tragedies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
2006—Daryl W. Palmer. “Motion and Mercutio
in Romeo and Juliet,” from Philosophy and Literature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

Series Introduction
q
Shakespeare Through the Ages presents not the most current of Shakespeare
criticism, but the best of Shakespeare criticism, from the seventeenth century
to today. In the process, each volume also charts the flow over time of critical
discussion of a particular play. Other useful and fascinating collections of his-
torical Shakespearean criticism exist, but no collection that we know of contains
such a range of commentary on each of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and at the
same time emphasizes the greatest critics in our literary tradition: from John
Dryden in the seventeenth century, to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth cen-
tury, to William Hazlitt and Samuel Coleridge in the nineteenth century, to
A.C. Bradley and William Empson in the twentieth century, to the most per-
ceptive critics of our own day. This canon of Shakespearean criticism empha-
sizes aesthetic rather than political or social analysis.
Some of the pieces included here are full-length essays; others are excerpts
designed to present a key point. Much (but not all) of the earliest criticism
consists only of brief mentions of specific plays. In addition to the classics of
criticism, some pieces of mainly historical importance have been included, often
to provide background for important reactions from future critics.
These volumes are intended for students, particularly those just beginning
their explorations of Shakespeare. We have therefore also included basic
materials designed to provide a solid grounding in each play: a biography of
Shakespeare, a synopsis of the play, a list of characters, and an explication of
key passages. In addition, each selection of the criticism of a particular century
begins with an introductory essay discussing the general nature of that century’s
commentary and the particular issues and controversies addressed by critics
presented in the volume.
Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time,” but much Shakespeare
criticism is decidedly for its own age, of lasting importance only to the scholar
who wrote it. Students today read the criticism most readily available to them,
which means essays printed in recent books and journals, especially those journals
made available on the Internet. Older criticism is too often buried in out-of-print
books on forgotten shelves of libraries or in defunct periodicals. Therefore, many
ix

Romeo and Juliet
students, particularly younger students, have no way of knowing that some of the
most profound criticism of Shakespeare’s plays was written decades or centuries
ago. We hope this series remedies that problem, and more importantly, we hope
it infuses students with the enthusiasm of the critics in these volumes for the
beauty and power of Shakespeare’s plays.

Introduction by
Harold Bloom
q
Juliet, though she is early in Shakespeare’s career, is a superb creation, outshin-

ing even the brilliant Mercutio, who alone might have drawn away any of our
interest from her. Mercutio dies, to save the play, and the Nurse dwindles into
a savagely reductive pragmatist, until Juliet no longer can accept her. Though
Romeo gathers our sympathetic attention, he is inadequate to the boundless
depth and splendor of Juliet. As I age, I find myself less in agreement with A. C.
Bradley’s assertion that the only Shakespearean characters endless to mediation
are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra. They are the richest in complexity
and human range, but they have near-companions in Juliet, Shylock, Rosalind,
Malvolio, Hal/Henry V, Lear and his Fool, Edgar and Edmund, Macbeth,
Antony, Leontes, and Prospero. That baker’s dozen have not exhausted my
wonder in more than a half-century of pondering Shakespeare.
Juliet induces in Romeo an heroic attempt to apprehend her fully and
somehow to be worthy of her. Yet who could attain the sublimity of Juliet, who
is absolute in her love?
Rom. O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

Jul. What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?
Rom. Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.
Jul. I gave thee mine before thou didst request it,
And yet I would it were to give again.
Rom. Wouldst thou withdraw it? For what purpose, love?
Jul. But to be frank and give it thee again;
And yet I wish but for the thing I have.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep: The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.
[II. Ii. 107-35]
To be able to say: “And yet I wish but for the thing I have” is marvelous
enough in this context, but to go on to the boundlessness, depth, and infiniteness
xi

xii Romeo and Juliet
of Juliet’s love is extraordinary. Shelley, in Juliet’s spirit, was to write that in true
love the achieved difference was that to divide was not to take away. And yet
even that vision of eros comes short of Juliet’s. We have become so accustomed
to her play, and its place in culture, that we blind ourselves from seeing the
natural perfection of her love. By the miracle of Shakespeare’s art she is at once
a very young woman, part of our cosmos, and an exemplary saint of the religion
of love. As a start, that may do, but her profundity is difficult for us to discern
and absorb.
Though Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s first true tragedy, it differs from
all the others in that its catastrophe is circumstantial and not inwardly founded
upon the ethos of its protagonists. Whenever I teach the play I find myself still
more moved by Juliet than before. Increasingly I distrust thinking about it as a
tragedy, if only because Juliet necessarily moves the aware reader or theater-goer
to a kind of celebratory awe. In herself she is a triumph even though the long and
happy life in marriage she merits is not allowed to her. Shakespeare, through
inventing Juliet, all but touches one of his rare limits. In what society could so
exquisite a spirit as Juliet’s survive and flourish? The opera-like elements in the
play are palpable, and have furnished the material for several valuable operas.
If you start however with Juliet’s: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea” then
the operatic aura dissolves. As a human heroine, Juliet was radically new in
literature; she is healthy and precise in her love, and defeats any skepticism we
could bring. Who would wish to be skeptical or ironical when confronting her
authenticity? Gratitude joins wonder in any mature response to her greatness.

Biography of
William Shakespeare
q
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564

into a family of some prominence. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover
and merchant of leather goods who earned enough to marry Mary Arden, the
daughter of his father’s landlord, in 1557. John Shakespeare was a prominent
citizen in Stratford, and at one point, he served as an alderman and bailiff.
Shakespeare presumably attended the Stratford grammar school, where he
would have received an education in Latin, but he did not go on to either Oxford
or Cambridge universities. Little is recorded about Shakespeare’s early life;
indeed, the first record of his life after his christening is of his marriage to Anne
Hathaway in 1582 in the church at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. He would
have been required to obtain a special license from the bishop as security that
there was no impediment to the marriage. Peter Alexander states in his book
Shakespeare’s Life and Art that marriage at this time in England required neither
a church nor a priest or, for that matter, even a document—only a declaration
of the contracting parties in the presence of witnesses. Thus, it was customary,
though not mandatory, to follow the marriage with a church ceremony.
Little is known about William and Anne Shakespeare’s marriage. Their first
child, Susanna, was born in May 1583 and twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585.
Later on, Susanna married Dr. John Hall, but the younger daughter, Judith,
remained unmarried. When Hamnet died in Stratford in 1596, the boy was
only 11 years old.
We have no record of Shakespeare’s activities for the seven years after the
birth of his twins, but by 1592 he was in London working as an actor. He was
also apparently well known as a playwright, for reference is made of him by his
contemporary Robert Greene in A Groatsworth of Wit, as “an upstart crow.”
Several companies of actors were in London at this time. Shakespeare may
have had connection with one or more of them before 1592, but we have no
record that tells us definitely. However, we do know of his long association with
the most famous and successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. (When
James I came to the throne in 1603, after Elizabeth’s death, the troupe’s name

Romeo and Juliet
changed to the King’s Men.) In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men provided the
financial backing for the construction of their own theater, the Globe.
The Globe was begun by a carpenter named James Burbage and finished by
his two sons, Cuthbert and Robert. To escape the jurisdiction of the Corporation
of London, which was composed of conservative Puritans who opposed the
theater’s “licentiousness,” James Burbage built the Globe just outside London, in
the Liberty of Holywell, beside Finsbury Fields. This also meant that the Globe
was safer from the threats that lurked in London’s crowded streets, like plague
and other diseases, as well as rioting mobs. When James Burbage died in 1597,
his sons completed the Globe’s construction. Shakespeare played a vital role,
financially and otherwise, in the construction of the theater, which was finally
occupied sometime before May 16, 1599.
Shakespeare not only acted with the Globe’s company of actors; he was also
a shareholder and eventually became the troupe’s most important playwright.
The company included London’s most famous actors, who inspired the creation
of some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, such as Hamlet and Lear, as
well as his clowns and fools.
In his early years, however, Shakespeare did not confine himself to the
theater. He also composed some mythological-erotic poetry, such as Venus
and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which were dedicated to the earl of
Southampton. Shakespeare was successful enough that in 1597 he was able to
purchase his own home in Stratford, which he called New Place. He could even
call himself a gentleman, for his father had been granted a coat of arms.
By 1598 Shakespeare had written some of his most famous works, Romeo
and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of
Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as his historical
plays Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, and King John. Somewhere around the
turn of the century, Shakespeare wrote his romantic comedies As You Like It,
Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, as well as Henry V, the last of his
history plays in the Prince Hal series. During the next 10 years he wrote his
great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra.
At this time, the theater was burgeoning in London; the public took an avid
interest in drama, the audiences were large, the plays demonstrated an enormous
range of subjects, and playwrights competed for approval. By 1613, however, the
rising tide of Puritanism had changed the theater. With the desertion of the
theaters by the middle classes, the acting companies were compelled to depend
more on the aristocracy, which also meant that they now had to cater to a more
sophisticated audience.
Perhaps this change in London’s artistic atmosphere contributed to
Shakespeare’s reasons for leaving London after 1612. His retirement from the
theater is sometimes thought to be evidence that his artistic skills were waning.
During this time, however, he wrote The Tempest and Henry VIII. He also

Biography of William Shakespeare
wrote the “tragicomedies,” Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. These were
thought to be inspired by Shakespeare’s personal problems and have sometimes
been considered proof of his greatly diminished abilities.
However, so far as biographical facts indicate, the circumstances of his life
at this time do not imply any personal problems. He was in good health and
financially secure, and he enjoyed an excellent reputation. Indeed, although he
was settled in Stratford at this time, he made frequent visits to London, enjoying
and participating in events at the royal court, directing rehearsals, and attending
to other business matters.
In addition to his brilliant and enormous contributions to the theater,
Shakespeare remained a poetic genius throughout the years, publishing a
renowned and critically acclaimed sonnet cycle in 1609 (most of the sonnets
were written many years earlier). Shakespeare’s contribution to this popular
poetic genre are all the more amazing in his break with contemporary notions
of subject matter. Shakespeare idealized the beauty of man as an object of praise
and devotion (rather than the Petrarchan tradition of the idealized, unattainable
woman). In the same spirit of breaking with tradition, Shakespeare also treated
themes previously considered off limits—the dark, sexual side of a woman as
opposed to the Petrarchan ideal of a chaste and remote love object. He also
expanded the sonnet’s emotional range, including such emotions as delight,
pride, shame, disgust, sadness, and fear.
When Shakespeare died in 1616, no collected edition of his works had
ever been published, although some of his plays had been printed in separate
unauthorized editions. (Some of these were taken from his manuscripts, some
from the actors’ prompt books, and others were reconstructed from memory by
actors or spectators.) In 1623 two members of the King’s Men, John Hemings
and Henry Condell, published a collection of all the plays they considered to be
authentic, the First Folio.
Included in the First Folio is a poem by Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben
Jonson, an outstanding playwright and critic in his own right. Jonson paid
tribute to Shakespeare’s genius, proclaiming his superiority to what previously
had been held as the models for literary excellence—the Greek and Latin writers.
“Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show / To whom all scenes of Europe
homage owe. / He was not of an age, but for all time!”
Jonson was the first to state what has been said so many times since. Having
captured what is permanent and universal to all human beings at all times,
Shakespeare’s genius continues to inspire us—and the critical debate about his
works never ceases.


Summary of
Romeo and Juliet
q
Act I
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet begins with the appearance of the chorus, who
introduces the work with a prologue in the form of a sonnet. The prologue
informs the audience that this play is about two wealthy families in the city of
Verona, Italy (the date is unspecified), who are engaged in a bitter feud. A son
and a daughter from the two families fall in love, meet with ill fortune, com-
mit suicide, and “with their death bury their parents’ strife.” The sad story line
is repeated, and the chorus apologizes in advance for any deficiencies in the
performance.
The violence and the persistence of the Montague-Capulet feud, emphasized
by the prologue, is immediately demonstrated in Act I, scene 1, of the play.
Two servants of the Capulets, Sampson and Gregory, walk through the streets of
Verona armed with swords and small shields. In the conversation it becomes clear
that they are seeking to brawl with some Montagues. Their motivation seems
somewhat vague, and their conversation is pugnacious and vulgar; Sampson in
particular brags that he will beat all the Montague men and rape all the Montague
women.
This boasting is promptly put to the test with the arrival of two servants of
the house of Montague, Abram and Balthasar, the latter being Romeo’s personal
servant. Gregory and Sampson confer as to how to provoke a brawl while staying
on the right side of Verona’s laws, which forbid fighting or provoking fights
in the streets. Sampson bites his thumb at Abram and Balthasar (a gesture of
extreme disdain). But when Abram challenges Sampson, asking, “Do you bite
your thumb at us, sir?,” Gregory informs Sampson that replying yes would be
breaking the law, and Sampson is placed in the ridiculous position of claiming
that while he did indeed bite his thumb, the gesture was not made toward
anybody in particular.
Not surprisingly, Sampson’s disclaimer does little to pacify Abram, who
challenges him to claim that he is the better man. At this point Benvolio, a
member of the Montague family, enters the scene and is spied by Gregory.
Gregory, assuming that Benvolio will protect them or be impressed by their

Romeo and Juliet
fighting, tells the faltering Sampson to say that he is better than Abram; Sampson
does, and the servants attack each other. Benvolio, far from encouraging the fight,
forcefully breaks it up by beating down the servants’ swords with his own. He is
spotted in his efforts by the hotheaded Tybalt, a Capulet and Juliet’s mother’s
nephew, who accuses Benvolio of attacking the servants. When Benvolio claims
he was only trying to make peace, Tybalt sums up his own character by retorting,
“I hate the word / As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee,” and attacks the
hapless Benvolio.
The altercation attracts a few fed-up Verona citizens, who, in addition to
breaking up the fight with a variety of blunt instruments, cry out their disapproval
of the feud: “Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!” The elderly
patriarch of the Capulets appears with his wife and promptly demands a sword
when he sees the similarly decrepit head of the Montagues, who has also been
attracted by the scene. The two men are easily prevented from fighting by their
wives until the prince of Verona, Escalus, enters and soundly chastises the men
for allowing their conflict (“bred of an airy word,” according to Escalus) to
break out repeatedly in the city. “If ever you disturb our streets again,” Escalus
warns the two men, “your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.”
The prince leaves the old Capulet, promising to see Montague that afternoon,
and the crowd disperses, leaving Montague, Lady Montague, and Benvolio. The
Montagues ask Benvolio to describe how the fight began, but the conversation
soon turns to the whereabouts of their son, Romeo, who has been moody and
withdrawn lately for unknown reasons. The topic of their conversation handily
appears, and Benvolio bids the Montagues to depart so that he can query Romeo
as to the cause of his sadness.
Benvolio does not wonder long, for Romeo readily reveals that he is in love
and that the woman he loves—Rosaline—does not return his favor. Romeo’s
bewailing of his fate is, to say the least, self-indulgent—he interrupts his own
request for an account of the recent brawl in order to continue bemoaning his
plight. He speaks in elevated rhymed couplets, and his language is filled with
apostrophes and similes. Although sympathetic, Benvolio obviously has a hard
time taking Romeo’s passion seriously; he rather cynically suggests that Romeo
can cure his love by simply meeting other pretty ladies and comparing Rosaline’s
none-too-exceptional face to theirs.
Scene 2 takes the reader to the Capulets and another sort of love. Old
Capulet, accompanied by a servant, is discussing his recent chastisement by
the prince with County (Count) Paris, a young nobleman who is kin to Prince
Escalus (and thus of higher social rank than the Capulets). Paris quickly
changes the topic of conversation: He has asked for the hand of Juliet, Capulet’s
daughter, and wishes for a response. Capulet objects that Juliet is too young to
marry. He also indicates that he is favorably inclined to the suit but that he will
defer to Juliet’s wish.

Summary of Romeo and Juliet
The back-to-back scenes with Romeo and with Paris serve a number of
purposes in the play. First, there is the inevitable establishment of barriers to
the couple’s romance (the “right” couple—Romeo and Juliet—having been
established in both the play’s title and its prologue) that will just as inevitably
be overcome later on in the play. In addition, there is the presentation in these
scenes of a number of false loves—Romeo’s juvenile love for Rosaline, Capulet’s
hypocritical statement of concern for Juliet that simply masks a deeper love of
money and position, and Paris’s seemingly sincere but totally unrequited love
for Juliet. These loves (especially the first two) seem to serve as a foil to Romeo
and Juliet’s later love; although it can be argued that their love is impulsive and
ill advised, it is decidedly more attractive to the audience than Romeo’s whining
or Capulet’s unscrupulousness. Such implicit contrasts reoccur throughout the
play.
Capulet’s interest in marrying his daughter to Paris becomes evident when he
invites the count to a party at his house that evening. The two go off to confer,
leaving Capulet’s servant with a list of people to invite. The servant, however, is
illiterate and decides to find an educated person to decipher the list for him. Just
then, Benvolio and Romeo appear, still arguing over whether or not Romeo can
cure his passion for Rosaline by meeting other women. The servant asks them to
read the list for him, and when they do so, he repays the favor by inviting them
to the Capulets’ party (provided that they are not of the house of Montague, of
course). The list of guests includes Rosaline and a number of other young women;
Benvolio points out that this is an excellent opportunity for Romeo to see other
beauties and realize that Rosaline is only one of many. Romeo disagrees with this
contention, but agrees to go anyway in order to see his love.
Scene 3 unfolds in the Capulet household, where Lady Capulet, Juliet,
and Juliet’s nurse are engaged in a serious discussion. At first, they attempt to
determine exactly how old Juliet is, and the nurse quickly reveals herself to be
somewhat addlepated and overly talkative. Nonetheless, she is clearly quite
fond of Juliet and is a trusted family confidante in matters concerning the girl.
They determine that Juliet is almost 14, old enough to marry by the custom of
the day, and Lady Capulet asks her daughter if she would like to marry Paris.
Before Juliet can answer, the nurse and Lady Capulet burst out in praise of Paris’s
handsomeness. Lady Capulet informs Juliet that she will see Paris at the party
tonight and lets her know that even if she is not impressed by his looks, she
should be impressed by his status, which she would share if she were to become
his wife. Juliet obediently promises to look favorably upon Paris, but only as
favorably as her parents will allow.
Scene 4 takes place outside the Capulets’ house, as Romeo, Benvolio, and
a number of friends and fellow Montagues gather before entering the party. In
order to protect their identities, the members of Romeo’s party are going to the
ball as masked dancers, and they pause to discuss the details of their performance.

Romeo and Juliet
Romeo insists on being a torchbearer, claiming that he is too lovesick to dance.

One of Romeo’s friends, Mercutio (who is also related to Prince Escalus), teases
Romeo mercilessly for not dancing. Romeo states that he had an ominous
dream, and Mercutio launches on a long and witty diatribe against taking dreams
seriously, claiming that they are simply the mischief of Queen Mab, the fairy
midwife. When Romeo accuses Mercutio of talking nonsense, Mercutio counters
that dreams are nonsense, but Romeo remains apprehensive.
Scene 5 moves to inside the Capulets’ house, where the servants are putting
the finishing touches on the dance hall. The Capulets and their guests enter;
the masked dancers begin to dance with the ladies as Juliet’s father and another
elderly Capulet reminisce about their long-gone dancing days. Romeo, holding a
torch, spies Juliet and is immediately smitten, asking a servant to identify her (he
cannot) and declaiming on her beauty.
Juliet’s feisty cousin Tybalt recognizes Romeo’s voice and promptly sends for
his sword, claiming that he will kill him where he stands. Fortunately for Romeo,
old Capulet stops Tybalt, claiming that he does not want a fight at his party and
pointing out that Romeo is behaving himself appropriately. Tybalt, however, is
still eager to fight and is only deterred by the threat of losing Capulet’s favor; he
leaves the party, promising revenge. In the meantime, Romeo accosts Juliet, takes
her hand, declares his affection, and kisses her twice before the nurse intervenes.
Romeo learns from the nurse Juliet’s identity. Later, after the party breaks up,
Juliet learns Romeo’s identity from the same source. Both are distraught by the
knowledge, for they have irretrievably fallen in love.
Act II
Act II begins with another sonnet from the chorus, who reassures the audience
that Romeo’s old love is gone and that he and Juliet now love each other. The
chorus points out that although the couple has little opportunity to interact,
their “passion lends them power, time, means to meet.” Their meeting forms
the subject of the act, as Romeo hides in the Capulets’ orchard in scene 1 while
his friends, Benvolio and Mercutio, try to find him to take him home. Mercutio
mocks Romeo’s passion, ridiculing it as vulgar lust. After the two friends finally
give up and leave, Romeo bitterly remarks that Mercutio “jests at scars” because
he “never felt a wound.”
Romeo’s comment begins the famous balcony scene in Act II, scene 2. Juliet
appears at her window in the house by the orchard, and Romeo is astonished yet
again by her beauty. “But soft” he exclaims, “what light through yonder window
breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” Romeo continues to compare Juliet
favorably to a host of heavenly beings, but hopes that she will steer clear of the
moon, which is associated with Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and also
the patron of virgins. She appears as if she is going to speak; Romeo thinks for
a moment of revealing himself, but hesitates to disturb her. He watches her lean

Summary of Romeo and Juliet
her cheek against her hand, and then she breaks out with an “Ay me!” which
excites the hidden Romeo still more.
Unbeknownst to Romeo, Juliet is equally distraught and lovestruck, and she
has evidently gone to the balcony to be alone with her feelings. Thinking herself
alone, she begins to bewail her fate in loving a man of a rival family, exclaiming:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
Romeo wonders whether to reveal himself, but chooses to hear more. Juliet
continues to hope aloud that Romeo would forget his familial association and be
her love:
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 call’d.
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.
Romeo, who can no longer contain himself, emerges from hiding, exclaiming,
“Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d.” Although Romeo refuses to identify
himself by his hated name, Juliet quickly recognizes his voice.
The two converse, and Juliet immediately demonstrates a certain practical
streak—her first concerns are to know how Romeo got into her garden and to
warn him that if her kinsmen find him he will be killed. Romeo restores the
romantic tone, however, exclaiming that he would willingly die for her and that
love showed him the way to her window. His professions of love fluster Juliet,
who declares that she loves him as well and hopes that he does not find her “too
quickly won” or “think [her] behavior light.” Romeo attempts to vow his love,
but Juliet worries that his promises will be false. She does swear her love, though,
and when her nurse calls her away from the window, she tells Romeo to stay.
She quickly reappears and tells Romeo that if his “bent of love be honorable,” he
should arrange for them to be married the next day and send a message telling her
where and when to meet him for the wedding. Her nurse calls her away again,
and Romeo starts to leave. But Juliet reappears one last time, and the two of them
exchange some genuine expressions of affection before she exits again.
In scene 3, dawn is breaking on the living quarters of Friar Laurence (spelled
in some texts as Lawrence), a Franciscan monk. The friar is preparing to gather

10 Romeo and Juliet
healing herbs and reveals a wealth of knowledge of the medicinal properties of

plants—knowledge that will figure prominently later on in the play. Romeo
enters, and the friar, noting that he has not slept the night before, exclaims that
he hopes Romeo was not engaging in illicit activities with Rosaline. Romeo
explains that he has forgotten all about Rosaline; he is now in love with Juliet
and wants the friar to marry them. The friar echoes the question that is perhaps
foremost in the audience’s mind: Hasn’t Romeo been awfully quick to discard
Rosaline? At the same time, the friar somewhat unwittingly reinforces the idea
that Romeo and Juliet’s love is good and special by pointing out that everyone
knew Romeo did not really love Rosaline, and that marrying the couple will help
mend the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets.
The difference between Romeo’s love for Juliet and what the friar termed as
“doting” on Rosaline is emphasized in scene 4, when Romeo, having left the friar,
runs into Benvolio and Mercutio, who are discussing the challenge to a duel that
Tybalt sent to the Montague house for Romeo that morning. When they meet
up with Romeo, he is far from his former self-dramatizing, melancholy self and
instead jests heartily with Mercutio. Juliet’s nurse enters with her servant Peter
and asks to speak to Romeo alone (which results in an endless amount of snide
commentary from Mercutio and Benvolio). Romeo tells her where and when
he and Juliet are to marry, and in scene 5 the nurse returns home, where Juliet
anxiously awaits the news. After some teasing and withholding of information
(foreshadowing the later unreliable messenger of Friar Laurence’s), the nurse
relays the message. Scene 6, the final scene of Act II, has Romeo and Friar
Laurence waiting for Juliet in the friar’s quarters. The scene is not entirely happy,
however, for the friar ominously informs the impassioned Romeo, “These violent
delights have violent ends. / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder. /
Which as they kiss consume.” Juliet appears, the two exchange pleasantries, and
the friar leads them off to be married.
Act III
Scene 1 begins with Benvolio and Mercutio walking the streets of Verona.
Mercutio is obviously spoiling for a fight, and when Tybalt appears and begins
to ask after Romeo, Mercutio makes it clear that he would like nothing better
than to duel. The fight is momentarily delayed, however, when Romeo appears
on the scene. Tybalt insults him, but Romeo (aware, as Tybalt is not, that they
are now related through marriage) ignores the insult and declares his love for
Tybalt. Mercutio, inflamed by what he sees as Romeo’s craven submissiveness,
draws his sword and challenges Tybalt over Romeo’s objections. The two fight.
When Romeo tries to break up the duel, Tybalt reaches under Romeo’s arm
with his sword and stabs Mercutio, then leaves the scene.
The wound proves fatal, and Mercutio, lying wounded on the streets of
Verona, wishes “A plague a’ both your houses!” before Benvolio takes him

Summary of Romeo and Juliet 11
indoors. Benvolio returns shortly with news of Mercutio’s death, just as Tybalt
reappears. The grief-stricken Romeo challenges Tybalt, they fight, and Tybalt
is slain. By this point the citizens of Verona have been alarmed, and Benvolio
points out that if Romeo is accosted by the authorities, he will surely be put to
death. Romeo flees the scene, crying, “O, I am fortune’s fool!”
The authorities enter, looking for the murderer of Mercutio. When Benvolio
points out the dead Tybalt to them, he is taken into custody. Prince Escalus
and the heads of the Montague and Capulet households appear, and Benvolio
recounts the bloody events. Lady Capulet challenges his account, however,
claiming that since he is a Montague, his word cannot be trusted. The prince
decides to make an example of Romeo and exiles him from Verona on penalty
of death.
Scene 2 opens on a blissfully ignorant Juliet, who is breathlessly awaiting
the coming of night, when Romeo is to sneak into her room by means of a rope
ladder and they are to consummate their marriage. Her nurse, rendered almost
speechless with grief, appears with the ladder; in her incoherence she garbles
her message and causes Juliet to think that Romeo has been killed. Eventually
she makes it clear that Romeo killed Tybalt and has been banished. Juliet is
obviously none too happy at either piece of news, but she realizes that she would
rather Romeo killed Tybalt than vice versa. The nurse promises to bring Romeo
to comfort her.
Scene 3 shows Romeo hiding out in Friar Laurence’s quarters. The friar enters
and informs Romeo that he has been banished. Like Juliet, Romeo becomes
distraught and suicidal at the thought of being separated from his love, and
he refuses to hide himself when someone knocks at the door. Fortunately it is
Juliet’s nurse, who draws the obvious parallel between the two lovers’ miseries.
This fails to calm Romeo, however. Upon hearing that he has caused Juliet
pain, he attempts to stab himself, but the nurse snatches the dagger away. The
friar castigates Romeo for the suicide attempt, telling him that he is being self-
indulgent and actually unloving to Juliet, who would certainly follow his example
if he killed himself. This perceptive (if somewhat ominous) criticism is followed
by the practical suggestion that Romeo see Juliet that night, then sneak out of
Verona and stay in nearby Mantua until the prince can be convinced to forgive
him. The nurse praises this sage advice and, after giving Romeo a ring of Juliet’s,
leaves to give Juliet the news.
The blunt passion of Romeo contrasts strongly with the insensitivity of old
Capulet, who appears at home in scene 4 with his wife and County Paris. Capulet
explains Juliet’s absence by pointing out that her cousin was murdered that day;
then after claiming that he loved Tybalt, he dismisses his slain kinsman with a
callous “Well, we were borne to die.” Although he has yet to hear his daughter’s
opinion of Paris, he agrees to marry her to him that coming Wednesday. Upon
hearing that it is now Monday night, he exclaims:

12 Romeo and Juliet
Monday! ha! Well, We’nesday is too soon,

A’ Thursday let it be—a’ Thursday, tell her,
She shall be married to this noble earl.
In scene 5, as dawn rises the next day, Romeo and Juliet stand at Juliet’s
balcony, savoring the last minutes of a night of conjugal bliss. Romeo must flee,
however, when the nurse brings news that Lady Capulet is coming. The lady and
Juliet discuss Tybalt’s death and his killer, and Juliet begins what is to become a
habit of clever dissembling, wishing aloud that she herself could give poison to
Romeo (she knows, as her mother does not, that this would guarantee Romeo’s
safety). Her mother tells her to be happy, for she is to marry Paris. Juliet replies
that she would rather marry Romeo, a statement Lady Capulet interprets as
meaning that Juliet is absolutely uninterested in Paris.
At this point, Capulet enters, and upon hearing of Juliet’s refusal, he lashes
out at his daughter, claiming that he will drag her bodily to the church if he
must. When his wife and Juliet’s nurse object to his abusive language, he rails
against them as well, finally telling Juliet that he will throw her out on the street
to starve if she does not marry Paris. He storms off, his wife follows, and the
devastated Juliet turns to the nurse for advice. The nurse’s counsel, however,
appalls her: She suggests that Juliet marry Paris because he is wealthier and
more powerful than Romeo—advice that if followed would make Juliet a
bigamist (since her first marriage was consummated and her first husband is
alive). Hiding her feelings, Juliet tells the nurse that she is comforted and must
go to Friar Laurence to make confession. The nurse goes to tell the parents
where Juliet is heading; meanwhile, the young lady swears never to trust her
nurse again and determines to stop the wedding—either by getting help from
the friar or by killing herself.
Act IV
Scene 1 begins with Friar Laurence in his quarters discussing the planned
wedding with County Paris. Not surprisingly, the friar attempts to discover if
Paris has asked Juliet her opinion of the match. Paris, of course, has not, but he
wishes to hold the wedding soon in any case, since it seems that Juliet is mourn-
ing Tybalt excessively and the wedding might cheer her up. Juliet enters and is
not only unresponsive to Paris’s solicitude, but also implies that the count thinks
he owns her. He leaves her with the friar to make her confession, and she tells
the friar that he must help her or she will commit suicide.
The friar comes up with a dangerous plot: He has a potion that, when
swallowed, makes a person fall into a deathlike coma for a period of 42 hours.
Juliet is to return home and claim that she will accept the marriage, and then take
the potion that night. The next day when her family finds her, they will believe
her dead and inter her in the Capulet tomb. The friar will send a messenger to

Romeo in Mantua, who will go to the Capulet tomb and break it open just before
she revives. The couple will then be free to live together in Mantua. The plot has
its hazards, but Juliet is sure of her courage and readily approves.
The morning comes in scene 4, as the Capulets and the nurse prepare for the
wedding. In scene 5, the nurse goes into Juliet’s room to wake her and discovers
her seeming corpse. The resulting scene, in which the nurse, Paris, and the
Capulets mourn Juliet’s death, is almost comic. The phrases the mourners use
are like a parody of grief and, at the least, seem to indicate a lack of real feeling
for Juliet even at her death. For example, the nurse cries, “She’s dead, deceas’d,
she’s dead, alack the day!” and Lady Capulet replies, “Alack the day, she’s dead,
she’s dead, she’s dead!” Paris claims that Juliet has been “Beguil’d, divorced
wronged, spited, slain!” and old Capulet chimes in with “Despis’d, distressed,
hated, martyr’d, kill’d!” Much as he earlier chastised Romeo, Friar Laurence
(who arrives to perform the marriage) stops the hysterical mourners with a
blunt “Peace, ho, for shame!” and berates the hypocritical Capulets.
The friar also takes the opportunity to further his own agenda by suggesting
that they place her in the tomb as soon as possible. The wedding party, now
a funeral party, departs for the graveyard, leaving the servants and musicians
behind to make jokes and connive to get free food.
Act V
Scene 1 opens in Mantua, where Romeo is pondering another dream, one in
which Juliet found him dead and brought him back to life with a kiss. His
good mood is destroyed, however, when his servant Balthasar comes in, hav-
ing just arrived from Verona. Juliet is dead, Balthasar tells Romeo; he saw her
corpse being placed in the Capulet tomb. Romeo, disbelieving, plans to ride to
Verona that night. He then asks Balthasar if there is any news from the friar
and, hearing there is none, dismisses the man. Once Balthasar is gone, Romeo
reveals his true intentions—he will kill himself with poison at Juliet’s tomb.
He has noticed a rundown apothecary’s shop in the city, and goes there on the
assumption that the man’s poverty will prompt him to sell poison, an illegal act
in Mantua. His hunch proves correct; the apothecary seems a good man but is
desperate for money, which Romeo gives him with the caveat that it is “worse
poison to men’s souls, / Doing more murther in this loathsome world, / Than
these poor compounds that thou mayest not sell.”
In scene 2, Friar Laurence runs into Friar John, a fellow Franciscan who was
supposed to bring the message of Juliet’s ruse to Romeo. John has been trapped
in a house afflicted with some sort of plague and was not able to go to Mantua or
even send a message. Laurence, assuming that Romeo is simply ignorant of the
whole affair, arranges to send him another message and prepares to break into the
Capulet tomb and retrieve the revived Juliet himself, then hide her in his quarters
until Romeo comes.

14 Romeo and Juliet
Laurence is not the only one interested in the Capulet tomb; Paris has
decided to strew Juliet’s grave with flowers and perfume every night in token
of his affection. In scene 3, night finds him making these rites in the graveyard,
while his page keeps watch and alerts him to the coming of two men. Paris
conceals himself only to see Romeo and Balthasar come to the tomb, armed
with equipment to break in. Romeo gives Balthasar a letter to give to his father
and tells him in no uncertain terms to leave. Balthasar is suspicious of Romeo’s
intentions, however, and decides to hide himself nearby. Romeo begins breaking
into the tomb, but Paris, recognizing him and assuming he is in the graveyard to
defile the Capulet bodies, steps out and challenges him. They fight, frightening
off Paris’s page, who goes to call the watch.
Romeo fatally wounds his attacker (whose identity he does not know), and
the count makes a dying request to be placed in the tomb with Juliet. Romeo
realizes that he has killed Paris, Mercutio’s kinsman, and vaguely recalls hearing
that Paris was to marry Juliet. Although Romeo is not sure that his memory is
correct, he honors his rival’s last request, bringing him into the tomb. There he
sees Juliet’s body and, with unintended irony, he remarks on her beauty, which he
thinks has been amazingly well preserved in death. He also notes Tybalt’s corpse
and hopes that by killing himself he will somehow make amends for that murder.
He swears his love for Juliet, embraces her body, and swallows the poison, which
quickly kills him.
Immediately after Romeo’s death, Friar Laurence enters the graveyard and
happens upon Balthasar, who tells him that Romeo is in the Capulet tomb. In
the entrance to the tomb, the friar sees the blood and weapons from the fight
between Romeo and Paris; his worries are justified as he goes into the tomb and
sees the corpses of the two men. Soon after he enters, Juliet revives, asking after
Romeo. The friar, hearing the watch come, quickly tells her that Romeo and
Paris are dead and tries to convince her to flee the scene with him. But Juliet
stays and, as in Romeo’s dream, kisses his corpse, which is still warm. He does
not revive, however; instead, Juliet hears the arrival of the watch and decides to
kill herself with his dagger before they can find and stop her. She stabs herself
and dies on Romeo’s corpse.
The page and the watch arrive and discover the three bodies. They send
messengers to the Montagues, Capulets, and Prince Escalus and scour the area for
witnesses, picking up Balthasar and Friar Laurence. The prince and the Capulets
arrive first, followed by old Montague, who reveals that Lady Montague has
died of grief because of Romeo’s exile. The friar tells the assembled party about
Romeo and Juliet’s secret marriage and subsequent suicide; the letter Romeo gave
Balthasar to give to old Montague confirms the friar’s tale. The prince decides
that this tragedy is divine retribution for the Capulet-Montague feud, telling the
patriarchs:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punish’d.
Old Capulet and Montague swear to end their hostilities, and each offers to
raise a gold statue of the other’s child. The prince ends the play on an appropriately
mournful note:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Key Passages in
Romeo and Juliet
q
Act I, iii, 1–6

Lady Cap.: Nurse, where’s my daughter? Call her forth to me
Nurse: Now by my maidenhead at twelve year old,
I bade her come. What, lamb. What, ladybird.
God forbid. Where’s this girl? What, Juliet!
Enter Juliet
Juliet: How now, who calls?
Nurse: Your mother.
This is our first introduction to Juliet’s nurse, a presence to be reckoned with—

for she has been Juliet’s caregiver since birth, and is thus able to provide the
audience with an eyewitness account of the girl’s brief history. As is immediately
seen, the nurse loves to talk, mostly gibberish; according to one scholar, there
was a proverb current in Shakespeare’s time that “a Nurse’s tongue was privi-
leged to talk.” By the time we meet her, she has already become the confidante
of her 13-year-old charge; clearly she is also a trusted counselor, for we see her
being quickly recalled by Lady Capulet during a critical discussion with Juliet
regarding her preparedness to make a socially acceptable marriage.
An analysis of the above passage presents a portrait of the nurse’s very distinct
personality, both earthy in her pragmatic understanding of how the world works
and bawdy in her perception of love and marriage. Nevertheless, for all of her
sexual joking, the nurse also relates her own life’s story and, in so doing, presents
a poignant aspect to her persona. As will also become abundantly clear in
subsequent scenes, the nurse’s vulgar outlook regarding the relationship between
men and women stands in sharp contrast to Juliet’s romantic ideals.
The scene opens with the nurse swearing by her “maidenhead at twelve year
old” that she has already summoned Juliet in response to Lady Capulet’s question
on the whereabouts of her daughter, since that is the age when her virginity was
still intact. Once Juliet enters, it is interesting to note that although the nurse
is initially dismissed, Lady Capulet immediately recalls her, since she is Juliet’s
trusted advisor—and Lady Capulet’s intended discussion of Juliet’s marriage
17

18 Romeo and Juliet
prospects, now that she is nearly 14 years of age, is far too important for the nurse
to be excluded. Interestingly, as the nurse is quick to point out, this scene takes
place approximately two weeks before Lammas Eve, a harvest festival which,
according to the early English church, took place on August 1, to celebrate the
first ripe corn from which bread was made, both as food and for purposes of
consecration (and an apt symbol for all the contrary themes within the play).
Lammas also marked the end of summer and the beginning of fall, when the
days grow shorter and the heat subsides—symbolization that is meaningful both
as prophesy for Romeo and Juliet as well as in the nurse’s story. Furthermore,
in addition to this date falling near Juliet’s birthday on July 31, the discussion
of Juliet’s preparedness for marriage and childbearing takes place at a time
and within the context of a celebration of fertility. Finally, since the church is
involved, there is also the suggestion that Juliet’s marriage will be the fulfillment
of a sacrament.
As the nurse proceeds to digress with her own history, we learn the tragic story
of her daughter, Susan, who died when only 12 years old, enabling her to then
nurse Juliet as compensation. This fact adds poignancy to the nurse’s character
and will become even more heartbreaking in retrospect, as it foreshadows Juliet’s
untimely death as well. Following Susan’s demise, the nurse, while sitting
under the “dove-house wall,” applied wormwood, a bitter herb with medicinal
properties, to her breast in preparation for weaning Juliet. According to James
Harting in The Birds of Shakespeare, the reference to a “dove” is the only instance
in Shakespeare where this bird is synonymous with a pigeon, thus symbolizing
fidelity. Further on, this reference will become an apt description of Juliet’s love
for Romeo, and an ironic association for the nurse, who will betray the confidence
entrusted to her.
Typical of the nurse’s ramblings and digressions, following the sad story of
her deceased child, her bawdy sense of humor soon returns as she relates an
anecdote concerning her equally vulgar husband. Her story is of a memorable
sexual joke he made at the expense of his young Susan when she fell and broke
her forehead. In response to this accident, her husband made a double entendre
of the child’s falling on her face by stating that she will lie on her back once she
reaches sexual maturity: “Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit.”
Indeed, the nurse is so fond of this story that she repeats and enhances it, as she
so often does, comparing the bump on Susan’s forehead to that of a young man’s
testicles, though Lady Capulet bids her to keep quiet.
Once the nurse is finally convinced to leave off her ribaldry, a serious
interrogation ensues in which Juliet is questioned regarding her willingness to
marry, to which Juliet responds in the negative: “It is an honour that I dream
not of.” She then learns that her mother has chosen the gallant Paris, kinsman
of Escalus, Prince of Verona, whom the nurse describes as “a man of wax” and
beyond comparison. Lady Capulet and the nurse continue to persuade and

Key Passages in Romeo and Juliet 19
otherwise entreat Juliet to consider marrying Paris, claiming that his looks and
character are nonpareil, comparing him to a beautiful manuscript that lacks only
a woman for its exquisite binding: “This precious book of love, this unbound
lover, / To beautify him only lacks a cover.” In this passage, such a comparison
subtly introduces a theme that will become increasingly apparent, for love
during the Renaissance had become a literary convention and, consequently, an
artificiality insofar as its precepts were incorporated by poets and men of letters.
This love convention was codified by Petrarch, as a way of expressing his love
for the unattainable Laura, his young pupil. The Petrarchan convention is lavish
and extensive and includes the lover’s outpourings about the unparalleled beauty
of the lady; it is also replete with poetic lamentations that the lady will not
reciprocate. Having learned much from Dante, Petrarch drew on the thematic
materials used by the poets, including such rhetorical devices as the power of
a lady’s looks, her angelic way of being, her unparalleled beauty, the torture of
unrequited love, and the struggle of the poet’s soul between admiration and
desire. In comparing Paris to a beautiful book, which can be understood as one
filled with lovely rhetorical flourishes, the elaborate conceit and imagery give
him the aura of a fiction from the start and, further, imply its impossibility for
the idealistic Juliet. For her part, Juliet’s response is appropriate. Since she is
being persuaded on the grounds of Paris’s fair image, she will simply look upon
his features and no further. Indeed, it will be Romeo’s refusal to profess love “by
the book” that will prove a barometer of his sincerity and enable the love story of
Romeo and Juliet to achieve true dignity, despite its tragic end.
QQQ
Act I, iv, 47–113
Romeo: And we mean well in going to this masque,
But ’tis no wit to go.
Mercutio: Why, may one ask?
Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.
Romeo: In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.
Mercutio: O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Over men’s noses as they lie asleep.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut

20 Romeo and Juliet
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time-out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
Her traces of the smallest spider web,
Her collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
No half so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O’er lawyers’ fingers who straight dream on fees;
O’er ladies lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are,
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose
And then drams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tite-pig’s tail,
Tickling a parson’s nose as a lies asleep;
Then dreams he of another benefice,
Sometime she driveth o’er a solder’s neck
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscados, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plaits the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes,
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she—
Romeo: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace,
Thou talk’st of nothing.
Mercutio: True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air

And more inconstant than the wind, who woos

Even now the frozen bosom of the north
And, being anger’d, puffs away from then
Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.
Benvolio: This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves;
Supper is done and we shall come too late.
Romeo: I fear too early, for my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life clos’d in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death,
But he that hath the steerage of my course
Direct my sail!
This passage features Romeo and his close friend Mercutio, a highly imagina-
tive character fond of wordplay, especially sexual innuendo, who offers a witty
and ribald commentary regarding love and the anticipated feast to be given by
the Capulet family. As it turns out, Romeo, through the mistake of an illiterate
servant, is inadvertently invited to attend the banquet. (Capulet had sent one of
his serving men on a mission to deliver personal invitations to all names on a
written list, but the servant, who could not read, handed the paper to Romeo,
who saw Rosaline’s name and determined to attend.)
There is to be entertainment, a masque, during this banquet to which Romeo
will go in disguise. Though the masque has its antecedents in medieval Europe, in
the mummings and disguisings that had become popular during festive occasions,
it is primarily a Renaissance innovation. A festive, courtly form of entertainment
popular during the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, its basic elements were
music and dancing with ornately masked and costumed participants, who donned
the appearance of mythological or allegorical beings. The masque also had a strong
political and social aspect as well, since it was during this entertainment that the
royalty and nobility mingled and, in so doing, affirmed their social status, not
to mention justifying their enormous expenditures for the sake of this agenda.
Romeo vows that he will not participate in the dancing as he has “a soul of lead,”
an obvious pun meaning his feet are not suitable for dancing.
As they are on their way to the feast, Mercutio sees fit to launch into an
elaborate speech meant to defuse all of Romeo’s sublime notions of love. To
illustrate his point, Mercutio discourses on Queen Mab, an obscure figure—
probably a fairy from Celtic folklore, possibly Mabb of Wales, whose name
“Mab” is also a reference to a promiscuous woman. According to folklore, Mab
was able to influence men’s dreams, visiting them by night and delivering their
wishes (though she also assisted in delivering babies): “Through lovers’ brains,

22 Romeo and Juliet
and then they dream of love; / O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies
straight; / O’er lawyers’ fingers who straight dream on fees.” This description of
dreamers from a range of occupations is clearly meant as social satire, of both
courtiers, who fawn with outward shows of respect, and lawyers, one group
among many insincere practitioners who are interested only in money. Neither
does the parson do well in Mercutio’s estimation, for he too is interested in
personal profit: “Tickling a parson’s nose as a lies asleep; / Then dreams he of
another benefice.”
It is interesting to note the amount of detail expended on Queen Mab’s
physical appearance and chariot. Shaped no bigger than an “agate stone,” a
precious commodity on which small figures were often engraved, Mab commands
a team of miniature beings who drive a wagon fashioned out of tiny insects,
galloping through lovers’ brains. Indeed, the lavish depiction of Mab’s wagon
mirrors Mercutio’s elaborate speech on her influence over dreams and, further,
actually provides an example of the rhetorical device known as the “somnium
animale,” or dream which arises from agitation of the waking mind. In his article
on the two types of dreams to be found in Elizabethan drama, Robert K. Presson
identifies this dream as arising from one’s waking desires and fears, as opposed to
prophetic dreams, and a manifestation of Mercutio’s power: “Whether scoffing at
lovers, or elaborating on the clock, or moralizing over the medlar, the lively play
of mind of youth and his copious fancy are character in the highest sense . . . . A
rhetorical device here is characterization.”
Finally, Mab’s powers extend to controlling men’s fate, as Mercutio describes
her braiding horses’ manes while they sleep in one moment and, in a rapid
transition to humans, intertwining the hair of harlots who bring misfortune
upon themselves when they attempt to untangle the knots. Clearly, through the
medium of Queen Mab, who disdains “sluts and sluttery,” Mercutio conveys his
disdain for all forms of affectation and insincerity, including idealized notions
of love between the sexes. Romeo, however, cannot be dissuaded, despite all
of Mercutio’s skillful and well-wrought attempts to convince him otherwise:
“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace, / Thou talk’st of nothing.” Nevertheless, for all
of its fanciful talk, scene 4 ends on an inauspicious note, for Romeo has vague
misgivings that the masque will prove unfortunate: “If fear too early, for my mind
misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars / Shall bitterly begin his
fearful date.”
QQQ
Act II, iii, 5–30
Friar Laurence: Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye
The day to cheer, and night’s dank dew to dry,
I must upfill this osier cage of ours

With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.

The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find.
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some, and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give.
For naught so good but, strain’d from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied,
And vice sometime’s by action dignified.
Enter Romeo
Within the infant rind of this weak flower

Poison hath residence, and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs: grace and crude will;
And where the worser is predominant
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.
This passage, in which Friar Laurence descants on philosophical matters,

is important because it encapsulates many of the spiritual themes central to
understanding the transcendent relationship of Romeo and Juliet, whose love
surpasses the violence and evil of the earthly world and promises to continue for
eternity as the two young lovers are joined in death.
To begin with, the friar is a member of the Franciscan religious order and,
as such, is ordained to act as a spiritual guide, having himself taken vows of
chastity and poverty. As he will soon act on behalf of the young lovers, offering
both spiritual guidance and performing the marriage ceremony, he fulfills his
sacred offices. Moreover, Friar Laurence also has a passion for and an abiding
interest in medicinal herbs and the powers inherent within them. This passion
grants him an expertise in some of nature’s secrets, enabling him to become a
practitioner of healing arts and, ultimately, qualifying him for his future role as
the manufacturer of the love potion that will save Juliet from a coerced marriage
that her parents are so determined in pressuring her into.

24 Romeo and Juliet
Most important, however, is Friar Laurence’s “sermon” on virtue, which we

are privileged to overhear as he gathers medicinal herbs in his wicker basket,
referred to here as an “osier cage.” As he walks amidst a variety of plants and
flowers, he points out the contrariness of nature, both sinister and beneficent,
as he identifies the “baleful weeds” that live side by side with “precious-juiced
flowers.” He also notes that the earth, which provides sustenance to her
“children,” is always, at the same time, the site of their eventual tomb, adding on
another important theme for the Renaissance known as the “momento mori,” or
reminder of death. Indeed, the friar’s commentary on the dual aspect of nature is
both a reminder of our mortality and an important moral lesson on the inherent
duality of the natural world, where nature’s bounteous offerings can be either
the means of healing and salvation, if used correctly, or, conversely, the pathway
to destruction. Thus, Friar Laurence provides a succinct definition of the power
to do either good or evil that exists in nature and which, by extension, exists in
humankind. Just as the herbs and exotic flowers can become dangerous if used
improperly, it is likewise up to each individual to choose the right way to live his
life, virtuously, eschewing all wrongdoing, an achievement that is won only by
recognizing right from wrong. In other words, the potential for good and evil
resides in all of nature’s phenomena and it is up to each individual to decide how
to use it.
Perhaps the four lines from the friar’s sermon that precede Romeo’s entrance
provide the best commentary on virtue, for they describe a great battle that can
turn either way depending upon one’s choices: “For naught so good but, strain’d
from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. / Virtue itself
turns vice being misapplied, / And vice sometime’s by action dignified.” Ironically,
as it will turn out, the friar’s good intentions on Juliet’s behalf will turn tragically
wrong by a series of human errors beyond his control. That he understands this
ever-present potential for misfortune is made clear in his image of the medicinal
plants acting like “two opposed kings” for whom the outcome is highly tentative
and not at all assured: “Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath
residence, and medicine power: . . . Two such opposed kings encamp them still /
In man as well as herbs: grace and rude will.”
QQQ
Act III, ii, 1–35
Juliet: Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a waggoner
As Phaeton would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway’s eyes may wink, and Romeo

Leap to these arms untalk’d-of and unseen

Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle, till strange love grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.
Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love
But no possess’d it, and though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d. 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. O, here comes my Nurse.
Enter Nurse with cords, wringing her hands.
And she brings news, and every tongue that speaks
But Romeo’s name speaks heavenly eloquence.
Now, Nurse, what news? What hast thou there?
The cords that Romeo bid thee fetch?
As the scene opens, a very anxious Juliet appears at the window waiting to
celebrate her wedding night with Romeo. Her soliloquy is both eloquent and
moving, demonstrating a skillful use of poetic language and classical meta-
phors. At the same time, this passage serves as a prime example of a theme that
runs throughout the play, namely a concern with time and an impatience that
ultimately proves ruinous for the two young lovers.
In the opening lines, Juliet makes reference to Phaeton, the Greek god and the
sun of Helios, god of the sun. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Phaeton asks his father to
let him guide the solar chariot for a day, but proves himself unable to manage the
immortal horses that are likely to set the world on fire. Phaeton is ultimately killed
by a thunderbolt from Zeus. Phaeton is an important mythological analogue in

26 Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet because of his association with the sun; he is symbolic of the
overwhelming heat and passion of the young lovers. Here, Juliet wishes Phaeton
to return to his “lodging” far from the sun, which is to say that she implores
darkness to descend in order that she may be with her new husband. With these
words, Juliet is actually asking Phaeton to reverse his normal duties and, quite
possibly, the runaway she refers to is the same Greek charioteer who ushers in
the new dawn day—thus it could be construed that she is asking the mythological
god to conspire in and accelerate her secret assignation with Romeo: “Spread thy
close curtain, love-performing night, / That runaway’s eyes may wink.”
It should be noted that in Greek mythology, the gods are forever
intervening with human beings, sometimes coming to their aid and, at other
times, playing tricks on them or meting out punishment. However, there is
a very sobering aspect to Juliet’s appeal, since Phaeton ultimately destroys
himself through impatience—implying that, on some level, though she longs
to be with Romeo, who will “leap” into her arms, Juliet is also aware that their
situation is fraught with peril, given the furtive wedding ceremony and the
secret between them.
As Juliet continues to express her ardent desire for Romeo, we are
reminded once again that her love is an ennobling one and that she, in contrast
to her immoral nurse and the debauched perspective of Mercutio, has kept
her virginity for her wedding night. In a word, Juliet proves herself a faithful
wife, as yet inexperienced, who will hold her marriage vows sacred: “Hood my
unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks, / With thy black mantle, till strange
love grown bold, / Think true love acted simple modesty.” Juliet’s conceit is
also notable for its bird imagery. Inasmuch as “hood” is a term of falconry,
her comparison to an “unmanned” hawk refers to one that is not fully within
the keeper’s grasp and therefore bats its wings in an effort to escape. Finally,
the theme of impatience is succinctly intertwined with naïveté when Juliet
likens herself to a child eager but constrained from following its impulses: “So
tedious is this day / . . . To an impatient child that hath new robes / And may
not wear them.”
QQQ
Act IV, i, 68–108
Friar Laurence: Hold, daughter, I do spy a kind of hope.
Which craves as desperate an execution?
As that is desperate which we would prevent
If, rather than to marry County Paris,
Thou hast the strength of will to slay thyself,
Then it is likely thou wilt undertake
A thing like death to chide away this shame,

That cop’st with death himself to scape from it.

And if thou dar’st, I’ll give thee remedy.
Juliet: O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris.
From off the battlements of any tower,
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk
Where serpents are. Chain me with roaring bears,
or hide me nightly in a charnel-house
O’er covered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.
Or bid me go into a new made grave,
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud—
Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble—
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.
Friar Laurence: Hold then. Go home, be merry, give consent
To marry Paris. Wednesday is tomorrow;
Tomorrow night look that thou lie alone.
Let not the Nurse lie with thee in thy chamber.
Take thou this vial, being then in bed
And this distilling liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease
No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To wanny ashes, thy eyes’ window fall
Like death when he shuts up the day of life.
Each part depriv’d of supple government
Shall stiff and stark and cold appear, like death,
And in this borrow’d likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
Now when the bridegroom in the morning comes
To rouse thee from thy bed, there art thou, dead.
The first stanza of this passage has an eerie quality, in that the elaborate plan
Friar Laurence is about to propose is both ironic and chillingly prophetic: The
friar will soon become the agent of Juliet’s destruction, and the desperate execu-
tion will in fact turn out to be all too real—and by his hand, no less. It should
be noted that as a friar, suicide is a crime, and although he has the best of inten-
tions, he nevertheless transgresses his religious offices and the moral guidance
he is obligated to provide.

28 Romeo and Juliet
Juliet’s response once again reminds us of the impatience and haste that have
proven so dangerous for both Romeo and Juliet, and the implicit foreshadowing
of death that has haunted their relationship all along. With only the thought
that she must evade Paris at all costs, Juliet is ready to risk a violent death,
be it jumping from a tower, plunging into a snake pit, or living in the most
horrid conditions: a death-in-life scenario, dwelling in charnel houses amidst
the remains of the dead. But the most chilling of these desperate suggestions
is the last, in which she is willing to be buried alive rather than consummate
an impossible marriage to Paris, a wish that will tragically and literally come
to pass.
Nevertheless, her protestations notwithstanding, Juliet’s love for Romeo is
absolutely unshakeable and faithful: “To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.”
How ironic, then, when the friar bids her to leave off her worrying and go about
her day, happy in the knowledge that she will be able to cheat this proposed
marriage while remaining true to Romeo.
QQQ
Act V, i, 14–86
Romeo: How doth my lady? Is my father well?
How doth my Juliet? That I ask again,
For nothing can be ill if she be well.
Balthasar: Then she is well and nothing can be ill.
Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.
I saw her laid low in her kindred’s vault
And presently took post to tell it you.
O pardon me for bringing these ill news,
Since you did leave it for my office, sir.
Romeo: Is it e’en so? Then I defy you, stars!
Thou know’st my lodging. Get me ink and paper,
And hire posthorses. I will hence tonight.
Balthasar: I do beseech you sir, have patience.
Your looks are pale and wild and do import
Some misadventure.
Romeo: Tush, thou art deceiv’d.
Leave me, and do the thing I bid thee do.
Hast thou no letters to me from the Friar?
Balthasar: No, my good lord.
Romeo: No matter. Get thee gone.
And hire those horses. I’ll be with thee straight.
Exit Balthasar.

Will Juliet, I will lie with thee tonight.

Let’s see for means. O mischief thou art swift
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men.
I do remember an apothecary—
And hereabouts a dwells—which late, I noted
In tatter’d weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples. Meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones,
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff ’d, and other skins
Of ill-shap’d fishes; and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses
Were thinly scatter’d to make up a show.
Noting this penury, to myself I said,
‘And if a man did need a poison now,
Whose sale is present death in Mantua,
Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him.’
O, this same thought did but forerun my need,
And this same needy man must sell it me.
As I remember, this should be the house.
Being holy-day, the beggar’s shop is shut.
What ho! Apothecary!
Enter Apothecary.
Apothecary: Who calls so loud?
Romeo: Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor.
Hold, there is forty ducats. Let me have
A dram of poison; such soon-speeding gear
As will disperse itself through all the veins
That the life-weary taker may fall dead;
And that the trunk may be discharg’d of breath
As violently as hasty powder fir’d
Doth hurry from the fatal cannon’s womb.
Apothecary: Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law
Is death to any he that utters them.
Romeo: Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear’st to die? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back,
The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;

30 Romeo and Juliet
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.

Apothecary: My poverty, but not my will consents.
Romeo: I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.
Apothecary: Put this in any liquid thing you will.
And drink it off and if you had the strength
Of twenty men it would dispatch you straight.
Romeo: There is thy gold—worse poison to men’s souls,
Doing more murder in this loathsome world
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.
I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.
Farewell, buy food, and get thyself in flesh.
Come, cordial, and not poison, go with me
To Juliet’s grave, for there must I use thee.
As this scene opens, we see yet another instance of faulty communication. Here,
Romeo’s servant, Balthasar, announces that Juliet is dead, although she is actu-
ally just asleep from the magic potion she has swallowed. Though the friar’s
deception has worked, and Juliet does indeed lie in the family tomb, Romeo has
not been privy to the most important piece of information—namely, that Juliet’s
death has merely been staged. Indeed, Romeo’s misapprehension of the real facts
is due to yet another mishap, when Friar John’s message does not reach him.
Thus, the tragic coincidences and calamities continue to mount at a rapid pace,
with Romeo resolving to get to Juliet’s tomb with the greatest haste so that he
may lie beside her. Once again we are reminded of a theme that runs throughout
Romeo and Juliet, one in which impatience and rash behavior turn to disaster.
Here, Balthasar’s attempts to reason with Romeo and advise him to exercise
caution are to no avail, as Romeo makes clear that he intends to commit suicide.
Romeo is reminded of a desperately poor apothecary, a “caitiff wretch” whom he
will visit without further ado. Apparently, this man’s situation is so beleaguered
that Romeo is convinced he will sell poison in order to make some money, and
Romeo is indeed right in his estimation.
With his planned visit to the apothecary, Romeo provides us with a catalog of
the items to be found in a Renaissance apothecary shop, replete with all manner
of curiosities such as the stuffed skins of alligators and other reptiles, as well as
earthen green pots and musty seeds. Ironically, the image of the apothecary bears
a strong resemblance to that of Friar Laurence, as Romeo describes him “culling
of simples,” much like the friar gathering herbs in his osier cage. However,
the friar is deeply committed to his study of nature and has only the best of
intentions in offering his knowledge of herbs to the betterment of society, while
the apothecary remains a vague and elusive man who is trying to stay alive and
willing to trade anything he can in order to earn some money. Furthermore,
while the friar is first and foremost a religious man, the apothecary, whose shop

Romeo fears will be closed due to some unspecified holy day, is open and ready
to perform the deadly transaction. Finally, when Romeo tells him that he wants
to poison himself, as quickly as possible, the apothecary’s first response is that the
laws of Mantua forbid him to sell his drugs for the purpose of destroying life, but
his financial straits are so great that he agrees to the request. The scene concludes
with Romeo pointing out a paradoxical situation regarding this fatal transaction:
Although Romeo gives the apothecary the money he needs to subsist, Romeo
states that he has in fact sold the real poison while the apothecary has not.
While this statement appears illogical, it can be understood as a manifestation of
Romeo’s irrational thinking: He no longer wishes to stay alive, but has provided
the means for the apothecary to do so, even as the apothecary has facilitated an
end to the misery of Romeo’s mortal existence.
QQQ

List of Characters in
Romeo and Juliet
q
Romeo is the son of the house of Montague, a wealthy Verona family. A young,
romantic man, he seems relatively uninvolved in the feud between his family
and the Capulets, another wealthy family in the city, and in the course of the
play he falls deeply in love with the Capulets’ daughter, Juliet. They secretly
marry, but events cause Romeo to kill her cousin, Tybalt, and be exiled from
the city. Upon hearing a false account of Juliet’s death, Romeo goes to her tomb
and poisons himself.
Juliet is the daughter of the house of Capulet, which is engaged in a bloody

feud with the Montagues. Juliet, who at the beginning of the play seems merely
a young, naive, and obedient daughter, falls in love with Romeo and marries
him. She reveals herself to be tough-minded and courageous when her secret
marriage to Romeo is threatened by her father’s decision to marry her to Paris.
She eventually participates in an elaborate plan to avoid the second marriage by
feigning her own death. The plan backfires when Romeo, believing her dead,
commits suicide; upon discovering his corpse, Juliet fatally stabs herself.
Friar Laurence, a Franciscan monk, performs the secret wedding of Romeo

and Juliet and devises the scheme by which Juliet attempts to avoid marrying
Paris. The friar is a learned man and offers generally wise advice to a number
of other characters; however, the scheme he proposes to Juliet eventually leads
to the deaths of her, Paris, and Romeo.
Juliet’s nurse is a dedicated and loyal, if somewhat empty-headed, ally of Juliet.

She plays an important role in getting Romeo and Juliet secretly married.
However, her lack of moral center causes Juliet to discard her as a confidante
(after she suggests that Juliet marry Paris, who is richer, despite her existing
marriage to Romeo).
Paris, kin to Prince Escalus and Mercutio, is a wealthy nobleman who wishes
to marry Juliet. Although he seems a decent man, he is blind to the fact that
33

34 Romeo and Juliet
Juliet does not care for him and does not want to marry him. He is eventually
killed by Romeo, whom he attacks when he thinks Romeo is breaking into the
Capulet tomb to defile the bodies.
Old Capulet is the head of the Capulet household and Juliet’s father. He con-
dones the feud with the Montagues but displays a certain restraint when he
prevents Tybalt from attacking Romeo at a party. His character becomes less
sympathetic, however, when he attempts to force Juliet to marry the wealthy
and powerful Paris. After the suicides of Romeo and Juliet, he swears friendship
with old Montague.
Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother and Tybalt’s aunt, encourages Juliet to marry
Paris but objects to her husband’s abusive behavior when her daughter refuses.
Tybalt, the nephew of Juliet’s mother, is an extremely violent and pugnacious

young man who kills Romeo’s friend Mercutio and is in turn killed by Romeo,
causing Romeo to be exiled from Verona.
Old Montague is head of the Montague household and Romeo’s father. He

obviously cares for his son, but encourages the feud that results in Romeo’s
banishment.
Lady Montague is Romeo’s mother, who dies from grief after her son’s banish-
ment from Verona.
Mercutio is a witty and punning young nobleman and kin to both Paris and
Prince Escalus. Although he is not a Montague, he takes that family’s side in
the feud, an attitude that causes him to challenge Tybalt, who kills him.
Benvolio, the nephew of old Montague, is a calm and reasonable character who
attempts to keep the peace in Verona in the face of an escalating feud.
Prince Escalus is the ruler of Verona, who exiles Romeo in an attempt to end
the Capulet-Montague feud, which he feels is a disturbance and a menace to
the people of his city.

Criticism
Through the Ages
q
35

Romeo and Juliet
in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
q
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was written sometime between 1595 and 1596
at a time when the bard was experimenting with a wide range of poetic and
dramatic styles. Prior to Shakespeare, the story of Romeo and Juliet existed in
folklore, though its origin is both obscure and diverse. The story of Romeo and
Juliet familiar to the Elizabethan audience developed in fifteenth-century Italy
in the genre of the novella, or short tale. Among the well-known writers of the
Italian Renaissance who created their own versions of the popular myth were
Masuccio Salernitano, who included most of the plot in a collection of stories
entitled Novellino, in 1476, and Luigi da Porto, whose Historia novellamente
ritrovata di due nobili amanti (c. 1530) drew on various legendary sources, as well
as on Boccaccio’s Decameron.
However, the most immediate sources for Shakespeare were a poem written
by Arthur Brooke, entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562),
which Shakespeare apparently knew by 1591, and a prose work by William
Painter, called The Palace of Pleasure (1567), which was based on older stories.
Both Brooke and Painter depict a violent society, are sympathetic to the lovers,
and stress the primary role of fate in the unfolding of events. However, of the
two English works, Arthur Brooke’s is the more innovative. While expressing
admiration for the two young lovers in his poem, Brooke’s introductory address
to the reader exhibits striking contradictions regarding his attitude towards the
story of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, Brooke’s address becomes a scathing editorial
about the deceitful and surreptitious relationship which they pursue despite all
rules of propriety towards their elders. Furthermore, Brooke makes patently clear
in this introduction that justice will ultimately be served, as Romeo and Juliet are
headed towards their own demise:
The glorious triumphe of the continent man upon the lustes of

wanton fleshe, incourageth men to honest restraynt of wyld affections,
the shamefull and wretched endes of such, as have yielded their
libertie thrall to fowle desires, teache men to witholde themselves
from the hedlong fall of loose dishonestie. . . . And to this ende
37

38 Romeo and Juliet
(good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to describe unto thee

a coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest
desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and frendes,
conferring their principall counsels with drunken gossyppes, and
superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instruments of unchastitie)
attemptying all adventures of peryll, for thattaynyng of their wished
lust, usyng auricular confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason)
for futheraunce of theyr purpose . . . .
That Brooke is compassionate towards Romeo and Juliet and the tragic
conclusion of their young lives is evidenced in the concluding lines of his poem.
Here, Brooke is mindful of the need to pay respects to their memory, as he
bestows nobility to their untimely death:
And lest that length of time might from our myndes remove
The memory of so perfect, sound, and so approved love,
The bodies dead removed from vaulte where they did dye,
In stately tombe, on pillers great, of marble rayse they hye.
On every side above, were set and eke beneath,
Great store of cunning Epitaphes, in honor of theyr death.
And even at this day the tombe is to be seene
So that among the monuments that in Verona been,
There is no monument more worthy of the sight,
Then is the tombe of Juliet, and Romeus her knight.
In his 1635 poem on the natural sciences, John Swan makes an allusion
to Romeo and Juliet. The full title of the poem is Speculum Mundi, or, A glasse
representing the face of the world shewing both that it did begin, and must also
end, the manner how, and time when. It is a summary of the natural history of
his day. In the poem, Swan borrows from Friar Laurence’s speech in Act II,
scene 3, in order to better express appreciation for the wonders of the physical
world and its powers. In particular, Swan echoes Friar Laurence’s caution that
there is an inherent contradiction in all natural phenomena, that the herbs and
trees and stones that heal also possess the ability to be harmful. Swan’s poem
makes clear that it is not only necessary to study nature, but also to share newly
acquired knowledge with others:
Oh mickle is the powerful good that lies

In herbs, trees, stone, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that on earth doth live,
But to the earth some secret good doth give.

Romeo and Juliet in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 39
And nought so rich on either rock or shelf,

But, if unknown, lies useless to it self.
Therefore who thus doth make their secrets known,
Doth profit others, and not hurt his own.
During the reign of the Puritans, from 1642 to 1660, the British theaters
were closed for political and ideological reasons. However, following the
death of Oliver Cromwell and the ascension of Charles II to the throne, the
theaters reopened and flourished once again. Shortly after the Restoration, a
version of Romeo and Juliet was performed at a theater in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
in what had previously been a tennis court. This performance was attended by
Samuel Pepys and recorded in Pepys’s diary, which is considered an invaluable
primary source for the English Restoration period. In his entry for March 1,
1662, Pepys makes it clear that he thoroughly detested the first performance
he attended of Romeo and Juliet and is emphatic that he will not be attending
a second time. In fact, it is said elsewhere that the actors for this performance
had apparently not learned their lines, which accounts for Pepys’s derogatory
commentary.
Most older plays produced in the Restoration period, however, were
restructured and revised to fit new cultural standards. Thomas Otway’s History
and Fall of Caius Marius, published in 1680, is an example of a substantially
changed Romeo and Juliet. In addition to essentially rewriting Shakespeare’s
lines, Otway emphasizes a new political agenda, which is to stage the horrors
of civil war, while the story of a passionate and complex love relationship
recedes into the background. Caius Marius had ten performances between
December 1677 and March 1682, and after it was revived in the 1690s, it
had another 29 performances. During this time, Charles II was attempting to
have his brother, James, excluded from the succession. In effect, Charles was
attempting to send James into exile. Otway’s intention seemed to be to warn the
audience of the dangers of social unrest, reminding them of the events of the
1640s that led to civil war. Consequently, among the alterations to be found
in Caius Marius are two equally feuding and vicious families, with frightening
images of civil disobedience, while the lovers, renamed Marius junior and
Lavinia, function as symbols of natural virtue who fade out amidst the social
turmoil. As the scholar John Wallace points out, Otway’s play reads like a
sermon in which the youthful lovers function as symbols of “good nature, filial
affection, and a desire to obey . . . the action is overwhelmed by ill-natured
banishments and ambition.” Based on the story of Marius in Plutarch’s Lives,
Otway’s play is focused on the “national” character of individuals. His prologue
to the work praises Shakespeare, whom Otway calls the “happiest Poet of

40 Romeo and Juliet
his Time, and best,” and apologizes for stealing and reworking Shakespeare’s
play:
Our this-day’s Poet fears h’has done him wrong.

Like greedy Beggars that steal Sheaves away,
You’ll find h’has rifled him of half a Play.
Two of Otway’s alterations to Romeo and Juliet stand out. First, when Marius
junior arrives at Lavinia’s tomb, he finds her alive, and they speak to each other
briefly before poisoning themselves. Lavinia announces her joy in being reunited
with her husband, saying “the Gods have heard my Vows” and declaring her
abiding confidence in Marius’s ability to “revive the Dead,” while Marius observes
that the ill fate that has been visited upon them is also a release from cruel parents
and oppressive laws: “Thus to redeem me from this vale of Torments, / And bear
me with thee to those Hills of Joys. / This World’s gross air grows burthensome
already.” Marius dies two lines later, followed by Lavinia, who partakes of the
poison from his lips.
Secondly, the Mercutio figure, Sulpitius, actually survives and has the last
word in Act V. In Otway’s play, Sulpitius, who has been wounded as a result of
getting caught up in a riotous mob, rails against any possibility of redemption
for the feuding families through the martyred deaths of their children: “A curse
on all Repentance! how I hate it!” The play ends with Sulpitius writing his own
epitaph:
Sulpitius lies here, that troublesome Slave,

That sent many honester men to the Grave,
And dy’d like a Fool when h’ had liv’d like a Knave.
Perhaps the most interesting comment on the play in this century was a
brief remark by the great poet and critic John Dryden, in an epilogue to one
of his own plays, The Conquest of Granada, published in 1672. Writing about
the “refinement of Wit,” Dryden refers to a statement supposedly made by
Shakespeare himself: that he was forced to kill off Mercutio early in Romeo and
Juliet “to prevent being killed by him.” Many critics, readers, and theatergoers
have noted that the charismatic Mercutio seems to dominate the play until
he dies in the third act. Whether or not Shakespeare actually said this, the
comment reflects a widely held opinion that Mercutio had to die early on for
the sake of the play. In later years, various other critics such as Samuel Johnson
and Harold Bloom would refer to Dryden’s remark. Conversely, in Otway’s
play, the Mercutio figure can survive because the focus of the work is more on
politics than on the love story.

1562—Arthur Brooke. “To the Reader,”

from The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet
Arthur Brooke (?–1563) wrote what is usually regarded as the main

source for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He died in a shipwreck in
1563; little else is known of his life.
The God of all Glory created, universally, all creatures to set forth His praise;
both those which we esteem profitable in use and pleasure, and also those
which we accompt noisome and loathsome. But principally He hath appointed
man the chiefest instrument of His honour, not only for ministering matter
thereof in man himself, but as well in gathering out of other the occasions of
publishing God’s goodness, wisdom, and power. And in like sort, every doing
of man hath, by God’s dispensation, something whereby God may and ought
to be honoured. So the good doings of the good and the evil acts of the wicked,
the happy success of the blessed and the woeful proceedings of the miserable,
do in divers sort sound one praise of God. And as each flower yieldeth honey
to the bee, so every example ministereth good lessons to the well-disposed
mind. The glorious triumph of the continent man upon the lusts of wanton
flesh, encourageth men to honest restraint of wild affections; the shameful
and wretched ends of such as have yielded their liberty thrall to foul desires
teach men to withhold themselves from the headlong fall of loose dishonesty.
So, to like effect, by sundry means the good man’s example biddeth men to be
good, and the evil man’s mischief warneth men not to be evil. To this good
end serve all ill ends of ill beginnings. And to this end, good Reader, is this
tragical matter written, to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers;
thralling themselves to unhonest desire; neglecting the authority and advice of
parents and friends; conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips
and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity); attempting
all adventures of peril for th’ attaining of their wished lust; using auricular
confession the key of whoredom and treason, for furtherance of their purpose;
abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage to cloak the shame of stolen
contracts; finally by all means of unhonest life hasting to most unhappy death.
This precedent, good Reader, shall be to thee, as the slaves of Lacedemon,
oppressed with excess of drink, deformed and altered from likeness of men
both in mind and use of body, were to the free-born children, so shewed to
them by their parents, to th’ intent to raise in them an hateful loathing of so
filthy beastliness. Hereunto, if you apply it, ye shall deliver my doing from
offence and profit yourselves. Though I saw the same argument lately set forth
on stage with more commendation than I can look for—being there much
better set forth than I have or can do—yet the same matter penned as it is may

42 Romeo and Juliet
serve to like good effect, if the readers do bring with them like good minds to
consider it, which hath the more encouraged me to publish it, such as it is.
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1635—John Swan. From the Speculum Mundi
John Swan was an avid follower of the natural sciences of his day. His
Speculum Mundi draws a sharp contrast between early times, “when all
things were in their full strength,” and the present day.
Oh mickle is the powerful good that lies

In herbs, trees, stone, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that on earth doth live,
But to the earth some secret good doth give.
And nought so rich on either rock or shelf,
But, if unknown, lies useless to it self.
Therefore who thus doth make their secrets known,
Doth profit others, and not hurt his own.
QQQ
1662—Samuel Pepys. From The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was an English naval administrator and

Member of Parliament. His private diary, published after his death, is
one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration
period and provides a fascinating combination of personal revelation
and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of
London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London, in addi-
tion to various early performances of Shakespeare’s plays.
March 1, 1662
. . . thence to the Opera and there saw Romeo and Julett, the first time it was
ever acted. But it is the play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life,
and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do; and I am resolved to go
no more to see the first time of acting, for they were all of them out more or
less.
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1672—John Dryden. From The Conquest

of Granada. Second Part. Defence of the Epilogue
John Dryden (1631–1700) was an English poet, dramatist, and liter-

ary critic who so dominated the literary scene of his day that it came
to be known as the Age of Dryden. He produced the first substantive
criticism of Shakespeare. Dryden also wrote An Essay on Dramatick
Poesie (1668), All for Love (1678), Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and
MacFleknoe (1682).
That the wit of this age is much more courtly, may easily be proved by viewing
the characters of gentlemen which were written in the last. . . . Shakespeare
showed the best of his skill in his Mercutio; and said himself, that he was forced
to kill him in the third act, to prevent being killed by him. But, for my part, I
cannot find he was so dangerous a person: I see nothing in him but what was so
exceeding harmless, that he might have lived to the end of the play, and died in
his bed, without offence to any man.
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1680—Thomas Otway. “Prologue,”

from History and Fall of Caius Marius
Thomas Otway (1652–1685), one of the most popular of Restoration

playwrights, was praised by contemporaries such as John Dryden. His
other plays include Venice Preserved, or A Plot Discovered, a blank-verse
tragedy about a conspiracy to murder Venetian senators; Alcibiades;
Don Carlos, Prince of Spain; The Orphan, or The Unhappy Marriage; and
The Atheist.
In Ages past, (when will those Times renew?)

When Empires flourisht, so did Poets too.
When great Augusus the World’s Empire held,
Horace and Ovid’s happy Verse excell’d.
Ovid’s soft Genius, and his tender Arts
Of moving Nature, melted hardest Hearts.
It did th’ Imperial Beauty, Julia, move
To listen to the Language of his Love.
Her Father honour’d him: and on her Breast,
With ravish’d sense in her Embraces prest,

44 Romeo and Juliet
He lay transported, fancy-full, and blest.

Horace’s lofty Genius boldlier rear’d
His manly Head, and through all Nature steer’d;
Her richest Pleasures in his Verse refin’d,
And wrought ’em to the relish of the Mind.
He lasht, with a true Poet’s fearless Rage,
The Villanies and Follies of the Age.
Therefore Mœcenas, that great Fav’rite, rais’d
Him high, and by him was he highly prais’d.
Our Shakespear wrote too in an Age as blest,
The happiest Poet of his Time, and best;
A gracious Prince’s Favour chear’d his Muse,
A constant Favour he ne’r fear’d to lose.
Therefore he wrote with Fancy unconfin’d,
And Thoughts that were Immortal as his Mind.
And from the Crop of his luxuriant Pen
E’re since succeeding Poets humbly glean
Though much the most unworthy of the Throng,
Our this-day’s Poet fears h’has done him wrong.
Like greedy Beggars that steal Sheaves away,
You’ll find h’has rifled him of half a Play.
Amidst his baser Dross you’ll see it shine
Most beautiful, amazing, and Divine.
To such low Shifts, of late, are Poets worn,
Whilst we both Wit’s and Cæsar’s Absence mourn.
Oh! when will He and Poetry return?
When shall we there again behold him fit
’Midst shining Boxes and a Courtly Pit,
The Lord of Hearts, and President of Wit?
When that blest Day (quick may it come) appears,
His Cares once banisht, and his Nation’s Fears,
The joyfull Muses on their Hills shall sing
Triumphant Songs of Britain’s happy King.
Plenty and Peace shall flouish in our Isle
And all things like the English Beautysmile.
You, Criticks, shall forget your nat’ral Spite,
And Poets with unbounded Fancy write.
Ev’n This-day’s Poet shall be alter’d quite:
His Thoughts more loftily and freely flow;
And he himself, whilst you his Verse allow,
As much trasported as he’s humble now.

Romeo and Juliet
in the Eighteenth Century
q
The eighteenth century marked the burgeoning of Shakespeare studies, as

evidenced by the numerous editions of his complete works. The first standard
collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays was produced by Nicholas Rowe (1709).
This was followed by the editions of Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald
(1734), Samuel Johnson (1765–1768), George Steevens (1773 and 1778), and
many others. Of the major comments on Romeo and Juliet in this century, what
is most striking is the critics’ appreciation of Shakespeare’s understanding of
human nature. The critical essays below note Shakespeare’s keen insight into
human behavior as well as his vivid poetic depiction of the passion of love. In
general, they see Shakespeare as a spokesman for all time rather than a reflec-
tion of the spirit of Elizabethan England.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s commentary lauds Shakespeare’s achievement
in Romeo and Juliet as having created a “living picture” whereby the playwright
breathes life into the very concept of Love. For Lessing, Shakespeare has
endowed the love between Romeo and Juliet with a viable force that thinks and
acts creatively on its own behalf, to the extent that it establishes sovereignty over
those whose bodies it inhabits, “until it is the autocrat of all our desires and all
our aversions!”
Samuel Johnson is widely considered to be the greatest critic in English
history, as well as one of the greatest commentators on Shakespeare in particular.
His edition of Shakespeare contained his famous notes on the plays. His “General
Observation” on Romeo and Juliet is full of praise for Shakespeare’s attempt to
display gentlemanly conversation and juvenile elegance and for the thoroughly
human aspects of individual characters. Johnson begins by stating his absolute
delight in Mercutio’s “wit, gaiety and courage,” and his ability to attract friends and
admirers who wish him well. He openly disagrees with Dryden, who, according to
Johnson, said that Shakespeare admitted that he was forced to kill off Mercutio,
“lest he should have been killed by him” (here Johnson somewhat misquotes
Dryden). Johnson says instead that Mercutio has “lived out the time allotted him
in the construction of the play” and further suggests that Dryden, despite his
intelligence, lacked the temperament to appreciate Shakespeare’s artistry.
45

46 Romeo and Juliet
Johnson also comments on the famous character of the nurse. He believes

that Shakespeare clearly enjoyed creating her, with her character a marvelous
display of contrasts. Overall, while Johnson appreciates Shakespeare’s enormous
talent, he does also find fault: “His comick scenes are happily wrought, but his
pathetic strains are always polluted with some unexpected depravations.”
Charles Dibdin praises Romeo and Juliet for its brilliant portrayal of love,
which, he declares, is without comparison in any other language. Dibdin admires
Shakespeare’s charting of the tumultuous course of all adolescent love along with
its ennobling aspects, so beautifully and poetically expressed, while retaining an
inherent truthfulness regarding the vagaries and vicissitudes of youthful love: “Were
I to go on investigating the various ways in which Shakespeare has treated this one
passion, I should greatly exceed the limits I am obliged to prescribe for myself.”
1767—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

From Hamburgische Dramaturgie
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was a German writer, philoso-
pher, publicist, and art critic, and an important figure in the era of the
Enlightenment. He is the author of The Young Scholar (Der junge Gelehrte)
(1748), Laokoon (1766), and The Education of Humankind (1780).
It was Love itself that dictated La Zaïre to Voltaire, says a critic prettily enough.
It would have been nearer the mark had he said that it was la Galanterie. I know
of but one drama that Love itself elaborated, and this Romeo and Juliet. It must
be confessed that Voltaire makes his enamoured Zaïre express her feelings
very prettily, very discreetly, but what are all these expressions in comparison
with that living picture of all the little secret wiles whereby love creeps into our
souls, of all the imperceptible advantages that it gains there, of all the artifices
wherewith it acquires the ascendancy over every other passion, until it is the
autocrat of all our desires and all our aversions!
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1768—Samuel Johnson.
From Notes on Shakespear’s Plays
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), often referred to simply as Dr. Johnson,

was one of England’s greatest literary figures: a poet, essayist, and
lexicographer, and often considered the finest critic of English literature.
He was also a great wit and prose stylist and is still frequently quoted.

Romeo and Juliet in the Eighteenth Century 47
His work includes Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English
Poets (1779–1781). Although his edition of Shakespeare required further
revisions by successors, his critical preface to the edition, as well as his
many notes and observations, remain classic statements in the history
of Shakespeare criticism. Included below is a selection of the most
interesting of his notes on the text of Romeo and Juliet.
III, i, 182 Affection makes him false . . .

The charge of falshood on Bonvolio, though produced at hazard, is very
just. The author, who seems to intend the character of Bonvolio as good,
meant perhaps to shew, how the best minds, in a state of faction and
discord, are detorted to criminal partiality.
...
IV, iii, 3 For I have need of many orisons . . .
Juliet plays most of her pranks under the appearance of religion: perhaps
Shakespeare meant to punish her hypocrisy.
...
IV, iii, 46 Alas, alas! it is not like that I . . .
This speech is confused, and inconsequential, according to the disorder
of Juliet’s mind.
...
V, i, 3
My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne;
And all this day an unaccustom’d spirit
Lifts me above the ground with chearful thoughts
These three lines are very gay and pleasing. But why does Shakespeare
give Romeo this involuntary cheerfulness just before the extremity of
unhappiness? Perhaps to shew the vanity of trusting to these uncertain
and casual exaltations or depressions, which many consider as certain
foretokens of good and evil.
...
V, iii, 229 Friar: I will be brief . . .
It is much to be lamented, that the poet did not conclude the dialogue
with the action, and avoid a narrative of events which the audience
already knew.
...
General Observation
This play is one of the most pleasing of our author’s performances. The scenes
are busy and various, the incidents numerous and important, the catastrophe
irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability,
at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires.

48 Romeo and Juliet
Here is one of the few attempts of Shakespeare to exhibit the conversation of

gentlemen, to represent the airy sprightliness of juvenile elegance. Mr. Dryden
mentions a tradition, which might easily reach his time, of a declaration made by
Shakespeare, that he was obliged to kill Mercutio in the third act, lest he should have
been killed by him. Yet he thinks him no such formidable person, but that he might
have lived through the play, and died in his bed, without danger to a poet. Dryden
well knew, had he been in quest of truth, that, in a pointed sentence, more regard
is commonly had to the words than the thought, and that it is very seldom to be
rigorously understood. Mercutio’s wit, gaiety, and courage, will always procure
him friends that wish him a longer life; but his death is not precipitated, he has
lived out the time allotted him in the construction of the play; nor do I doubt
the ability of Shakespeare to have continued his existence, though some of his
sallies are perhaps out of the reach of Dryden; whose genius was not very fertile
of merriment, nor ductile to humour, but acute, argumentative, comprehensive,
and sublime.
The Nurse is one of the characters in which the author delighted: he has, with
great subtilty of distinction, drawn her at once loquacious and secret, obsequious
and insolent, trusty and dishonest.
His comic scenes are happily wrought, but his pathetic strains are always
polluted with some unexpected depravations. His persons, however distressed,
have a conceit left them in their misery, a miserable conceit.
QQQ
1794—Charles Dibdin. From “Shakespear,”

in A Complete History of the Stage
Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) was an English songwriter and theatri-
cal entrepreneur whose sea songs and operas made him one of the
most popular composers of the late eighteenth century. He also wrote
A Complete History of the Stage.
The general merit of Shakespear manifests itself in a thousand various ways.

Take any one of the passions which he has moulded at will to serve the general
purpose of instruction and amusement, and see to what an astonishing pitch he
has affected the human heart by a critical and interesting display of it.
Is the passion love? See how he has followed it through all its vicissitudes.
The delicate tenderness, the fond impatience, the impetuous ardour, the noble
constancy of Romeo and Juliet, perhaps, has not a parallel in language. To
youthful love every thing is possible; and the exquisite nonsense that Shakespear
has put into the mouth of the doating, enamoured, yet delicate Juliet, is full of

Romeo and Juliet in the Eighteenth Century 49
poetic beauty, so boundlessly, so extravagant, and yet so truly natural, that we are
equally captivated with her love and her innocence.
The love of Romeo is no less admirably drawn. It is impetuous, thoughtless,
and rash, yet manly, noble, and generous; but its characteristic is nature. He leaps
the orchard wall and braves the resentment of Juliet’s relations, out of love, yet
presently, out of this very love, he becomes a coward and puts up with an insult
from of those relations; nor is he roused out of this apathy till called upon to
revenge the death of his friend.
In the garden scene, surely nothing can be so beautiful as the enchanted, yet
respectful, manner in which he listens to the unaffected tenderness, the timid
honesty, the techy impatience of Juliet. His love, profound, and awful, recedes
from his tongue to his heart; her’s, inconsiderate and volatile, flies from her
heart to her tongue, till, at length impelled to reply to her fond confession, which
disdains all hypocrisy, and derides all subterfuge, they join in interchanging vows,
tender and affectionate on her part, manly and honourable on his.
Absence only renders more amiable the noble and exalted minds of those
lovers. His despair at hearing the sentence of banishment, his horror at the news
of Juliet’s death, and his solemn determination to follow her; and her resigned
compliance with the friar’s stratagem, her awful manner of executing it, and
her destroying herself, after every hope has failed her, are masterly pictures of
exquisite love. (1)
Were I to go on investigating the various ways in which Shakespear has treated
this one passion, I should greatly exceed the limits I am obliged to prescribe
for myself. I shall, therefore, for the present pass by the noble and persevering
constancy of Imogen, the patient and endearing tenderness of Desdemona, the
generous and enterprizing affection of Rosalind, the silent and devouring passion
of Viola, and all those great and unexampled proofs of consummate strength of
mind and profound judgment of the human heart in which Shakespear, though
he may have been in one instance now and then equalled by a particular author,
taking his writings on the passion of love in their full and comprehensive sense,
he has clearly excelled every author.
Notes
1. Merrier was so charmed with Romeo and Juliet, and so distressed that the
lovers should become victims to the unjust and unreasonable enmity of their fami-
lies, that he has given the plot a new turn. The play never was performed, but it has
all the delicacy, finesse, and truth of that admirable author. Benvolio, having long
foreseen the consequence of this family hatred, does his utmost to excite the love
of Romeo and Juliet, in order to bring about a reconciliation. He finds both the
families averse to his project, and, therefore, connives at a private marriage. Every
thing happens as in Shakespear’s play. Benvolio, however, in the place of the friar,
having from his infancy studied chemistry, administers a potion to Juliet; and, con-
triving that Romeo should be informed of the death, furnishes him with another.

50 Romeo and Juliet
Romeo opens the tomb and finding Juliet apparently dead, drinks the potion and
falls down at her side. In the mean, Benvolio having alarmed the two fathers they
presently behold their two children in this state. After reading to them a severe
lecture, and reproaching them for their conduct and the dreadful consequences of
their mutual enmity, he honestly confesses that he has wrought all this; tells them
that this seeming death of these lovers is but a sleep; that he alone, however, knows
the charm to revive them; and that, if they will discard their unjust anger and vow
perpetual amity, their children shall wake and revive the double pleasure of being
restored to life and to the arms of their parents; but that, if they hesitate, it will be
too late. In that case he knows he shall be considered as their murderer, but that he
would rather die than witness a rancour so dishonourable to themselves and such a
scandal to human nature. The result is obvious. The lovers revive, and their affec-
tion is crowned with the approbation and blessing of their fathers. I shall only add
that the Frenchman merely alters the story; he does not attempt to improve upon
Shakespear, whose genius he reverences, and to whose productions he had upon all
occasions most willingly paid a warm tribute of admiration.

Romeo and Juliet in the
Nineteenth Century
q
Critics in the nineteenth century continued to appreciate Romeo and Juliet,

with the Romantic writers represented here, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and Coleridge,
focusing on Shakespeare’s understanding of the psychology of love and his bril-
liant display of imagination, and also praising his poignant presentation of real
human emotion and passion and his sublime poetry. Later critics in the century
deepened this analysis by adding other concerns. For example, Anna Jameson,
who likewise shares in the Romantic celebration of deep human emotions,
praises in particular Juliet, as a female character who manifests a wide range of
emotions and growth and, as a result, embodies many ennobling qualities. Still
later critics began to manifest important disagreements. The critics Edward
Dowden and Bernhard ten Brink agree on the transcendent and therefore
uplifting message to the lovers’ tragic deaths, but disagree on the importance of
the play. Dowden, who upheld Hamlet as the supreme tragedy, maintains that
Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare’s early and not very profound experiment in
this genre, while ten Brink commends the play as high tragedy, exemplifying
those elements outlined by Aristotle’s definition. By way of contrast, Frederick
S. Boas maintains that there is no transcendence to be found in the story of
“star-crossed” lovers who fall victim to Fate. The following is a more detailed
discussion of the individual critics.
In his commentary on Romeo and Juliet, August Wilhelm Schlegel maintains
that the pathos of this play can only be understood when looked at in its entirety,
rather than in an analysis of its constituent parts. Though there are comic and
enjoyable moments in the play, as there are individual characters created to
function in comic roles, the two young lovers are doomed from the outset. They
act on an “irresistible impulse to live in one another,” in defiance of the familial
feuds and treacherous political implications, and are destined to be united only
through death. Schlegel admires Shakespeare’s ability to instill a passionate love
story with sweetness and decorum, elevating the lovers’ tragic history to sublime
poetry, and thereby granting an uplifting transcendence despite the tragic
conclusion: “Under his handling, it has become a glorious song of praise on that
inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul, . . . while at the same time it is a
51

52 Romeo and Juliet
melancholy elegy on its inherent and imparted frailty; it is at once the apotheosis
and the obsequies of love.” Schlegel also praises Romeo and Juliet for its dramatic
arrangement and the appropriateness of every character and circumstance.
William Hazlitt begins his essay by admiring what Shakespeare has
accomplished in Romeo and Juliet, namely the creation of a tragedy based wholly
on a love story and, further, a narrative made all the more excellent by its poignant
imagery of a sweet and genuine love that is both new and passionate but never
maudlin. Responding to those critics who faulted the play’s focus on the absurd
passion between an immature and inexperienced boy and girl, Hazlitt argues
that Shakespeare has expressed passions more strenuously by showing what the
lovers have not yet experienced, rather than employing the time-worn formula
found in other literary works or contemporary philosophy, where beauty and
infatuation are sought from older or more experienced lovers. “Desire has no
limit itself. Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite, extravagant,
inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it.” Hazlitt concludes that
in following the enduring fundamentals of human nature, Shakespeare has
fashioned a story that is true to the progress of human life, which “embraces the
circle of the affections from childhood to old age.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge praises Shakespeare’s consummate skill in fashioning
a viable and living portrait of a family drama while adhering to the classical
prescription of a unity of action so important to the ancient Greeks, a unity which
he prefers to identify as “homogeneity” and “proportionateness.” In an effort to
demonstrate Shakespeare’s artistry, Coleridge makes the comparison between a
mechanical work of art, similar to a watch where parts may be substituted as
needed, versus an “organic” work of art, which creates and preserves an inviolable
integrity of the whole. For Coleridge, Romeo and Juliet presents us with a “lively
picture” similar to the beautiful shapes and colors of a landscape.
In her essay on Juliet’s character, Anna Jameson speaks in superlatives, stating
that her heroine is the incarnation of love itself. Jameson celebrates the full
range of emotions in her female heroine, who is calm and contemplative in one
moment and vehement and passionate in the next, and states that the defining
moment for the character is when she takes umbrage at the nurse’s derogatory
comments about Romeo: “This scene is the crisis in the character; and henceforth
we see Juliet assume a new aspect. The fond, impatient, timid girl puts on the
wife and the woman: she has learned heroism from suffering, and subtlety from
oppression.”
Edward Dowden begins his essay with the premise that Romeo and Juliet was a
brief foray into tragedy during Shakespeare’s early years and that the playwright,
recognizing that he and the play lacked profound understanding of human nature
and passion, returned to the history plays for several years before writing his
best tragedy, Hamlet. Assessing Romeo and Juliet as a product of Shakespeare’s
youth, Dowden maintains that the two young lovers achieve adulthood during

Romeo and Juliet in the Nineteenth Century 53
the course of the play and that there is a feeling of hope and accomplishment
through their deaths. It is interesting to note that Dowden sees a qualitative
distinction in their coming-of-age, in that he sees Romeo’s maturation as the
emerging from a dream-like state, while Juliet’s emotional development is quite
different, for she is Romeo’s savior: “Romeo had attained to manhood. Juliet had
suddenly blossomed into heroic womanhood. Through her, and through anguish
and joy, her lover had emerged from the life of dream into the waking life of
truth. Juliet has saved his soul.”
Comparing Shakespeare to his sources, Bernhard ten Brink praises Romeo and
Juliet for its characterization, appropriateness of language, and dramatic structure.
Ten Brink contends that Shakespeare intended a transcendental ending to the
tragic death of his two young lovers, that “in death they are lastingly united,”
and that this peaceful resolution of all conflict within the play was the impetus
upon which he based his play. Furthermore, ten Brink maintains that it was
Shakespeare’s objective to arouse sympathy and fear and, at the same time, to
elevate our spirits so that we, too, may experience the nobility of their deaths:
“The sacrifices which love demanded have appeased the old hatred also; the prince
stands there a woeful, sympathetic looker-on, a witness of the peace concluded
over the open grave.”
Frederick S. Boas is enamored of Shakespeare’s “Italianate” plays, Romeo and
Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. He admires the magical atmosphere conveyed
in these two works, the result of Shakespeare’s early travels. After providing a
detailed summary of Shakespeare’s sources, Boas concentrates on the importance
of the political plot, which dictates the final tragic outcome for Romeo and Juliet:
“No a priori ideas that Shakspere is pre-eminently the poet of free will as opposed
to necessity should prevent us recognizing that in Romeo and Juliet, following the
steps of Brooke, and treating a characteristically medieval theme, he has given to
Fate a prominence unique in his writings.”
1809—August Wilhelm Schlegel.

From “Criticisms on Shakspeare’s Tragedies,”
from Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) was an influential German poet,
translator, and critic, as well as a key figure in the German Romantic
movement. He translated a number of Shakespeare’s plays into
German.
Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, differ from most of the pieces which we have
hitherto examined, neither in the ingredients of the composition, nor in the
manner of treating them: it is merely the direction of the whole that gives them

54 Romeo and Juliet
the stamp of Tragedy. Romeo and Juliet is a picture of love and its pitiable fate, in
a world whose atmosphere is too sharp for this the tenderest blossom of human
life. Two beings created for each other feel mutual love at the first glance; every
consideration disappears before the irresistible impulse to live in one another;
under circumstances hostile in the highest degree to their union, they unite
themselves by a secret marriage, relying simply on the protection of an invisible
power. Untoward incidents following in rapid succession, their heroic constancy
is within a few days put to the proof, till, forcibly separated from each other, by
a voluntary death they are united in the grave to meet again in another world.
All this is to be found in the beautiful story which Shakspeare has not invented,
and which, however simply told, will always excite a tender sympathy: but it was
reserved for Shakspeare to join in one ideal picture purity of heart with warmth
of imagination; sweetness and dignity of manners with passionate intensity of
feeling. Under his handling, it has become a glorious song of praise on that
inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity,
and which elevates even the senses into soul, while at the same time it is a
melancholy elegy on its inherent and imparted frailty; it is at once the apotheosis
and the obsequies of love. It appears here a heavenly spark, that, as it descends
to the earth, is converted into the lightning flash, which almost in the same
moment sets on fire and consumes the mortal being on whom it lights. All that
is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring,—all that is languishing in
the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, all alike
breathe forth from this poem. But even more rapidly than the earliest blossoms
of youth and beauty decay, does it from the first timidly-bold declaration and
modest return of love hurry on to the most unlimited passion, to an irrevocable
union; and then hastens, amidst alternating storms of rapture and despair, to the
fate of the two lovers, who yet appear enviable in their hard lot, for their love
survives them, and by their death they have obtained an endless triumph over
every separating power. The sweetest and the bitterest love and hatred, festive
rejoicings and dark forebodings, tender embraces and sepulchral horrors, the
fulness of life and self-annihilation, are here all brought close to each other; and
yet these contrasts are so blended into a unity of impression, that the echo which
the whole leaves behind in the mind resembles a single but endless sigh.
The excellent dramatic arrangement, the significance of every character in
its place, the judicious selection of all the circumstances, even the most minute,
have already been dwelt upon in detail. I shall only request attention to a trait
which may serve for an example of the distance to which Shakspeare goes back
to lay the preparatory foundation. The most striking and perhaps incredible
circumstance in the whole story is the liquor given by the Monk to Juliet, by
which she for a number of hours not merely sleeps, but fully resembles a corpse,
without however receiving the least injury. How does the poet dispose us to
believe that Father Lorenzo possesses such a secret?—At his first appearance he

exhibits him in a garden, where he is collecting herbs and descanting on their

wonderful virtues. The discourse of the pious old man is full of deep meaning: he
sees everywhere in nature emblems of the moral world; the same wisdom with
which he looks through her has also made him master of the human heart. In
this manner a circumstance of an ungrateful appearance, has become the source
of a great beauty.
QQQ
1817—William Hazlitt. From “Romeo and Juliet,”

from Characters of Shakespear’s Plays
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English writer and literary critic.
He is the author of Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets (1818),
and The Spirit of the Age (1825).
Romeo and Juliet is the only tragedy which Shakespear has written entirely on
a love-story. It is supposed to have been his first play, and it deserves to stand
in that proud rank. There is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the
rapturous intoxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair. It has been said of
Romeo and Juliet by a great critic, that ‘whatever is most intoxicating in the odour
of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in
the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem.’ The description is true;
and yet it does not answer to our idea of the play. For if it has the sweetness of
the rose, it has its freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale’s song,
it has also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as
glowing and as bright. There is nothing of a sickly and sentimental cast. Romeo
and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. Every thing speaks the very soul
of pleasure, the high and healthy pulse of the passions: the heart beats, the blood
circulates and mantles throughout. Their courtship is not an insipid interchange
of sentiments lip-deep, learnt at second-hand from poems and plays,—made up
of beauties of the most shadowy kind, of ‘fancies wan that hang the pensive head,’
of evanescent smiles, and sighs that breathe not, of delicacy that shrinks from the
touch, and feebleness that scarce supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of thought,
and an artificial dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and nature! It is the reverse of all
this. It is Shakespear all over, and Shakespear when he was young.
We have heard it objected to Romeo and Juliet, that it is founded on an idle
passion between a boy and a girl, who have scarcely seen and can have but little
sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who have had no experience of
the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must be therefore equally

56 Romeo and Juliet
groundless and fantastical. Whoever objects to the youth of the parties in this play
as ‘too unripe and crude’ to pluck the sweets of love, and wishes to see a first-love
carried on into a good old age, and the passions taken at the rebound, when their
force is spent, may find all this done in the Stranger and in other German plays,
where they do things by contraries, and transpose nature to inspire sentiment and
create philosophy. Shakespear proceeded in a more strait-forward, and, we think,
effectual way. He did not endeavour to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild
throb of passion from the last expiring sigh of indifference. He did not ‘gather
grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles.’ It was not his way. But he has given a picture
of human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has founded the passion of
the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures
they had not experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried
source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught
made them drunk with love and joy. They were in full possession of their senses
and their affections. Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire. Youth is the
season of love, because the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the
touch of novelty, and kindled to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoyments
or its wishes. Desire has no limit but itself. Passion, the love and expectation of
pleasure, is infinite, extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and
kill it. Juliet exclaims on her first interview with Romeo—

My love as deep.
And why should it not? What was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure, which
had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but
experience which she was yet without? What was to abate the transport of the
first sweet sense of pleasure, which her heart and her senses had just tasted, but
indifference which she was yet a stranger to? What was there to check the ardour
of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment which
she had not yet felt! As are the desires and the hopes of youthful passion, such is
the keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect. Such is the transition
in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest despair, from the nuptial couch to
an untimely grave. The only evil that even in apprehension befalls the two lovers
is the loss of the greatest possible felicity; yet this loss is fatal to both, for they
had rather part with life than bear the thought of surviving all that had made life
dear to them. In all this, Shakespear has but followed nature, which existed in his
time, as well as now. The modern philosophy, which reduces the whole theory of
the mind to habitual impressions, and leaves the natural impulses of passion and
imagination out of the account, had not then been discovered; or if it had, would
have been little calculated for the uses of poetry.

It is the inadequacy of the same false system of philosophy to account for

the strength of our earliest attachments, which has led Mr. Wordsworth to
indulge in the mystical visions of Platonism in his ‘Ode on the Progress of Life.’
He has very admirably described the vividness of our impressions in youth and
childhood, and how ‘they fade by degrees into the light of common day,’ and
he ascribes the change to the supposition of a pre-existent state, as if our early
thoughts were nearer heaven, reflections of former trails of glory, shadows of our
past being. This is idle. It is not from the knowledge of the past that the first
impressions of things derive their gloss and splendour, but from our ignorance
of the future, which fills the void to come with the warmth of our desires,
with our gayest hopes, and brightest fancies. It is the obscurity spread before it
that colours the prospect of life with hope, as it is the cloud which reflects the
rainbow. There is no occasion to resort to any mystical union and transmission of
feeling through different states of being to account for the romantic enthusiasm
of youth; nor to plant the root of hope in the grave, nor to derive it from the
skies. Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above the stars. Desire and
imagination are inmates of the human breast. The heaven ‘that lies about us in
our infancy’ is only a new world, of which we know nothing but what we wish
it to be, and believe all that we wish. In youth and boyhood, the world we live in
is the world of desire, and of fancy: it is experience that brings us down to the
world of reality. What is it that in youth sheds a dewy light round the evening
star? That makes the daisy look so bright? That perfumes the hyacinth? That
embalms the first kiss of love? It is the delight of novelty, and the seeing no end
to the pleasure that we fondly believe is still in store for us. The heart revels in
the luxury of its own thoughts, and is unable to sustain the weight of hope and
love that presses upon it.—The effects of the passion of love alone might have
dissipated Mr. Wordsworth’s theory, if he means any thing more by it than an
ingenious and poetical allegory. That at least is not a link in the chain let down
from other worlds; ‘the purple light of love’ is not a dim reflection of the smiles
of celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and then seems like
‘another morn risen on mid-day.’ In this respect the soul comes into the world ‘in
utter nakedness.’ Love waits for the ripening of the youthful blood. The sense of
pleasure precedes the love of pleasure, but with the sense of pleasure, as soon as it
is felt, come thronging infinite desires and hopes of pleasure, and love is mature
as soon as born. It withers and it dies almost as soon!
This play presents a beautiful coup-d’oeil of the progress of human life.
In thought it occupies years, and embraces the circle of the affections from
childhood to old age. Juliet has become a great girl, a young woman since we
first remember her a little thing in the idle prattle of the nurse. Lady Capulet was
about her age when she became a mother, and old Capulet somewhat impatiently
tells his younger visitors,

58 Romeo and Juliet
I’ve seen the day,

That I have worn a visor, and could tell
A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,
Such as would please: ’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone.
Thus one period of life makes way for the following, and one generation
pushes another off the stage. One of the most striking passages to show the
intense feeling of youth in this play is Capulet’s invitation to Paris to visit his
entertainment.
At my poor house, look to behold this night

Earth-treading stars that make dark heav’n light;
Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
When well-apparel’d April on the heel
Of limping winter treads, even such delight
Among fresh female-buds shall you this night
Inherit at my house.
The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended together like the
breath of opening flowers. Images of vernal beauty appear to have floated before
the author’s mind, in writing this poem, in profusion. Here is another of exquisite
beauty, brought in more by accident than by necessity. Montague declares of his
son smit with a hopeless passion, which he will not reveal—
But he, his own affection’s counsellor,

Is to himself so secret and so close,
So far from sounding and discovery,
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.
This casual description is as full of passionate beauty as when Romeo dwells

in frantic fondness on ‘the white wonder of his Juliet’s hand.’ The reader may, if
he pleases, contrast the exquisite pastoral simplicity of the above lines with the
gorgeous description of Juliet when Romeo first sees her at her father’s house,
surrounded by company and artificial splendour.
What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand

Of yonder knight?
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright;
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.

It would be hard to say which of the two garden scenes is the finest, that
where he first converses with his love, or takes leave of her the morning after
their marriage. Both are like a heaven upon earth; the blissful bowers of Paradise
let down upon this lower world. We will give only one passage of these well
known scenes to shew the perfect refinement and delicacy of Shakespear’s
conception of the female character. It is wonderful how Collins, who was a critic
and a poet of great sensibility, should have encouraged the common error on this
subject by saying—‘But stronger Shakespear felt for man alone.’
...
Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and
sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both are
absent and self-involved, both live out of themselves in a world of imagination.
Hamlet is abstracted from every thing; Romeo is abstracted from every thing
but his love, and lost in it. His ‘frail thoughts dally with faint surmise,’ and are
fashioned out of the suggestions of hope, ‘the flatteries of sleep.’ He is himself
only in his Juliet; she is his only reality, his heart’s true home and idol. The rest
of the world is to him a passing dream. How finely is this character pourtrayed
where he recollects himself on seeing Paris slain at the tomb of Juliet!—
What said my man, when my betossed soul

Did not attend him as we rode? I think
He told me Paris should have married Juliet.
And again, just before he hears the sudden tidings of her death—
If I may trust the flattery of sleep,

My dreams presage some joyful news at hand;
My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne,
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead,
(Strange dream! that gives a dead man leave to think)
And breath’d such life with kisses on my lips,
That I reviv’d and was an emperour.
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess’d,
When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!
Romeo’s passion for Juliet is not a first love: it succeeds and drives out his
passion for another mistress, Rosaline, as the sun hides the stars. This is perhaps
an artifice (not absolutely necessary) to give us a higher opinion of the lady, while
the first absolute surrender of her heart to him enhances the richness of the prize.
The commencement, progress, and ending of his second passion are however

60 Romeo and Juliet
complete in themselves, not injured if they are not bettered by the first. The
outline of the play is taken from an Italian novel; but the dramatic arrangement
of the different scenes between the lovers, the more than dramatic interest
in the progress of the story, the development of the characters with time and
circumstances, just according to the degree and kind of interest excited, are not
inferior to the expression of passion and nature. It has been ingeniously remarked
among other proofs of skill in the contrivance of the fable, that the improbability
of the main incident in the piece, the administering of the sleeping-potion,
is softened and obviated from the beginning by the introduction of the Friar
on his first appearance culling simples and descanting on their virtues. Of the
passionate scenes in this tragedy, that between the Friar and Romeo when he is
told of his sentence of banishment, that between Juliet and the Nurse when she
hears of it, and of the death of her cousin Tybalt (which bear no proportion in
her mind, when passion after the first shock of surprise throws its weight into
the scale of her affections) and the last scene at the tomb, are among the most
natural and overpowering. In all of these it is not merely the force of any one
passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from
one to another, the mingling currents of every different feeling rising up and
prevailing in turn, swayed by the master-mind of the poet, as the waves undulate
beneath the gliding storm. Thus when Juliet has by her complaints encouraged
the Nurse to say, ‘Shame come to Romeo,’ she instantly repels the wish, which
she had herself occasioned, by answering—
Blister’d be thy tongue

For such a wish! He was not born to shame.
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit,
For ’tis a throne where honour may be crown’d
Sole monarch of the universal earth!
O, what a beast was I to chide him so?
Nurse: Will you speak well of him that kill’d your cousin?
Juliet: Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah my poor lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours’ wife, have mangled it?
And then follows on the neck of her remorse and returning fondness, that
wish treading almost on the brink of impiety, but still held back by the strength
of her devotion to her lord, that ‘father, mother, nay, or both were dead,’ rather
than Romeo banished. If she requires any other excuse, it is in the manner in
which Romeo echoes her frantic grief and disappointment in the next scene
at being banished from her.—Perhaps one of the finest pieces of acting that
ever was witnessed on the stage, is Mr. Kean’s manner of doing this scene and

his repetition of the word, Banished. He treads close indeed upon the genius
of his author.
QQQ
1818—Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

From “Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare, with Introductory
Remarks on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, critic,

and, with his good friend William Wordsworth, one of the found-
ers of the English Romantic movement. He is best known for his
poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Kubla Khan”
(1816). His major prose work is the largely philosophical Biographia
Literaria (1817).
I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three
unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and
to the particular stage for which Shakspeare wrote, as far as he can be said
to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I have
in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the former two, instead of
being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local peculiarities of the
Athenian drama; that the last alone deserved the name of a principle, and that
in the preservation of this unity Shakspeare stood preeminent. Yet, instead of
unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more appropriate, though scholastic
and uncouth, words homogeneity, proportionateness, and totality of interest,—
expressions, which involve the distinction, or rather the essential difference,
betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive,
life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived,
and then by a succeeding act put together;—not as watches are made for
wholesale,—(for there each part supposes a preconception of the whole in some
mind)—but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony
that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks,
the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech
and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain
trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the
visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that
the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in
each component part. And as this is the particular excellence of the Shakspearian
drama generally, so is it especially characteristic of the Romeo and Juliet.

62 Romeo and Juliet
The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the
play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit,
at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object
in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the twisted wires on the
plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some
degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in family quarrels, which have proved
scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and precipitancy, and passion from
mere habit and custom, can alone be expected. With his acustomed judgment,
Shakspeare has begun by placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of
the play; and, as nature ever presents two sides, one for Heraclitus, and one for
Democritus, he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable absurdity of the
evil by the contagion of it reaching the servants, who have so little to do with it,
but who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensoreal power fly
off through the escape-valve of wit-combats, and of quarrelling with weapons
of sharper edge, all in humble imitation of their masters. Yet there is a sort of
unhired fidelity, an ourishness about all this that makes it rest pleasant on one’s
feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion of the Prince’s speech, is a
motley dance of all ranks and ages to one tune, as if the horn of Huon had been
playing behind the scenes.
Benvolio’s speech—
Madam, an hour before the worshipp’d sun

Peer’d forth the golden window of the east—
and, far more strikingly, the following speech of old Montague—
Many a morning hath he there been seen

With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew—
prove that Shakspeare meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem,
which, and indeed its early date, may be also inferred from the multitude of
rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are right, from the internal evidence,
in pronouncing this one of Shakspeare’s early dramas, it affords a strong
instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the passions, that
Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered. The necessity of loving creates
an object for itself in man and woman; and yet there is a difference in this
respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a perception of it. It
would have displeased us if Juliet had been represented as already in love, or
as fancying herself so;—but no one, I believe, ever experiences any shock at
Romeo’s forgetting his Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the yearning of
his youthful imagination, and rushing into his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was
a mere creation of his fancy; and we should remark the boastful positiveness of

Romeo in a love of his own making, which is never shown where love is really
near the heart.
When the devout religion of mine eye

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires!
...
One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun
Ne’er saw her match, since first the world begun.
The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakspeare to a

direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy
and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class,—just as
in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,—so it is nearly
as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet’s hand. Here you
have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant,
whose sympathy with the mother’s affections gives her privileges and rank in the
household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place,
and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that
happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her
superiors!—
Yes, madam!—Yet I cannot choose but laugh, &c.
In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. O! how shall I

describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over
the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts
the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her
forehead in the triumph of its smoothness! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and
procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own,
is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested in
them,— these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common copula of
them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellencies and all its
weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio!
QQQ
1832—Anna Jameson. “Juliet,” from Shakespeare’s Heroines:

Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical
Anna Murphy Brownell Jameson (1794–1860), born in Dublin, is best
remembered for her character studies of Shakespeare’s heroines. In

64 Romeo and Juliet
addition to her work on Shakespeare, she kept a diary of her travels

on the Continent as governess to a wealthy family, later published as
The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826). She also edited Memoirs of the Early Italian
Painters (1845) and wrote Sacred and Legendary Art (1848–60; edited by
E. M. Hurll, 1896).
O Love! thou teacher, O Grief! thou tamer, and Time, thou healer of human
hearts!—bring hither all your deep and serious revelations! And ye too, rich fancies
of unbruised, unbowed youth—ye visions of long-perished hopes—shadows of
unborn joys—gay colorings of the dawn of existence! whatever memory hath
treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art; all soft and delicate
images—all lovely forms—divinest voices and entrancing melodies—gleams of
sunnier skies and fairer climes—Italian moonlights, and airs that “breathe of the
sweet south,”—now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination—live once more
to my heart! Come thronging around me, all inspirations that wait on passion,
on power, on beauty; give me to tread, not bold, and yet unblamed, within
the inmost sanctuary of Shakespeare’s genius, in Juliet’s moonlight bower and
Miranda’s enchanted isle!
* * * * *
It is not without emotion that I attempt to touch on the character of Juliet.
Such beautiful things have already been said of her—only to be exceeded in
beauty by the subject that inspired them!—it is impossible to say anything
better; but it is possible to say something more. Such, in fact, is the simplicity,
the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet’s character, that we are not at first aware
of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion,
a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel
as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to
soul and sense is as if, while hanging over a half-blown rose, and revelling in
its intoxicating perfume, we should pull it asunder, leaflet by leaflet, the better
to display its bloom and fragrance. Yet how otherwise should we disclose the
wonders of its formation, or do justice to the skill of the divine hand that hath
thus fashioned it in its beauty?
Love, as a passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. Now, admitting
the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand
different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects
as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the
individual character and temperament, but it is under the influence of climate
and circumstance. The love that is calm in one moment, shall show itself
vehement and tumultuous at another. The love that is wild and passionate in
the south, is deep and contemplative in the north; as the Spanish or Roman
girl perhaps poisons a rival, or stabs herself for the sake of a living lover, and
the German or Russian girl pines into the grave for love of the false, the

absent, or the dead. Love is ardent or deep, bold or timid, jealous or confiding,
impatient or humble, hopeful or desponding;—and yet there are not many
loves, but one love.
All Shakespeare’s women, being essentially women, either love or have
loved, or are capable of loving; but Juliet is love itself. The passion is her state of
being, and out of it she has no existence. It is the soul within her soul; the pulse
within her heart; the life-blood along her veins, “blending with every atom of
her frame.” The love that is so chaste and dignified in Portia—so airy-delicate
and fearless in Miranda—so sweetly confiding in Perdita—so playfully fond in
Rosalind—so constant in Imogen—so devoted in Desdemona—so fervent in
Helen—so tender in Viola—is each and all of these in Juliet. All these remind
us of her; but she reminds us of nothing but her own sweet self; or if she does,
it is of the Gismunda, or the Lisetta, or the Fiametta of Boccaccio, to whom she
is allied, not in the character or circumstances, but in the truly Italian spirit, the
glowing, national complexion of the portrait.
There was an Italian painter who said that the secret of all effect in color
consisted in white upon black, and black upon white. How perfectly did
Shakespeare understand this secret of effect! and how beautifully has he
exemplified it in Juliet!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,

As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
Thus she and her lover are in contrast with all around them. They are all
love, surrounded with all hate; all harmony, surrounded with all discord; all pure
nature, in the midst of polished and artificial life. Juliet, like Portia, is the foster-
child of opulence and splendor; she dwells in a fair city—she has been nurtured
in a palace—she clasps her robe with jewels—she braids her hair with rainbow-
tinted pearls; but in herself she has no more connection with the trappings
around her than the lovely exotic transplanted from some Eden-like climate
has with the carved and gilded conservatory which has reared and sheltered its
luxuriant beauty.
But in this vivid impression of contrast there is nothing abrupt or harsh.
A tissue of beautiful poetry weaves together the principal figures and the
subordinate personages. The consistent truth of the costume, and the exquisite
gradations of relief with which the most opposite hues are approximated, blend
all into harmony. Romeo and Juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic
background; nor are they, like Thekla and Max in the “Wallenstein,” two angels
of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects
of humanity; but every circumstance, and every personage, and every shade
of character in each, tends to the development of the sentiment which is the
subject of the drama. The poetry, too, the richest that can possibly be conceived,

66 Romeo and Juliet
is interfused through all the characters; the splendid imagery lavished upon all
with the careless prodigality of genius; and the whole is lighted up into such a
sunny brilliance of effect, as though Shakespeare had really transported himself
into Italy and had drunk to intoxication of her genial atmosphere. How truly
it has been said, that “although Romeo and Juliet are in love, they are not love-
sick!” What a false idea would anything of the mere whining amoroso give us
of Romeo, such as he really is in Shakespeare—the noble, gallant, ardent, brave,
and witty! And Juliet—with even less truth could the phrase or idea apply to
her! The picture in “Twelfth Night” of the wan girl dying of love, “who pined in
thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy,” would never surely occur to
us when thinking on the enamoured and impassioned Juliet, in whose bosom
love keeps a fiery vigil, kindling tenderness into enthusiasm, enthusiasm into
passion, passion into heroism! No, the whole sentiment of the play is of a far
different cast. It is flushed with the genial spirit of the south: it tastes of youth,
and of the essence of youth; of life, and of the very sap of life. We have indeed
the struggle of love against evil destinies and a thorny world; the pain, the grief,
the anguish, the terror, the despair; the aching adieu; the pang unutterable
of parted affection; and rapture, truth, and tenderness trampled into an early
grave: but still an Elysian grace lingers round the whole, and the blue sky of
Italy bends over all!
In the delineation of that sentiment which forms the groundwork of the
drama, nothing in fact can equal the power of the picture, but its inexpressible
sweetness and its perfect grace: the passion which has taken possession of
Juliet’s whole soul has the force, the rapidity, the resistless violence of the
torrent; but she is herself as “moving delicate,” as fair, as soft, as flexible
as the willow that bends over it, whose light leaves tremble even with the
motion of the current which hurries beneath them. But at the same time
that the pervading sentiment is never lost sight of, and is one and the same
throughout, the individual part of the character in all its variety is developed,
and marked with the nicest discrimination. For instance,—the simplicity of
Juliet is very different from the simplicity of Miranda: her innocence is not
the innocence of a desert island. The energy she displays does not once remind
us of the moral grandeur of Isabel, or the intellectual power of Portia;—it
is founded in the strength of passion, not in the strength of character; it is
accidental rather than inherent, rising with the tide of feeling or temper, and
with it subsiding. Her romance is not the pastoral romance of Perdita, nor the
fanciful romance of Viola; it is the romance of a tender heart and a poetical
imagination. Her inexperience is not ignorance; she has heard that there is
such a thing as falsehood, though she can scarcely conceive it. Her mother
and her nurse have perhaps warned her against flattering vows and man’s
inconstancy, or she has even

. . . turned the tale by Ariosto told.

Of fair Olympia, loved and left, of old!
Hence that bashful doubt, dispelled almost as soon as felt—
Ah, gentle Romeo!

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.
That conscious shrinking from her own confession—
Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny

What I have spoke!
The ingenuous simplicity of her avowal—
Or, if thou think’st I am too quickly won,

I’ll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo—but else, not for the world!
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou may’st think my ’haviour light;
But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true
Than those who have more cunning to be strange.
And the proud yet timid delicacy with which she throws herself for forbearance
and pardon upon the tenderness of him she loves, even for the love she bears
him—
Therefore pardon me,

And not impute this yielding to light love,
Which the dark night hath so discovered.
In the alternative, which she afterwards places before her lover with such
a charming mixture of conscious delicacy and girlish simplicity, there is that
jealousy of female honor which precept and education have infused into her
mind, without one real doubt of his truth, or the slightest hesitation in her self-
abandonment; for she does not even wait to hear his asseverations:
But if thou mean’st not well, I do beseech thee

To cease thy suit, and leave me to my grief.
Romeo: So thrive my soul—
Juliet: A thousand times, good night!

68 Romeo and Juliet
But all these flutterings between native impulses and maiden fears become
gradually absorbed, swept away, lost, and swallowed up in the depth and
enthusiasm of confiding love.

My love as deep; the more I give to you
The more I have—for both are infinite!
What a picture of the young heart, that sees no bound to its hopes, no end
to its affections! For “what was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure, which
had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but
experience, which she was yet without? What was to abate the transport of the
first sweet sense of pleasure, which her heart had just tasted, but indifference,
to which she was yet a stranger? What was there to check the ardor of hope, of
faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment, which she had
never yet felt?”
Lord Byron’s Haidée is a copy of Juliet in the Oriental costume, but the
development is epic, not dramatic.1
I remember no dramatic character conveying the same impression of singleness
of purpose, and devotion of heart and soul, except the Thekla of Schiller’s
“Wallenstein”; she is the German Juliet; far unequal, indeed, but conceived,
nevertheless, in a kindred spirit. I know not if critics have ever compared them,
or whether Schiller is supposed to have had the English, or rather the Italian,
Juliet in his fancy when he portrayed Thekla; but there are some striking points of
coincidence, while the national distinction in the character of the passion leaves
to Thekla a strong cast of originality. The Princess Thekla is, like Juliet, the heiress
of rank and opulence; her first introduction to us, in her full dress and diamonds,
does not impair the impression of her softness and simplicity. We do not think
of them, nor do we sympathize with the complaint of her lover—
The dazzle of the jewels which played round you

Hid the beloved from me.
We almost feel the reply of Thekla before she utters it—
Then you saw me

Not with your heart, but with your eyes!
The timidity of Thekla in her first scene, her trembling silence in the
commencement, and the few words she addresses to her mother, remind us
of the unobtrusive simplicity of Juliet’s first appearance; but the impression is
different: the one is the shrinking violet, the other the unexpanded rosebud.

Thekla and Max Piccolomini are, like Romeo and Juliet, divided by the hatred
of their fathers. The death of Max, and the resolute despair of Thekla, are also
points of resemblance; and Thekla’s complete devotion, her frank yet dignified
abandonment of all disguise, and her apology for her own unreserve, are quite
in Juliet’s style—
I ought to he less open, ought to hide

My heart more from thee—so decorum dictates:
But where in this place wouldst thou seek for truth
If in my mouth thou didst not find it?
The same confidence, innocence, and fervor of affection distinguish both

heroines: but the love of Juliet is more vehement, the love of Thekla is more calm,
and reposes more on itself; the love of Juliet gives us the idea of infinitude, and
that of Thekla of eternity; the love of Juliet flows on with an increasing tide, like
the river pouring to the ocean, and the love of Thekla stands unalterable, and
enduring as the rock. In the heart of Thekla love shelters as in a home; but in
the heart of Juliet he reigns a crowned king—“he rides on its pants triumphant!”
As women, they would divide the loves and suffrages of mankind, but not as
dramatic characters: the moment we come to look nearer, we acknowledge that
it is indeed “rashness and ignorance to compare Schiller with Shakespeare.”2
Thekla is a fine conception in the German spirit, but Juliet is a lovely and
palpable creation. The coloring in which Schiller has arrayed his Thekla is pale,
sombre, vague, compared with the strong individual marking, the rich glow of
life and reality, which distinguish Juliet. One contrast in particular has always
struck me: the two beautiful speeches in the first interview between Max and
Thekla, that in which she describes her father’s astrological chamber, and that in
which he replies with reflections on the influence of the stars, are said to “form
in themselves a fine poem.” They do so; but never would Shakespeare have placed
such extraneous description and reflection in the mouths of his lovers. Romeo
and Juliet speak of themselves only; they see only themselves in the universe;
all things else are as an idle matter. Not a word they utter, though every word
is poetry, not a sentiment or description, though dressed in the most luxuriant
imagery, but has a direct relation to themselves, or to the situation in which they
are placed and the feelings that engross them: and besides, it may be remarked
of Thekla, and generally of all tragedy heroines in love, that, however beautifully
and distinctly characterized, we see the passion only under one or two aspects at
most, or in conflict with some one circumstance or contending duty or feeling. In
Juliet alone we find it exhibited under every variety of aspect, and every gradation
of feeling it could possibly assume in a delicate female heart—as we see the rose,
when passed through the colors of the prism, catch and reflect every tint of the
divided ray, and still it is the same sweet rose.

70 Romeo and Juliet
I have already remarked the quiet manner in which Juliet steals upon us in
her first scene, as the serene, graceful girl, her feelings as yet unawakened, and
her energies all unknown to herself, and unsuspected by others. Her silence and
her filial deference are charming—
I’ll look to like, if looking liking move:

But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent shall give it strength to fly.
Much in the same unconscious way we are impressed with an idea of her
excelling loveliness:
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
and which could make the dark vault of death “a feasting presence full of light.”
Without any elaborate description, we behold Juliet, as she is reflected in the
heart of her lover, like a single bright star mirrored in the bosom of a deep,
transparent well. The rapture with which he dwells on the “white wonder of her
hand;” on her lips,
That even in pure and vestal modesty

Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.
And then her eyes, “two of the fairest stars in all the heavens!” In his exclamation
in the sepulchre,
Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair?
there is life and death, beauty and horror, rapture and anguish combined. The
Friar’s description of her approach,
O, so light a step
Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint!
and then her father’s similitude,
Death lies on her, like an untimely frost

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field;—
all these mingle into a beautiful picture of youthful, airy, delicate grace,—
feminine sweetness, and patrician elegance.

And our impression of Juliet’s loveliness and sensibility is enhanced, when

we find it overcoming in the bosom of Romeo a previous love for another. His
visionary passion for the cold, inaccessible Rosaline forms but the prologue, the
threshold, to the true, the real sentiment which succeeds to it. This incident,
which is found in the original story, has been retained by Shakespeare with equal
feeling and judgment; and far from being a fault in taste and sentiment, far from
prejudicing us against Romeo, by casting on him, at the outset of the piece, the
stigma of inconstancy, it becomes, if properly considered, a beauty in the drama,
and adds a fresh stroke of truth to the portrait of the lover. Why, after all, should
we be offended at what does not offend Juliet herself? for in the original story
we find that her attention is first attracted towards Romeo by seeing him “fancy
sick and pale of cheer” for love of a cold beauty. We must remember that in
those times every young cavalier of any distinction devoted himself, at his first
entrance into the world, to the service of some fair lady, who was selected to be
his fancy’s queen; and the more rigorous the beauty, and the more hopeless the
love, the more honorable the slavery. To go about “metamorphosed by a mistress,”
as Speed humorously expresses it;3 to maintain her supremacy in charms at the
sword’s point; to sigh; to walk with folded arms; to be negligent and melancholy,
and to show a careless desolation, was the fashion of the day. The Surreys, the
Sydneys, the Bayards, the Herberts of the time—all those who were the mirrors
“in which the noble youth did dress themselves”—were of this fantastic school of
gallantry, the last remains of the age of chivalry; and it was especially prevalent
in Italy. Shakespeare has ridiculed it in many places with exquisite humor; but he
wished to show us that it has its serious as well as its comic aspect. Romeo, then,
is introduced to us with perfect truth of costume, as the thrall of a dreaming,
fanciful passion for the scornful Rosaline, who had forsworn to love; and on
her charms and coldness, and on the power of love generally, he descants to his
companions in pretty phrases, quite in the style and taste of the day.4
Why, then, O brawling love, O loving hate,

O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs:
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;

Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears.
But when once he has beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of
hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the
soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round his heart burns to that
heart’s very core. We no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked

72 Romeo and Juliet
phrases, or making a confidant of gay companions; he is no longer “for the

numbers that Petrarch flowed in;” but all is concentrated, earnest, rapturous, in
the feeling and the expression. Compare, for instance, the sparkling antithetical
passages just quoted with one or two of his passionate speeches to, or of, Juliet:
Heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives! &c.
Ah, Juliet! if the measure of thy joy

Be heap’d like mine, and that thy skill be more
To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbour air, and let rich music’s tongue
Unfold the imagin’d happiness, that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter.
Come what sorrow may,

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.
How different! and how finely the distinction is drawn! His first passion is
indulged as a waking dream, a reverie of the fancy; it is depressing, indolent,
fantastic: his second elevates him to the third heaven, or hurries him to
despair. It rushes to its object through all impediments, defies all dangers, and
seeks at last a triumphant grave in the arms of her he so loved. Thus Romeo’s
previous attachment to Rosaline is so contrived as to exhibit to us another
variety in that passion which is the subject of the poem, by showing us the
distinction between the fancied and the real sentiment. It adds a deeper effect
to the beauty of Juliet; it interests us in the commencement for the tender and
romantic Romeo; and gives an individual reality to his character, by stamping
him like an historical, as well as a dramatic portrait, with the very spirit of the
age in which he lived.
It may be remarked of Juliet as of Portia, that we not only trace the component
qualities in each as they expand before us in the course of the action, but we seem
to have known them previously, and mingle a consciousness of their past with
the interest of their present and their future. Thus, in the dialogue between Juliet
and her parents, and in the scenes with the nurse, we seem to have before us the
whole of her previous education and habits; we see her on the one hand kept in
severe subjection by her austere parents; and on the other, fondled and spoiled
by a foolish old nurse—a situation perfectly accordant with the manners of the
time. Then Lady Capulet comes sweeping by with her train of velvet, her black
hood, her fan, and her rosary—the very beau-idéal of a proud Italian matron
of the fifteenth century, whose offer to poison Romeo in revenge for the death

of Tybalt, stamps her with one very characteristic trait of the age and country.
Yet she loves her daughter; and there is a touch of remorseful tenderness in her
lamentation over her, which adds to our impression of the timid softness of Juliet,
and the harsh subjection in which she has been kept:
But one, poor one!—one poor and loving child,

But one thing to rejoice and solace in,
And cruel death hath catch’d it from my sight!
Capulet, as the jovial, testy old man, the self-willed, violent, tyrannical
father,—to whom his daughter is but a property, the appanage of his house,
and the object of his pride,—is equal as a portrait: but both must yield to the
Nurse, who is drawn with the most wonderful power and discrimination. In the
prosaic homeliness of the outline, and the magical illusion of the coloring, she
reminds us of some of the marvellous Dutch paintings, from which, with all their
coarseness, we start back as from a reality. Her low humor, her shallow garrulity,
mixed with the dotage and petulance of age, her subserviency, her secrecy, and
her total want of elevated principle, or even common honesty, are brought before
us like a living and palpable truth.
Among these harsh and inferior spirits is Juliet placed; her haughty parents,
and her plebeian nurse, not only throw into beautiful relief her own native
softness and elegance, but are at once the cause and the excuse of her subsequent
conduct. She trembles before her stern mother and her violent father; but, like
a petted child, alternately cajoles and commands her nurse. It is her old foster-
mother who is the confidante of her love. It is the woman who cherished her
infancy who aids and abets her in her clandestine marriage. Do we not perceive
how immediately our impression of Juliet’s character would have been lowered,
if Shakespeare had placed her in connection with any commonplace dramatic
waiting-woman?—even with Portia’s adroit Nerissa, or Desdemona’s Emilia?
By giving her the Nurse for her confidante, the sweetness and dignity of Juliet’s
character are preserved inviolate to the fancy, even in the midst of all the romance
and wilfulness of passion.
The natural result of these extremes of subjection and independence is
exhibited in the character of Juliet as it gradually opens upon us. We behold it
in the mixture of self-will and timidity, of strength and weakness, of confidence
and reserve, which are developed as the action of the play proceeds. We see it in
the fond eagerness of the indulged girl, for whose impatience the “nimblest of the
lightning-winged loves” had been too slow a messenger; in her petulance with
her nurse; in those bursts of vehement feeling which prepare us for the climax
of passion at the catastrophe; in her invectives against Romeo, when she hears of
the death of Tybalt; in her indignation when the Nurse echoes those reproaches,
and the rising of her temper against unwonted contradiction:

74 Romeo and Juliet
Nurse: Shame come to Romeo!

Juliet: Blister’d be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.
Then comes that revulsion of strong feeling, that burst of magnificent

exultation in the virtue and honor of her lover:
Upon his brow Shame is ashamed to sit,

For ’tis a throne where Honour may be crown’d
Sole monarch of the universal earth!
And this, by one of those quick transitions of feeling which belong to

the character, is immediately succeeded by a gush of tenderness and self-
reproach—
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,

When I, thy three-hours’ wife, have mangled it?
With the same admirable truth of nature, Juliet is represented as at first

bewildered by the fearful destiny that closes round her; reverse is new and
terrible to one nursed in the lap of luxury, and whose energies are yet untried.
Alack, alack, that Heaven should practise stratagems

Upon so soft a subject as myself!
While a stay remains to her amid the evils that encompass her, she clings to
it. She appeals to her father, to her mother—
Good father, I beseech you on my knees,

Hear me with patience but to speak one word!
* * * * *
Ah, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month,—a week!
And, rejected by both, she throws herself upon her nurse in all the helplessness
of anguish, of confiding affection, of habitual dependence—
O God! O nurse! how shall this be prevented?

Some comfort, nurse!
The old woman, true to her vocation, and fearful lest her share in these
events should be discovered, counsels her to forget Romeo and marry Paris;

and the moment which unveils to Juliet the weakness and the baseness of her
confidante is the moment which reveals her to herself. She does not break into
upbraidings; it is no moment for anger; it is incredulous amazement, succeeded
by the extremity of scorn and abhorrence, which takes possession of her mind.
She assumes at once and asserts all her own superiority, and rises to majesty in
the strength of her despair.
Juliet: Speakest thou from thy heart?

Nurse: Ay, and from my soul too;—or else
Beshrew them both!
Juliet: Amen!
This final severing of all the old familiar ties of her childhood—
Go, counsellor.
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain!
and the calm, concentrated force of her resolve—
If all else fail, myself have power to die;
have a sublime pathos. It appears to me also an admirable touch of nature,

considering the master-passion which, at this moment, rules in Juliet’s soul, that
she is as much shocked by the Nurse’s dispraise of her lover, as by her wicked,
time-serving advice.
This scene is the crisis in the character; and henceforth we see Juliet assume
a new aspect. The fond, impatient, timid girl puts on the wife and the woman:
she has learned heroism from suffering, and subtlety from oppression. It is idle
to criticize her dissembling submission to her father and mother; a higher duty
has taken place of that which she owed to them; a more sacred tie has severed
all others. Her parents are pictured as they are, that no feeling for them may
interfere in the slightest degree with our sympathy for the lovers. In the mind
of Juliet there is no struggle between her filial and her conjugal duties, and
there ought to be none. The Friar, her spiritual director, dismisses her with these
instructions:—
Go home,—be merry,—give consent

To marry Paris;
and she obeys him. Death and suffering in every horrid form she is ready to
brave, without fear or doubt, “to live an unstain’d wife:” and the artifice to which
she has recourse, which she is even instructed to use, in no respect impairs the

76 Romeo and Juliet
beauty of the character; we regard it with pain and pity, but excuse it, as the
natural and inevitable consequence of the situation in which she is placed. Nor
should we forget that the dissimulation, as well as the courage of Juliet, though
they spring from passion, are justified by principle:
My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven:

How shall my faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven?
In her successive appeals to her father, her mother, her nurse, and the Friar,
she seeks those remedies which would first suggest themselves to a gentle and
virtuous nature, and grasps her dagger only as the last resource against dishonor
and violated faith:
God join’d my heart with Romeo’s—thou our hands.

And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal’d,
Shall be the label to another deed,
Or my true heart, with treacherous revolt,
Turn to another,—this shall slay them both!
Thus, in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion and terror, preserving, to a
certain degree, that moral and feminine dignity which harmonizes with our best
feelings, and commands our unreproved sympathy.
I reserve my remarks on the catastrophe, which demands separate
consideration; and return to trace from the opening another and distinguishing
trait in Juliet’s character.
In the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the action,
the language, the sentiments of the drama, Juliet resembles Portia; but with this
striking difference. In Portia, the imaginative power, though developed in a high
degree, is so equally blended with the other intellectual and moral faculties, that
it does not give us the idea of excess. It is subject to her nobler reason; it adorns
and heightens all her feelings; it does not overwhelm or mislead them. In Juliet,
it is rather a part of her southern temperament, controlling and modifying
the rest of her character; springing from her sensibility, hurried along by her
passions, animating her joys, darkening her sorrows, exaggerating her terrors,
and, in the end, overpowering her reason. With Juliet, imagination is, in the first
instance, if not the source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her
imagination. It is through the power of imagination that the eloquence of Juliet
is so vividly poetical: that every feeling, every sentiment comes to her, clothed
in the richest imagery, and is thus reflected from her mind to ours. The poetry
is not here the mere adornment, the outward garnishing of the character; but its
result, or, rather, blended with its essence. It is indivisible from it, and interfused

through it like moonlight through the summer air. To particularize is almost

impossible, since the whole of the dialogue appropriated to Juliet is one rich
stream of imagery; she speaks in pictures. And sometimes they are crowded one
upon another: thus in the balcony scene—
I have no joy of this contract to-night:

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens.
This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,

May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet
Again,
O, for a falconer’s voice

To lure this tassel-gentle back again!
Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud;
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies,
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine
With repetition of my Romeo’s name.
Here there are three images in the course of six lines. In the same scene, the
speech of twenty-two lines, beginning,
Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
contains but one figurative expression, the mask of night; and every one reading
this speech with the context must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity,
though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly
is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the situation and in the feeling of the
moment; where confusion, and anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate,
the excitability and play of the imagination would be checked and subdued for
the time.
In the soliloquy of the second act, where she is chiding at the Nurse’s
delay:—
O, she is lame! Love’s heralds should be thoughts,

That ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams,
Driving back shadows over low’ring hills:
Therefore do nimble-pinion’d doves draw Love,
And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings!

78 Romeo and Juliet
How beautiful! how the lines mount and float responsive to the sense! She
goes on—
Had she affections, and warm youthful blood,

She’d be as swift in motion as a ball;
My words should bandy her to my sweet love
And his to me!
The famous soliloquy, “Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds,” teems with

luxuriant imagery. The fond adjuration, “Come night! come Romeo! come thou
day in night!” expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration for her lover
which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only Juliet could or would
have expressed it,—in a bold and beautiful metaphor. Let it be remembered,
that in this speech Juliet is not supposed to be addressing an audience, nor
even a confidante; and I confess I have been shocked at the utter want of
taste and refinement in those who, with coarse derision, or in a spirit of
prudery yet more gross and perverse, have dared to comment on this beautiful
“Hymn to the Night” breathed out by Juliet in the silence and solitude of her
chamber. She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart “triumphing to itself
in words.” In the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls upon the
night to bring Romeo to her arms, there is something so almost infantile in
her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the imagery and language,
that the charm of sentiment and innocence is thrown over the whole; and her
impatience, to use her own expression, is truly that of “a child before a festival,
that hath new robes and may not wear them.” It is at the very moment, too,
that her whole heart and fancy are abandoned to blissful anticipation, that
the Nurse enters with the news of Romeo’s banishment; and the immediate
transition from rapture to despair has a most powerful effect.
It is the same shaping spirit of imagination which, in the scene with the Friar,
heaps together all images of horror that ever hung upon a troubled dream.
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,

From off the battlements of yonder tower;
Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house
O’ercover’d quite with dead men’s rattling bones;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave;
Or hide me with a dead man in his shroud;—
Things that, to hear them told have made me tremble!
But she immediately adds,

And I will do it without fear or doubt,

To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.
In the scene where she drinks the sleeping potion, although her spirit does
not quail nor her determination falter for an instant, her vivid fancy conjures
up one terrible apprehension after another, till gradually, and most naturally,
in such a mind once thrown off its poise, the horror rises to frenzy—her
imagination realizes its own hideous creations, and she sees her cousin Tybalt’s
ghost.5
In particular passages this luxuriance of fancy may seem to wander into
excess. For instance,
O serpent heart, hid with a flowery face!

Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolfish ravening lamb, &c.
Yet this highly figurative and antithetical exuberance of language is defended

by Schlegel on strong and just grounds; and to me also it appears natural,
however critics may argue against its taste or propriety.6 The warmth and vivacity
of Juliet’s fancy, which plays like a light over every part of her character—which
animates every line she utters—which kindles every thought into a picture,
and clothes her emotions in visible images, would naturally, under strong and
unusual excitement, and in the conflict of opposing sentiments, run into some
extravagance of diction.
With regard to the termination of the play, which has been a subject of
much critical argument, it is well known that Shakespeare, following the
old English versions, has departed from the original story of Da Porta;7 and
I am inclined to believe that Da Porta, in making Juliet waken from her
trance while Romeo yet lives, and in his terrible final scene between the lovers,
has himself departed from the old tradition, and, as a romance, has certainly
improved it; but that which is effective in a narrative is not always calculated
for the drama; and I cannot but agree with Schlegel, that Shakespeare
has done well and wisely in adhering to the old story. Can we doubt for a
moment that he who has given us the catastrophe of Othello, and the tempest
scene in Lear, might also have adopted these additional circumstances of
horror in the fate of the lovers, and have so treated them as to harrow up our
very soul—had it been his object to do so? But apparently it was not. The tale
is one,
Such as, once heard, in gentle heart destroys

All pain but pity.

80 Romeo and Juliet
It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. We behold the
catastrophe afar off with scarcely a wish to avert it. Romeo and Juliet must die:
their destiny is fulfilled: they have quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite
of joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more
upon this earth? Young, innocent, loving and beloved, they descend together into
the tomb: but Shakespeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted
affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,—not a dark charnel-vault,
haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. Romeo and Juliet are pictured
lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not oppress us with
that suffocating sense of horror which in the altered tragedy makes the fall of
the curtain a relief; but all pain is lost in the tenderness and poetic beauty of the
picture. Romeo’s last speech over his bride is not like the raving of a disappointed
boy: in its deep pathos, its rapturous despair, its glowing imagery, there is the very
luxury of life and love. Juliet, who had drunk off the sleeping potion in a fit of
frenzy, wakes calm and collected—
I do remember well where I should be

And there I am:—Where is my Romeo?
The profound slumber in which her senses have been steeped for so many
hours has tranquillized her nerves, and stilled the fever in her blood; she wakes
“like a sweet child who has been dreaming of something promised to it by its
mother,” and opens her eyes to ask for it—
. . . . Where is my Romeo?
She is answered at once,
Thy husband in thy bosom here lies dead.
This is enough: she sees at once the whole horror of her situation—she sees
it with a quiet and resolved despair—she utters no reproach against the Friar,
makes no inquiries, no complaints, except that affecting remonstrance—
O churl—drink all, and leave no friendly drop

To help me after!
All that is left her is to die, and she dies. The poem, which opened with the
enmity of the two families, closes with their reconciliation over the breathless
remains of their children; and no violent, frightful, or discordant feeling is
suffered to mingle with that soft impression of melancholy left within the
heart, and which Schlegel compares to one long, endless sigh.

“A youthful passion,” says Goethe (alluding to one of his own early

attachments), “which is conceived and cherished without any certain object,
may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it rises calmly in a
brilliant track, and seems to mix and even to dwell for a moment with the stars
of heaven; but at length it falls, it bursts, consuming and destroying all around,
even as itself expires.”
* * * * *
To conclude: love considered under its poetical aspect is the union of passion
and imagination; and accordingly to one of these, or to both, all the qualities
of Juliet’s mind and heart (unfolding and varying as the action of the drama
proceeds) may be finally traced: the former concentrating all those natural
impulses, fervent affections, and high energies, which lend the character its
internal charm, its moral power, and individual interest; the latter diverging into
all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external
glow, its beauty, its vigor, its freshness, and its truth.
With all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a
deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and
education; and the action of the drama, while it serves to develop the character,
appears but its natural and necessary result. “Le mystère de l’existence,” said
Madame de Staël to her daughter, “c’est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos
peines.”
Notes
1. I must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which I have heard
likened to Juliet, and often quoted as the heroine par excellence of amatory fiction—
I mean the Julie of Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse!” I protest against her altogether.
As a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring
inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind
as the fabled Syrens, Hamadryads, and Centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. As a
woman, Julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of
melting and dazzling eloquence in which Rousseau has garnished out his idol did
not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of Isis,
we should be disgusted. Rousseau, having composed his Julie of the commonest
clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own
spirit into her, and then calls the “impetticoated” paradox a woman. He makes her
a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments;—and what sentiments!
but that I fear to soil my pages, I would pick out a few of them, and show the
difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy
and pedantry, sophistical prudery and detestable grossièreté, and our own Juliet.
No! if we seek a French Juliet, we must go far, far back to the real Héloïse, to her
eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of passion, her devotedness of truth. She, at
least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than
died for him;—but enough of both.
2. Coleridge, Preface to “Wallenstein.”
3. In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

82 Romeo and Juliet
4. There is an allusion to this court language of love in “All’s Well that Ends
Well,” where Helena says,
There shall your master have a thousand loves—
* * * * *
A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,
A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear,
His humble ambition, proud humility,
His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,
His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world
Of pretty, fond, adoptious Christendoms,
That blinking Cupid gossips.—Act i. scene I.
The courtly poets of Elizabeth’s time, who copied the Italian sonneteers of the
sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits.
5. Juliet, courageously drinking off the potion, after she has placed before her-
self in the most fearful colors all its possible consequences, is compared by Schlegel
to the famous story of Alexander and his physician.
6. Perhaps ’tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm!
Perhaps ’tis tender, too, and pretty,
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.
And what if in a world of sin
(O, sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom, save from rage and pain,
So talks as it’s most used to do?—Coleridge
These lines seem to me to form the truest comment on Juliet’s wild exclamations
against Romeo.
7. The “Giulietta” of Luigi da Porta was written about 1520. In a popular little
book published in 1565, thirty years before Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, the name
of Juliet occurs as an example of faithful love, and is thus explained by a note in the
margin. “Juliet, a noble maiden of the citie of Verona, which loved Romeo, eldest
son of the Lord Monteschi; and being privily married together, he at last poisoned
himself for love of her: she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger.”
This note, which furnishes, in brief, the whole argument of Shakespeare’s play, might
possibly have made the first impression on his fancy. In the novel of Da Porta the
catastrophe is altogether different. After the death of Romeo, the Friar Lorenzo
endeavors to persuade Juliet to leave the fatal monument. She refuses; and throwing
herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely holds her breath and
dies.—“E voltatasi al giacente corpo di Romeo, il cui capo sopra un origliere, che con
lei nell’ arca era stato lasciato, posto aveva; gli occhi meglio rinchiusi avendogli, e di
lagrime il freddo volto bagnandogli, disse: ‘Che debbo senza di te più in vita piu fare,
signor mio? e che altro mi resta verso te se non colla mia morte seguirti?’ E detto
questo, la sua gran sciagura nell’ animo recatasi, e la perdita del caro amante ricordan-
dosi, deliberando di più non vivere, raccolto a se il fiato, e per buono spazio tenutolo,
e poscia con un gran grido fuori mandandolo, sopra il morto corpo, morta ricadde.”

There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and Juliet as to make us

doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. “The Veronese,” says Lord Byron, in one
of his letters from Verona, “are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet’s story,
insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open,
and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate
conventual garden—once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situa-
tion struck me as very appropriate to the legend being blighted as their love.” He
might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Palladian
structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will still be con-
secrated by the memory of Juliet.
When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who being then “dans le genre romantique,”
wore a fragment of Juliet’s tomb set in a ring.
QQQ
1872—Edward Dowden. From “The First and

Second Tragedy: Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet,” from
Shakespere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art
Edward Dowden (1843–1913), born in Cork, Ireland, was a poet, critic,

and literature professor at the University of Oxford and Trinity College,
Cambridge. He wrote a number of books on Shakespeare as well as a
biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He also edited The Sonnets
of William Shakespeare (1881).
During the first ten years of Shakspere’s dramatic career he wrote quickly,
producing (if we suppose that he commenced authorship in 1590 at the age of
twenty-six), on an average, about two plays in each year. These eighteen or twenty
plays written between 1590 and 1600, include some eight or nine comedies, and
the whole of the great series of English historical dramas, which, when Henry
V. was written, Shakspere probably looked upon as complete. To this field he did
not return, except in one instance when it would seem that a portion of a play on
the subject of Henry VIII. was written, and while still incomplete was handed
over on some special occasion to the dramatist Fletcher to expand from three
acts into five. In the first decade of Shakspere’s authorship (if we set aside Titus
Andronicus as the work of an unknown writer), a single tragedy appears,—Romeo
and Juliet. This play is believed to have engaged Shakspere’s attention during a
number of years. Dissatisfied probably with the first form which it assumed,
Shakspere worked upon the play again, rewriting and enlarging it.1 But it is not
unlikely that even then he considered his powers to be insufficiently matured for
the great dealing as artist with human life and passion, which tragedy demands;
for, having written Romeo and Juliet, Shakspere returned to the histories, in

84 Romeo and Juliet
which, doubtless, he was aware that he was receiving the best possible culture for
future tragedy; and he wrote the little group of comedies in which Shaksperian
mirth obtains its highest and most complete expression. Then, after an interval of
about five years, a second tragedy, Hamlet, was produced. Over Hamlet, as over
Romeo and Juliet, it is supposed that Shakspere laboured long and carefully. Like
Romeo and Juliet the play exists in two forms, and there is reason to believe that
in the earlier form in each instance we possess an imperfect report of Shakspere’s
first treatment of his theme.2
It may be thought paradoxical to infer from the absence of tragedy in the
earlier years of Shakspere’s dramatic career, that he looked upon the writing of
tragedy as his chief vocation as author; yet the inference is not unconfirmed by
facts in Shakspere’s subsequent career. Almost from the first it would appear
that he had before him the design of Romeo and Juliet. When after five or six
years it was actually accomplished, there still appeared in the play unmistakable
marks of immature judgment. Shakspere accordingly, who in his histories had
abundance of work planned out for him, wisely abstained for some time further
from writing tragedy. But as soon as Hamlet was completed, and it became a
demonstrated fact to the poet that he had attained his full maturity, and was
master of his craft, then he no longer hesitated or delayed, and year by year
from 1602 to 1612 he added to the great roll of his tragedies, accomplishing in
those years by sustained energy of heart and imagination as marvellous a feat of
authorship as the world has seen.
When Shakspere began to write for the stage, as was noticed in the
preceding chapter, he was by no means misled by self-confidence. He began
cautiously and tentatively, feeling his way. And there was one cause which
might reasonably make him timid in the direction of tragedy. Shakspere, at
the age of twenty-six, was not afraid to compete with contemporary writers
in comedy and history. He co-operated, it may be, in the writing of historical
plays, “The First Part of the Contention,” and “The True Tragedie of Richard
Duke of Yorke,” at an early age, and afterwards by revision and addition made
these plays still more his own.3 But the department of tragedy was dominated
by a writer of superb genius, Christopher Marlowe. Shakspere, whose powers
ripened slowly, may at the time when be wrote “The Comedy of Errors,” and
“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” have well hesitated to dispute with Marlowe his special
province. Imitators and disciples had crowded around the master. All the vices
of his style had been exaggerated. Shakspere saw one thing clearly, that if the
time ever came when be would write tragedy, the tragedy must be of a kind
altogether different from that created upon Marlowe’s method,—the method
of idealising passions on a gigantic scale. To add to the pieces of the school of
Marlowe a rhapsody of blood commingled with nonsense was impossible for
Shakspere, who was never altogether wanting in a sane judgment, and a lively
sense of the absurd.

Thus it came about that Shakspere at nearly forty years of age was the
author of but two or three tragedies. Of these, Romeo and Juliet may be looked
upon as the work of the artist’s adolescence; and Hamlet as the evidence that
he bad become adult, and in this supreme department master of his craft. To
add to the interest of these plays as subjects of Shaksperian study, each, as was
observed above, exists in two very different forms; and from these something
may be learnt as to the poet’s method of rehandling his own work. In the case
of Romeo and Juliet, we possess the English original, a poem by Arthur Brooke,
upon which Shakspere founded his drama, and which in many particulars he
minutely followed. It is therefore possible in the case of this play, to investigate
with peculiar advantage Shakspere’s method of treating his original.
The first two tragedies having been so carefully and deliberately thought
out, having been looked upon by their author as of chief importance among his
writings, we might anticipate that the second could hardly have been written
without conscious reference to the first. In his early tentative plays Shakspere
made trial of various styles; he broke out now on this side, now on that, in
directions which were wide apart; now he was engaged upon a history, now
upon a comedy of incident, almost a farce; now a comedy of dialogue; and again
a comedy of tender and graceful sentiment He evidently had resolved that
he would not repeat himself, that he would not allow his invention to come
under control of any one of its own creatures. Too often a distinguished literary
success is the prelude to literary failure. The artist in fainter colours, and with
a more uncertain outline repeats his admired figures and situations. Shakspere
instinctively and by resolve put himself into relation with facts of the most diverse
kinds, and preferred a comparatively slow attainment of a comprehension of life
to a narrow intensity of individuality. The broad history of the nation interested
him; but also, the passion of love and death in two young hearts; he could laugh
brightly, and mock the affectations and fashionable follies of his day; but he must
also stand before the tomb of the Capulets possessed by a sense of mystery, and
that strenuous pain, in which something else than mere sorrow is predominant.
Now when writing Hamlet, his second tragedy, Shakspere, we must needs
believe, determined that he would break away from the influence of his first
tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet is steeped in passion; Hamlet
is steeped in meditation. Contrast the hero of the one play, the man of the
South, with the chief figure of the other, the Teuton, the man of the North.
Contrast Hamlet’s friend and comforter, Horatio, possessed of grave strength,
self-government, and balance of character, with Romeo’s friend, Mercutio, all
brilliance, intellect, wit, and effervescent animal spirits. Contrast the gay festival
in Capulet’s house with the brutal drinking of the Danish king and courtiers.
Contrast the moonlit night in the garden, while the nightingale’s song is panting
forth from the pomegranate tree, with the silence, the nipping and eager air of the
platform of Elsinore, the beetling height to seaward, and the form of terror which

86 Romeo and Juliet
stalked before the sentinels. Contrast the perfect love of Juliet and her Romeo,
with the piteous foiled desire for love in Hamlet and Ophelia. Contrast the
passionate seizure upon death, as her immediate and highest need, of the Italian
wife, with the misadventure of the crazed Ophelia, so pitiful, so accidental, so un-
heroic, ending in “muddy death.” Yet, with all their points of contrast, there is one
central point of affinity between the plays. Like Mr Browning’s Paracelsus and
his Sordello, the poems are companion poems, while they are set over one against
the other; they are contrasted but complementary.4 Hamlet resembles Romeo in
his inability to maintain the will in a fruitful relation with facts, and with the real
world. Neither is a ruler of events. Luck is for ever against Romeo; the stars are
inauspicious to him, and to such men the stars will always be inauspicious, as to
a Henry V. they will always prove auxiliary. With Hamlet to resolve is to stand
at gaze before an action, and to become incapable of achieving it. The necessary
coupling between the purpose and the deed has been fatally dissolved. There is
this central point in common between Hamlet and Romeo—the will in each is
sapped; but in each it is sapped by a totally different disease of soul.5
The external atmosphere of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, its Italian
colour and warmth, have been so finely felt by M. Philarète Chasles that his
words deserve to be a portion of every criticism of that play.—“Who does not
recall those lovely summer nights, in which the forces of nature seem eager
for development, and constrained to remain in drowsy languor—a mingling of
intense beat, superabundant energy, impetuous power, and silent freshness?
“The nightingale sings in the depths of the woods. The flower-cups are
half closed. A pale lustre is shed over the foliage of the forests, and upon the
brow of the hills. The deep repose conceals, we are aware, a procreant force; the
melancholy reserve of nature is the mask of a passionate emotion. Under the
paleness and the coolness of the night you divine restrained ardours, and flowers
which brood in silence, impatient to shine forth.
“Such is the peculiar atmosphere with which Shakspere has enveloped one of
his most wonderful creations—Romeo and Juliet.
“Not only the substance, but the forms of the language come from the South.
Italy was the inventor of the tale: she drew it from her national memorials, her
old family-feuds, her annals filled with amorous and bloody intrigues. In its
lyric accent, its blindness of passion, its blossoming and abundant vitality, in
the brilliant imagery, in the bold composition, no one can fail to recognise Italy.
Romeo utters himself like a sonnet of Petrarch, with the same refined choice, and
the same antitheses; there is the same grace and the same pleasure in versifying
passion in allegorical stanzas. Juliet, too, is wholly the woman of Italy; with small
gift of forethought, and absolutely ingenuous in her abandon, she is at once
vehement and pure.”6
The season is midsummer. It wants a fortnight and odd days of Lammastide
(August 1st). Wilhelm Schlegel, and after him Hazlitt, have spoken as if the

atmosphere of the play were that of a southern spring.7 Such a criticism indicates
a want of sensibility to the tone and colouring of the piece. The mid-July heat
broods over the five tragic days of the story. The mad blood is stirring in men’s
veins during these hot summer days.8 There is a thunderous feeling in the moral
element. The summer was needed also that the nights and mornings might
quickly meet. The nights are those luminous nights from which the daylight
seems never wholly to depart, nights through which the warmth of day still
hangs over the trees and flowers.
It is worth while to pause and note Shakspere’s method of treating external
nature as the milieu or enveloping medium of human passion; while sometimes,
in addition, between external nature and human passion Shakspere reveals acute
points of special contact. We recall in King Lear the long and terrible day which
begins at moonset before the dawn, when Kent is put in the stocks, and which
ends with the storm upon the heath. The agony is intensified by the stretch of
time, strained with passion and events, until the time tingles and is intense; it
culminates in the night of furious wind and spouting rain, of lightning and of
thunder, when the roots of nature seem shaken in the same upheaval of things
which makes a daughter cruel. We remember bow Duncan breathed a delicate
air when he entered under the martlet-haunted portals of Macbeth, as though
nature insinuated into Duncan’s senses a treacherous presentiment of peace and
security; and there followed upon this the night when the earth was feverous and
the air was filled with lamentings and strange screams of death. We remember
that other night of tempest and prodigy which preceded the fall of Julius Caesar,
when Cassius, catching exhilaration and energy from the mutiny in the heaven,
walked about the streets unbraced, “submitting him unto the perilous night.”
Then in contrast with these we think of the lyric love of Lorenzo and Jessica
under the star-sown sky, every orb of which sings in its motion like an angel “still
quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;” we think of the Forest of Arden, with its
tempered light and shade, its streams where the deer comes to drink, and green
haunts in which adversity grows sweet; we think of the mountain country of
Wales, and the salutations to the heaven of the royal youths whom Cymbeline
had lost. The air which surrounds the island of Prospero is one of enchantment
fit to breathe upon marvel and beauty:—
The isle is full of noises

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
In the play of Pericles we are for ever in presence of the waters furious or
serene, and their voices of tumult or of calm are for ever mingling with the
human voices, with the sorrow of the bereaved father, and the magical singing of
the sea-pure and sea-sensitive Marina. Once again, in Timon, we are in presence
of the sea,—but it is not the stormy waters of Pericles that we gaze at; it is not

88 Romeo and Juliet
the yellow sands of Prospero’s island, where the sea-nymphs dance, and curtsy,
and take hands; in Timon it is neither the strength nor the beauty of the waves
we are made to feel:—
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.
We see the cold white lip of the wave curling over, and curling over again, with
bitter monotony upon the sand; and it is there, touched by the salt and pitiless
edge of the sea, that the corpse of the desperate man must lie abandoned.
Romeo is not the determiner of events in the play. He does not stand
prominently forward, a single figure in the first scene, as does Marlowe’s Barabas,
and Shakspere’s Richard III., soliloquising about his own persons and his plans.
The first scene of the play prepares a place for Romeo, it presents the moral
environment of the hero, it exhibits the feud of the houses which determines
the lovers’ fate, although they for a brief space forget these grim realities in the
rapture of their joy. The strife of the houses Capulet and Montague appears in
this first scene in its trivial, ludicrous aspect; threatening, however, in a moment
to become earnest and formidable. The serving-men Gregory and Samson biting
thumbs at the serving-men Abraham and Balthasar,—this is the obverse of the
tragic show. Turn to the other side, and what do we see? The dead bodies of
young and beautiful human creatures, of Tybalt and Paris, of Juliet and Romeo,
the bloody harvest of the strife. This first scene, half ludicrous, but wholly grave,
was written not without a reference to the final scene. The bandying of vulgar
wit between the servants must not hide from us a certain grim irony which
underlies the opening of the play. Here the two old rivals meet; they will meet
again. And the prince appears in the last scene as in the first. Then old Capulet
and Montague will be pacified; then they will consent to let their desolated
lives decline to the grave in quietness. Meanwhile serving-men with a sense of
personal dignity must bite their thumbs, and other incidents may happen.
Few critics of the play have omitted to call attention to the fact that
Shakspere represents Romeo as already in love before he gives his heart to Juliet,
in love with the pale-cheeked, dark-eyed, disdainful Rosaline. “If we are right,”
Coleridge wrote, “ . . . in pronouncing this one of Shakspere’s early dramas, it
affords a strong instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the
passions, that Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered.” The circumstance is
not of Shakspere’s invention. He has retained it from Brooke’s poem; but that he
thought fit to retain the circumstance, fearlessly declaring that Romeo’s supreme
love is not his first love, is noteworthy. The contrast in the mind of the earlier
poet between Rosaline, who

From her youth was fostered evermore

With vertues foode, and taught in schole, of wisdomes skilfull lore,
and Juliet, who yields to her passion, and by it is destroyed, was a contrast which
Shakspere rejected as a piece of formal and barren morality. Of what character
is the love of Romeo for Rosaline? Romeo’s is not an active practical nature like
Henry V.; neither is he great by intellect, a thinker in any high sense of the word.
But if he lives and moves and has his being neither heroically in the objective
world of action, like Henry V., nor in the world of the mind like Hamlet, all the
more he lives, moves, and has his being in the world of mere emotion. To him
emotion which enriches and exalts itself with the imagination, emotion apart
from thought, and apart from action, is an end in itself. Therefore it delights him
to hover over his own sentiment, to brood upon it, to feed upon it richly. Romeo
must needs steep his whole nature in feeling, and, if Juliet does not appear, he
must love Rosaline.
Nevertheless the love of Rosaline cannot be to Romeo as is the love of Juliet. It
is a law in moral dynamics, too little recognised, that the breadth, and height, and
permanence of a feeling depend in a certain degree at least upon the actual force
of its external cause. No ardour of self-protection, no abandonment prepense,
no self-sustained energy, can create and shape a passion of equal volume, and
possessing a like certainty and directness of advance with a passion shaped,
determined, and for ever re-invigorated by positive, objective fact. Shakspere had
become assured that the facts of the world are worthy to command our highest
ardour, our most resolute action, our most solemn awe; and that the more we
penetrate into fact the more will our nature be quickened, enriched, and exalted.
The play of Romeo and Juliet exhibits to us the deliverance of a man from dream
into reality. In Romeo’s love of Rosaline we find represented the dream-life as yet
undisturbed, the abandonment to emotion for emotion’s sake. Romeo nurses his
love; he sheds tears; he cultivates solitude; he utters his groans in the hearing of
the comfortable friar; he stimulates his fancy with the sought-out phrases, the
curious antitheses of the amorous dialect of the period.9
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!

O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
He broods upon the luxury of his sorrow. And then Romeo meets Juliet.
Juliet is an actual force beyond and above himself, a veritable fact of the world.
Nevertheless there remains a certain clinging self-consciousness, an absence of
perfect simplicity and directness even in Romeo’s very real love of Juliet. This is

90 Romeo and Juliet
placed by Shakspere in designed contrast with the singleness of Juliet’s nature,

her direct unerroneous passion which goes straight to its object, and never broods
upon itself. It is Romeo who says in the garden scene,—
How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears.
He has overheard the voice of Juliet, and he cannot answer her call until he
has drained the sweetness of the sound. He is one of those men to whom the
emotional atmosphere which is given out by the real object, and which surrounds
it like a luminous mist, is more important than the reality itself. As he turns
slowly away, loath to leave, Romeo exclaims,—
Love goes toward love, as school-boys from their books,

But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.
But Juliet’s first thought is of the danger to which Romeo is exposed in her
father’s grounds. It is Juliet who will not allow the utterance of any oath because
the whole reality of that night’s event, terrible in its joy, has flashed upon her, and
she, who lives in no golden haze of luxurious feeling, is aroused and alarmed by
the sudden shock of too much happiness. It is Juliet who uses direct and simple
words—
Farewell compliment!
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay,”
And I will take thy word.
She has declared that her bounty is measureless, that her love is infinite, when
a sudden prosaic interruption occurs; the nurse calls within, Juliet leaves the
window, and Romeo is left alone. Is this new joy a dream?
O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard,

Being in night, all this is but a dream,
Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.
But Juliet hastily reappears with words upon her lips which make it evident that
it is no dream of joy in which she lives.
Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed.

If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow,
By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,

Where, and what time thou wilt perform the rite,

And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay,
And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world.
The wholeness and crystalline purity of Juliet’s passion is flawed by no double

self. She is all and entire in each act of her soul. While Romeo, on the contrary,
is as yet but half delivered from self-consciousness.
If Shakspere ventured upon any generalization about women, it was perhaps
this—that the natures of women are usually made up of fewer elements than
those of men, but that those elements are ordinarily in juster poise, more fully
organized, more coherent and compact; and that, consequently, prompt and
efficient action is more a woman’s gift than a man’s. “Man delights not me, nor
woman neither,” confessed Hamlet; and the courtiers declare they smiled to
think if he delighted not in man, what lenten entertainment the players would
receive from him. The players—for the drama is founded on mere delight in
human personality. Man delighted Shakspere, and woman also; but the chief
problems of life seemed to lurk for Shakspere in the souls and in the lives of
men, and therefore he was more profoundly interested in the natures of men
than in those of women. His great tragedies are not Cordelia, Desdemona,
Ophelia, Volumnia; but Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus. Shakspere’s men
have a history, moral growth or moral decay; his women act and are acted upon,
but seldom grow and are transformed. We get from Shakspere no histories of a
woman’s soul like the history of Romola, or of Maggie Tulliver, or of Dorothea
Brooke; none—unless, perhaps, that of Cleopatra—at all so carefully studied and
curiously detailed as may be found in the novels of Goethe. Shakspere creates his
women by a single strong or exquisite inspiration; but he studies his men. His
witty women are not a complex of all various qualities like Falstaff; his wicked
women are simply wicked like Goneril and Regan, not an inscrutable mystery
of iniquity like Iago; his women of intellect are bright, are effective with ideas
which they use as the means of action or of enjoyment, but among them there
is not a female Hamlet.10
Yet the women of Shakspere have almost always the advantage of his men.
Although their natures are made up of fewer elements, yet because those
elements are quite vital and coherent, his women are in the highest degree direct
in feeling and efficient in action. All the half-organised power of men is not a
match for their directness and efficiency. Portia in the Merchant of Venice can
bring all her wits at a moment’s notice into play; every faculty is instinct with
a single and indivisible energy; set over against the great masculine force of
Shylock she proves more than a match for him. In Helena (All’s Well that Ends
Well) there is perfect rectitude of intellect and will, and a solid unity of character
which enables her to shape events as she has decided it is well they should be
shaped, and secures her from all distraction and all illusion. She imposes herself

92 Romeo and Juliet
as a blessing upon the high-born youth, who, for his part, had been sufficiently
blind and dull; at length he perceives that while he stumbled and seemed to go
astray, Helena was the providence which forced him to stumble into security, and
strength, and the abiding-place of love. Volumnia, by the unfaltering insistence
of her single moral motive subdues Coriolanus. Macbeth is brave and cowardly,
sceptical and superstitious, loyal and treacherous, ambitious and capable of
service, at once restrained and stimulated by his imagination. Lady Macbeth is
terribly efficient; at one time a will strung tense, at another a conscience strung
tense; possessed of only that active kind of imagination which masters practical
difficulties. She has violently wrenched her nature; and the wrench is fatal. But
Macbeth can live on, sinking farther and farther from reality and strength and
joy, dropping away into the shadow, undergoing gradual extinction, decay, and
disintegration of his moral being; never a sudden and absolute ruin.
Juliet at once takes the lead. It is she who proposes and urges on the sudden
marriage. She is impatient for complete self-surrender, eager that the deed
should become perfect and irreversible. When, after the death of Tybalt, Romeo
learns from the lips of the Friar that he has been condemned to banishment
he is utterly unmanned. He abandons himself to helpless and hopeless despair.
He turns the tender emotion upon himself, and extracts all the misery which
is contained in that one word “banished.” He throws himself upon the ground
and grovels pitifully in the abjectness of his dismay. His will is unable to deal
with his own emotions so as to subdue or control them. Upon the next day, after
her casting away of her own kindred, after her parting with her husband, Juliet
comes to the same cell of Friar Laurence, her face pale and traces of tears upon
it which she cannot hide. Paris, the lover whom her father and mother have
designed for Juliet, is there. She meets him with gay words, gallantly concealing
the heart which is eager and trembling, and upheld from desperation only by a
high strung fortitude. Then when the door is shut her heart relieves itself, and
she urges the Friar, with passionate energy, to devise forthwith a remedy for the
evil that has befallen.
In her home Juliet is now without adviser or sustainer; a girl of fourteen years,
she stands the centre of a circle of power which is tyrannous, and pledged to
crush her resistance; old Capulet (the Capulets are a fiery self-willed race, unlike
the milder Montagues) has vehemently urged upon her the marriage with Count
Paris. She turns her pale face upon her father, and addresses him appealingly.11
Good father, I beseech you on my knees

Hear me with patience but to speak a word.
She turns to her mother,—the proud Italian matron, still young, who had not
married for love, whose hatred is cold and deadly, and whose relation with the
child, who is dear to her, is pathetically imperfect:12

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,

That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month, a week.
Last she looks for support to her Nurse, turning in that dreadful moment
with the instinct of childhood to the woman on whose breast she had lain, and
uttering words of desperate and simple earnestness:—
O God! O nurse! how shall this be prevented?

. . . . . . .
Some comfort, nurse.
The same unfaltering severity with which a surgeon operates is shown by

Shakspere in his fidelity here to the nurse’s character. The gross and wanton
heart, while the sun of prosperity is full, blossoms into broad vulgarity; and
the raillery of Mercutio deals with it sufficiently. Now in the hour of trial her
grossness rises to the dignity of a crime. “The Count is a lovely gentleman;
Romeo’s a dishclout to him; the second match excels the first; or if it does not,
Juliet’s first is dead, or as good as dead, being away from her.” “This moment,”
Mrs Jameson has finely said, “reveals Juliet to herself. She does not break into
upbraidings; it is no moment for anger; it is incredulous amazement, succeeded
by the extremity of scorn and abhorrence, which takes possession of her mind.
She assumes at once and asserts all her own superiority, and rises to majesty in
the strength of her despair.” Here Juliet enters into her solitude.13
The Friar has given Juliet a phial containing a strange, untried mixture, and
she is alone in her chamber. Juliet’s soliloquy ends with one of those triumphant
touches by which Shakspere glorified that which he appropriated from his
originals. In Brooke’s poem, Juliet swallows the sleeping-potion hastily lest
her courage should fail. “Shakspere,” Coleridge wrote, “provides for the finest
decencies. It would have been too bold a thing for a girl of fifteen;—but she
swallows the draught in a fit of fright.” This deprives Juliet of all that is most
characteristic in the act. In the night and the solitude, with a desperate deed to
do, her imagination is intensely and morbidly excited. All the hideous secrets of
the tomb appear before her. Suddenly in her disordered vision the figure of the
murdered Tybalt rises, and is manifestly in pursuit of some one. Of whom? Not
of Juliet, but of her lover who had slain him. A moment before Juliet had shrunk
with horror from the thought of confronting Tybalt in the vault of the Capulets.
But now Romeo is in danger. All fear deserts her. To stand by Romeo’s side is
her one necessity. With a confused sense that this draught will somehow place
her close to the murderous Tybalt, and close to Romeo whom she would save,
calling aloud to Tybalt to delay one moment,—“Stay, Tybalt, stay!”—she drains

94 Romeo and Juliet
the phial, not “in a fit of fright,” but with the words “Romeo! I come; this do I
drink to thee.”
The brooding nature of Romeo, which cherishes emotion, and lives in it, is
made salient by contrast with Mercutio, who is all wit, and intellect, and vivacity,
an uncontrollable play of gleaming and glancing life. Upon the morning after
the betrothal with Juliet, a meeting happens between Romeo and Mercutio.
Previously, while lover of Rosaline, Romeo had cultivated a lover-like melancholy.
But now, partly because his blood runs gladly, partly because the union of soul
with Juliet has made the whole world more real and substantial, and things have
grown too solid and lasting to be disturbed by a laugh, Romeo can contend in
jest with Mercutio himself, and stretch his wit of cheveril “from an inch narrow
to an ell broad.” Mercutio and the nurse are Shakspere’s creations in this play.
For the character of the former he had but a slight hint in the poem of Arthur
Brooke. There we read of Mercutio as a courtier who was bold among the bashful
maidens as a lion among lambs, and we are told that he had an “ice-cold hand.”
Putting together these two suggestions, discovering a significance in them, and
animating them with the breath of his own life, Shakspere created the brilliant
figure which lights up the first half of Romeo and Juliet, and disappears when
the colours become all too grave and sombre.
Romeo has accepted the great bond of love. Mercutio, with his ice-cold hand,
the lion among maidens, chooses above all things a defiant liberty, a liberty of
speech, gaily at war with the proprieties, an airy freedom of fancy, a careless
and masterful courage in dealing with life, as though it were a matter of slight
importance. He will not attach himself to either of the houses. He is invited by
Capulet to the banquet; but he goes to the banquet in company with Romeo and
the Montagues. He can do generous and disinterested things; but he will not
submit to the trammels of being recognised as generous. He dies maintaining
his freedom, and defying death with a jest. To be made worm’s meat of so
stupidly, by a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic, and through Romeo’s
awkwardness, is enough to make a man impatient. “A plague o’ both your houses!”
The death of Mercutio is like the removal of a shifting breadth of sunlight, which
sparkles on the sea; now the clouds close in upon one another, and the stress of
the gale begins.14
The moment that Romeo receives the false tidings of Juliet’s death, is the
moment of his assuming full manhood. Now, for the first time, he is completely
delivered from the life of dream, completely adult, and able to act with an
initiative in his own will, and with manly determination. Accordingly, he now
speaks with masculine directness and energy:—
Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars!
Yes; be is now master of events; the stars cannot alter his course;

Thou know’st my lodgings: get me ink and paper,

And hire post-horses; I will hence to-night.
Balthasar: I do beseech you, sir, have patience.
Your looks are pale and wild, and do import
Some misadventure.
Romeo: Tush! thou art deceiv’d.
Leave me, and do the thing I bid thee do.
Hast thou no letters to me from the Friar?
Balthasar: No, my good lord.
Romeo: No matter; get thee gone,
And hire those horses; I’ll be with thee straight.
“Nothing,” as Maginn has observed, “can be more quiet than his final
determination,
Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night.
It is plain Juliet. . . . There is nothing about ‘Cupid’s arrow,’ or ‘ Dian’s wit;’ no

honeyed word escapes his lips, nor again does any accent of despair. His mind
is so made up; the whole course of the short remainder of his life so unalterably
fixed that it is perfectly useless to think more about it.”15 These words because
they are the simplest are amongst the most memorable that Romeo utters. Is
this indeed the same Romeo who sighed, and wept, and spoke sonnet-wise, and
penned himself in his chamber, shutting the daylight out for love of Rosaline?
Now passion, imagination, and will, are fused together, and Romeo who was
weak has at length become strong.
In two noteworthy particulars Shakspere has varied from his original.
He has compressed the action from some months into four or five days.16
Thus precipitancy is added to the course of events and passions. Shakspere
has also made the catastrophe more calamitous than it is in Brooke’s poem.
It was his invention to bring Paris across Romeo in the church-yard. Paris
comes to strew his flowers, uttering in a rhymed sextain, (such as might have
fallen from Romeo’s lips in the first Act) his pretty lamentation. Romeo
goes resolutely forward to death. He is no longer “young Romeo,” but
adult, and Paris is the boy. He speaks with the gentleness, and with the
authority of one who knows what life and death are of one who has gained
the superior position of those who are about to die over those who still
may live:
Good, gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man.

Fly hence and leave me; think upon these gone;
Let them affright thee. I beseech thee, youth,

96 Romeo and Juliet
Put not another sin upon my head,

By urging me to fury.
He would save Paris if that might be. But Paris still crosses Romeo, and he must
needs be dealt with:
Wilt thou provoke me? then have at thee, boy!
Romeo has now a definite object; be has a deed to do, and he will not brook
obstacles.17
Friar Laurence remains to furnish the Prince with an explanation of the
events. It is impossible to agree with those critics, among others Gervinus, who
represent the Friar as a kind of chorus expressing Shakspere’s own ethical ideas,
and his opinions respecting the characters and action. It is not Shakspere’s
practice to expound the moralities of his artistic creations; nor does he ever
by means of a chorus stand above and outside the men and women of his
plays, who are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. The nearest approach
perhaps to a chorus, is to be found in the person of Enobarbus in Antony and
Cleopatra. Hamlet commissions Horatio to report him and his cause aright to
the unsatisfied and Horatio placing the bodies of the dead upon a stage is about,
in judicial manner, to declare the causes of things; but Shakspere declines to put
on record for us the explanations made by Horatio. No! Friar Laurence also is
moving in the cloud, and misled by error as well as the rest. Shakspere has never
made the moderate, self-possessed, sedate person, a final or absolute judge of the
impulsive and the passionate; the one sees a side of truth which is unseen by the
other; but to neither is the whole truth visible. The Friar had supposed that by
virtue of his prudence, his moderation, his sage counsels, his amiable sophistries,
he could guide these two young, passionate lives, and do away the old tradition
of enmity between the houses. There in the tomb of the Capulets is the return
brought in by his investment of kindly scheming. Shakspere did not believe that
the highest wisdom of human life was acquirable by mild, monastic meditation,
and by gathering of simples in the coolness of the dawn. Friar Laurence too, old
man, had his lesson to learn.
In accordance with his view that the Friar represents the chorus in this tragedy,
Gervinus discovers as the leading idea of the piece a lesson of moderation; the
poet makes his confession that “excess in any enjoyment, however pure in
itself, transforms its sweet into bitterness, that devotion to any single feeling,
however noble, bespeaks its ascendancy; that this ascendancy moves the man
and woman out of their natural spheres.”18 It is somewhat hard upon Shakspere
to suppose that he secreted in each of his dramas a central idea for a German
critic to discover. But if there be a central idea in Romeo and Juliet can this be
it? What! did Shakspere then mean that Romeo and Juliet loved too well? That

all would have been better if they had surrendered their lives each to the other
less rapturously, less absolutely? At what precise point ought a discreet regard for
another human soul to check itself and say, “Thus far towards complete union
will I advance, but here it is prudent to stop?” Or are not Romeo’s words at least
as true as the Friar’s?
Come what sorrow can,

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring Death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.
Doubtless, also, Cordelia misunderstood the true nature of the filial relation;
upon perceiving a possibility of defeat, she ought to have retreated to the safe
coast of France. Portia upon hearing that the enemies of Brutus were making
head, weakly “fell distract,” and swallowed fire, not having learned that a well-
balanced heart bestows upon a husband only a regulated moderation of love;
Shakspere, by the example of Portia, would teach us that a penalty is paid for
excess of wifely loyalty! No; this method of judging characters and actions by
gross awards of pleasure and pain as measured by the senses does not interpret
the ethics or the art of Shakspere, or of any great poet. Shakspere was aware
that every strong emotion which exalts and quickens the inner life of man at the
same time exposes the outer life of accident and circumstance to increased risk.
But the theme of tragedy, as conceived by the poet, is not material prosperity or
failure; it is spiritual; fulfilment or failure of a destiny higher than that which is
related to the art of getting on in life. To die under certain conditions may be a
higher rapture than to live.
Shakspere did not intend that the feeling evoked by the last scene of this
tragedy of Romeo and Juliet should be one of hopeless sorrow or despair in
presence of failure, ruin, and miserable collapse.19 Juliet and Romeo, to whom
Verona has been a harsh step-mother, have accomplished their lives. They loved
perfectly. Romeo had attained to manhood. Juliet had suddenly blossomed
into heroic womanhood. Through her, and through anguish and joy, her lover
had emerged from the life of dream into the waking life of truth. Juliet had
saved his soul; she had rescued him from abandonment to spurious feeling,
from abandonment to morbid self-consciousness, and the enervating luxury of
emotion for emotion’s sake. What more was needed? And as secondary to all this,
the enmity of the houses is appeased? Montague will raise in pure gold the statue
of true and faithful Juliet; Capulet will place Romeo by her side. Their lives are
accomplished; they go to take up their place in the large history of the world,
which contains many such things. Shakspere in this last scene carries forward our

98 Romeo and Juliet
imagination from the horror of the tomb to the better life of man, when such
love as that of Juliet and Romeo will be publicly honoured, and remembered by
a memorial all gold.20
Notes
1. The opinion of Mr Richard Grant White deserves to be stated. It is “That
the Romeo and Juliet which has come down to us (for there may have been an
antecedent play upon the same story), was first written [in 1591], by two or more
playwrights, of whom Shakspere was one; that subsequently [in 1596], Shakspere
re-wrote this old play, of which he was part author, making his principal changes in
the passages which were contributed by his co-labourers.” Mr R. G. White believes
the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet to be an imperfect and garbled copy, obtained
by the aid of a reporter, of Shakspere’s new work, the defects of which were sup-
plied partly by some verse-mongers of the day, and partly from the old play in the
composition of which Shakspere was one of two or more co-labourers.
2. The editors of the Cambridge Shakspere believe that there was an old play
on the subject of Hamlet, “some portions of which are still preserved in the quarto
of 1603.” For various bits of evidence (some good, some bad), to prove that the
text of this quarto was obtained orally, and not directly from a manuscript, see
Tschischwitz’s “Shakspere-Forschungen I. Hamlet,” pp. 10–14.
3. The latest study of 2 and 3 Henry VI. and the relation of these to The Con-
tention and True Tragedie is the admirably careful essay by Miss Jane Lee, “Trans-
actions of the New Shakspere Society 1875–76.” The opinion arrived at by Miss
Lee is that in 2 and 3 Henry VI. Shakspere and Marlowe are revisers of work by
Marlowe, Greene and perhaps Peele.
4. See the writer’s lecture on the poetry of Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning:
Afternoon Lectures, vol. v. p. 178.
5. “Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and
sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both
are absent and self-involved; both live out of themselves in a world of imagina-
tion.”—Hazlitt: Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, p. 177 (ed. 1818).
6. Études sur W. Shakspeare, Marie Stuart, et L’Arétin, pp. 141–42.
7. So also Flathe: Shakspeare, &c. Part ii., p. 188.
8. Benvolio—“For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring.” See the extract
from Dr Theodor Sträter in H. H. Furness’s Variorum Edition of Romeo and
Juliet, pp. 461–62.
9. Mrs Jamieson has noticed that in “All’s Well that Ends Well” Helena mock-
ingly reproduces this style of amorous antitheses (Act i. Sc. 1, ll. 180–189). Helena,
who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous towards all unreality
and affectation.
10. See on this subject Mrs Jameson’s Characteristics of Women, Introduction;
also a remarkable passage in Mr Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, pp. 126–31. Rümelin
maintains that in consequence of his position as player, Shakspere was excluded
from the acquaintance of women of fine culture and character, and therefore drew
upon his fancy for his female portraits. At the same time Shakspere shared with
Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul (a strange assemblage!) a
mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more
divine. For a comparison of Shakspere with Goethe in this respect, see Rümelin

Shakespeare Studien pp 288–292. It is clever and superficial, like much of the

“realistic criticism” of Rümelin. Leo’s “Shakespeare’s Frauen-Ideale” is a somewhat
misleading title. In the few pages on Shakspere’s women (pp. 35–44), there is
contained little that is new or valuable.
11. Shakspere, as Mr Clark notices, contrives to bring before no the paleness of
Juliet’s face in this great crisis of her life, dramatically, by means of old Capulet’s
vituperative terms:—
Out you green-sickness carrion! out you baggage!
You tallow face!
12. Shakspere reduces Juliet’s age from the sixteen years of Brooke’s poem to
fourteen. He loved the years of budding womanhood—Miranda is fifteen years of
age, Marina fourteen. Lady Capulet says to Juliet:
By my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid. Act i., Scene 3.
Therefore she is perhaps under thirty years of age. But it is thirty years since
old Capulet last went masking (Act i., Scene 5). Observe Lady Capulet’s manner of
speech with her husband in Act iv., Scene 4, and note her announcement (intended
to gratify Juliet) that she will despatch a messenger to Mantua to poison Romeo.
Act iii., Scene 5.
13. “The nurse has a certain vulgarised air of rank and refinement, as if, prid-
ing herself on the confidence of her superiors, she had caught and assimilated their
manners to her own vulgar nature. In this mixture of refinement and vulgarity both
elements are made the worse for being together. . . . She abounds, however, in ser-
viceable qualities.” Hudson. Shakespere’s Life, Art and Characters, vol. ii., pp. 214,
215. Mrs Jameson observes justly that the sweetness and dignity of Juliet’s character
could hardly have been preserved inviolate if Shakspere had placed her in connection
with any common-place dramatic waiting-woman.
14. The German Professor sometimes does not quite keep pace with Shakspere,
and is heard stumbling heavily behind him. Gervinus thus describes Mercutio: “A
man without culture, coarse and rude, ugly, a scornful ridiculer of all sensibility and
love.”
15. Shakespeare Papers, p. 99.
16. The following passage quoted by H. H. Furness (Variorum Romeo and
Juliet, pp. 226, 27), from Mr Clarke may be serviceable as giving some of the
notes of time which occur in this play, “In Scene 1, the Prince desires Capulet to
go with him at once, and Montague to come to him, ‘this afternoon.’ In Scene 2,
Capulet speaks of Montague being ‘bound’ as well as himself, which indicates that
the Prince’s charge has just been given to both of them, and shortly after speaks
of the festival at his house ‘this night.’ At this festival Romeo sees Juliet when she
speaks of sending to him ‘to-morrow,’ and on that ‘morrow’ the lovers are united
by Friar Laurence. Act iii. opens with the scene where Tybalt kills Mercutio, and
during which scene Romeo’s words, ‘Tybalt, that an hour hath been my kinsman’
show that the then time is the afternoon of the same day. The Friar, at the close of
Scene 3. of that Act bids Romeo ‘good night;’ and in the next scene, Paris, in reply
to Capulet’s inquiry, ‘What day is this?’ replies, ‘Monday, my lord.’ This, by the way,
denotes that the ‘old accustomed feast’ of the Capulets, according to a usual practice

100 Romeo and Juliet
in Catholic countries, was celebrated on a Sunday evening. In Scene 5. of Act iii.

comes the parting of the lovers at the dawn of Tuesday, and when at the close of
the scene, Juliet says she shall repair to Friar Laurence’ cell. Act iv. commences with
her appearance there, thus carrying on the action during the same day, Tuesday.
But the effect of long time is introduced by the mention of ‘evening mass,’ and by
the Friar’s detailed directions and reference to ‘to-morrow’s night;’ so that when the
mind has been prepared by the change of scene, by Capulet’s anxious preparations
for the wedding, and by Juliet’s return to filial submission, there seems no violence
done to the imagination by Lady Capulet’s remarking, ‘’Tis now near night.’ . . .
Juliet retires to her own room with the intention of selecting wedding attire for the
next morning, which her father has said shall be that of the marriage, anticipating it
by a whole day—Wednesday instead of Thursday.” The sleeping-potion is expected
by the Friar to operate during two and forty hours, Act iv. Scene 1. Juliet drinks it
upon Tuesday night, or rather in the night hours of Wednesday morning—delaying
as long as she dare. On the night of Thursday she awakens in the tomb and dies.
Maginn believed that there must be some mistake in the reading “two and forty
hours;” but there is no need to suppose this. The play, as Maginn observes, is dated
by Shakspere throughout with a most exact attention to hours.
17. In the first quarto Benvolio dies. Montague, Act v. Scene 3, announces the
death of his wife,—the quarto adds the line, “And young Benvolio is deceased too.”
18. Shakespeare Commentaries, by Gervinus, translated by F. E. Bunnett. 1863.
Vol. i. p. 293.
19. Kreyssig writes with reference to this tragedy:—“Nicht zufällig ist die ideale,
leidenschaftliche Jugendliebe in Sage und Gedicht aller Völker die Schwester des
Leides. Sie hat ihren Lohn in sich selbst. Des Leben hat ihr Nichts weiter zu
bieten.”—Shakespeare Fragen, p. 120. In the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. ix. p.
328, will be found a notice of a study of Romeo and Juliet (Leipzig, 1874) by the
celebrated author of the “Philosophie des Unbewussten,” E. von Hartmann. He pro-
nounces that the love between Juliet and Romeo is not the deep, spiritual, German
ideal of love, but a sensuous play of passionate fancy. (Did not this latest leader of
German thought previously teach that love at its best and truest is an illusion imposed
upon the individual by the Unconscious Somewhat which displays itself through
nature and man, an illusion which serves the important purpose of securing the
continuance of the species?) To such criticism the true answer was given long since
by Franz Horn,—“Shakspeare knows nothing, and chooses to know nothing, of that
false division of love into spiritual and sensual; or rather, he knows of it only when
he purposely takes notice of it, that is, when he wishes to depict affectation striving
after a misconceived platonism; or on the other hand, when he portrays a coarse,
brutish, merely earthly passion” (Translated in Furness’s Romeo and Juliet, p. 446.)
Contrast Juliet with Cressida; or Goethe’s Mignon with his Philina. See Shakespeare
Jahrbuch, vol. vii. p. 16; and Mrs Jameson’s “Characteristics of Woman,” especially
the passage in which she comments upon Juliet’s soliloquy, “Gallop apace.”
20. Among the critics of this play, one of the most intelligently appreciative
is George Fletcher in his Studies of Shakespeare, 1847. Fletcher’s interpretation
of Juliet’s soliloquy before she drinks the sleeping-potion differs from that given
above; and I will not assert that Fletcher may not be right, pp. 349–355. It may
be worth while to add a note on the chief critical crux of the play, “Runnawayes
Eyes,” Act iii.
QQQ

1895—Bernhard ten Brink. “Shakespeare

as Dramatist,” from Five Lectures on Shakespeare
Bernhard ten Brink (1841–1892) was a German philologist. He is the

author of the History of English Literature (1895–1896) and The Language
and Meter of Chaucer (1884).
Much as judgments may differ regarding Shakespeare, all critics may be said
to agree in acknowledging him to be preeminent among dramatists, either of
all times, or at least of modern ages as contrasted with classic antiquity. And
to dispute this judgment would least of all befit Germans, whose own classic
writers, and especially those distinguished for dramatic power, have evidently
learned so much from Shakespeare; to whose stage, since it cannot subsist upon
the novelties of the day alone, Shakespeare is more indispensable than any other
poet.
If we want to see clearly at a glance what Shakespeare signifies to us as a
dramatist, let us imagine the repertory of our stage without “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,”
“Othello,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Winter’s Tale,” “Julius Caesar,”
“Coriolanus,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Twelfth Night,” and whatever other
Shakespearean plays are presented to us; imagine us without Schiller, or at least
with an entirely different, much tamer Schiller in his place; imagine that we had
only half a Lessing, half a Grillparzer, no Kleist, and no Hebbel; then estimate
what this would mean in the development of our drama, of the histrionic art, and,
furthermore, in the realm of poetry, of aesthetics, nay, in our whole culture.
No modern dramatist can even approach comparison with Shakespeare.
Just figure to yourself the prodigious fertility of this poet, the multitude of his
dramatic productions; and in this multitude we find no zeros, nor any mere
numbers, pieces which the memory is in danger of confounding one with another,
as may easily happen with the purely superficial Spanish writers, who were even
more prolific than Shakespeare. For each one of his dramas has a distinct form
and physiognomy which stamp themselves indelibly upon the mind; each one
represents a small world within itself—and in each of these worlds what teeming
abundance of life! what rich variety of characters! Nothing enables us to estimate
so clearly the creative power of a dramatist as the effort to bring before our minds
bodily, as it were, the characters who owe him their being. No poet can enable
us to do this as readily as Shakespeare; no poet can summon up such a host of
spirits, with forms so palpable, colouring so vivid.
It holds good of all works produced from the depths of the human soul that
we think the work does not give the full measure of the artist. The greatness of
the work leads us to imagine the greatness of the artist, and we conceive him as
rising above it. High as his achievement may have been, his design, or at least

his aim, was still higher. Much of what the artist has seen and felt is lost on its
arduous passage through the material at his command—becomes, as it were,
entangled in it. This is true of the poet, too, who for his representations has to
make use of the most volatile, the most spiritual, of all substances—language.
This is true, too, of Shakespeare. We conceive the poet Shakespeare greater than
what he has created. But he was fortunate beyond many others in that he could
express so great a part of what he felt in a form so entirely conformable to his
nature—the dramatic form. None of our great poets was so wholly possessed by
the genius of the drama as Shakespeare. It is impossible to conceive of him as
other than a dramatist.
The loss would be irreparable were we to be deprived of the sonnets, those
little masterpieces of art, like chiselled marble, so clear cut, so delicately wrought,
breathing such glowing life. But even the sonnets recall the dramatic poet, not
only because taken in connection they are related to a real and most moving
drama, but because at many points the poem in its stormy course and its daring
use of metaphors betrays real dramatic intensity.
But the dramatist appears much more clearly in his epic attempts, in “Venus
and Adonis” and in “Lucrece,” not to the advantage of the effect produced by
these poems. The very thing that constitutes the greatest strength of the poet
here appears as a weakness. The abundance, the clearness, the intensity, of his
conceptions prove an injury to him here, because the means to which he is
accustomed are not here at his disposal. The stage he knows intimately; he comes
into daily and closest contact with his audience; he knows what will produce
an effect upon the stage, and what kind of an effect; all its artifices are at his
command. If he wishes to represent a character, a situation, he has the greatest
variety of means at his disposal, besides the speech, the play of features, and the
gestures of the actors, to whom he need but give hints. Here, furthermore, the
meaning of everything is brought out by its accompaniments—the cause by
the effect it produces, the character of a man by the impression he makes upon
others, the speech by its answer. Shakespeare has all the resources of theatrical
illusion in his mind when writing his dramas, and he has complete command
of them. In epic poetry he must renounce the methods so familiar to him. He
knows this; he knows that it is his words alone which must produce the effect
upon the senses; he thinks, therefore, that he must give more than mere allusions
if he wants to make his readers see things as he sees them—and he always sees
them vividly, bodily, before him. He endeavours to express everything, and the
consequence is that we have an overwhelming abundance of details which do
not combine to give us a comprehensive view of the whole; it is poetry which,
in spite of the wonderful beauty of its lavishly scattered details, as a whole leaves
us unmoved.
Nothing of epic delight in these poems; everywhere the most intense tension,
keeping the reader in almost breathless suspense. Full of passionate sympathy

for his subject, the poet endeavors to exploit all the elements of it, to illuminate
them on every side; everywhere we wish the action to proceed, and we feel it
retarded. And there is, besides, the true dramatic striving to attribute a symbolic
significance to every part of the action, to spiritualize every material detail. We
find this illustrated in the description of Tarquin’s passage in the night from his
own chamber to that of the heroine: how he forces open the locks of the doors
through which he must pass, and how at this every lock cries out indignantly;
how the door creaks on its hinges to betray him; how the weasels prowling about
at night frighten him with their screeching; how the wind, penetrating through
the cracks and crannies, wages war with the torch he holds in his hand, blowing
the smoke into his face, and extinguishing the light; but how he rekindles it with
the breath hot from his burning heart. All this is conceived in a dramatic, by no
means in an epic, sense.
But here arises the question: How can it be accounted for that Shakespeare,
so normal, healthy, and simple a nature, is gifted so exclusively for the drama,
not at all for epic poetry, while it is precisely epic poetry that flourishes in
ages characterized by a simple, healthy spirit? Let us pause a moment at this
question.
Real epic poetry proceeds from a joyous love of life, and its effect is to
enhance that joy. A thorough optimism characterizes the true epic bard, and
he presupposes his readers to be endowed with the same quality. He calculates
mainly upon their impulse to admire great heroic figures, mighty deeds, strange
destinies; even where deep sympathy is aroused in the fate of the hero it is
grounded upon admiration: an Achilles who dies an early death, a Siegfried who
is treacherously murdered. And how characteristic of the ancient Homeridœ
that they do not represent at all the death of Achilles, but simply let us feel that
it is an event certain before long to take place. To the epic poet almost all that
he describes is beautiful and worthy; that which is ugly or contemptible is only
introduced for the sake of contrast; and he knows how to idealize even what is
ugly and contemptible. He invests the objects and concerns of everyday life with
a golden glow which makes them appear attractive and important; every warrior
becomes to him upon occasion a hero; the hero rises to a demigod, nay, at times
dares to engage in combat with the gods themselves.
The epic poet is instinct with exuberant life, and he enhances this feeling, and
the feeling of joy in existence, in his hearers. Naturally he arouses a longing, too,
for a beautiful, vanished age; but it is longing of a kind which childhood, living
in a fairy world, experiences—a kind that finds its gratification in the poem itself.
This is true of even so tragic an epic as Milton’s “Paradise Lost”; here, of course,
the representation turns upon the irrevocable loss, but very essentially, too, upon
a vivid presentment of what was lost, upon a description of paradise.
How totally different the drama! The dramatist, also, leads us into an ideal
world, but never to show it to us in its unclouded purity, always picturing it in a

state of conflict and confusion. The drama, too, places heroes before us, but what
renders these heroes dramatically effective is not the qualities which make them
heroes, but those which make them men. The dramatic hero is, above all else, a
man—that is to say, a combatant.
Conflict is the essential thing in the drama—conflict in all its detail, in its
origin and its development; it does not depend for its effect upon the strength
and the courage of the victor; on the contrary, those dramatic struggles are the
most impressive where the hero is finally vanquished. In the drama we do not
want to have our admiration aroused, but to be stirred by a living sympathy; even
if it moves us to tears of intensest pity, if it convulses the very depths of our being,
we want to share, within ourselves, in the hero’s struggle, whether it have a happy
or an unhappy issue, whether it be followed by the hero’s ruin, or only by his
punishment or mortification. But to this end we must become most intimately
acquainted with the cause and the circumstances of the conflict, as well as with
the character of the hero. We must see the inevitableness of the struggle, how it
is evolved through the action and reaction between the character, desires, aims,
of the hero, on the one hand, and his environment on the other. We must feel
convinced that the hero in a given situation could, to be true to his nature, have
acted only as he did, and not otherwise. Only then shall we see ourselves pictured
in him, only then put ourselves in his place, identify ourselves with him, suffer
with his sorrow and rejoice in his joy; only then, too, will the laughter which he
compels be the outburst of a full heart, affording us genuine spiritual relief.
The drama, then, as opposed to the epic, is at once more spiritual and more
effective. It allows us to penetrate more deeply into the inner being of the
characters; cause and effect are closely linked together; we are more powerfully
moved by it to laughter or to tears. These highest effects of the drama are only
attainable, however, if we actually witness the action; and, on the other hand, if
a dramatic performance were presented before us without producing any such
effects, it would soon grow wearisome and annoying.
The more ambitious, the more powerful, the artistic means employed to
impress the sense, the more powerful should the effect prove. Only an action that
really stirs us, and keeps us in vivid suspense, should be dramatically represented.
To create this effect there must be a consonance between the matter and the
form and between both and the theatrical presentation.
As the epic is the poetry of the youth of mankind, so is the drama the poetry
of its manhood. It flourishes in epochs which no longer cherish much faith in
the golden age, among men who see life as it is, as a struggle, and who, at the
same time, seek strength and refreshment for this struggle in the contemplation
of ideal conflicts which bring before them an image of their own inmost life.
To return to Shakespeare. His early youth passed like an idyl replete with epic
joyousness, but without rousing within him the desire to enhance that joyousness
artistically. To this simple man the calm life in communion with the nature

which surrounded him was sufficient; no models pointed the way toward epic
creation; no vision of literary renown passed in alluring colors before his soul.
Perfect content needs no artistic utterance; great inner wealth is self-sufficient.
Scarce had he entered upon manhood when the idyl drew to its close; his heart
was stirred by mighty passions, a tremendous conflict rent his soul, the battle of
life had begun for him, and uninterruptedly through the best years of his life, nay,
beyond that period, he had to fight this battle in many forms, and was thus ever
reminded of the limitations of human nature.
So it fell out that Shakespeare came to London, became acquainted with
the stage, where Marlowe’s art, then enjoying its first triumphs, took our poet’s
fancy captive. Need we wonder that Shakespeare became a dramatist, that he
developed with a certain exclusiveness into a dramatic artist, since his outward
as well as his inward life, since the whole time to which he belonged, impelled
him to it?
But it is time that we should observe more accurately how Shakespeare
conceived and carried out his art.
It is the task of every art, in every individual instance, to so fashion an object
out of a given substance that it will represent an idea or arouse a certain state of
feeling. The material, be it stone or bronze, colour or tone or word, determines
the manner of representation in one art as distinguished from another. The
drama, like all poesy, has language as its material to work in, but it commands,
besides this, the histrionic art. The entire personality of the actors, the whole
stage apparatus, form a part of the dramatic artist’s material; he is thus not the
sole, but only the foremost, the leading artist. Language is the stuff in which he
works, but he must picture to himself as he labours the effect which the theatrical
presentation of his work is to produce.
The subject of the dramatic poet’s work consists in the story or plot. It may
be handed down by history, or be based upon some event of the day; it may
belong to myth or legend, or be the result of pure invention. In the last case the
poet may himself have invented the plot, but this rarely happens; as a rule, the
story is handed down to the poet, and it is indeed the greatest poets who trouble
themselves least with the invention of a new plot.
The reason of this may be easily comprehended. The story is the substance
which the dramatist shapes in accordance with his own ideas. Shall he, then, first
create this substance, and afterward elaborate it to suit his higher purposes? If
so, it were much simpler for him to be governed by these purposes in inventing
his plot; that is, to take an idea which he wishes to convey as a starting point,
and seek a concrete embodiment of that idea. Many dramas are formed on this
principle,—the modern French stage might offer us numerous examples,—and
such dramas may be very effective. Yet, as a rule, there is something artificial
about them; they are apt to create an impression, fatal to the success of any poetic
production, of something forced. It appears too evident that the whole thing is

conceived merely to illustrate an idea, that the action takes place only to prove
some abstract proposition—and the consequence is that it is our intelligence
alone that is concerned, our hearts remain cold; we may be pleasantly animated,
perhaps excited, but we are not thrilled by it.
The normal course is that some occurrence—in life, in history, in
conversation—or the substance of some tale, has so powerfully wrought upon
the poet that it has stirred the creative vein within him.
And so it was in the case of Shakespeare. Rarely, perhaps never, did he
invent his plot for himself, different as the extent and the significance of what
he owes to his sources may be. He shows himself most independent, perhaps,
in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” where, although we can prove certain motives and
situations to be reminiscences of older works, we can nowhere find a model
for the groundwork of the action as a whole. Yet who knows but that life itself
offered what literature has so far not disclosed to us? As a rule, we are able to
authenticate his sources, be they histories, novels, or dramas; and a comparative
study teaches us with what freedom, with what entire absence of timidity, he
drew from those sources. Shakespeare has been called the great adapter, and with
justice; but he who thinks that by this designation he can rob him of even the
smallest leaf of his laurel crown knows not what poetic originality signifies in the
history of literature. “Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,” said Molière, and this is
the maxim that all great conquerors in the realm of the mind have followed. The
essential question is not how much one has appropriated, but what he makes of
the thing he appropriates. And who, indeed, could urge grounds of complaint
against Shakespeare’s proceeding? The authors whom he has made use of? But
did they not themselves likewise, nay, still more comprehensively, make use of
their predecessors? And then—do not most of them owe their immortality solely
to Shakespeare? Who would now read their writings were it not on account of
Shakespeare?
The dramatist, then, must shape the story handed down to him into dramatic
action. In this he is governed by the ideas which possess his soul, often without
his full consciousness, as a vague impulse, a compelling force. How does
Shakespeare proceed to mold the story into dramatic action? Regarded on the
surface, we observe the greatest variety in his methods, and in vain should one
labour to extract from a study of his dramas any sort of prescription for the benefit
of incipient dramatists. Now we see Shakespeare following his sources as closely
as possible, deviating only in details, apparently in matters of no significance,
and again we find him transforming the story in its most essential points; now
endeavouring to simplify the story, and again complicating it by combining
it with other tales and other motives. Already in one of his first dramas—“A
Comedy of Errors”—the poet makes use of no less than four different sources in
order to produce a most highly involved and yet readily comprehended action;
in his next comedy the action is as simple as possible, one might almost say

inadequate.—What is it, then, that is common to methods differing so widely

from each other, that is characteristic of them all? One might say: Shakespeare
always condenses the dramatic action, draws it together more closely, in order to
bring out forcibly the chief elements of the play, and glides lightly over the mere
connecting links. True as this may be, yet in view of the fact that he frequently
amplifies the main plot, interweaves it with others, or introduces some episode
into the action, the truth of the remark would hardly be evident. One might, on
the other hand, say: Shakespeare is always intent upon joining the members of
the action in closer union by strengthening the motive, laying greater stress upon
the relation between cause and effect, impressing upon the whole development
of the piece the stamp of necessity. This might also be very true; yet here, too,
individual instances can be cited in apparent contradiction to that proposition.
We find that Shakespeare’s plots, particularly toward the close of his dramas, are
occasionally somewhat loosely constructed. Or how else should we term it when,
in “As You Like It,” the usurper Frederick, who has driven his brother, the good
duke, from the throne, toward the end of the drama, as we are told (for we see
none of it), surrounds the wood where the latter abides with his army, intending
to seize and kill him; there he meets with an old monk or hermit, who after some
talk converts him, so that he not only abandons his purpose, but retires from the
world and restores to his brother the crown of which he had robbed him. Here
Shakespeare has, indeed, been easy-going in the matter of motive.
Did we wish to characterize Shakespeare’s method in a manner that should
fitly apply to all cases, we should have to make prominent, above all, the
unfailingness with which he seizes the gist of his plot, and develops the whole
from that point; the mastery with which he so organizes it that, starting with
very simple premises, all seems to follow with the inevitableness of nature’s
laws; that we are prepared in advance for every incident, and that it, in its turn,
prepares us for what is to follow, all the wheels working into each other; every
feature, even the most insignificant, contributes to the development of the
whole. All this, however, is only to say that Shakespeare is unapproached in the
dramatic conception of a given material, in the genius with which he molds the
story in accordance with his ideas.
Everything, therefore, depends upon the idea which fills the poet’s mind or
which is aroused by the story. What, then, are we to understand by this idea
in Shakespeare? German œsthetics laboured many years to prove that there is
in every Shakespearean drama a so-called fundamental idea concealed behind
the action. Particularly in those plays where the action is a complicated one,
not easily to be grasped as a unity, did they seek with all the more ardor for a
unity of idea. By this they understood, as a rule, some general proposition, or,
at any rate, an abstract formula: for instance, the relation of man to possession;
or the necessity of guarding against extremes in passion—for instance, in love;
or the inquiry as to the just balance between reflection and action. Wearied by

the multitude of artificial deductions by means of which they arrived at such

often very trivial results, they have, indeed, more recently gone over to the other
extreme, “throwing out the child along with the bath.” Many deny the necessity
of a unity of idea for the drama, and the existence of such an idea has, in “Twelfth
Night,” for example, been even lately disputed.
It all depends upon what is understood by the dramatic idea.
In reality, this means nothing but the point of view from which the poet
regards the plot. This point of view must be unitary, yet we often feel the
resulting unity of action without distinctly recognizing it. We are not always
able to trace it back to a general proposition.
Yet it were perhaps better to abandon the field of abstractions, and make
our meaning clearer by taking a concrete example. For this purpose let us select
a drama which is familiar to you all—one, besides, where, regarded purely on
the surface, the dramatist owes apparently almost everything to the source from
which he drew: “Romeo and Juliet.” Gustav Freytag has, in his “Technology of
the Drama,” compared in a very attractive manner the action in this tragedy with
the story upon which it is founded; yet his presentation contains some errors,
which are to be mainly attributed to his lack of acquaintance, or at least to his
insufficient acquaintance, with the actual source of the drama. The distinction
between the mere action of the play and the story which the poet made use of
is not nearly as great as Freytag points out; the difference, however, between
the tragedy and the tale upon which it is based is none the less great; but this
difference does not lie alone, nor even chiefly, in the construction of the plot, but
in the treatment of the characters, in the dramatic structure in the aptness of
the language for the stage—in short, in the execution in its most comprehensive
sense. The play will, on that account, serve best to teach us how all these elements
are related to each other.
The sources of the Romeo and Juliet legend are, as is well known,
Italian. Shakespeare, however, became acquainted with it through two English
adaptations, both of which can be traced back through a French medium to
the Italian original: the prose presentation by William Paynter, which appeared
in the year 1567, and especially the versified tale of Arthur Brooke, which was
printed as early as 1562. Paynter’s prose is essentially a close reproduction of
his French model, whereas we find a considerable development in Brooke’s
poetical version, the details variously modified and enriched. Notwithstanding its
somewhat Old Frankish tone, this poem evinces genuine feeling and pronounced
talent; that Shakespeare made it the groundwork of his drama is its highest
acknowledgment.
Shakespeare found his material in Brooke’s poem, by no means in a raw state,
but in a very advanced stage—not only the chief characters, but nearly all the
minor ones, all the more important and a great number of subordinate motives,
the plan of entire scenes, the ideas of numerous passages. What remained, then,

for the poet to do, and what was his share of the work? Well, Shakespeare has
created an irresistibly fascinating, thrilling tragedy out of an interesting, touching
romance, a work of art of imperishable worth out of a poem of ephemeral value.
This, I think, were enough. But how has he done it?
He who would give a categorical, objective account of the contents of
Shakespeare’s tragedy, on the one hand, and of Brooke’s versified romance, on
the other, would present two tales which deviate very little from each other, nay,
which superficial readers would regard as exactly identical. But what a difference
in their way of looking at the story, in the idea which each conceives of his
subject! Both Shakespeare and Brooke have taken the trouble to intimate briefly
in a sonnet the substance of their poems. It is instructive to compare the two
sonnets with each other.
This is how Brooke conceives his subject: Love has enkindled two hearts
at first sight, and they accomplish their desires. They are secretly united by a
monk, and enjoy for a time the highest bliss. Inflamed to fury by Tybalt’s wrath,
Romeo kills him and is obliged to flee into banishment. Juliet is to be forced
into another marriage; to escape this she takes a draught which has the effect
of making her appear as if dead; while in this sleep she is buried alive. Her
husband receives information of her death, and takes poison. And she, when
she awakes, kills herself with Romeo’s dagger. This is all; not a word about
the feud between the two houses of Verona, the Montagues and Capulets;
although the poem makes mention of all these things, they are evidently of no
real interest to the poet; he perceives no deeper connection between the family
feud and the fate of his main characters. It is a touching love story to him, and
nothing more.
And Shakespeare? I will not translate here the familiar sonnet which
precedes the tragedy. But this is his idea of the story: Two young beings
endowed by Nature with her most charming gifts, created as if for each other,
glow with the purest, most ardent love. But fate has placed them in a rude,
hostile world; their passion blossoms and grows in the midst of the most
inflamed party and family hatred. A peaceful development, one that would
lead to a happy consummation, is here impossible. Completely possessed by
their love, they forget the hate which divides their families, enjoy for a few
brief moments a happiness which transports them to the summit of human
experience. Then they are torn asunder by the hostile powers. A last flickering
of hope, a daring attempt to lead the Fates in accordance with their desires,
and immediately thereafter the fatal error which plunges them in the cold
embrace of death. But in death they are lastingly united, their burning longing
is now stilled forever; and as they themselves have found peace, so does their
blood quench the flames of the hatred which has disunited their families. Over
their lifeless bodies the fathers join their hands in a brotherly grasp, and their
monument becomes a symbol of the love that conquered hate.

This is the way that Shakespeare regarded his subject; this, the idea he sought
to impress upon his material; from this conception sprang all the deviations from
his model, sprang the entire structure of the tragedy.
Shakespeare’s object is to arouse the deepest sympathy, the most heartfelt pity,
for his lovers, to thrill us with their tragic destiny, but at the same time to lift us
to a point whence we can feel a reconciling element even in this cruel fate.
All that can serve this double purpose is brought into play, all opposing
elements are discarded.
Let us consider a few details. In Brooke’s narrative the action extends over
a greater period of time, over several months; Shakespeare has concentrated it
into a few days. Why this change? It was not the arrangements or the usages
of his stage which determined him to it. In these respects, on the contrary,
Shakespeare exercised the utmost freedom. He was guided solely by his sure
dramatic instinct. For how was that long space of time in the narrative filled
up? Three months does Brooke allow the secretly united pair to enjoy their
happiness in peace. Then only does the event occur which parts them. Who
does not feel that the delicate bloom which clings to Shakespeare’s characters
would be at once dispelled by the admixture of this feature? Who does not
feel that the infinite pathos of their fate, as well, would sink to an everyday
level? Besides, if they could be secretly happy for three months, why does not
their happiness last longer? It is mere chance which brings it to an end. How
different with Shakespeare! These two glorious creatures are made for each
other; but the world, the Fates, do not will them to be united. And not for a
moment does the poet leave us in uncertainty about their tragic destiny. They
may enjoy their love but a few short hours, and that only when their fate is
already sealed, when Tybalt is dead and Romeo banished. Not for a moment
the feeling of undisturbed possession, and upon this brief joy follows at
once the eternal parting. This is poetry, this is tragedy. You see how infinitely
much depends upon this one little deviation in regard to time. And still more
depends on it. This concentration of the action is in most perfect keeping with
the condensed structure of this dramatic gem.
This quicker tempo at the same time attunes us to the heated atmosphere
which breathes in this tragedy, to the sudden kindling, the rapid development, of
glowing love, the rude outburst of wild hatred. The striking truth to nature of the
tone and colouring of “Romeo and Juliet” has long been commented upon. One
is everywhere reminded that the action takes place under an Italian sky. Neither
does the poet neglect to bring clearly before us the season in which the tragedy
develops, although some critics have been mistaken about it. It was in the hot
summer days:
“I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire;

The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,

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

For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”
The dawn follows close upon the twilight. In the scenes between the two lovers
we seem to breathe the air of the brief Italian night.
Over this scene Shakespeare has spread all the witchery of his art, infused
it with all the ardor of his young and loving heart. Only three times does the
poet represent Romeo and Juliet together, living, and in a fully developed scene:
first, the decisive meeting at the ball; then the balcony scene immediately
following it; finally, the farewell of the young pair after their first and last night
of love. Nothing more touching or beautiful has ever been written. The climax,
however, is perhaps reached in the balcony scene. The fact alone that here lay
the most dangerous rock in the path makes it pre-eminent, for there is nothing
more difficult and dangerous for the dramatist than the attempt to rival the
musician and the lyric poet, to which such extremely simple situations invite
him. Other great poets,—and Shakespeare as well, on certain occasions,—have
recourse to this or that artifice: they allow the dialogue to be interrupted once
or even oftener,—I may remind you of the celebrated garden scene in Goethe’s
“Faust,”—they intimate more than they represent, allow the largest and best
part to be divined, while some attractive, childish byplay lends animation to the
scene. The lovers do not entertain each other with speaking of their emotions;
they relate incidents of their past, talk of their everyday life. There is nothing
of all this in “Romeo and Juliet.” With a genuine scorn of death Shakespeare
launches the ship of his fancy, with all sails set, upon the high sea of emotion,
regardless of the perils which threaten its course, but which cannot harm it. At
such points we ought to compare Brooke’s poem with the drama. In the poem
Juliet sees Romeo first, then he her; both are elated with joy, yet she the most;
then she thinks of the danger hovering over him, and begins to speak amid her
tears. In Shakespeare Romeo beholds Juliet appear at the window, and listens,
unseen by her, to her monologue. When he has thus learned her tender secret,
he discovers himself to her.
Admirable, too, is the art with which Shakespeare shows how the character
of his lovers is developed in and through their love. Admirable, yet not
astonishing! For the conception of his characters is with him indissolubly
united with his conception of the dramatic action. Therein lies his greatness:
that just as he regards all things in their connection, so does he create them
in their connection. The psychological depth and truth of his characters, the
fullness of life they breathe, the consistency of their development, the necessity
with which their actions follow from their nature and position, are universally
marvelled at; but the greatest wonder, after all, is how these characters in their
gradations, in the way they complement, and, by their contrast, stand out in
bold relief against each other, are so totally controlled by the idea of the action.

Let us observe Romeo and Juliet—what they were before their love, and what
love makes of them.
The greatest transformation takes place in Romeo. A youth with noble
sentiments, fine culture, keen powers of observation, and ready wit, he seems
at the beginning of the play to be pining away from a superabundance of
emotion and fancy. The world that surrounds him is too rough and too sober
for him. He isolates himself from it entirely, beholds it only as through a veil,
and adapts himself more and more to his inner world—a world of dreams, of
imaginary joys and sorrows. The poet has retained from Brooke’s poem Romeo’s
sentimental, unrequited love for Rosaline, without presenting Rosaline herself.
Her personality is of no concern to us—it might be she or another. Her image
is only meant to fill a void in Romeo’s inner world; she is merely the object
toward which Romeo’s deep longing first turns until the proper object appears.
From the moment when he beholds Juliet a transformation takes place within
him. He is still the youthful dreamer, the poet, that he was, but he begins to act.
The consciousness that his love is returned restores him to himself and to the
world. His changed being at once strikes his friend: “Why, is not this better than
groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou
what thou art by art as well as by nature.” When he is hurled from the heaven
of bliss into the wretchedness of banishment, he loses all self-control, breaks out
into unmeasured lamentations, into impotent rage against fate. Hope once more
revives him. Then, when he finally learns that all is at an end, his decision is at
once taken; all gone is his youthful loquacity; happiness and misfortune have
completed his education: he has become a man.
In Shakespeare, Juliet is a girl of fourteen, two years younger than in his
model. She is for that reason so much more touching a figure: a child who
through a great, pure love becomes a woman. She, too, stands isolated in the
world, yet not, like Romeo, because she is by nature a dreamer. She is at first quite
unconscious of her position; it is only her experiences after she has met Romeo
that reveal to her how foreign to her her parents and surroundings really are.
Her nature is simpler, but stronger, her love much more unselfish, than Romeo’s.
Completely possessed by one idea, she at once comes to a decision, is intent upon
practical action. The strength of her love overcomes maidenly shyness, womanly
timidity, and allows her to look death in the face. The unfolding of her character
in the course of the soliloquy before she takes the sleeping potion is significant.
In that nightly hour, on the threshold of the decisive moment, horrid visions rise
up before her. Finally she fancies she beholds the awful form of the murdered
Tybalt. We find this feature also in Brooke’s poem. But there Juliet finally hastily
drinks down the contents of the vial, lest fear, after longer reflection, should deter
her. Shakespeare’s Juliet beholds her Romeo threatened by Tybalt, and swiftly
seizes the only means of sharing his danger:

“Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.”
Regarding the characters which group themselves partly about the hero and
partly about the heroine, I shall speak but briefly. Excellently drawn is the figure
of the old, hasty, passionate Capulet. His wife, very much younger than himself,
appeals very feebly to our sympathies; her relations to her husband are in the
main of a superficial nature, and even to her child she is bound only by the ties
of blood, not by any soulful or spiritual union. And then the nurse, a type of the
vulgar, garrulous female, her individuality brought out with masterly realism, and,
in spite of Goethe’s well-known dictum, an indispensable figure to the drama,
serving as a foil to the character of Juliet, as well as to make us comprehend her
total isolation in her parents’ house.
Romeo’s parents, as befits the story, remain more in the background. On
the other hand, we become acquainted with his friends: the calm, moderate
Benvolio; the light-hearted, good-natured, impudent, witty Mercutio. This last
figure is altogether Shakespeare’s creation; in Brooke’s poem he is introduced
only once, and then merely by allusion. Mercutio,—an image of the exuberance
of virile youth in the plenitude of its strength; a humorist who enjoys life and
is, at the same time, a shrewd observer,—throws a bright radiance over the first
half of the drama. His figure is of the greatest significance, not only in so much
as it elucidates Romeo’s character, but also on account of the manner in which
Shakespeare involves him in the drama of the family feud.
To this side of his subject, to the tragedy of hate, Shakespeare has devoted
scarcely less care than to the tragedy of love, which, indeed, only becomes a
tragedy through the other. Shakespeare does not content himself with presenting
to our minds the tragic end of his lovers as a motive, strong as this motive,
furnished by the story, was. He is intent from the first upon working upon our
feelings, prepares us at the outset for the tragic result, knows how to produce
in us by a thousand artifices the impression that this thing cannot now or ever
reach a happy consummation. Everything must serve this purpose: the character
of his lovers, Juliet’s youth, her complete isolation, her ignorance of the world,
the fatal rapidity with which her love is developed, the dark presentiments which,
at the decisive moment, arise in her soul. But this end is served above all by the
family feud, so vividly presented to our view; and here we see the art with which
Shakespeare constructs his drama, brings his various motives before us. Already
in the first scene we are initiated into these relations. From insignificant, nay,
ridiculous beginnings a serious, violent quarrel is evolved. Only the interposition
of the prince, who asserts his authority in the most energetic manner, is sufficient
to ward off extremes. And already in the first scene Shakespeare introduces
Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, the wild, turbulent youth, who embodies most intensely
the family hatred. In the ball scene Tybalt is again present, outraged at Romeo’s

audacity, restrained only with difficulty by his old uncle, and giving vent to the
wrath which he is now prevented from satisfying in vows of vengeance:
“But this intrusion shall

Now seeming sweet convert to bitter gall.”
Shakespeare’s source introduces Tybalt for the first time in the decisive
scene, and in a manner totally different, though reminding one, indeed,
of the scene in the first act. A street fight has arisen, Tybalt is among the
crowd; Romeo appears upon the scene, tries, like Benvolio in Shakespeare’s
first act, to separate the combatants. Then Tybalt suddenly attacks Romeo
himself, forces him to defend himself, and in thus defending his life to kill
him. In Shakespeare the development is an entirely different one, much
more significant and tragic. Tybalt seeks out Romeo, challenges him to
combat. Romeo refuses to fight with Juliet’s cousin. All that is near to her
is dear to him. Astounded and enraged at the gentle words with which his
friend addresses the brawling fellow, Mercutio then asks Tybalt to walk away
with him. Romeo again comes forward when the fight is at its hottest, throws
himself between the two combatants, and thus becomes the innocent cause
of Mercutio’s death. The end of the sturdy humorist is worthy of his life:
“Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I
warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! ’Zounds, a dog, a rat, a
mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights
by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt
under your arm.” “I thought all for the best,” replies Romeo. With Mercutio
the cheerful glow of the zest of life vanishes from the drama; the approaching
night heralds its advent. The result has turned Romeo’s good intentions into
a calamity. His friend is killed for his sake, through his fault. It is his to
avenge his death—not by accident, in the stress of self-defense, as Brooke has
it, but consciously, from a feeling of duty, must he draw his sword against
Juliet’s cousin, and strike him down. He gives expression to his feelings
after the deed is accomplished as he exclaims: “Oh, I am fortune’s fool!”
With his own hand, because he could do no otherwise, Romeo gives his
dream of love its death blow. Again, as in the first scene of the play, the
prince appears, then restraining and threatening, now punishing. The
innocent ones, the lovers, fall a sacrifice to justice; Romeo is banished. When
the prince appears the third time, the tragedy is closed. The sacrifices which
love demanded have appeased the old hatred also; the prince stands there a
woeful, sympathetic looker-on, a witness of the peace concluded over the
open grave.
QQQ

1896—Frederick S. Boas. “Shakespere ‘Italianate’:

Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice,”
from Shakespeare and His Predecessors
Frederick S. Boas (1862–1957) was an English scholar of early mod-

ern drama and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author
of Shakespeare and the Universities: And Other Studies in Elizabethan Drama
(1923) and From Richardson Pinero: Some Innovators and Idealists (1936), as
well as the editor of numerous works, including The Tempest (1897) and
The Works of Thomas Kyd (1901).
The first group of comedies, amidst their varieties of source and theme, have
one feature in common. Whether the plot be laid in Navarre, Ephesus, Athens,
Padua or Verona, the atmosphere is unmistakably English. It is true, of course,
that in The Errors and in The Taming of the Shrew, typical characters from Latin
or Italian comedy are introduced, but they are set amidst surroundings which
suggest London or Stratford. In The Two Gentlemen Shakspere even makes the
elementary geographical blunder of representing Valentine as journeying from
Verona to Milan by sea. It is therefore startling, when we turn to Romeo and Juliet
(drawn, like The Two Gentlemen, from the annals of Verona), to find it steeped in
distinctively Italian colour, and yet more amazing to see in The Merchant of Venice
intimate knowledge of the city of the lagoons and its neighbourhood. The most
satisfactory way of accounting for the contrast is, as has already been stated, to
conclude that Shakspere had in the interval visited the North of Italy.1 Never
again did he so magically reproduce the atmosphere of the South as in these
dramas, the fruit, it would thus appear, of his Wanderjahre, as the early histories
and comedies were of his Lehrjahre. So, in later years, Macbeth, there is good
reason to hold, was written after a recent visit to Scotland. In an age of universal
travel, why should Shakspere, of all men, be confined within the narrow seas, and
be supposed to have never crossed the Alps or ‘swum in a gondola’?
The date of Romeo and Juliet cannot be exactly determined. It was first
published in quarto in 1597, with the inscription ‘as it hath been often (with
great applause) plaid publiquely by the right Honourable the Lord of Hunsdon
his Servants.’ The word ‘often’ opens up an indefinite vista backwards, and makes
it certain that the play had been written and acted in some form for an appreciable
period before it was printed. How long was that period? Some inquirers base
their answer upon the Nurse’s words, ‘’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,’
which in all probability refer to the earthquake of 1580. If the garrulous old lady’s
chronology is to be trusted, this would give 1591 as the date of the play, and it
contains without doubt passages written in rhyme and full of conceits, rhetoric,
and verbal quips in the dramatist’s earliest manner. But, on the other hand,

Shakspere is not likely to have visited Italy at so early a date, and moreover there
are features in this first edition of the tragedy, such as the elaborated portraiture
of the chief characters and the beauty of much of the blank verse, that point to
a period of comparative maturity. The presumption, therefore, is that Shakspere
was occupied with his theme during a number of years, and that it took definite
literary shape about 1595–6, not long after a continental journey.2
The story over which the young dramatist thus lingered so lovingly was one
which had for already more than a century touched the hearts of men.3 It had
been first told, with Mariotto and Gianozza of Siena as hero and heroine, and
with some harshness and extravagance of detail, by the novelist Masuccio of
Salerno in 1476. Some sixty years later Luigi da Porto retold the tale in altered
and heightened form, introducing for the first time the names of Romeo and
Giulietta, and making them children of the rival Veronese houses, Capelletti
and Montecchi. In its essential features his romance resembles Shakspere’s play,
but it differs in one important detail. Romeo, at Juliet’s tomb, drinks the poison,
but before he is cold in death, his bride awakes, and they have a last passionate
dialogue, while folded in each other’s arms. In 1554 another novelist, Bandello,
included the story in his collection of Novelle, and added to it fresh features.
He brings into prominence the ‘Rosaline’ episode, he uses the name Paris for
Romeo’s rival, and above all he is the first to mention the Nurse as the lovers’ go-
between. A French translation of Bandello’s romance was issued in 1559 by Pierre
Boisteau, who originated the close of the tale afterwards followed by Shakspere,
wherein Romeo dies before Juliet awakes from her trance, only to end her life,
not through the violence of her grief, as in the earlier versions, but through
the self-inflicted stroke of her husband’s dagger. Boisteau’s tale was soon made
familiar to English readers by Arthur Brooke’s metrical paraphrase Romeus and
Juliet, 1562, and William Painter’s prose translation, in his collection of novels,
The Palace of Pleasure, 1567. Brooke declares that he had seen the same argument
lately set forth on the stage, and there would thus appear to have been some
early dramatic version of the theme which has not come down to us, though it
may have been known to Shakspere, and used by him. In any case, Brooke’s own
poem must have furnished the basis for Shakspere’s crowning treatment of the
story. It was Brooke who first gave prominence to the character of the Nurse, and
put into her mouth speeches which the dramatist followed in parts with curious
fidelity. It was Brooke also who invented the scene of Romeo’s despair in the
Friar’s cell after the murder of Tybalt, and it was he who called Friar Lawrence’s
messenger John instead of Anselm. Nor was Romeus and Juliet an unworthy
model. It was a well-proportioned narrative, in long flowing couplets, consisting
of an Alexandrine followed by a Septenar. This metre, which Surrey had made
fashionable, was skilfully handled by Brooke, and in spite of overdone antithesis,
and of occasional luxuriance of sensuous description, balanced by a vein of
sententious moralizing, the poem was warmed with true pathos, and showed an

eye for dramatic types and situations. But dominating every other personality
is that of Fortune, who sports with her victims as she pleases, lifting them to a
height only afterwards to cast them down in her rage. The same conception of
Fortune was inspiring at almost the same date The Mirror for Magistrates, and it
should certainly be home in mind in the consideration of the play.
The story, which had run through so many channels before it reached
Shakspere, throbbed in every vein with the life of Italy. There alone amorous
passion shot up with lightning swiftness into fever heat; there alone the family
vendetta drenched the streets with blood; there alone the stiletto and the
poison-phial were weapons of daily use. In Shakspere’s version this atmosphere
is faithfully perpetuated. The season is midsummer, and the fiery sun beats down
from a cloudless heaven upon street and square, setting the mad blood astir in
the brawler’s veins, and making pedestrianism on romantic errands a weariness of
the flesh to ladies of ripe years, in spite of attendant fan-bearers. The nights are
only softer days, not made for sleep, but for masque and dance, or for lingering
in moonlit gardens, where the fruit-tree tops are tipped with silver, and the
nightingale pants forth her song from the deep pomegranate bower. The one
hour of coolness is the dawn, when flowers and herbs are still dank with heavy
dew, and hermit or lover, who fears the garish eyes of noon, may steal forth into
the fields or the sycamore-grove. Under such skies life is lived with an intensity
which may compress the passion of years into a few hours. And thus Shakspere,
with a masterly innovation upon Brooke and the novelists, shortened the action
of the story to little more than four days, from Sunday morning but ‘new struck
nine’ to the dim dawn of Thursday. During that brief tract of time events stride
on in such precipitate sequence that we are fain to follow them breathlessly, and
it is only when all is over that we pause to ask the meaning of the play as a whole.
As soon as we do so, we realize that Romeo and Juliet leaves upon different minds
the most opposite impressions. By the majority of readers it is regarded as a
unique offering laid by the poet on the shrine of Cupid, at once the most musical
of paeans over the triumphant glory of love, and the most musical of elegies
over its brittleness and briefness in a cold and cruel world. To others the play is
a record, pitiful yet inexorable, of the disasters wrought by ill-regulated passion,
whether of love or hate, and one more warning that the meden agan is the true
guiding principle of life. Let us endeavour, by an examination of the drama, to
trace these conflicting impressions to their source.
It has been seen that in several of Shakspere’s plays there is an enveloping
political plot. The peculiarity of Romeo and Juliet is that the political plot does
not merely form the background to the main action, but is one of its integral
elements. The rivalry of the Montagues and the Capulets gives a tragic bias
to what would otherwise be a story of youthful love, and it is therefore rightly
made the subject of the opening scene. The biting of thumbs by the serving-men,
pugnacious within the safe limits of the law, prepares the way for the entrance

of Tybalt, the champion of the Capulet claims, the professional duellist with the
lore of the fencing school at his finger-tips, who ‘fights as you sing prick-song,
keeps time, distance, and proportion: rests me his minim rest, one, two, and the
third in your bosom.’ To such a swashbuckler even the mild Benvolio’s presence
is a call to arms, and the result is speedily a general fray swollen by partisans
of either house, and by citizens who hate both equally, till the entrance of the
Prince stops the tumult on pain of death. Thus the rival families are marshalled
face to face at the very outset of the action, and the chief of the state, though he
is seen for only the briefest interval, launches the edict which is to have fateful
consequences hereafter.
From the ranks of the Montague swordsmen there has been one remarkable
absentee. The aged head of the house has flourished his blade in defence of
the family honour, but Romeo, the son and heir, is nowhere to be seen. His
mother’s anxious inquiry elicits the news that he has been espied before dawn,
stealing alone towards a grove of sycamore, and we further learn that such is his
wont, and that at the first streak of light he creeps home to his chamber where
he pens himself in artificial night. We are thus warned, before Romeo appears
in person, that he is apart from his kinsmen in nature and sympathies. There is
a sentimental strain in his character, and at the outset he and Proteus, though
they develop so differently, have a certain likeness. His entrance gives the key
to his strange humour. He is in love with the lady Rosaline, but his suit is in
vain. Hence his passion for solitude, his sighs, and his tears. But neither the
love nor the misery, we are persuaded, can be very deep that finds its vent in
unmeaning fantastic antithesis, the reductio ad absurdum of ‘the numbers that
Petrarch flowed in.’ A heart that is really breaking does not explode in verbal
fireworks about ‘anything of nothing first created.’ This calf-love of Romeo is
adopted by Shakspere from Brooke, and it is probably a mistake to invest it
with too great significance. That there enters into Romeo’s character a vein of
weakness, of volatile emotion, cannot be denied, but it is important to notice
that whenever Shakspere gives it prominence he is following closely in the
wake of Brooke, and that in the scenes due to his own invention the more
sterling and genuinely impassioned side of his hero’s nature is developed. The
retention of the Rosaline episode is very possibly due to the fact that it prepares
the way for one of those instances of the irony of fortune which stud the drama.
Benvolio bids Romeo attend the feast of the Capulets that he may forget his
mistress in the light of other eyes, and Romeo, though he assents, does so with
protestations of unswerving fidelity to Rosaline. But even while he is on the
way to the palace of the rival house, he is haunted by presentiments that his
fate is not in his own hands
‘My mind misgives

Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,


With this night’s revels.’
And so it proves: Romeo has but to change eyes with Juliet, and his love in
idleness for Rosaline is annihilated, only to give place to a far more absorbing
passion. Benvolio’s well-meant panacea becomes the root of a direr malady than
it was devised to cure.
Of Juliet and her surroundings we have had glimpses before this fateful
meeting, sufficient to show that she too is apart in temper from her kindred,
and that love is something as yet outside her experience or even her vision.
She has reached the age where under southern skies girlhood is trembling into
womanhood, and those around her are eager to hasten the process. Her father
indeed, for the present, looks upon her as a child, ‘a stranger in the world’; but
her budding beauty has attracted the gaze of the handsome and well-born
County Paris, who is anxious to make her his bride. He finds ready allies in
Juliet’s two female companions, her mother and her nurse. Lady Capulet is the
very type of the starched and conventional woman of quality, who having gone
through the duties of matrimony and maternity at the regulation age for ‘ladies
of esteem,’ propounds to her daughter ‘in brief ’ that a similar opportunity is
now offered to her. But the thin phrases that trickle from her lips are drowned
in the torrent of the Nurse’s loquacity. The admirable sketch of this personage
given by Brooke is developed by Shakspere with the richest humour. Plebeian
to the core she has yet caught by long association with people of rank a surface
air of importance, and she is given a place in the family council. She is not
without genuine affection for her youthful charge, but this is subordinate to a
singular interest in Juliet’s enjoyment of pleasures that are now beyond her own
reach. Her tongue rambles here and there, backwards and forwards, but always
dropping concrete phrases of the most suggestive kind. But to the promptings
alike of convention and of sensuality Juliet turns a deaf ear. Marriage, even with
‘a man of wax’ is an honour that she dreams not of; the utmost that she will offer
is the non-committing promise: ‘I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.’ Thus
if Romeo’s false sense of security before the critical moment of his fate is due
to his heart being already occupied, Juliet’s springs from exactly the contrary
reason, that hers is absolutely vacant. They meet, and from that moment
they live only in and for each other. It is useless to criticize the plausibility of
this instantaneous passion; the reality of love at first sight is an axiom in the
Shaksperean drama. That Romeo should at once salute his new mistress with
a kiss is in accord with the fashion of the time, as is also the lyrical form and
imagery of their opening dialogue, which falls almost into sonnet shape. But
the graceful phrases of compliment die down under the horror of the mutual
discovery that Romeo is a Montague and Juliet a Capulet. And instead there
rise the passionate protests against the cruel irony of fate:

‘Romeo: Is she a Capulet?

O dear account, my life is my foe’s debt.
Juliet: My only love sprung from my only hate,
Too early seen unknown, and known too late.’
But destiny, that has produced ‘this prodigious birth of love,’ is determined to
further its growth. Romeo, when the ball is over, takes shelter in the garden of
the Capulets, beneath Juliet’s window, and under the screen of darkness hears his
mistress confess her love for him in a soliloquy to the night-air. With a nature
such as Juliet’s, passionate in the depths, but proud and steeped in maidenly
delicacy on the surface, the first avowal of affection, above all to a hereditary foe,
would be hard to make, and could only be the result of long effort. It was thus
a stroke of the most delicate insight on Shakspere’s part—for the device is his
own—to represent Juliet as betrayed by unforeseen chance into the revelation
of her new-born feeling. But her confession once taken by surprise, she is too
nobly sincere to draw back: she covers her confusion with some charmingly arch
sallies, and the protestation that she’ll prove more true ‘than those that have more
cunning to be strange.’ And the playful tone soon deepens into that of passionate,
unmeasured self-surrender:
‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea;

My love as deep: the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.’
But again the presage of woe to come overshadows the scene:
‘Although I joy in thee,

I have no joy of this contract to-night
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be,
Ere one can say it lightens.’
Yet, in spite of forebodings, Juliet knows that there is only one way now by which
she and her lover can be united, and this, with quiet resolution, she determines
to take. Let him send her word to-morrow where and what time he will marry
her, and she will come to him, and be his for evermore.
The simplicity and directness of Juliet’s bearing in this scene have been often
contrasted with the more brooding emotion of Romeo. His language is certainly
fuller of imagery, recalling sometimes in softened form his earlier utterances,
and he abandons himself more unreservedly to the luxury of sentiment
while forgetting the practical dangers of his situation. But it is surely going
beyond Shakspere’s purpose to look upon Romeo as a ‘study’ in over-luxuriant,

half-unreal emotion. The more such a point is pressed, the less justification is
there for Juliet’s self-surrender, and the less productive of ‘pity and terror’ is the
collision in the drama between the two passions of love and hate. The primary
aim of the poet in this his earliest tragedy is neither to give elaborate studies of
character, nor to point morals, but to tell in moving fashion an old-world tale of
‘star-crossed lovers’ and their ‘misadventured piteous overthrows.’
It is important to bear this in mind in turning to the scene in Friar Laurence’s
cell. Of the abrupt transitions that mark the play throughout, the most striking
is the change from the passionate interview between the two lovers in the
moonlit garden, to the solitary figure of the hermit, with the grey dawn breaking
over him, as he sets out, osier-cage in hand, to gather weeds and flowers. These
products of the earth suggest to him an analogy in human nature:
‘Within the infant rind of this weak flower

Poison hath residence, and medicine power.
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part,
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed Kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will,
And when the worser is predominant
Full soon the canker death eats up the plant.’
Kreyssig and Gervinus find in these words the keynote of the drama, and
look upon the Friar as playing the part of the classical chorus, which was
the mouthpiece of the poet’s own sentiments. Shakspere, according to this
interpretation, censures the lovers for yielding to ‘rude will’ or passion instead of
being regulated by ‘grace’ or gentle moderation. But adherents of the Romantic
school from Schlegel onwards, have refused to see in the Friar’s words anything
more than a suitable dramatic utterance. The problem is, without doubt,
perplexing. Though Shakspere never identifies himself absolutely with any
single character, yet certain of his creations make the impression of representing
him more fully than others, and it must be allowed that the hermit’s moralizing
phrases are introduced and repeated with what sounds like deliberate emphasis.
But this doctrine of moderation in love is nowhere else found in Shakspere’s
writings. Bassanio, Orlando, and Ferdinand offer whole-hearted, enthusiastic
devotion to their mistresses, and no moralist rebukes them for their want
of circumspection. Is not the pathetic failure of Ophelia’s life owing to her
obedience to a shallow worldly wisdom rather than the dictates of her own
heart? Why then should Romeo and Juliet, the glowing creations of the
dramatist’s youth, alone be condemned out of his own mouth? There is another
interpretation which in some degree reconciles the opposing views. All through
the drama there runs the note of tragic predestination. It has had utterance

from the lips of Romeo and Juliet, but merely as a vague presentiment. In the
friar’s mouth it naturally takes a moralizing form and is made the occasion of
a sermon on man’s unruliness. As the hero and heroine repeat time after time
their apprehensions of evil to come, so, after his own fashion, does the Friar.
Hence the prominence given to his warnings: they are part of the ever-swelling
burden of the drama that the ecstasies of love are brief and brittle: they must not
be simply set aside as prosy commonplaces, but they cannot be accepted as the
full and final judgement upon love and life by Shakspere, the Shakspere of the
Sonnets to Will. And indeed, if Romeo and Juliet, swayed by passion become
the victims of an ironical destiny, is this less true of the cautious Laurence with
all his saws and maxims? Romeo bursts into the cell, his tongue on fire with
the exciting news of his last night’s fortunes. He cannot stop to give details, but
blurts out breathlessly his main object:
‘When, where, and how,

We met, we wooed, and made exchange of vow
I’ll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray
That thou consent to marry us to-day.’
The churchman blames the young waverer’s precipitancy, but thinks to bring good
out of evil: a match between a Montague and a Capulet may turn the households’
rancour to pure love. Is not this amiable confidence as bitterly mocked by the
sequel as the hopes of the wooers, who that very afternoon are made man and
wife? The scene is brief but intensely significant. Romeo’s joy utters itself, as
usual, in highly-wrought phrase, while Juliet’s is too deep for words. Both alike
are thrilled in every vein with the passion that speaks in Romeo’s adjuration:
‘Do thou but close our hands with holy words,

Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.’
And again in sharpest contrast rings out the Friar’s warning:
‘These violent delights have violent ends,

And in their triumph die: like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.’
And even as the prophecy is uttered events are taking place, not far off, which
are to hasten their fulfilment. In the town-square, under the noonday sun, there
is gathered a crowd of Montague retainers, with Benvolio and Mercutio at their
head. Mercutio has already made his appearance on several occasions, but now
he first becomes a real factor in the plot. For his character Shakspere found

the slightest hints in his originals. Brooke simply speaks of him as ‘courteous
of speech and pleasant of devise,’ with an ice-cold hand. Out of such meagre
materials Shakspere created the brilliant figure who forms as admirable a foil to
Romeo as, after a different fashion, the Nurse to Juliet. The brooding, emotional
temperament of the heir of the Montagues finds its complete antithesis in the
sparkling vivacity of his friend, in whom we may detect a touch of likeness to
Valentine, while as yet he crowed like a cock and was not ‘metamorphosed with
a mistress.’ But Mercutio’s flashing wit and nimble tongue are all his own, and
every form of affectation, or what he deems to be such, gets a volley from him in
turn. Dreams and omens, over which Romeo ponders, are to him ‘the children of
an idle brain’ to be quizzed away as old wives’ tales of Mab and her antics. And
as his estimate of dreams thus resembles that of Theseus, so he takes much the
same view of the relation of lovers, poets, and madmen, though he throws it into
the form of a jest, and not of serious reflection:
‘Romeo, humours, madman, passion, lover!

Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh
Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied.’
But Mercutio’s very mockery is not without its poetic note, as his ‘brilliant
arabesque of fancies about Queen Mab’ is sufficient to show. A splendid zest
in real life, an ingrained scorn of all affectation, a somewhat distant bowing
acquaintance with the proprieties, give salt and savour to his wit, though it be
a trifle over-pungent for delicate ears. A ‘French slop’ and a French salutation
equally stir his derision, but what absolutely sticks in his throat is the fantastic
etiquette of the fencing-school, of which Tybalt is the professional representative.
It is the grudge borne by the mettlesome swordsman against the tactician,
the ‘villain that fights by the book of arithmetic,’ that throws Mercutio, who
belongs to neither house, upon the Montague side. Thus when Tybalt appears,
he attempts to provoke him into open quarrel, but the Capulet champion is
seeking Romeo, who enters immediately afterwards fresh from his marriage with
Juliet, and determined not to be drawn into combat with any one of the Capulet
name. His refusal to take up the challenge which Tybalt throws in his teeth so
incenses Mercutio that his rapier is out in a moment and crossed with his foe’s,
and when Romeo seeks to beat the weapons down, Tybalt lunges under his arm
and gives Mercutio the wound that, though ‘not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
a church door,’ makes of him ‘a grave man.’ And so, game to the last, with jests
and maledictions mingling on his lips, the gallant spirit ‘aspires the clouds,’ and
the scene darkens as he disappears. Once again, and the episode is Shakspere’s
own, fate has made mock of Romeo, but her fury is yet far from spent. Tybalt
re-enters in triumph, and Romeo, maddened by the thought of Mercutio slain
in his quarrel and through his intervention, turns on the murderer and sends his

soul to keep company with his victim’s. Then the horror of the situation flashes
upon him, and he rushes off with the agonized cry on his lips, ‘O, I am fortune’s
fool.’ And, as after the earlier fray, the Prince again enters, with Capulets and
Montagues on either hand. Death is too heavy a penalty for so provoked an
offence, but the stern alternative is perpetual banishment, and that to Romeo is
very death in life.
From the hurtle of steel under the open sky we pass to Juliet’s solitary watch-
chamber, whence she leans out with eyes fixed on the westward sloping sun, that
seems to sink so slowly to his grave. And as she gazes, there floats from the lips
of the maiden wife the epithalamium, the marriage hymn which no voice save her
own could sing over her strange and stolen bridal. Passionate is her invocation,
passionate as the blood bating in her cheeks, but pure—pure as her own stainless
maidenhood. Love with Shakspere rose from the first high above the level of
sense where Marlowe had held it down, but it never floats away into a bloodless
abstraction. It is the travail of one being to be united to another in body, soul,
and spirit, and this complex longing is frankly made articulate in Juliet’s lyric to
‘Night.’ ‘A heart,’ it has been finely said, ‘may be as pure as snow or as pure as
flame, and Juliet’s is of the latter kind.’
The reverie is abruptly broken by the entrance of the Nurse with confused
babble of lamentation, whence at last there surges to the surface the news of
Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment. In fierce revulsion of feeling Juliet for
the moment launches forth reproaches against her husband, but the frigid chain
of meaningless antitheses that issues from her lips proves that her anger has
as little pith as Romeo’s early love which found similar expression. The instant
that the Nurse begins to follow her lead, she recants, and eagerly catches at the
proposal to send to him where he is hid at Laurence’s cell.
There Romeo lies ‘with his own tears made drunk’ in the very luxury of
woe, hugging, as it were, his sentence of banishment deliriously to him, and
battening on its stored up misery. He is utterly unmanned; and those who, like
Kreyssig, see in the play a scientific diagnosis of emotion, point to Romeo as the
example of the ruin wrought in a life which makes the blunder of taking love
as the sum total of existence. But in this scene Shakspere follows Brooke with
unusual closeness, and the original responsibility for the not very edifying picture
of Romeo in his collapse rests with the poet rather than the dramatist. Indeed
Shakspere, as compared with Brooke, takes a more sympathetic view of Romeo’s
distracted mood, and the Friar’s conventional counsels and proffer of ‘philosophy’
as a balm for the heartache are met with the pregnant rejoinder, ‘Thou canst not
speak of that thou dost not feel.’ But what philosophy cannot do is effected by
the thought of a last meeting with Juliet. Over that meeting itself, which Brooke
reports in full, Shakspere with fine reticence draws the veil: at the threshold of
the marriage chamber his muse ever stays her foot. All that is made known to us,
and all that we need to know is the ineffable sorrow of the parting at dawn. Here

again Shakspere has chosen a lyric mould, borrowing, perhaps unconsciously, the
favourite Provençal ‘dawn-song’ wherein two lovers debate whether the daylight
hour of parting be already come. But though the form be one of Shakspere’s
many debts to mediaevalism, his alone is the magical melody of lines, which
distil at once love’s quintessential rapture and its infinite sum of pain. But the
bitter-sweet parting is over at last, and Romeo climbs down the rope-ladder. As
he touches the ground, again from Juliet’s lips rises the presaging cry:
‘O God, I have an ill-divining soul:

Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.’
But vague presentiments soon sink in present fear. Lady Capulet enters with the
news that Juliet is to be consoled for Tybalt’s death by being made the joyful
bride of Paris on Thursday next. Barely has the girl-wife time to answer in words
of double meaning that when she marries
‘It shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate,

Rather than Paris,’
when her father bursts in to hear how she has received his ‘decree.’ Capulet has
hitherto shown no lack of tenderness to his daughter, and the device of the
marriage has been well-intentioned enough, but resistance inflames his autocratic
temper into almost frenzied irritability. With volley upon volley of coarse abuse
he shouts down the girl, the pallor on whose cheeks earns for her the epithets
of ‘green-sickness carrion’ and ‘tallow-face.’ In vain Juliet pleads at his feet for
mercy; equally in vain she appeals to her mother whose stony silence is as cruel
as the lash of Capulet’s tongue. Only one friend is left to her, the Nurse, and to
her she turns in words of simple, imploring earnestness,
‘O God, O Nurse, how shall this be prevented?’
But the sensuous element in the Nurse’s affection for her young mistress betrays
her at the critical moment; the thought of a second marriage with a lovely
gentleman, to whom Romeo is a ‘dishclout,’ has an irresistible fascination for
her; the first husband dead or useless, it is the very height of luck to get another.
The Nurse has indeed given Juliet marvellous much comfort: the gross proposal
teaches her the secret strength of her own stainless love, and with a solemn
‘Amen’ she isolates herself from the whole Capulet household for ever. At a
single shock the girl is transformed into the heroic woman.
Her instinct guides her to the Friar for help: he who has made her Romeo’s
wife can surely teach her how to keep this new wooer at bay. At the cell she

meets the County himself, who has come to make preparation for the marriage
rite, and who with confident familiarity salutes her as ‘my lady and my wife.’
Steeled to perfect outward self-control she answers with incisive badinage, but
the door once shut on Paris, she utters the agonized cry of one ‘past hope, past
cure, past help.’ The breakdown is only for a moment, and the Friar’s plan for
her salvation, desperate though it be, rekindles her dauntless spirit. Eagerly she
grasps the phial with the opiate that is to lull her into the very counterfeit of
death. ‘Give me, give me! O tell not me of fear.’ And with the same unfaltering
resolve, in the solitude and silence of her own chamber, she drinks the strange
draught. For a brief space her courage falters as she conjures up a vision of the
charnel-house and its horrors, but there flashes before her gaze the image of
Tybalt’s ghost ranging for revenge on Romeo, and she empties the vial with a
confused sense that she is rushing to her husband’s aid:
‘Stay, Tybalt, stay.

Romeo, I come: this do I drink to thee.’
So when the Nurse enters to wake Juliet on Wednesday morning for the bridal
with Paris she is found lying in seeming death. And from lips lately so cruel or
so perversely kind there rises a chorus of hollow lamentation, couched in that
interjectional verbiage which Shakspere uses throughout the play to mark unreal
emotion of whatever kind. Amid such a mockery of sorrow Juliet is borne forth
to her mock funeral in the vault of the Capulets.
The Friar’s plans have been skilfully laid, but it is now his turn, for all
his craft, to become ‘fortune’s fool.’ His messenger to Romeo is accidentally
delayed, and meanwhile Balthasar hastens to Mantua. Once again, as on the
eve of his first meeting with his love, Romeo has had a dream, but now—and
it is fortune’s most satiric stroke—it presages joyful news at hand. In answer
to this presage comes Balthasar’s announcement that Juliet ‘is well,’ for her
body sleeps in Capulet’s monument, and her immortal part is with the angels.
The malice of fortune has dealt its most exquisite blow, and the wretched man
whom it has hunted from point to point now at last turns to bay: ‘Is it e’en
so? then I defy you, stars!’ To-night he will lie with Juliet: a poison phial will
invalidate all decrees of banishment. But Fortune does not leave her victim’s
challenge unanswered. At the door of the Capulets’ monument (and again the
episode is Shakspere’s addition) Romeo chances upon Paris, who has come to
strew flowers by his lady’s bier. Gentle appeals to fly are met with violence, and
again Romeo is fain to redden his sword with an adversary’s life-blood. He
has come to offer Death a second victim, but its detestable maw has claimed
a third. The young, the fair, the loving—these are they for whom its jaws gape
widest, and as Romeo turns to gaze on the face of his bride, with ‘beauty’s
ensign’ yet crimson in her lips and in her cheeks, one last gorgeous flash of

the old fancy leaps up in the thought that Death, not Paris, is his rival for
Juliet’s hand:
‘Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?’
Juliet had drained her phial, that she might hasten between her lover and Tybalt’s
angry ghost; so Romeo tosses off the poison to shield his wife from the caresses
of the grim power, that reigns in ‘this palace of dim night.’ The drugs are quick,
and with but one kiss Romeo shakes off ‘the yoke of inauspicious stars’ for ever.
Yet his death itself is a counter in Fortune’s malignant game, which a few
added moments of life would have spoilt. Juliet awakes only to hear from the lips
of the Friar the confession that old heads as well as young hearts may be baffled
in their purposes:
‘A greater Power than we can contradict

Hath thwarted our intents.’
Her husband indeed lies in her bosom, but his immortal part has gone the way
that she had only feigned to go. She has wakened to find the world empty of
all that gave it glory: there is nothing left but to sink back into sleep, the self-
sought everlasting sleep of death. And when all is over, as the grey dawn begins
to glimmer in the sky, again and for the last time, Montagues and Capulets meet
face to face, and gaze upon the ruin that the hate of the houses has wrought. In
the infinite pity of the spectacle even mourning is hushed: the fiery greybeards
bow the head in silence, while the Prince sternly upbraids them with the tragic
issue of their strife. The friar too, when he has briefly told his tale, is dumb;
moralizing maxims can avail nothing in the sight of those fair young bodies
stretched in death. But sentimental elegiacs would be equally out of place. The
story unfolded has been one of destiny. No a priori ideas that Shakspere is
pre-eminently the poet of free will as opposed to necessity should prevent us
recognizing that in Romeo and Juliet, following the steps of Brooke, and treating
a characteristically mediaeval theme, he has given to Fate a prominence unique
in his writings. The lovers have been ‘star-crossed,’ and in their ‘misadventured
piteous overthrows’ they merit neither blame nor praise. Still less does Shakspere
explicitly strike the transcendental note of the modern poet that ‘Love is all, and
Death is nought.’ Yet he does not leave us bowed in barren sorrow. Over the
dead bodies of their children, Montague and Capulet clasp hands, and the family
vendetta is stayed for ever. The love of ‘true and faithful’ Juliet and her Romeo
has been the love spoken of in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

‘Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,

Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.’
But lightning, the elemental force, though it carry death and terror with it,
purges and purifies the world’s atmosphere. So is it with the equally elemental
force of love.
Notes
1. See previous note.
2. The further question arises. Does this quarto of 1597 do justice to the play
as it stood in that year, or is it an imperfect version? For in 1599 appeared a second
quarto edition, ‘newly corrected, augmented, and amended,’ which forms the basis
of our present text of the play. In many passages the two quartos are absolutely iden-
tical, in others the later edition gives in expanded form speeches which the earlier
had only outlined, and in a few scenes, such as the marriage of Romeo and Juliet at
the Friar’s cell, and the lamentation over Juliet’s supposed dead body, they essentially
differ. At first sight the inference would be that Shakspere, having put into print in
1597 the result of his labours up to that date, had been still attracted by the theme,
and had given it further elaboration, which took final form in 1599. But various pas-
sages which occur only in the second quarto are not such as Shakspere’s more mature
hand would have been at all likely to add. Among these is Lady Capulet’s fantastic
description of Paris in rhyming couplets (Act i. Scene 3). On the other hand, several
of the very finest scenes, such as the dialogues between Romeo and Juliet after the
ball and at their last interview, are substantially the same in both quartos. There is
thus great plausibility in Daniel’s conjecture, in his edition of the parallel texts, that
the quarto of 1597 is a pirated version ‘made up partly from copies of portions of the
original play, partly from recollection and from notes taken during the performance.’
The quarto of 1599 gives the true representation of the play, though it had ‘received
some sight augmentations, and in some few places’ (those where there is a broad
difference between the two versions) ‘must have been entirely rewritten.’
3. An account of the earlier versions of the story is given in Dowden’s essay on
Romeo and Juliet in his Transcripts and Studies, to which I am indebted.
QQQ

Romeo and Juliet in the
Twentieth Century
q
Shakespearean criticism of the twentieth century is vast and richly varied,

ranging from in-depth psychoanalytical studies of character to detailed exami-
nations of the ways in which history, philosophy, politics, and gender relate to
the time in which the plays were written. Discussed below are but a few of the
century’s best and most interesting examinations of Romeo and Juliet.
At the beginning of the century, the poet Walter de la Mare published an
insightful poetic analysis of the character of the nurse. In “Juliet’s Nurse,” de la
Mare portrays the nurse as living a second childhood, and a very tragic one at
that, since she has lost her daughter. Her only recourse now is to gossip and to
find solace in a flood of memories: “There’s not a name but calls a tale to mind.”
Another poet, the famous American Robert Penn Warren, cites in particular
the language of Romeo and Juliet in the midst of his meditation on the purity of
poetry.
Arguing against those critics who see Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy due to a
“predominance of accident over character,” Harold C. Goddard’s essay maintains
that the theme of the play is about the relationship of love and violence. In
support of his thesis that Shakespeare presents no ordinary love story, Goddard
frames the central issue in terms of the unconscious mind and maintains that
dreams are the vehicle for gaining access to the characters. With respect to the
famous Queen Mab passage, Goddard maintains that Shakespeare meant it to
be an exposition of Mercutio’s imagination; Romeo, on the other hand, simply
believes in his dreams—“love’s shadows.” “[A]ll the dreams and premonitions of
both Romeo and Juliet throughout the play, . . . come from a fountain of wisdom
somewhere beyond time.” Goddard concludes that fear is the true malaise in
Romeo and Juliet, be it Romeo’s anxiety about a code of honor, or the dread of the
plague that causes Friar Laurence’s letter to be miscarried, or, finally, the fear of
poverty that leads the apothecary to sell the deadly poison.
Harry Levin sees Romeo and Juliet as Shakespeare’s first successful attempt
at tragedy. He underscores the novelty of the play, stating that, in Shakespeare’s
time, romance was always the subject matter of comedies. As Levin points out,
Shakespeare was in effect overturning convention, as exemplified in the opposition
129

within the play of youth and impatience versus the formality of books and stock
Elizabethan phrases for love.
Also emphasizing the many references to reading and books, Norman N.
Holland asserts that Romeo and Juliet is a highly artificial play and, thus, a weak
tragedy. Citing such early instances as Juliet’s statement to Romeo that he
kisses “by the book” and Mercutio’s complaint that Tybalt “fights by the book
of arithmetic,” Holland connects the formality of these statements to the play’s
poetic structure—its conscious use of a dialogue imbued with rhyme and lyrics—
and argues that Romeo and Juliet is preoccupied with wordplay and is, therefore,
the product of Shakespeare’s lyric, rather than dramatic, imagination. Holland
concludes that what makes for the tragic turn of events in this play is a mishap
related to the written word itself, when Friar John, carrying an important letter
to Romeo, is accidentally quarantined.
Francis Fergusson’s essay outlines many of the major themes in Romeo and
Juliet. Among those themes is the importance of the setting in bringing together
the darkest and most foreboding aspects of Romeo and Juliet. Fergusson maintains
that the last scene of Act I allows Shakespeare to introduce the dual theme of
a fated love and violence. Fergusson also points out that by compressing the
action into five days, Shakespeare is able to initiate the breathless momentum
that is carried through to the end: “By that means alone he achieves the rhythm
of youth, when patience is unknown and every experience of joy or pain is met
headlong, for the first time.”
Susan Snyder’s essay is a discussion of the way in which Romeo and Juliet is
transformed from a comedy into a tragedy, a conversion of genre that Shakespeare
would never again attempt after this play. Beginning with the premise that tragedy
presents inevitably heroic characters while comedy is anything but predictable,
Snyder marks the turning point in the play at Mercutio’s death, as his demise
engenders all other deaths that follow. To be sure, other secondary characters,
such as Friar Laurence and the nurse, help to realize the various calamities in
which they participate: “For Shakespeare, tragedy is usually a matter of both
character and circumstance, a fatal interaction of man and moment. But in this
play, although the central characters have their weaknesses, their destruction
does not really stem from these weaknesses.”
James H. Seward lauds Shakespeare as a tragic poet whose interests lie
in human beauty and the torment associated with its destruction. Focusing
on what he describes as the most difficult part of the play, the balcony scene
in Act II, Seward agrees with earlier critics who mark a change in Romeo’s
character from an adolescent infatuation with Rosaline to a true and steadfast
love for Juliet. However, Seward maintains Shakespeare is making a statement
regarding the inherent danger of playing with passion and the consequences
of what the lovers might do as a result of these intense emotions: “Romeo’s
capacity for love, a capacity which is so movingly illustrated in this scene and

Romeo and Juliet in the Twentieth Century 131
which still shines through the murkiness of the passion, defines in human
terms the meaning of the tragedy which appears to be building before their
eyes.”
The great Canadian critic Northrop Frye begins his discussion of Romeo
and Juliet by describing the opening scene of the play, which seems to exhibit
the political lesson that, when the aristocracy is embroiled in a struggle among
itself, chaos inevitably reigns until someone appears to restore law and order.
Frye goes on to explain that the action of the play is far more important than
characterization and to discuss the complex nature of love in the early Middle
Ages, with reference to Dante and Petrarch, before offering an uplifting image
of the tragic nature of a perfect love, which by its terms cannot survive this world
without being corrupted: “It takes the greatest rhetoric of the greatest poets to
bring us a vision of the tragic heroic, and such rhetoric doesn’t make us miserable
but exhilarated, not crushed but enlarged in spirit.”
Thomas McAlindon argues that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is
incommensurate with the facts presented to us and maintains that what we have
is an image of the world that lacks the potential for high tragedy. According to
McAlindon, Shakespeare’s solution for this incommensurability is to transform
Verona into a microcosm of the world, so that personal incidents such as the
feuding between the Capulets and the Montagues are magnified and assume a
universal significance. McAlindon identifies the tragic elements as time itself
and the victims it claims, rather than some inherent flaw within the characters:
“The limitation of this play as tragedy is that the compulsion to embrace a fatal
destiny is too closely identified with mere haste, and too dependent on verbal
and imagistic expression. In later tragedies, by contrast, it is deeply embedded
in character and linked to a capacity for violence and destruction which is truly
frightening.”
Maynard Mack discusses the genre of Romeo and Juliet by examining the
comedic elements within an ultimately tragic story. Summarizing many of
the character types one meets in comedy, as opposed to the individualized
characters that mark tragic drama, Mack argues that the distinction between
these two competing theatrical “universes” is blurred and difficult to discern.
He cites such examples as the moralizing yet effectual friar and the Capulets’
detached mourning for Juliet, whom the audience knows is still alive. Both of
these lend a strong comic aspect to otherwise catastrophic events. Moreover,
the incorporation of conventions and stylized expressions typical of romances
adds a further confusing element to this complex generic mix. Ultimately, Mack
argues that the play works by virtue of the fact that these contrary worlds are
placed side by side, none interfering with the other: “Mercutio never learns
of Romeo’s mature love for Juliet, and his death is well behind us when we
encounter theirs. Perhaps the playwright feared that either view, if brought too
close to its opposite, would shatter.”

Harold Bloom’s comments emphasize the importance and power of Juliet,

who, Bloom claims “is the play’s triumph, since she inaugurates Shakespeare’s
extraordinary procession of vibrant, life-enhancing women.” Bloom also makes
an interesting reference to Dryden’s seventeenth-century claim that Shakespeare
said he was forced to kill off Mercutio early in the play: “Shakespeare is reputed
to have said that he had to kill off Mercutio lest Mercutio kill the play. I think it
likelier that the full revelation of Juliet’s greatness made it necessary to dispose of
the prurient Mercutio, whose lively blasphemies against the splendors of Juliet’s
love might well have wearied us.”
A good deal of the Shakespearean criticism in the latter decades of the
twentieth century followed new fashions in academia, with such critical approaches
as new historicism, feminist criticism, and cultural studies. Issues addressed by
new historicists regarding the play included coming-of-age and sexuality in
Elizabethan England, as well as themes of punishment by exile and the terrible
psychological consequences for those exiled. Some critics also examined historical
details, such as whether there is any historical basis to the nurse’s statement about
an earthquake. Feminist critics focused on an appreciation of Juliet’s character,
often claiming that she becomes the more powerful of the two lovers, exhibiting
more control and awareness of reality than Romeo. Nevertheless, many of the
enduring questions, such as how to define the play and where to mark the
transition from comic to tragic, also reappeared up into the twenty-first century.
1902—Walter de la Mare. “Juliet’s Nurse,”

from Characters from Shakespeare
Walter John de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, short-story
writer, and novelist. He is the author of such novels as Henry Brocken
(1904) and Memoirs of a Midget (1921), as well as poetry collections,
including Songs of Childhood (1902) and The Listeners (1912).
In old-world nursery vacant now of children,

With posied walls, familiar, fair, demure,
And facing southward o’er romantic streets,
Sits yet and gossips winter’s dusk away
One gloomy, vast, glossy, and wise, and sly:
And at her side a cherried country cousin.
Her tongue claps ever like a ram’s sweet bell;
There’s not a name but calls a tale to mind—
Some marrowy patty of farce or melodram;
There’s not a soldier but hath babes in view;

There’s not on earth what minds not of the midwife:

“O, widowhood that left me still espoused!”
Beauty she sighs o’er, and she sighs o’er gold;
Gold will buy all things, even a sweet husband,
Else only Heaven is left and—farewell youth!
Yet, strangely, in that money-haunted head,

The sad, gemmed crucifix and incense blue
Is childhood come again. Her memory
Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs,
But twig stilled never. And to see her face,
Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands,
Ever like ’lighting doves, and her small eyes—
Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious—
To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom,
And paint disaster with uplifted whites,
Is life’s epitome. She prates and prates—
A waterbrook of words o’er twelve small pebbles.
And when she dies—some grey, long, summer evening,
When the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk,
’Neath night’s faint tapers—then her body shall
Lie stiff with silks of sixty thrifty years.
QQQ
1943—Robert Penn Warren.

“Pure and Impure Poetry,” from Kenyon Review
Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was a novelist, critic, and, according
to Harold Bloom, one of the most important American poets of the
twentieth century. He is probably best known for his novel All the King’s
Men. He was allied with such literary movements as the New Critics and
the Fugitive/Agrarian school.
Critics are rarely faithful to their labels and their special strategies. Usually
the critic will confess that no one strategy—the psychological, the moralistic,
the formalistic, the historical—or combination of strategies, will quite work
the defeat of the poem. For the poem is like the monstrous Orillo in Boiardo’s
Orlando Innamorato. When the sword lops off any member of the monster, that
member is immediately rejoined to the body, and the monster is as formidable

as ever. But the poem is even more formidable than the monster, for Orillo’s
adversary finally gained a victory by an astonishing feat of dexterity: he slashed
off both the monster’s arms and quick as a wink seized them and flung them
into the river. The critic who vaingloriously trusts his method to account for the
poem, to exhaust the poem, is trying to emulate this dexterity: he thinks that he,
too, can win by throwing the lopped-off arms into the river. But he is doomed to
failure. Neither fire nor water will suffice to prevent the rejoining of the mutilated
members to the monstrous torso. There is only one way to conquer the monster:
you must eat it, bones, blood, skin, pelt, and gristle. And even then the monster
is not dead, for it lives in you, is assimilated into you, and you are different, and
somewhat monstrous yourself, for having eaten it.
So the monster will always win, and the critic knows this. He does not want
to win. He knows that he must always play stooge to the monster. All he wants
to do is to give the monster—the poem—a chance to exhibit again its miraculous
power, which is poetry.
With this fable, I shall begin by observing that poetry wants to be pure. And
it always succeeds in this ambition. In so far as we have poetry at all, it is always
pure poetry; that is, it is not non-poetry. The poetry of Shakespeare, the poetry
of Pope, the poetry of Herrick, is pure, in so far as it is poetry at all. We call the
poetry “higher” or “lower,” we say “more powerful” or “less powerful” about it,
and we are, no doubt, quite right in doing so. The souls that form the great rose
of Paradise are seated in banks and tiers of ascending blessedness, but they are
all saved, they are all perfectly happy; they are all “pure,” for they have all been
purged of mortal taint. This is not to say, however, that if we get poetry from only
one source, say Shakespeare, such a single source ought to suffice us, in as much
as we can always appeal to it; or that, since all poetry is equally pure, we engage
in a superfluous labor in trying to explore or create new sources of poetry. No,
for we can remember that every soul in the great rose is precious in the eyes of
God. No soul is the substitute for another.
Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least, most of them do not
want to be too pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the
elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward
that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to
contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end. Are we then
to conclude that neutral or recalcitrant elements are simply an index to human
frailty, and that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems, which
would, then, be perfectly pure? No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our
world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would
appear necessary. They are not even as pure as they might be in this imperfect
world. They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words and
ugly thoughts, colloquialisms, clichés, sterile technical terms, headwork and

argument, self-contradictions, clevernesses, irony, realism—all things which call

us back to the world of prose and imperfection.
Sometimes a poet will reflect on this state of affairs, and grieve. He will decide
that he, at least, will try to make one poem as pure as possible. So he writes:
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
The fire-fly wakens; waken thou with me.
We know the famous garden—the garden in Tennyson’s “Princess.” We know

how all nature conspires here to express the purity of the moment: how the
milk-white peacock glimmers like a ghost, and how like a ghost the unnamed
“she” glimmers on to her tryst; how earth lies “all Danaë to the stars,” as the
beloved’s heart lies open to the lover; and how, in the end, the lily folds up her
sweetness, “and slips into the bosom of the lake,” as the lovers are lost in the
sweet dissolution of love.
And we know another poet and another garden. Or perhaps it is the same
garden, after all, viewed by a different poet, Shelley.
I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
We remember how, again, all nature conspires, how the wandering airs “faint,”
how the Champak’s odors “pine,” how the nightingale’s complaint “dies upon
her heart,” as the lover will die upon the beloved’s heart. Nature here strains out
of nature, it wants to be called by another name, it wants to spiritualize itself by
calling itself another name. How does the lover get to the chamber window? He
refuses to say how, in his semi-somnambulistic daze, he got there. He blames,
he says, “a spirit in my feet,” and hastens to disavow any knowledge of how that
spirit operates. In any case, he arrives at the chamber window. Subsequent events
and the lover’s reaction toward them are somewhat hazy. We know only that the
lover, who faints and fails at the opening of the last stanza and who asks to be
lifted from the grass by a more enterprising beloved, is in a condition of delectable
passivity, in which distinctions blur out in the “purity” of the moment.

Let us turn to another garden: the place, Verona; the time, a summer night,
with full moon. The lover speaks:
But, soft! what light through yonder

window breaks?
It is the east . . .
But we know the rest, and know that this garden, in which nature for the
moment conspires again with the lover, is the most famous of them all, for
the scene is justly admired for its purity of effect, for giving us the very essence
of young, untarnished love. Nature conspires beneficently here, but we may
remember that beyond the garden wall strolls Mercutio, he can celebrate Queen
Mab, but who is always aware that nature has other names as well as the names
the pure poets and pure lovers put upon her. And we remember that Mercutio,
outside the wall, has just said:
. . . ’twould anger him

To raise a spirit in his mistress’ circle
Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
Till she had laid it and conjured it down.
Mercutio has made a joke, a bawdy joke. That is bad enough, but worse, he has
made his joke witty and, worst of all, intellectually complicated in its form. Realism,
wit, intellectual complication—these are the enemies of the garden purity.
But the poet has not only let us see Mercutio outside the garden wall. Within
the garden itself, when the lover invokes nature, when he spiritualizes and
innocently trusts her, and says,
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear,
the lady herself replies,
O! Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,

That monthly changes in her circled orb.
The lady distrusts “pure” poems, nature spiritualized into forgetfulness. She has,
as it were, a rigorous taste in metaphor, too; she brings a logical criticism to bear
on the metaphor which is too easy; the metaphor must prove itself to her, must
be willing to subject itself to scrutiny beyond the moment’s enthusiasm. She
injects the impurity of an intellectual style into the lover’s pure poem.
And we must not forget the voice of the nurse, who calls from within, a voice
which, we discover, is the voice of expediency, of half-measures, of the view that
circumstances alter cases—the voice of prose and imperfection.

It is time to ask ourselves if the celebrated poetry of this scene, which as

poetry is pure, exists despite the impurities of the total composition, if the
effect would be more purely poetic were the nurse and Mercutio absent and
the lady a more sympathetic critic of pure poems. I do not think so. The effect
might even be more vulnerable poetically if the impurities were purged away.
Mercutio, the lady, and the nurse are critics of the lover, who believes in pure
poems, but perhaps they are necessary. Perhaps the lover can be accepted only
in their context. The poet seems to say: “I know the worst that can be said
on this subject, and I am giving fair warning. Read at your own risk.” So the
poetry arises from a recalcitrant and contradictory context; and finally involves
that context.
Let us return to one of the other gardens, in which there is no Mercutio
or nurse, and in which the lady is more sympathetic. Let us mar its purity by
installing Mercutio in the shrubbery, from which the poet was so careful to
banish him. You can hear his comment when the lover says:
And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
And we can guess what the wicked tongue would have to say in response to the
last stanza.
It may be that the poet should have made early peace with Mercutio, and
appealed to his better nature. For Mercutio seems to be glad to cooperate with
a poet. But he must be invited; otherwise, he is apt to show a streak of merry
vindictiveness about the finished product. Poems are vulnerable enough at best.
Bright reason mocks them like sun from a wintry sky. They are easily left naked
to laughter when leaves fall in the garden and the cold winds come. Therefore,
they need all the friends they can get, and Mercutio, who is an ally of reason
and who himself is given to mocking laughter, is a good friend for a poem to
have.
On what terms does a poet make his peace with Mercutio? There are about
as many sets of terms as there are good poets. I know that I have loaded the
answer with the word good here, that I have implied a scale of excellence based,
in part at least, on degree of complication. I shall return to this question. For the
moment, however, let us examine an anonymous sixteenth-century poem whose
apparent innocence and simple lyric cry should earn it a place in any anthology
of “pure poetry.”
Western wind, when will thou blow,

The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

The lover, grieving for the absent beloved, cries out for relief. Several kinds
of relief are involved in the appeal to the wind. First, there is the relief that
would be had from the sympathetic manifestation of nature. The lover, in his
perturbation of spirit, invokes the perturbations of nature. He invokes the
beneficent perturbation,
Western wind, when will thou blow,
as Lear invokes the destructive,
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
Second, there is the relief that would be had by the fulfillment of grief—the frost
of grief, the drought of grief broken, the full anguish expressed, then the violence
allayed in the peace of tears. Third, there is the relief that would be had in the
excitement and fulfillment of love itself. There seems to be a contrast between
the first two types of relief and the third type; speaking loosely, we may say that
the first two types are romantic and general, the third type realistic and specific.
So much for the first two lines.
In the last two lines, the lover cries out for the specific solace of his case:
reunion with his beloved. But there is a difference between the two lines. The first
is general, and romantic. The phrase “in my arms” does not seem to mean exactly
what it says. True, it has a literal meaning, if we can look close at the words, but
it is hard to look close because of the romantic aura—the spiritualized mist about
them. But with the last line the perfectly literal meaning suddenly comes into
sharp focus. The mist is rifted and we can look straight at the words, which, we
discover with a slight shock of surprise, do mean exactly what they say. The last
line is realistic and specific. It is not even content to say,
And I in bed again!
It is, rather, more scrupulously specific, and says,
And I in my bed again!
All of this does not go to say that the realistic elements here are to be taken
as canceling, or negating, the romantic elements. There is no ironical leer. The
poem is not a celebration of carnality. It is a faithful lover who speaks. He is
faithful to the absent beloved, and he is also faithful to the full experience of love.
That is, he does not abstract one aspect of the experience and call it the whole
experience. He does not strain nature out of nature; he does not over-spiritualize
nature. This nameless poet would never have said, in the happier days of his love,

that he had been led to his Sweet’s chamber window by “a spirit in my feet”; and
he certainly would not have added the coy disavowal, “who knows how?” But
because the nameless poet refused to overspiritualize nature, we can accept the
spirituality of the poem.
Another poem gives us another problem.
Ah, what avails the sceptered race!

Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.
This is another poem about lost love: a “soft” subject. Now, to one kind of poet
the soft subject presents a sore temptation. Because it is soft in its natural state,
he is inclined to feel that to get at its poetic essence he must make it softer still,
that he must insist on its softness, that he must render it as “pure” as possible. At
first glance, it may seem that Landor is trying to do just that. What he says seems
to be emphatic, unqualified, and open. Not every power, grace, and virtue could
avail to preserve his love. That statement insists on the pathetic contrast. And in
the next stanza, wakefulness and tearfulness are mentioned quite unashamedly,
along with memories and sighs. It is all blurted out, as pure as possible.
But only in the paraphrase is it “blurted.” The actual quality of the first stanza
is hard, not soft. It is a chiseled stanza, in which formality is insisted upon. We
may observe the balance of the first and second lines; the balance of the first half
with the second half of the third line, which recapitulates the structure of the first
two lines; the balance of the two parts of the last line, though here the balance
is merely a rhythmical and not a sense balance as in the preceding instances; the
binders of discreet alliteration, repetition, and assonance. The stanza is built up,
as it were, of units which are firmly defined and sharply separated, phrase by
phrase, line by line. We have the formal control of the soft subject, ritual and
not surrender.
But in the second stanza the rigor of this formality is somewhat abated, as
the more general, speculative emphasis (why cannot pomp, virtue, and grace
avail?) gives way to the personal emphasis, as though the repetition of the
beloved’s name had, momentarily, released the flood of feeling. The first line of
the second stanza spills over into the second; the “wakeful eyes” as subject find
their verb in the next line, “weep,” and the wake-weep alliteration, along with
pause after weep, points up the disintegration of the line, just as it emphasizes

the situation. Then with the phrase “but never see” falling away from the long
thrust of the rhetorical structure to the pause after weep, the poem seems
to go completely soft, the frame is broken. But, even as the poet insists on
“memories and sighs,” in the last two lines he restores the balance. Notice the
understatement of “A night.” It says: “I know that life is a fairly complicated
affair, and that I am committed to it and to its complications. I intend to
stand by my commitment, as a man of integrity, that is, to live despite the
grief. Since life is complicated, I cannot, if I am to live, spare too much time
for indulging grief. I can give a night, but not all nights.” The lover, like the
hero of Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” tears himself
from the temptation of staring into the treacherous, delicious blackness, for
he, too, has “promises to keep.” Or he resembles the Homeric heroes who,
after the perilous passage is made, after their energy has saved their lives, and
after they have beached their craft and eaten their meal, can then set aside an
hour before sleep to mourn the comrades lost by the way—the heroes who, as
Aldous Huxley says, understand realistically a whole truth as contrasted with
a half-truth.
Is this a denial of the depth and sincerity of the grief? The soft reader, who
wants the poem pure, may be inclined to say so. But let us look at the last line
to see what it gives us in answer to this question. The answer seems to lie in the
word consecrate. The meter thrusts this word at us; we observe that two of the
three metrical accents in the line fall on syllables of this word, forcing it beyond
its prose emphasis. The word is important and importance is justified, for the
word tells us that the single night is not merely a lapse into weakness, a trivial
event to be forgotten when the weakness is overcome. It is, rather, an event of
the most extreme and focal importance, an event formally dedicated, “set apart
for sacred uses,” an event by which other events are to be measured. So the word
consecrate formalizes, philosophizes, ritualizes the grief; it specifies what in the
first stanza has been implied by style.
But here is another poem of grief, grief at the death of a child. It is “Bells for
John Whiteside’s Daughter,” by John Crowe Ransom.
There was such speed in her little body,

And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.
Her wars were bruited on our high window.

We looked among orchard trees and beyond,
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud

Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little

Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams, and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!
But now go the bells, and we are ready;

In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.
Another soft subject, softer, if anything, than the subject of “Rose Aylmer,” and it
presents the same problem. But the problem is solved in a different way.
The first stanza is based on two time-honored clichés: first, “Heavens,
won’t that child ever be still, she is driving me distracted”; and second, “She
was such an active, healthy-looking child, who would’ve ever thought she
would just up and die?” In fact, the whole poem develops these clichés, and
exploits, in a backhand fashion, the ironies implicit in their interrelation.
And in this connection, we may note that the fact of the clichés, rather
than more original or profound observations at the root of the poem, is
important; there is in the poem the contrast between the staleness of the
clichés and the shock of the reality. Further, we may note that the second
cliché is an answer, savagely ironical in itself, to the first: the child you wished
would be still is still, despite all that activity which had interrupted your adult
occupations.
But such a savage irony is not the game here. It is too desperate, too naked, in
a word, too pure. And ultimately, it is, in a sense, a meaningless irony if left in its
pure state, because it depends on a mechanical, accidental contrast in nature, void
of moral content. The poem is concerned with modifications and modulations
of this brute, basic irony, modulations and modifications contingent upon an
attitude taken toward it by a responsible human being, the speaker of the poem.
The savagery is masked, or ameliorated.
In this connection, we may observe, first, the phrase “brown study.” It is
not the “frosted flower,” the “marmoreal immobility,” or any one of a thousand
such phrases which would aim for the pure effect. It is merely the brown study
which astonishes—a phrase which denies, as it were, the finality of the situation,
underplays the pathos, and merely reminds one of those moments of childish

pensiveness into which the grownup cannot penetrate. And the phrase itself is a
cliché—the common now echoed in the uncommon.
Next, we may observe that stanzas two, three, and four simply document, with
a busy, yet wavering rhythm (one sentence runs through the three stanzas), the
tireless naughtiness which was once the cause of rebuke, the naughtiness which
disturbed the mature goings-on in the room with the “high window.” But the
naughtiness is now transmuted into a kind of fanciful story-book dream world,
in which geese are whiter than nature, and the grass greener, in which geese
speak in goose language, saying “Alas,” and have apple-dreams. It is a drowsy,
delicious world, in which the geese are bigger than life, and more important. It is
an unreal (now unreal because lost), stylized world. Notice how the phrase “the
little lady with rod” works: the detached primness of “little lady”; the formal,
stiff effect gained by the omission of the article before rod ; the slightly unnatural
use of the word rod itself, which sets some distance between us and the scene
(perhaps with the hint of the fairy story, a magic wand, or a magic rod—not a
common, everyday stick). But the stanzas tie back into the premises of the poem
in other ways. The little girl, in her excess of energy, warred against her shadow.
Is it crowding matters too hard to surmise that the shadow here achieves a sort
of covert symbolic significance? The little girl lost her war against her “shadow,”
which was always with her. Certainly the phrase “tireless heart” has some rich
connotations. And the geese which say “Alas” conspire with the family to deplore
the excessive activity of the child. (They do not conspire to express the present
grief, only the past vexation—an inversion of the method of the pastoral elegy,
or of the method of the first two garden poems.)
The business of the three stanzas, then, may be said to be twofold. First, they
make us believe more fully in the child and therefore in the fact of the grief
itself. They “prove” the grief, and they show the deliciousness of the lost world
which will never look the same from the high window. Second, and contrariwise,
they “transcend” the grief, or at least give a hint of a means for transcending
immediate anguish: the lost world is, in one sense, redeemed out of time; it
enters the pages of the picture book where geese speak, where the untrue is true,
where the fleeting is fixed. What was had cannot, after all, be lost. (By way of
comparison—a comparison which, because extreme, may be helpful—we may
think of the transcendence in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.) The three stanzas,
then, to state it in another way, have validated the first stanza and have prepared
for the last.
The three stanzas have made it possible for us to say, when the bell tolls, “we
are ready.” Some kind of terms, perhaps not the best terms possible but some
kind, has been made with the savage underlying irony. But the terms arrived
at do not prevent the occasion from being a “stern” one. The transcendence is
not absolute, and in the end is possible only because of an exercise of will and
self-control. Because we control ourselves, we can say “vexed” and not some big

word. And the word itself picks up the first of the domestic clichés on which the
poem is based—the outburst of impatience at the naughty child who, by dying,
has performed her most serious piece of naughtiness. But now the word comes
to us charged with the burden of the poem, and further, as re-echoed here by the
phrase “brown study,” charged by the sentence in which it occurs: we are gathered
formally, ritualistically, sternly together to say the word vexed. Vexed becomes the
ritualistic, the summarizing word.
I have used the words pure and impure often in the foregoing pages, and I
confess that I have used them rather loosely. But perhaps it has been evident that
I have meant something like this: the pure poem tries to be pure by excluding,
more or less rigidly, certain elements which might qualify or contradict its
original impulse. In other words, the pure poems want to be, and desperately, all
of a piece. It has also been evident, no doubt, that the kinds of impurity which
are admitted or excluded by the various little anthology pieces which have been
presented, are different in the different poems. This is only to be expected, for
there is not one doctrine of “pure poetry”—not one definition of what constitutes
impurity in poems—but many.
And not all of the doctrines are recent. When, for example, one cites Poe
as the father of the doctrine of pure poetry, one is in error; Poe simply fathered
a particular doctrine of pure poetry. One can find other doctrines of purity
long antedating Poe. When Sir Philip Sidney, for example, legislated against
tragicomedy, he was repeating a current doctrine of purity. When Ben Jonson
told William Drummond that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved
hanging, he was defending another kind of purity; and when Dryden spoke to
save the ear of the fair sex from metaphysical perplexities in amorous poems,
he was defending another kind of purity, just as he was defending another
when he defined the nature of the heroic drama. The eighteenth century had
a doctrine of pure poetry, which may be summed up under the word sublimity,
but which involved two corollary doctrines, one concerning diction and the
other concerning imagery. But at the same time that this century, by means of
these corollary doctrines, was tidying up and purifying the doctrine derived by
Longinus, it was admitting into the drama certain impurities which the theorists
of the heroic drama would not have admitted.
But when we think of the modern doctrine of pure poetry, we usually think
of Poe, as critic and poet, perhaps of Shelley, of the Symbolists, of the Abbé
Bremond, perhaps of Pater, and certainly of George Moore and the Imagists.
We know Poe’s position: the long poem is “a flat contradiction in terms,” because
intense excitement, which is essential in poetry, cannot be long maintained; the
moral sense and the intellect function more satisfactorily in prose than in poetry,
and, in fact, “Truth” and the “Passions,” which are for Poe associated with the
intellect and the moral sense, may actually be inimical to poetry; vagueness,
suggestiveness are central virtues, for poetry has for “its object an indefinite

instead of a definite pleasure”; poetry is not supposed to undergo close inspection,

only a cursory glance, for it, “above all things, is a beautiful painting whose tints,
to minute inspection, are confusion worse confounded, but start out boldly to
the cursory glance of the connoisseur”; poetry aspires toward music, since it
is concerned with “indefinite sensations, to which music is essential, since the
comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception”; melancholy is
the most poetical effect and enters into all the higher manifestations of beauty.
We know, too, the Abbé Bremond’s mystical interpretation, and the preface to
George Moore’s anthology, and the Imagist manifesto.
But these views are not identical. Shelley, for instance, delights in the
imprecision praised and practiced by Poe, but he has an enormous appetite
for “Truth” and the “Passions,” which are, except for purposes of contrast,
excluded by Poe. The Imagist manifesto, while excluding ideas, endorses
precision rather than vagueness in rendering the image, and admits diction
and objects which would have seemed impure to Poe and to many poets
of the nineteenth century, and does not take much stock in the importance
of verbal music. George Moore emphasizes the objective aspect of his pure
poetry, which he describes as “something which the poet creates outside his
own personality,” and this is opposed to the subjective emphasis in Poe and
Shelley; but he shares with both an emphasis on verbal music, and with the
former a distaste for ideas.
But more recently, the notion of poetic purity has emerged in other contexts,
contexts which sometimes obscure the connection of the new theories with the
older theories. For instance, Max Eastman has a theory. “Pure poetry,” he says in
The Literary Mind, “is the pure effort to heighten consciousness.” Mr. Eastman,
we discover elsewhere in his book, would ban idea from poetry, but his motive is
different from, say, the motive of Poe, and the difference is important: Poe would
kick out the ideas because the ideas hurt the poetry, and Mr. Eastman would kick
out the ideas because the poetry hurts the ideas. Only the scientist, he tells us, is
entitled to have ideas on any subject, and the rest of the citizenry must wait to
be told what attitude to take toward the ideas which they are not permitted to
have except at second-hand. Literary truth, he says, is truth which is “uncertain
or comparatively unimportant.” But he does assign the poet a function—to
heighten consciousness. In the light of this context we would have to rewrite his
original definition: pure poetry is the pure effort to heighten consciousness, but
the consciousness which is heightened must not have any connection with ideas,
must involve no attitude toward any ideas.
Furthermore, to assist the poet in fulfilling the assigned function, Mr. Eastman
gives him a somewhat sketchy doctrine of “pure” poetic diction. For instance, the
word bloated is not admissible into a poem because it is, as he testifies, “sacred to
the memory of dead fish,” and the word tangy is, though he knows not exactly
how, “intrinsically poetic.” The notion of a vocabulary which is intrinsically

poetic seems, with Mr. Eastman, to mean a vocabulary which indicates agreeable
or beautiful objects. So we might rewrite the original definition to read: pure
poetry is the pure effort to heighten consciousness, but the consciousness which
is heightened must be a consciousness exclusively of agreeable or beautiful
objects—certainly not a consciousness of any ideas.
In a recent book, The Idiom of Poetry, Frederick Pottle has discussed the
question of pure poetry. He distinguishes another type of pure poetry in
addition to the types already mentioned. He calls it the “Elliptical,” and would
include in it symbolist and metaphysical poetry (old and new) and some
work by poets such as Collins, Blake, and Browning. He observes—without
any perjorative implication, for he is a critical relativist and scarcely permits
himself the luxury of evaluative judgments—that the contemporary product
differs from older examples of the elliptical type in that “the modern poet goes
much further in employing private experiences or ideas than would formerly
have been thought legitimate.” To the common reader, he says, “the prime
characteristic of this kind of poetry is not the nature of its imagery but its
obscurity: its urgent suggestion that you add something to the poem without
telling you what that something is.” This omitted “something” he interprets
as the prose “frame”—to use his word—the statement of the occasion, the
logical or narrative transitions, the generalized application derived from the
poem, etc. In other words, this type of pure poetry contends that “the effect
would be more powerful if we could somehow manage to feel the images fully
and accurately without having the effect diluted by any words put in to give
us a ‘meaning’—that is, if we could expel all the talk about the imaginative
realization and have the pure realization itself.”
For the moment I shall pass the question of the accuracy of Mr. Pottle’s
description of the impulse of Elliptical Poetry and present the question which
ultimately concerns him. How pure does poetry need to be in practice? That is
the question which Mr. Pottle asks. He answers by saying that a great degree
of impurity may be admitted, and cites our famous didactic poems, The Faerie
Queene, An Essay on Man, The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Excursion. That is the
only answer which the relativist, and nominalist, can give. Then he turns to what
he calls the hardest question in the theory of poetry: What kind of prosaism
is acceptable and what is not? His answer, which he advances very modestly, is
this:
. . . the element of prose is innocent and even salutary when it appears

as—take your choice of three metaphors—a background on which the
images are projected, or a frame in which they are shown, or a thread
on which they are strung. In short, when it serves a structural purpose.
Prose in a poem seems offensive to me when . . . the prosaisms are sharp,
obvious, individual, and ranked coordinately with the images.

At first glance this looks plausible, and the critic has used the sanctified word
structural. But at second glance we may begin to wonder what the sanctified word
means to the critic. It means something rather mechanical—background, frame,
thread. The structure is a showcase, say a jeweler’s showcase, in which the little
jewels of poetry are exhibited, the images. The showcase shouldn’t be ornamental
itself (“sharp, obvious, individual,” Mr. Pottle says), for it would then distract us
from the jewels; it should be chastely designed, and the jewels should repose
on black velvet and not on flowered chintz. But Mr. Pottle doesn’t ask what the
relation among the bright jewels should be. Not only does the showcase bear no
relation to the jewels, but the jewels, apparently, bear no relation to each other.
Each one is a shining little focus of heightened interest, and all together they
make only such a pattern, perhaps, as may make it easier for the eye to travel
from one little jewel to the next, when the time comes to move on. Structure
becomes here simply a device of salesmanship, a well-arranged showcase.
It is all mechanical. And this means that Mr. Pottle, after all, is himself
an exponent of pure poetry. He locates the poetry simply in the images, the
nodes of “pure realization.” This means that what he calls the “element of prose”
includes definition of situation, movement of narrative, logical transition, factual
description, generalization, ideas. Such things, for him, do not participate in
the poetic effect of the poem; in fact, they work against the poetic effect, and
so, though necessary as a frame, should be kept from being “sharp, obvious,
individual.”
I have referred to The Idiom of Poetry, first, because it is such an admirable
and provocative book, sane, lucid, generous-spirited, and second, because, to
my mind, it illustrates the insidiousness with which a doctrine of pure poetry
can penetrate into the theory of a critic who is suspicious of such a doctrine.
Furthermore, I have felt that Mr. Pottle’s analysis might help me to define the
common denominator of the various doctrines of pure poetry.
That common denominator seems to be the belief that poetry is an essence
that is to be located at some particular place in a poem, or in some particular
element. The exponent of pure poetry persuades himself that he has determined
the particular something in which the poetry inheres, and then proceeds to
decree that poems shall be composed, as nearly as possible, of that element and of
nothing else. If we add up the things excluded by various critics and practitioners,
we get a list like this:
1. ideas, truths, generalizations, “meaning”

2. precise, complicated, “intellectual” images
3. unbeautiful, disagreeable, or neutral materials
4. situation, narrative, logical transition
5. realistic details, exact descriptions, realism in general
6. shifts in tone or mood

7. irony
8. metrical variation, dramatic adaptations of rhythm, cacophony, etc.
9. meter itself
10. subjective and personal elements
No one theory of pure poetry excludes all of these items, and, as a matter
of fact, the items listed are not on the same level of importance. Nor do the
items always bear the same interpretation. For example, if one item seems to
be central to discussions of pure poetry, it is the first: “ideas,” it is said, “are not
involved in the poetic effect, and may even be inimical to it.” But this view can
be interpreted in a variety of ways. If it is interpreted as simply meaning that the
paraphrase of a poem is not equivalent to the poem, that the poetic gist is not
to be defined as the statement embodied in the poem with the sugar-coating as
bait, then the view can be held by opponents as well as exponents of any theory of
pure poetry. We might scale down from this interpretation to the other extreme
interpretation that the poem should merely give the sharp image in isolation. But
there are many complicated and confused variations possible between the two
extremes. There is, for example, the interpretation that “ideas,” though they are
not involved in the poetic effect, must appear in poems to provide, as Mr. Pottle’s
prosaisms do, a kind of frame, or thread, for the poetry—a spine to support the
poetic flesh, or a Christmas tree on which the baubles of poetry are hung. T. S.
Eliot has said something of this sort:
The chief use of the “meaning” of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may
be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all)
to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet,
while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar
is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.
Here, it would seem, Mr. Eliot has simply inverted the old sugar-coated-pill
theory: the idea becomes the sugar-coating and the “poetry” becomes the
medicine. This seems to say that the idea in a poem does not participate in the
poetic effect, and seems to commit Mr. Eliot to a theory of pure poetry. But to
do justice to the quotation, we should first observe that the parenthesis indicates
that the writer is referring to some sort of provisional and superficial distinction
and not to a fundamental one, and second observe that the passage is out of
its context. In the context, Mr. Eliot goes on to say that some poets “become
impatient of this ‘meaning’ [explicit statement of ideas in logical order] which
seems superfluous, and perceive possibilities of intensity through its elimination.”
This may mean either of two things. It may mean that ideas do not participate
in the poetic effect, or it may mean that, though they do participate in the poetic
effect, they need not appear in the poem in an explicit and argued form. And this

second reading would scarcely be a doctrine of pure poetry at all, for it would
involve poetic casuistry and not poetic principle.
We might, however, illustrate the second interpretation by glancing at
Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” on Cromwell. Marvell does not give us narrative; he
does not give us an account of the issues behind the Civil War; he does not state
the two competing ideas which are dramatized in the poem, the idea of “sanction”
and the idea of “efficiency.” But the effect of the poem does involve those two
factors; and the reserved irony, scarcely resolved, which emerges from the
historical situation, is an irony derived from unstated materials and ideas. It is, to
use Mr. Pottle’s term again, a pure poem in so far as it is elliptical in method, but
it is anything but a pure poem if by purity we mean the exclusion of idea from
participation in the poetic effect. And Mr. Eliot’s own practice implies that he
believes that ideas do participate in the poetic effect. Otherwise, why did he put
the clues to his ideas in the notes at the end of The Waste Land after so carefully
excluding any explicit statement of them from the body of the poem? If he is
regarding those ideas as mere bait—the “bit of nice meat for the house-dog”—he
has put the ideas in a peculiar place, in the back of the book—like giving the dog
the meat on the way out of the house with the swag, or giving the mouse the
cheese after he is in the trap.
All this leads to the speculation that Marvell and Mr. Eliot have purged
away statement of ideas from their poems, not because they wanted the ideas
to participate less in the poetry, but because they wanted them to participate
more fully, intensely, and immediately. This impulse, then, would account for
the characteristic types of image, types in which precision, complication, and
complicated intellectual relation to the theme are exploited; in other words,
they are trying—whatever may be their final success—to carry the movement of
mind to the center of the process. On these grounds they are the exact opposite
of poets who, presumably on grounds of purity, exclude the movement of mind
from the center of poetic process—from the internal structure of the poem—but
pay their respects to it as a kind of footnote, or gloss, or application coming at the
end. Marvell and Eliot, by their cutting away of frame, are trying to emphasize
the participation of ideas in the poetic process. Then Elliptical Poetry is not,
as Mr. Pottle says it is, a pure poetry at all; the elliptical poet is elliptical for
purposes of inclusion, not exclusion.
But waiving the question of Elliptical Poetry, no one of the other theories
does—or could—exclude all the items on the list above. And that fact may
instruct us. If all of these items were excluded, we might not have any poem at
all. For instance, we know how some critics have pointed out that even in the
strictest Imagist poetry idea creeps in—when the image leaves its natural habitat
and enters a poem, it begins to “mean” something. The attempt to read ideas out
of the poetic party violates the unity of our being and the unity of our experience.
“For this reason,” as Santayana puts it, “philosophy, when a poet is not mindless,

enters inevitably into his poetry, since it has entered into his life; or rather, the
detail of things and the detail of ideas pass equally into his verse, when both
alike lie in the path that has led him to his ideal. To object to theory in poetry
would be like objecting to words there; for words, too, are symbols without the
sensuous character of the things they stand for; and yet it is only by the net of
new connections which words throw over things, in recalling them, that poetry
arises at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience;
it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s length.”
Does this not, then, lead us to the conclusion that poetry does not inhere in
any particular element but depends upon the set of relationships, the structure,
which we call the poem?
Then the question arises: what elements cannot be used in such a structure?
I should answer that nothing that is available in human experience is to be
legislated out of poetry. This does not mean that anything can be used in any
poem, or that some materials or elements may not prove more recalcitrant than
others, or that it might not be easy to have too much of some things. But it does
mean that, granted certain contexts, any sort of material, a chemical formula
for instance, might appear functionally in a poem. It also may mean that, other
things being equal, the greatness of a poet depends upon the extent of the area
of experience which he can master poetically.
Can we make any generalizations about the nature of the poetic structure?
First, it involves resistances, at various levels. There is the tension between the
rhythm of the poem and the rhythm of speech (a tension which is very low at the
extreme of free verse and at the extreme of verse such as that of “Ulalume,” which
verges toward a walloping doggerel); between the formality of the rhythm and the
informality of the language; between the particular and the general, the concrete
and the abstract; between the elements of even the simplest metaphor; between
the beautiful and the ugly; between ideas (as in Marvell’s poem); between the
elements involved in irony (as in “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” or “Rose
Aylmer”); between prosaism and poeticisms (as in “Western Wind”).
This list is not intended to be exhaustive; it is intended to be merely
suggestive. But it may be taken to imply that the poet is like the jujitsu expert;
he wins by utilizing the resistance of his opponent—the materials of the poem.
In other words, a poem, to be good, must earn itself. It is a motion toward a
point of rest, but if it is not a resisted motion, it is motion of no consequence.
For example, a poem which depends upon stock materials and stock responses
is simply a toboggan slide, or a fall through space. And the good poem must, in
some way, involve the resistances; it must carry something of the context of its
own creation: it must come to terms with Mercutio.
This is another way of saying that a good poem involves the participation
of the reader; it must, as Coleridge puts it, make the reader into “an active
creative being.” Perhaps we can see this most readily in the case of tragedy: the

determination of good or evil is not a “given” in tragedy, it is something to be

earned in the process, and even the tragic villain must be “loved.” We must kill
him, as Brutus killed Caesar, not as butchers but as sacrificers. And all of this
adds up to the fact that the structure is a dramatic structure, a movement through
action toward rest, through complication toward simplicity of effect.
In the foregoing discussion, I have deliberately omitted reference to another
type of pure poetry, a type which tends to become dominant in an age of political
crisis and social disorientation. Perhaps the most sensible description of this type
can be found in an essay by Herbert Muller:
If it is not the primary business of the poet to be eloquent about these

matters [faith and ideals], it still does not follow that he has more
dignity or wisdom than those who are, or that he should have more
sophistication. At any rate the fact is that almost all poets of the past
did freely make large, simple statements, and not in their prosy or lax
moments.
Mr. Muller then goes on to illustrate by quoting three famous large, simple
statements:
E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace
and
We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
and
The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Mr. Muller is here attacking the critical emphasis on ironic tension in poetry.
His attack really involves two lines of argument. First, the poet is not wiser than
the statesman, philosopher, or saint, people who are eloquent about faith and
ideals and who say what they mean, without benefit of irony. This Platonic line
of argument is, I think, off the point in the present context. Second, the poets of
the past have made large, simple affirmations, have said what they meant. This
line of argument is very much on the point.
Poets have tried very hard, for thousands of years, to say what they mean.
Not only have they tried to say what they mean, they have tried to prove what

they mean. The saint proves his vision by stepping cheerfully into the fires. The
poet, somewhat less spectacularly, proves his vision by submitting it to the fires
of irony—to the drama of his structure—in the hope that the fires will refine it.
In other words, the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that
it can survive reference to the complexities and contradictions of experience. And
irony is one such device of reference.
In this connection let us look at the first of Mr. Muller’s exhibits. The famous
line occurs in Canto III of the Paradiso. It is spoken by Piccarda Donati, in
answer to Dante’s question as to why she does not desire to rise higher than her
present sphere, the sphere of the moon. But it expresses, in unequivocal terms, a
central theme of the Commedia, as of Christian experience. On the one hand, it
may be a pious truism, fit for sampler work, and, on the other hand, it may be a
burning conviction, tested and earned. Dante, in his poem, sets out to show how
it has been earned and tested.
One set of ironic contrasts which centers on this theme concerns, for
instance, the opposition between the notion of human justice and the notion
of divine justice. The story of Paolo and Francesca is so warm, appealing, and
pathetic in its human terms, and their punishment so savage and unrelenting, so
incommensurable, it seems, with the fault, that Dante, torn by the conflict, falls
down as a dead body falls. Or Farinata, the enemy of Dante’s house, is presented
by the poet in terms of his human grandeur, which now, in Hell, is transmuted
into a superhuman grandeur,
com’ avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.
Ulysses remains a hero, a hero who should draw special applause from Dante,
who defined the temporal end of man as the conquest of knowledge. But
Ulysses is damned, as the great Brutus is damned, who hangs from the jaws of
the fiend in the lowest pit of traitors. So divine justice is set over against human
pathos, human dignity, human grandeur, human intellect, human justice. And
we recall how Virgil, more than once, reminds Dante that he must not apply
human standards to the sights he sees. It is this long conflict, which appears
in many forms, this ironic tension, which finally gives body to the simple
eloquence of the line in question; the statement is meaningful, not for what
it says, but for what has gone before. It is earned. It has been earned by the
entire poem.
I do not want to misrepresent Mr. Muller. He does follow his quotations by
the sentence: “if they are properly qualified in the work as a whole, they may
still be taken straight, they are [he italicizes the word] taken so in recollection
as in their immediate impact.” But how can we take a line “straight,” in either
“recollection” or “immediate impact,” unless we ignore what “properly qualified”
the line in “the work as a whole”? And if we do take it so, are we not violating,

very definitely, the poet’s meaning, for the poet means the poem, he doesn’t mean
the line.
It would be interesting to try to develop the contexts of the other passages
which Mr. Muller quotes. But in any case, he is simply trying, in his essay,
to guard against what he considers to be, rightly or wrongly, a too narrow
description of poetry; he is not trying to legislate all poetry into the type
of simple eloquence, the unqualified statement of “faith and ideals.” But
we have also witnessed certain, probably preliminary, attempts to legislate
literature into becoming a simple, unqualified, “pure” statement of faith and
ideals. We have seen the writers of the 1920s called the “irresponsibles.”
We have seen writers such as Proust, Eliot, Dreiser, and Faulkner called
writers of the “death drive.” Why are these writers condemned? Because
they have tried, within the limits of their gifts, to remain faithful to the
complexities of the problems with which they are dealing, because they have
refused to take the easy statement as solution, because they have tried to
define the context in which, and the terms by which, faith and ideals may be
earned.
This method, however, will scarcely satisfy the mind which is hot for
certainties; to that mind it will seem merely an index to lukewarmness, indecision,
disunity, treason. The new theory of purity would purge out all complexities and
all ironies and all self-criticism. And this theory will forget that the hand-me-
down faith, the hand-me-down ideals, no matter what the professed content, is
in the end not only meaningless but vicious. It is vicious because, as parody, it is
the enemy of all faith.
QQQ
1951—Harold C. Goddard. “Romeo and Juliet,”

from The Meaning of Shakespeare
Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950) was head of the English Department

at Swarthmore College. One of the most important twentieth-century
books on Shakespeare is his The Meaning of Shakespeare, published after
his death.
I
One word has dominated the criticism of Romeo and Juliet: “star-cross’d.”
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,

says the Prologue-Chorus,
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.
“Star-cross’d” backed by “fatal” has pretty much surrendered this drama to the
astrologers. “In this play,” says one such interpreter, “simply the Fates have taken
this young pair and played a cruel game against them with loaded dice, unaided
by any evil in men.” That is merely an extreme expression of the widely held view
that makes Romeo and Juliet, in contrast with all Shakespeare’s later tragedies, a
tragedy of accident rather than of character and on that account a less profound
and less universal work. That this play betrays signs of immaturity and lacks
some of the marks of mastery that are common to the other tragedies may
readily be granted. But that its inferiority is due to the predominance of accident
over character ought not to be conceded without convincing demonstration.
The burden of proof is certainly on those who assert it, for nowhere else does
Shakespeare show any tendency to believe in fate in this sense. The integrity of
his mind makes it highly unlikely that in just one instance he would have let the
plot of the story he was dramatizing warp his convictions about freedom.
The theme of Romeo and Juliet is love and violence and their interactions. In
it these two mightiest of mighty opposites meet each other squarely—and one
wins. And yet the other wins. This theme in itself makes Romeo and Juliet an
astrological play in the sense that it is concerned throughout with Venus and
Mars, with love and “war,” and with little else. Nothing ever written perhaps
presents more simply what results from the conjunction of these two “planets.”
But that does not make it a fatalistic drama. It all depends on what you mean by
“stars.” If by stars you mean the material heavenly bodies exercising from birth a
predestined and inescapable occult influence on man, Romeo and Juliet were no
more star-crossed than any lovers, even though their story was more unusual and
dramatic. But if by stars you mean—as the deepest wisdom of the ages, ancient
and modern, does—a psychological projection on the planets and constellations
of the unconsciousness of man, which in turn is the accumulated experience of
the race, then Romeo and Juliet and all the other characters of the play are star-
crossed as every human being is who is passionately alive.
In tragic life, God wot,

No villain need be! Passions spin the plot,
We are betrayed by what is false within.
The “villain” need not be a conspicuous incarnation of evil like Richard III or
Iago; the “hero” himself may be the “villain” by being a conspicuous incarnation
of weakness as was another Richard or a Troilus. Or the “villain” may consist in

a certain chemical interplay of the passions of two or more characters. To seek

a special “tragic flaw” in either Romeo or Juliet is foolish and futile. From pride
down, we all have flaws enough to make of every life and of life itself a perpetual
and universal tragedy. Altering his source to make the point unmistakable,
Shakespeare is at pains to show that, however much the feud between Capulets
and Montagues had to do with it incidentally, the tragedy of this play flowed
immediately from another cause entirely. But of that in its place. Enough now if
we have raised a suspicion that the “star-cross’d” of the Prologue should be taken
in something other than a literal sense, or, better, attributed to the Chorus; not
to the poet. The two are far from being the same.1
In retrospect, Shakespeare’s plays, which in one sense culminate in King
Lear and in another, in The Tempest, are seen to deal over and over with the
same underlying subject that dominates the Greek drama: the relation of the
generations. Romeo and Juliet, as the first play of its author in which this subject is
central, assumes a profound seminal as well as intrinsic interest on that account.
It points immediately in this respect to Henry IV and Hamlet, and ultimately to
King Lear and The Tempest.
This theme of “the fathers” is merely another way of expressing the theme
of “the stars.” For the fathers are the stars and the stars are the fathers in the
sense that the fathers stand for the accumulated experience of the past, for
tradition, for authority and hence for the two most potent forces that mold
and so impart “destiny” to the child’s life. Those forces, of course, are heredity
and training, which between them create that impalpable mental environment,
inner and outer, that is even more potent than either of them alone. The hatred
of the hostile houses in Romeo and Juliet is an inheritance that every member
of these families is born into as truly as he is born with the name Capulet or
Montague. Their younger generations have no more choice in the matter than
they have choice of the language they will grow up to speak. They suck in the
venom with their milk. “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will
of a dead father,” as Portia puts it in The Merchant of Venice. The daughter may
be a son and the father may be living, but the principle is the same. Thus the
fathers cast the horoscopes of the children in advance—and are in that sense
their stars. If astrology is itself, as it is, a kind of primitive and unconscious
psychology, then the identity of the stars and the fathers becomes even more
pronounced.
Now there is just one agency powerful enough in youth to defy and cut across
this domination of the generations, and that is love. Love is a “star” but in another
and more celestial sense. Romeo, of the Montagues, after a sentimental and
unrequited languishing after one Rosaline, falls in love at first sight with Juliet, of
the Capulets, and instantly the instilled enmity of generations is dissipated like
mist by morning sunshine, and the love that embraces Juliet embraces everything
that Juliet touches or that touches her.


My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The words—music, imagery, and thought uniting to make them as wonderful as

any ever uttered about love—are Juliet’s, but Romeo’s love is as deep—almost.
It is love’s merit, not his, that his enemies suddenly become glorified with the
radiance of the medium through which he now sees everything. Hostility simply
has nothing to breathe in such a transcendental atmosphere. It is through this
effect of their love on both lovers, and the poetry in which they spontaneously
embody it, that Shakespeare convinces us it is no mere infatuation, but love
indeed in its divine sense. Passion it is, of course, but that contaminated term has
in our day become helpless to express it. Purity would be the perfect word for it
if the world had not forgotten that purity is simply Greek for fire.
II
Shakespeare sees to it that we shall not mistake this white flame of Romeo’s
love, or Juliet’s, for anything lower by opposing to the lovers two of the impurest
characters he ever created, Mercutio and the Nurse. And yet, in spite of them,
it has often been so mistaken. Mercutio and the Nurse are masterpieces of
characterization so irresistible that many are tempted to let them arrogate to
themselves as virtue what is really the creative merit of their maker. They are a
highly vital pair, brimming with life and fire—but fire in a less heavenly sense
than the one just mentioned. Juliet, at the most critical moment of her life, sums
up the Nurse to all eternity in one word. When, in her darkest hour, this woman
who has acted as mother to her from birth goes back on her completely, in a flash
of revelation the girl sees what she is, and, reversing in one second the feeling
of a lifetime, calls her a fiend (“most wicked fiend”). She could not have chosen
a more accurate term, for the Nurse is playing at the moment precisely the part
of the devil in a morality play. And Juliet’s “ancient damnation” is an equally
succinct description of her sin. What more ancient damnation is there than
sensuality—and all the other sins it brings in its train? Those who dismiss the
Nurse as just a coarse old woman whose loquacity makes us laugh fail hopelessly
to plumb the depth of her depravity. It was the Nurse’s desertion of her that
drove Juliet to Friar Laurence and the desperate expedient of the sleeping potion.
Her cowardice was a link in the chain that led to Juliet’s death.
The Nurse has sometimes been compared with Falstaff—perhaps the poet’s
first comic character who clearly surpassed her. Any resemblance between them
is superficial, for they are far apart as the poles. Falstaff was at home in low places
but the sun of his imagination always accompanied him as a sort of disinfectant.
The Nurse had no imagination in any proper sense. No sensualist—certainly no
old sensualist—ever has. Falstaff loved Hal. What the Nurse’s “love” for Juliet

amounted to is revealed when she advises her to make the best of a bad situation
and take Paris (bigamy and all). The man she formerly likened to a toad suddenly
becomes superior to an eagle.
Go, counsellor,
cries Juliet, repudiating her Satan without an instant’s hesitation,
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain.
It is the rejection of the Nurse. But unlike Falstaff, when he is rejected, she carries
not one spark of our sympathy or pity with her, and a pathetic account of her
death, as of his, would be unthinkable. We scorn her utterly as Juliet does.
III
The contrast between Friar Laurence and the Nurse even the most casual
reader or spectator could scarcely miss. The difference between the spiritual
adviser of Romeo and the worldly confidant of Juliet speaks for itself. The
resemblance of Mercutio to the Nurse is more easily overlooked, together with
the analogy between the part he plays in Romeo’s life and the part she plays in
Juliet’s. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that the entire play is built around that
resemblance and that analogy.
The indications abound that Shakespeare created these two to go together.
To begin with, they hate each other on instinct, as two rival talkers generally do,
showing how akin they are under the skin. “A gentleman, nurse,” says Romeo of
Mercutio, “that loves to hear himself talk, and will speak more in a minute than
he will stand to in a month.” The cap which Romeo thus quite innocently hands
the Nurse fits her so perfectly that she immediately puts it on in two speeches
about Mercutio which are typical examples of her love of hearing herself talk and
of saying things she is powerless to stand by:
An a’ speak any thing against me, I’ll take him down, an ’a were
lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks; and if I cannot, I’ll find those
that shall. Scurvy knave! I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his
skains-mates. (Turning to Peter, her man) And thou must stand by too,
and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure! . . . Now, afore God, I
am so vexed, that every part about me quivers. Scurvy knave!
That last, and the tone of the whole, show that there was a genuinely vicious
element in the Nurse under her superficial good nature, as there invariably is in
an old sensualist; and I do not believe it is exceeding the warrant of the text to
say that the rest of the speech in which she warns Romeo against gross behavior

toward her young gentlewoman—quite in the manner of Polonius and Laertes

warning Ophelia against Hamlet—proves that in her heart she would have been
delighted to have him corrupt her provided she could have shared the secret
and been the go-between. “A bawd, a bawd, a bawd!” is Mercutio’s succinct
description of her.
But, as usual, when a man curses someone else, he characterizes himself. In
what sense Mercutio is a bawd appears only too soon. In the meantime what
a pity it is that he is killed off so early in the action as to allow no full and
final encounter between these two fountains of loquacity! “Nay, an there were
two such, we should have none shortly.” Mercutio himself says it in another
connection, but it applies perfectly to this incomparable pair. Their roles are
crowded with parallelisms even down to what seem like the most trivial details.
“We’ll to dinner thither,” says Mercutio, for example, parting from Romeo in Act
II, scene 4. “Go, I’ll to dinner,” says the Nurse on leaving Juliet at the end of scene
5. A tiny touch. But they are just the two who would be certain never to miss a
meal. In Shakespeare even such trifles have significance.
The fact is that Mercutio and the Nurse are simply youth and old age of
the same type. He is aimed at the same goal she has nearly attained. He would
have become the same sort of old man that she is old woman, just as she was
undoubtedly the same sort of young girl that he is young man. They both think
of nothing but sex—except when they are so busy eating or quarreling that they
can think of nothing. (I haven’t forgotten Queen Mab; I’ll come to her presently.)
Mercutio cannot so much as look at the clock without a bawdy thought. So
permeated is his language with indecency that most of it passes unnoticed not
only by the innocent reader but by all not schooled in Elizabethan smut. Even
on our own unsqueamish stage an unabridged form of his role in its twentieth-
century equivalent would not be tolerated. Why does Shakespeare place the
extreme example of this man’s soiled fantasies precisely before the balcony
scene? Why but to stress the complete freedom from sensuality of Romeo’s
passion? Place Mercutio’s dirtiest words, as Shakespeare does, right beside
Romeo’s apostrophe to his “bright angel” and all the rest of that scene where the
lyricism of young love reaches one of its loftiest pinnacles in all poetry—and
what remains to be said for Mercutio? Nothing—except that he is Mercutio. His
youth, the hot weather, the southern temperament, the fashion among Italian
gentlemen of the day, are unavailing pleas; not only Romeo, but, Benvolio, had
those things to contend with also. And they escaped. Mercury is close to the sun.
But it was the material sun, Sol, not the god, Helios, that Mercutio was close to.
Beyond dispute, this man had vitality, wit, and personal magnetism. But personal
magnetism combined with sexuality and pugnacity is one of the most dangerous
mixtures that can exist. The unqualified laudation that Mercutio has frequently
received, and the suggestion that Shakespeare had to kill him off lest he quite
set the play’s titular hero in the shade, are the best proof of the truth of that

statement. Those who are themselves seduced by Mercutio are not likely to be
good judges of him. It may be retorted that Mercutio is nearly always a success
on the stage, while Romeo is likely to be insipid. The answer to that is that while
Mercutios are relatively common, Romeos are excessively rare. If Romeo proves
insipid, he has been wrongly cast or badly acted.
“But how about Queen Mab?” it will be asked. The famous description of
her has been widely held to be quite out of character and has been set down as
an outburst of poetry from the author put arbitrarily in Mercutio’s mouth. But
the judgment “out of character” should always be a last resort. Undoubtedly the
lines, if properly his, do reveal an unsuspected side of Mercutio. The prankish
delicacy of some of them stands out in pleasing contrast with his grosser aspects.
The psychology of this is sound. The finer side of a sensualist is suppressed and
is bound to come out, if at all, incidentally, in just such a digression as this seems
to be. Shakespeare can be trusted not to leave such things out. Few passages in
his plays, however, have been more praised for the wrong reasons. The account of
Queen Mab is supposed to prove Mercutio’s imagination: under his pugnacity
there was a poet. It would be nearer the truth, I think, to guess that Shakespeare
put it in as an example of what poetry is popularly held to be and is not. The lines
on Queen Mab are indeed delightful. But imagination in any proper sense they
are not. They are sheer fancy. Moreover, Mercutio’s anatomy and philosophy of
dreams prove that he knows nothing of their genuine import. He dubs them
the children of an idle brain,

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.
Perhaps his are—the Queen Mab lines would seem to indicate as much.
Romeo, on the other hand, holds that dreamers “dream things true,” and gives
a definition of them that for combined brevity and beauty would be hard to
better. They are “love’s shadows.” And not only from what we can infer about
his untold dream on this occasion, but from all the dreams and premonitions
of both Romeo and Juliet throughout the play, they come from a fountain of
wisdom somewhere beyond time. Primitives distinguish between “big” and
“little” dreams. (Aeschylus makes the same distinction in Prometheus Bound.)
Mercutio, with his aldermen and gnats and coach-makers and sweetmeats
and parsons and drums and ambuscadoes, may tell us a little about the littlest
of little dreams. He thinks that dreamers are still in their day world at night.
Both Romeo and Juliet know that there are dreams that come from as far
below the surface of that world as was that prophetic tomb at the bottom of
which she saw him “as one dead” at their last parting. Finally, how characteristic
of Mercutio that he should make Queen Mab a midwife and blemish his
description of her by turning her into a “hag” whose function is to bring an
end to maidenhood. Is this another link between Mercutio and the Nurse? Is

Shakespeare here preparing the way for his intimation that she would be quite
capable of assisting in Juliet’s corruption? It might well be. When Shakespeare
writes a speech that seems to be out of character, it generally, as in this case,
deserves the closest scrutiny.
And there is another justification of the Queen Mab passage. Romeo and
Juliet not only utter poetry; they are poetry. The loveliest comment on Juliet I
ever heard expressed this to perfection. It was made by a girl only a little older
than Juliet herself. When Friar Laurence recommends philosophy to Romeo as
comfort in banishment, Romeo replies:
Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet . . .
It helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more.
“Philosophy can’t,” the girl observed, “but poetry can—and it did!” Over against
the poetry of Juliet, Shakespeare was bound, by the demands of contrast on
which all art rests, to offer in the course of his play examples of poetry in various
verbal, counterfeit, or adulterate estates.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,

To beautify him, only lacks a cover.
That is Lady Capulet on the prospective bridegroom, Paris. It would have taken
the play’s booby prize for “poetry” if Capulet himself had not outdone it in his
address to the weeping Juliet:
How now! a conduit, girl? What, still in tears?

Evermore showering? In one little body
Thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind;
For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,
Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is,
Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs;
Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,
Without a sudden calm, will overset
Thy tempest-tossed body.
It is almost as if Shakespeare were saying in so many words: That is how poetry is

not written. Yet, a little later, when the sight of his daughter, dead as all suppose,
shakes even this egotist into a second of sincerity, he can say:
Death lies on her like an untimely frost

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.

There is poetry, deep down, even in Capulet. But the instant passes and he
is again talking about death as his son-in-law—and all the rest. The Nurse’s
vain repetitions in this scene are further proof that she is a heathen. Her O-
lamentable-day’s only stress the lack of one syllable of genuine grief or love
such as Juliet’s father shows. These examples all go to show what Shakespeare
is up to in the Queen Mab speech. It shines, and even seems profound, beside
the utterances of the Capulets and the Nurse. But it fades and grows superficial,
beside Juliet’s and Romeo’s. It is one more shade of what passes for poetry but
is not.
IV
The crisis of Romeo and Juliet, so far as Romeo is concerned, is the scene (just
after the secret marriage of the two lovers) in which Mercutio and Tybalt are slain
and Romeo banished. It is only two hundred lines long. Of these two hundred
lines, some forty are introduction and sixty epilogue to the main action. As for
the other hundred that come between, it may be doubted whether Shakespeare
to the end of his career ever wrote another hundred that surpassed them in the
rapidity, inevitability, and psychologic truth of the succession of events that they
comprise. There are few things in dramatic literature to match them. And yet I
think they are generally misunderstood. The scene is usually taken as the extreme
precipitation in the play of the Capulet–Montague feud; whereas Shakespeare
goes out of his way to prove that at most the feud is merely the occasion of
the quarrel. Its cause he places squarely in the temperament and character of
Mercutio, and Mercutio, it is only too easy to forget, is neither a Capulet nor a
Montague, but a kinsman of the Prince who rules Verona, and, as such, is under
special obligation to preserve a neutral attitude between the two houses.
This will sound to some like mitigating the guilt of Tybalt. But Tybalt has
enough to answer for without making him responsible for Mercutio’s sins.
The nephew of Lady Capulet is as dour a son of pugnacity as Mercutio is a
dashing one:
What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word,

As I hate hell.
These words—almost the first he speaks in the play—give Tybalt’s measure.

“More than prince of cats,” Mercutio calls him, which is elevated to “king of
cats” in the scene in which he mounts the throne of violence. (It is a comment
on the Nurse’s insight into human nature that she speaks of this fashionable
desperado as “O courteous Tybalt! honest gentleman!”) Mercutio’s contempt
for Tybalt is increased by the latter’s affectation of the latest form in fencing:
“He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion. . . . The
pox of such antic, lisping, affecting fantasticoes; these new tuners of accents!”

Yet but a moment later, in an exchange of quips with Romeo, we find Mercutio
doing with his wit just what he has scorned Tybalt for doing with his sword.
For all their differences, as far as fighting goes Mercutio and Tybalt are two of
a kind and by the former’s rule are predestined to extinction: “an there were
two such, we should rule none shortly, for one would kill the other.” When one
kills the other, there is not one left, but none. That is the arithmetic of it. The
encounter is not long postponed.
Tybalt is outraged when he discovers that a Montague has invaded the
Capulet mansion on the occasion of the ball when Romeo first sees Juliet. But
for his uncle he would assail the intruder on the spot:
Patience perforce with wilful choler meeting

Makes my flesh tremble2 in their different greeting.
I will withdraw; but this intrusion shall
Now seeming sweet convert to bitter gall.
He is speaking of the clash between patience and provocation in himself, But

he might be prophesying his meeting with Romeo. As the third act opens, he is
hunting his man.
Tybalt is not the only one who is seeking trouble. The first forty lines of the
crisis scene are specifically devised to show that Mercutio was out to have a fight
under any and all circumstances and at any price. As well ask a small boy and
a firecracker to keep apart as Mercutio and a quarrel. Sensuality and pugnacity
are the poles of his nature. In the latter respect he is a sort of Mediterranean
Hotspur, his frank southern animality taking the place of the idealistic “honour”
of his northern counterpart. He is as fiery in a literal as Romeo is in a poetic
sense.
The scene is a public place. Enter Mercutio and Benvolio. Benvolio knows
his friend:
I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire.

The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not ’scape a brawl,
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
Mercutio retorts with a description of the cool-tempered Benvolio that makes

him out an inveterate hothead:
Thou! why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more, or a
hair less, in his beard, than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for
cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes.
What eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is

as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been
beaten as addle as an egg for quarrelling. Thou hast quarrelled with a
man for coughing in the street, because he hath wakened thy dog that
hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for
wearing his new doublet before Easter? with another, for tying his new
shoes with old riband?
This, the cautious and temperate Benvolio! As Mercutio knows, it is nothing

of the sort. It is an ironic description of himself. It is he, not his friend, who
will make a quarrel out of anything—out of nothing, rather, and give it a local
habitation and a name, as a poet does with the creatures of his imagination.
Mercutio is pugnacity in its pure creative state. At the risk of the Prince’s anger,
he makes his friend Romeo’s cause his own and roams the streets in the hope
of encountering some Capulet with whom to pick a quarrel. The feud is only a
pretext. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. The Chorus
may talk about “stars,” but in this case Mars does not revolve in the skies on the
other side of the Earth from Venus, but resides on earth right under the jerkin
of this particular impulsive youth, Mercutio. Or if this “fate” be a god rather
than a planet, then Mercutio has opened his heart and his home to him with
unrestrained hospitality. So Romeo, is indeed “star-cross’d” in having Mercutio
for a friend.
Mercutio has no sooner finished his topsy-turvy portrait of Benvolio
than Tybalt and his gang come in to reveal which of the two the description
fits. Tybalt is searching for Romeo, to whom he has just sent a challenge,
and recognizing Romeo’s friends begs “a word with one of you.” He wishes,
presumably, to ask where Romeo is. But Mercutio, bent on provocation, retorts,
“make it a word and a blow.” Benvolio tries in vain to intervene. Just as things
are getting critical, Romeo enters, and Tybalt turns from Mercutio to the man
he is really seeking:
Romeo, the love I bear thee can afford

No better term than this,—thou art a villain.
Here is the most direct and galling of insults. Here are Mercutio, Benvolio, and
the rest waiting to see how Romeo will take it. The temperature is blistering in
all senses. And what does Romeo say?
Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee

Doth much excuse the appertaining rage
To such a greeting; villain am I none;
Therefore farewell; I see thou know’st me not.

We who are in the secret know that “the reason” is Juliet and that his love for
her is capable of wrapping all Capulets in its miraculous mantle, even “the king
of cats.”
But Tybalt is intent on a fight and will not be put off by kindness however
sincere or deep. “Boy,” he comes back insolently,
this shall not excuse the injuries

That thou hast done me; therefore turn and draw.
Romeo, however, is in the power of something that makes him impervious to

insults:
I do protest I never injur’d thee,

But love thee better than thou canst devise
Till thou shalt know the reason of my love;
And so, good Capulet,—which name I tender
As dearly as my own,—be satisfied.
The world has long since decided what to think of a man who lets himself be
called a villain without retaliating. Romeo, to put it in one word, proves himself,
according to the world’s code, a mollycoddle. And indeed a mollycoddle might
act exactly as Romeo appears to. But if Romeo is a mollycoddle, then Jesus was
a fool to talk about loving one’s enemies, for Romeo, if anyone ever did, is doing
just that at this moment. And Juliet was demented to talk about love being
boundless and infinite, for here Romeo is about to prove that faith precisely true.
Those who think that Jesus, and Juliet, and Romeo were fools will have plenty
of backing. The “fathers” will be on their side. They will have the authority of the
ages and the crowd. Only a philosopher or two, a few lovers, saints, and poets will
be against them. The others will echo the
O calm, dishonourable, vile submission!
with which Mercutio draws his rapier and begins hurling insults at Tybalt that
make Tybalt’s own seem tame:
Mercutio: Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?

Tybalt: What wouldst thou have with me?
Mercutio: Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives.
And Mercutio threatens to stick him before he can draw if he does not do so
instantly. What can Tybalt do but draw? “I am for you,” he cries, as he does so.

Such, however, is the power of Romeo’s love that even now he attempts to
prevent the duel:
Gentle Mercutio, put thy rapier up.
But Mercutio pays no attention and the two go to it. If ever a quarrel scene
defined the central offender and laid the responsibility at one man’s door, this is
the scene and Mercutio is the man. It takes two to make a quarrel. Romeo, the
Montague, will not fight. Tybalt, the Capulet, cannot fight if Romeo will not.
With Mercutio Tybalt has no quarrel. The poet takes pains to make that explicit
in a startling way. “Peace be with you, sir,” are the words Tybalt addresses to
Mercutio when Romeo first enters. That from the man who once cried,
peace! I hate the word,

As I hate hell.
Now we see why Shakespeare had him say it. It was in preparation for this scene.
Thus he lets one word exonerate Tybalt of the responsibility for what ensues
between him and Mercutio.
And now, condensed into the fractional part of a second, comes the crisis
in Romeo’s life. Not later, when he decides to kill Tybalt, but now. Now is the
moment when two totally different universes wait as it were on the turning of
a hand. There is nothing of its kind to surpass it in all Shakespeare, not even in
Hamlet or King Lear, not, one is tempted to think, in all the drama of the world.
Here, if anywhere, Shakespeare shows that the fate we attribute to the stars lies
in our own souls.
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope.
Romeo had free scope. For, if we are free to choose between two compulsions,
we are in so far free. Romeo was free to act under the compulsion of force or
under the compulsion of love—under the compulsion of the stars, that is, in
either of two opposite senses. Granted that the temptation to surrender to the
former was at the moment immeasurably great, the power of the latter, if Juliet
spoke true, was greater yet:


Everything that has just preceded shows that the real Romeo wanted to have
utter faith in Juliet’s faith. “Genius trusts its faintest intimation,” says Emerson,
“against the testimony of all history.” But Romeo, whose intimations were not
faint but strong, falls back on the testimony of all history that only force can
overcome force. He descends from the level of love to the level of violence and
attempts to part the fighters with his sword.
Draw, Benvolio; beat down their weapons.

Gentlemen, for shame, forbear this outrage!
Tybalt, Mercutio, the prince expressly hath
Forbidden bandying in Verona streets.
Hold, Tybalt! good Mercutio!
Here, if anywhere, the distinction between drama and poetry becomes clear.
Drama is a portrayal of human passions eventuating in acts. Poetry is a picture
of life in its essence. On the level of drama, we are with Romeo absolutely.
His purpose is noble, his act endearingly impulsive. We echo that purpose and
identify ourselves with that act. In theater we do, I mean, and under the aspect
of time. But how different under the aspect of eternity! There the scene is a
symbolic picture of life itself, of faith surrendering to force, of love trying to gain
its end by violence—only to discover, as it soon does, and as we do too, that what
it has attained instead is death. A noble motive never yet saved a man from the
consequences of an unwise act, and Romeo’s own words to Mercutio as he draws
his sword are an unconscious confession in advance of his mistake. Having put
aside his faith in Juliet’s faith, his appeal is in the name of law rather than of love:
“The prince expressly hath forbidden.” That, and his “good Mercutio,” reveal a
divided soul. And it is that divided soul, in a last instant of hesitation, that causes
an awkward or uncoordinated motion as he interferes and gives the cowardly
Tybalt his chance to make a deadly thrust at Mercutio under Romeo’s arm. If
Romeo had only let those two firebrands fight it out, both might have lost blood
with a cooling effect on their heated tempers, or, if it had gone to a finish, both
might have been killed, as they ultimately were anyway, or, more likely, Mercutio
would have killed Tybalt. (“An there were two such, we should have none shortly,
for one would kill the other.”) In any of these events, the feud between the two
houses would not have been involved. As it is, the moment of freedom passes,
and the rest is fate.
The fallen Mercutio reveals his most appealing side in his good humor, at
death. But why his reiterated “A plague o’ both your houses”? He is one more
character in Shakespeare who “doth protest too much.” Four times he repeats it,
or three and a half to be exact. How ironical of Mercutio to attribute his death to
the Capulet–Montague feud, when the Capulet who killed him had plainly been

reluctant to fight with him, and the chief Montague present had begged and
begged him to desist. That “plague o’ both your houses” is Mercutio’s unwitting
confession that his own intolerable pugnacity, not the feud at all, is responsible.
And if that be true, how much that has been written about this tragedy must be
retracted.
What follows puts a final confirmation on Romeo’s error in trying to part
the duelists by force. With Mercutio dead as a direct result of his interference,
what can Romeo say? We heard him fall from love to an appeal to law and
order while the fight was on. Now it is over, he descends even lower as he
bemoans his, “reputation stain’d with Tybalt’s slander.” Reputation! Iago’s
word.
O sweet Juliet,
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate
And in my temper soften’d valour’s steel!
Were ever words more tragically inverted? That fire should soften metal must
have seemed a miracle to the man who first witnessed it. How much greater the
miracle whereby beauty melts violence into love! That is the miracle that was on
the verge of occurring in Romeo and Juliet.
Instead, Benvolio enters to announce Mercutio’s death. Whereat Romeo,
throwing the responsibility of his own mistake on destiny, exclaims:
This day’s black fate on more days doth depend;

This but begins the woe others must end.
Could words convey more clearly the fact that the crisis has passed? Freedom has
had its instant. The consequences are now in control.
Tybalt re-enters. Does Romeo now remember that his love for Juliet makes
every Capulet sacred? Does he recall his last words to her as he left the orchard
at dawn?—
Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast!

Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!
Does he now use his sword merely to prevent bloodshed?
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
he cries, implying without realizing it the infernal character of his decision,
And fire-ey’d fury be my conduct now!

Fury! Shakespeare’s invariable word for animal passion in man gone mad. And in
that fury Romeo’s willingness to forgive is devoured like a flower in a furnace:
Now, Tybalt, take the villain back again

That late thou gav’st me; for Mercutio’s soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company.
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him.
The spirit of Mercutio does indeed enter Romeo’s body, and though it is Tybalt
who is to go with the slain man literally, it is Romeo who goes with him in
the sense that he accepts his code and obeys his ghost. Drawing his rapier,
he sends Tybalt to instant death—to the immense gratification of practically
everyone in the audience, so prone are we in the theater to surrender to the
ancestral emotions. How many a mother, suspecting the evil influence of some
companion on her small son, has put her arms about him in a desperate gesture
of protection. Yet that same mother will attend a performance of Romeo and
Juliet, and, seduced by the crowd, will applaud Romeo’s capitulation to the
spirit of Mercutio to the echo. So frail is the tenderness of the mothers in the
face of the fathers.
In this respect the scene is like the court scene in The Merchant of Venice
when we gloat over Shylock’s discomfiture. Here, as there, not only our cooler
judgment when we are alone but all the higher implications of the tragedy call
for a reversal of our reaction when with the crowd. In this calmer retrospect,
we perceive that between his hero’s entrance and exit in this scene Shakespeare
has given us three Romeos, or, if you will, one Romeo in three universes.
First we see him possessed by love and a spirit of universal forgiveness.
From this he falls, first to reason and an appeal to law, then to violence—but
violence in a negative or “preventive” sense. Finally, following Mercutio’s
death, he passes under the control of passion and fury, abetted by “honour,”
and thence to vengeance and offensive violence. In astrological terms, he
moves from Venus, through the Earth, to Mars. It is as if Dante’s Divine
Comedy were compressed into eighty lines and presented in reverse—Romeo
in an inverted “pilgrimage” passing from Paradise, through Purgatory, to the
Inferno.
This way of taking the scene acquits Romeo of doing “wrong,” unless we
may be said to do wrong whenever we fail to live up to our highest selves. Love
is a realm beyond good and evil. Under the aspect of time, of common sense,
possibly even of reason and morality, certainly of “honour,” Romeo’s conduct in
the swift succession of events that ended in Tybalt’s death was unexceptionable.
What else could he have done? But under the aspect of eternity, which is
poetry’s aspect, it was less than that. We cannot blame a man because he does

not perform a miracle. But when he offers proof of his power and the very next
moment has the opportunity to perform one, and does not, the failure is tragic.
Such was the “failure” of Romeo. And he himself admits it in so many words.
Death, like love, lifts us for a moment above time. Just before he drinks the
poison, catching sight of the body of Tybalt in the Capulet vault, Romeo cries,
“Forgive me, cousin.” Why should he ask forgiveness for what he did in honor,
if honor be the guide to what is right?
Romeo as an honorable man avenges his friend. But in proving himself a
man in this sense, he proves himself less than the perfect lover. “Give all to love,”
says Emerson:
Give all to love . . .

’Tis a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope . . .
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
Juliet’s love had bestowed on Romeo power to bring down a god, to pass even
beyond the biblical seventy times seven to what Emily Brontë calls the “first of
the seventy-first.” But he did not. The play is usually explained as a tragedy of the
excess of love. On the contrary it is the tragedy of a deficiency of it. Romeo did
not “follow it utterly,” did not give quite “all” to love.
V
Romeo’s mental condition following the death of Tybalt is proof of the
treason he has committed against his own soul. Up to this point in the scene,
as we saw, Shakespeare has given us three Romeos. Now he gives us a fourth:
the man rooted to the spot at the sight of what he has done. The citizens have
heard the tumult and are coming. “Stand not amaz’d,” cries Benvolio—and
it is a case where one poet’s words seem to have been written to illuminate
another’s. Wordsworth’s lines are like a mental stage direction for the dazed
Romeo:
Action is transitory—a step, a blow,

The motion of a muscle—this way or that—
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.

“O! I am Fortune’s fool,” cries Romeo. “Love’s not Time’s fool,” says Shakespeare,
as if commenting on this very scene, in that confession of his own faith, the
116th sonnet:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
There is an astrology at the opposite pole from that of the Chorus to this play.
Romeo’s love looked on a tempest—and it was shaken. He apparently has just
strength enough left to escape and seek refuge in Friar Laurence’s cell, where, at
the word of his banishment, we find him on the floor,
Taking the measure of an unmade grave,
in a fit of that suicidal despair that so often treads on the heels of “fury.” It is
not remorse for having killed Tybalt that accounts for his condition, nor even
vexation with himself for having spoiled his own marriage, but same for having
betrayed Juliet’s faith in the boundlessness of love.
Meanwhile, at the scene of the duels, citizens have gathered, followed by the
Prince with Capulets and Montagues. Lady Capulet, probably the weakest character
in the play, is the first to demand more blood as a solution of the problem:
Prince, as thou art true,

For blood of ours, shed blood of Montague.
But the Prince asks first for a report of what happened.
Benvolio, who began this bloody fray?
Benvolio mars what is otherwise a remarkably accurate account of the affair by

failing utterly to mention Mercutio’s part in instigating the first duel, placing the
entire blame on Tybalt.
He is a kinsman to the Montague,
cries Lady Capulet,
Affection makes him false; he speaks not true.

Some twenty of them fought in this black strife,
And all those twenty could but kill one life.

Her sense of reality and character are on a level with her courage.
In Capulet’s orchard, the Nurse brings to Juliet the rope ladder by which her
husband is to reach her chamber—and with it the news of Tybalt’s death and
Romeo’s banishment.
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!

Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
cries Juliet,
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,

When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?
Even in the exaggeration of her anguish, Juliet diagnoses what has happened
precisely as Shakespeare does: a fiend—the spirit of Mercutio—has taken
possession of her lover-husband’s body. Contrast her insight at such a moment
with the Nurse’s drivellings:
There’s no trust,
No faith, no honesty in men; all perjur’d,
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.
Ah, where’s my man?
A fair sample of how well her inane generalizations survive the test of concrete
need.
Back in Friar Laurence’s cell, the stunned Romeo is like a drunken man
vaguely coming to himself after a debauch. When he draws his sword to make
away with himself, the Friar restrains him not by his hand,3 as Romeo had once
sought to restrain Mercutio at a similarly critical moment, but by the force of
his words:
Hold thy desperate hand!

Art thou a man?
And he seeks to sting him back to manhood by comparing his tears to those of
a woman and his fury to that of a beast.
Thou hast amaz’d me . . . .

Why rail’st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once, which thou at once wouldst lose.

No nonsense about “star-cross’d lovers” for Friar Laurence. Shakespeare, like

Dante before him and Milton after him, knew where the stars are new, knew
that heaven and hell, and even earth, are located within the human soul. Romeo
is the “skilless soldier” who sets afire the powder in his own flask.
VI
Juliet too in her despair can think of death. But with what relative calmness
and in what a different key! The contrast between the two lovers at this stage is a
measure of the respectively innocent and guilty states of their souls.
Their meeting at night is left to our imagination, but their parting at dawn
is Shakespeare’s imagination functioning at its highest lyrical intensity, with
interwoven symbols of nightingale and lark, darkness and light, death and love.
Then follow in swift succession the mother’s announcement of her daughter’s
impending marriage with Paris, Juliet’s ringing repudiation of the idea, the
rejection of her, in order, by her father, her mother, and the Nurse—the first
brutal, the second supine, the third Satanic. And then, with an instantaneousness
that can only be called divine, Juliet’s rejection of the Nurse. In a matter of
seconds the child has become a woman. This is the second crisis of the drama,
Juliet’s, which, with Romeo’s, gives the play its shape as certainly as its two
foci determine the shape of an ellipse. If ever two crises were symmetrical, and
opposite, these are.
Romeo, in a public place, lured insensibly through the influence of Mercutio
to the use of force, falls, and as a direct result of his fall, kills Tybalt. Juliet, in
her chamber, deserted by her father and mother and enticed to faithlessness by
the Nurse, child as she is, never wavers for an instant, puts her tempter behind
her, and consents as the price of her fidelity to be “buried” alive. Can anyone
imagine that Shakespeare did not intend this contrast, did not build up his
detailed parallelism between Mercutio and the Nurse to effect it? Romeo, as
we said, does not give quite “all” for love. But Juliet does. She performs her
miracle and receives supernatural strength as her reward. He fails to perform
his and is afflicted with weakness. But eventually her spirit triumphs in him.
Had it done so at first, the tragedy would have been averted. Here again the
heroine transcends the hero. And yet Romeo had Friar Laurence as adviser
while Juliet was brought up by the Nurse! The profounder the truth, the more
quietly Shakespeare has a habit of uttering it. It is as if he were saying here
that innocence comes from below the sources of pollution and can run the
fountain clear.
To describe as “supernatural” the strength that enables Juliet “without fear
or doubt” to undergo the ordeal of the sleeping potion and the burial vault does
not seem excessive:
Give me, give me! O! tell me not of fear!

Long before—in the text, not in time—when she had wondered how Romeo had
scaled the orchard wall below her balcony, he had said:
With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls;

For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt.
Juliet is now about to prove the truth of his words, in a sense Romeo never
dreamed of, “in that dim monument where Tybalt lies.” The hour comes, and
after facing the terrors her imagination conjures up, Juliet goes through her
“dismal scene” alone, is found “dead,” and following a scene that anticipates
but reverses Hamlet in that a wedding is turned into a funeral, is placed in the
Capulet vault in accordance with Friar Laurence’s desperate plan. But after force
has had its instant way, fate in the guise of fear usually has its protracted way, and
to oppose it is like trying to stay an avalanche with your hand.
VII
The pestilence prevents the Friar’s messenger from reaching Romeo. Instead,
word is brought to him that Juliet is dead, and, armed with a drug of an apothecary
who defies the law against selling poison, he ends his banishment to Mantua and
starts back to Verona to seek beside Juliet the eternal banishment of death. The
fury with which he threatens his companion Balthasar, on dismissing him when
they reach the churchyard, if he should return to pry, reveals Romeo’s mood:
By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint

And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs.
The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.
And when he encounters and slays Paris, the contrast between his death and that
of Mercutio, or even Tybalt, shows that we are dealing here not so much with
the act of a free agent choosing his course in the present as with the now fatal
consequences of an act in the past, of an agent then free but now no longer so.
Paris is little more than the branch of a tree that Romeo pushes aside—and his
death affects us almost as little. It is all like a dream, or madness. Finding the
sleeping—as he supposes the dead—Juliet, Romeo pours out his soul in words
which, though incomparable as poetry, err in placing on the innocent heavens the
responsibility for his own venial but fatal choice:
O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh.
And then, by one of those strokes that, it sometimes seems, only Shakespeare
could achieve, the poet makes Romeo revert to and round out, in parting from
Juliet forever, the same metaphor he had used when she first gazed down on him
from her balcony and he had tried to give expression to the scope and range of
his love. How magically, placed side, by side, the two passages fit together, how
tragically they sum up the story:
I am no pilot; yet, went thou as far

As that vast shore wash’d with the farthest sea,
I would adventure for such merchandise.
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!
Here’s to my love! (Drinks.) O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die. (Dies.)
Enter Friar Laurence—a moment too late. That fear is with him Shakespeare
shows by another echo. “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast,” the Friar
had warned Romeo on dismissing him after his first confession of his love for
Juliet, and now he says:
How oft to-night

Have my old feet stumbled at graves! . . .
. . . Fear comes upon me.
He discovers the dead Romeo. Just then Juliet awakes. But at the same moment
he hears a noise. The watch is coming! He cannot be found here.
Come, go, good Juliet, I dare no longer stay,
and when she refuses to follow, he deserts her. With a glance into the empty
cup in Romeo’s hand and a kiss on the lips that she hopes keep poison for her
own—anticipating touches at the deaths of both Hamlet and Cleopatra—she
snatches Romeo’s dagger and kills herself.
Why did Shakespeare, after building up so noble a character as Friar
Laurence, permit him to abandon Juliet at so fatal a moment? Why add his name
to the so different ones of Capulet, Lady Capulet, and the Nurse, no matter how
much better the excuse for his desertion of her? For two reasons, I think: first, to

show how far the infection of fear extends that Romeo’s use of force had created.
“Here is a friar, that trembles, sighs, and weeps,” says the Third Watchman, and
Laurence himself confesses, when he tells his story,
But then a noise did scare me from the tomb.
And then, to show that Juliet, abandoned even by religion, must fall back for
courage finally on love alone.
The pestilence plays a crucial part toward the end of the action. It is a symbol.
Whatever literal epidemic there may have been in the region, it is plain that fear
is the real pestilence that pervades the play. It is fear of the code of honor, not
fate, that drives Romeo to seek vengeance on Tybalt. It is fear of the plague, not
accident, that leads to the miscarriage of Friar Laurence’s message to Romeo. It is
fear of poverty, not the chance of his being at hand at the moment, that lets the
apothecary sell the poison. It is fear of the part he is playing, not age, that makes
Friar Laurence’s old feet stumble and brings him to the tomb just a few seconds
too late to prevent Romeo’s death. It is fear of being found at such a spot at such
a time, not coincidence, that lets him desert Juliet at last just when he does. Fear,
fear, fear, fear, fear. Fear is the evil “star” that crosses the lovers. And fear resides
not in the skies but in the human heart.
VIII
The tragedy ends in the reconciliation of the two houses, compensation, it
is generally held, for the deaths of the two lovers. Doubtless the feud was not
renewed in its former form. But much superfluous sentiment has been spent
on this ending. Is it not folly to suppose that Capulet or Lady Capulet was
spiritually transformed by Juliet’s death? And as for Montague, the statue of her
in pure gold that he promised to erect in Verona is proof in itself how incapable
he was of understanding her spirit and how that spirit alone, and not monuments
or gold, can bring an end to feuds. (Lady Montague, who died of a broken heart,
was far and away the finest of the four parents.) Shakespeare’s happy endings
are, almost without exception, suspect. Or rather they are to be found, if at all,
elsewhere than in the last scene and final speeches, and are “happy” in a quite
untheatrical sense.
Cynics are fond of saying that if Romeo and Juliet had lived their love would
not have “lasted.” Of course it wouldn’t—in the cynic’s sense. You can no more
ask such love to last than you can ask April to last, or an apple blossom. Yet April
and apple blossoms do last and have results that bear no resemblance to what
they come from—results such as apples and October—and so does such love.
Romeo, in his last words, referred to the phenomenon known as “a lightning
before death.” Here is that lightning, and here, if it have one, is the happy ending
of Romeo and Juliet:

Romeo: If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,

My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.
My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne,
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead—
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!—
And breath’d such life with kisses in my lips,
That I reviv’d and was an emperor.
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess’d,
When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!
Enter Balthasar—with news of Juliet’s death.
Dreams go by contraries, they say, and this seems to be an example. But is it?
Notes
1. See the discussion of the Choruses of Henry V on this point.
2. Nurse (II, iv, 172): “Now, afore God, I am so vexed that every part about me
quivers.” Another revealing analogy.
3. The actor may easily make a mistake here and spoil Shakespeare’s point.
QQQ
1960—Harry Levin. “Form and Formality

in Romeo and Juliet,” from Shakespeare Quarterly
Harry Levin (1912–1994) was a professor of English at Harvard
University. He is the author of Toward Balzac (1948), Perspective of Criticism
(1950), Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (1966), and Shakespeare
and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (1976).
“Fain would I dwell on form—”, says Juliet from her window to Romeo in the
moonlit orchard below,
Fain would I dwell on form—fain, fain deny

What I have spoke; but farewell compliment! (II.ii.88–89)1
Romeo has just violated convention, dramatic and otherwise, by overhearing

what Juliet intended to be a soliloquy. Her cousin, Tybalt, had already
committed a similar breach of social and theatrical decorum in the scene
at the Capulets’ feast, where he had also recognized Romeo’s voice to be

that of a Montague. There, when the lovers first met, the dialogue of their
meeting had been formalized into a sonnet, acting out the conceit of his lips
as pilgrims, her hand as a shrine, and his kiss as a culminating piece of stage-
business, with an encore after an additional quatrain: “You kiss by th’ book”
(I.v.112). Neither had known the identity of the other; and each, upon finding
it out, responded with an ominous exclamation coupling love and death
(120, 140). The formality of their encounter was framed by the ceremonious
character of the scene, with its dancers, its masquers, and—except for Tybalt’s
stifled outburst—its air of old-fashioned hospitality. “We’ll measure them a
measure”, Benvolio had proposed; but Romeo, unwilling to join the dance,
had resolved to be an onlooker and carry a torch (I.iv.10). That torch may
have burned symbolically, but not for Juliet; indeed, as we are inclined to
forget with Romeo, he attended the feast in order to see the dazzling but soon
eclipsed Rosaline. Rosaline’s prior effect upon him is all that we ever learn
about her; yet it has been enough to make Romeo, when he was presented to
us, a virtual stereotype of the romantic lover. As such, he has protested a good
deal too much in his preliminary speeches, utilizing the conventional phrases
and standardized images of Elizabethan eroticism, bandying generalizations,
paradoxes, and sestets with Benvolio, and taking a quasi-religious vow which
his introduction to Juliet would ironically break (I.ii.92–97). Afterward this
role has been reduced to absurdity by the humorous man, Mercutio, in a
mock-conjuration evoking Venus and Cupid and the inevitable jingle of “love”
and “dove” (II.i.10). The scene that follows is actually a continuation, marked
in neither the Folios nor the Quartos, and linked with what has gone before
by a somewhat eroded rhyme.
’Tis in vain
To seek him here that means not to be found,
Benvolio concludes in the absence of Romeo (41, 42). Whereupon the latter, on
the other side of the wall, chimes in:
He jests at scars that never felt a wound. (II.ii.1)
Thus we stay behind, with Romeo, when the masquers depart. Juliet,
appearing at the window, does not hear his descriptive invocation. Her first
utterance is the very sigh that Mercutio burlesqued in the foregoing scene: “Ay,
me!” (II.ii.25). Then, believing herself to be alone and masked by the darkness,
she speaks her mind in sincerity and simplicity. She calls into question not
merely Romeo’s name but—by implication—all names, forms, conventions,
sophistications, and arbitrary dictates of society, as opposed to the appeal of
instinct directly conveyed in the odor of a rose. When Romeo takes her at her

word and answers, she is startled and even alarmed for his sake; but she does not
revert to courtly language.
I would not for the world they saw thee here,
she tells him, and her monosyllabic directness inspires the matching cadence of
his response:
And but thou love me, let them find me here. (77, 79)
She pays incidental tribute to the proprieties with her passing suggestion that,
had he not overheard her, she would have dwelt on form, pretended to be
more distant, and played the not impossible part of the captious beloved. But
farewell compliment! Romeo’s love for Juliet will have an immediacy which cuts
straight through the verbal embellishment that has obscured his infatuation with
Rosaline. That shadowy creature, having served her Dulcinea-like purpose, may
well be forgotten. On the other hand, Romeo has his more tangible foil in the
person of the County Paris, who is cast in that ungrateful part which the Italians
call terzo incòmodo, the inconvenient third party, the unwelcome member of an
amorous triangle. As the official suitor of Juliet, his speeches are always formal,
and often sound stilted or priggish by contrast with Romeo’s. Long after Romeo
has abandoned his sonneteering, Paris will pronounce a sestet at Juliet’s tomb
(V.iii.11–16). During their only colloquy, which occurs in Friar Laurence’s cell,
Juliet takes on the sophisticated tone of Paris, denying his claims and disclaiming
his compliments in brisk stichomythy. As soon as he leaves, she turns to the Friar,
and again—as so often in intimate moments—her lines fall into monosyllables:
O, shut the door! and when thou hast done so,

Come weep with me—past hope, past cure, past help! (IV.i.44–45)
Since the suit of Paris is the main subject of her conversations with her
parents, she can hardly be sincere with them. Even before she met Romeo, her
consent was hedged in prim phraseology:
I’ll look to like, if looking liking move. (I.iii.97)
And after her involvement she becomes adept in the strategems of mental
reservation, giving her mother equivocal rejoinders and rousing her father’s anger
by chopping logic (III.v.69–205). Despite the intervention of the Nurse on her
behalf, her one straightforward plea is disregarded. Significantly Lady Capulet,
broaching the theme of Paris in stiffly appropriate couplets, has compared his
face to a volume:2

This precious book of love, this unbound lover,

To beautify him only lacks a cover.
The fish lives in the sea, and ’tis much pride
The fair without the fair within to hide. (I.iii.89–90)
That bookish comparison, by emphasizing the letter at the expense of the spirit,
helps to lend Paris an aspect of unreality; to the Nurse, more ingenuously, he is
“a man of wax” (76). Later Juliet will echo Lady Capulet’s metaphor, transferring
it from Paris to Romeo:
Was ever book containing such vile matter

So fairly bound? (III.ii.83–84)
Here, on having learned that Romeo has just slain Tybalt, she is undergoing a
crisis of doubt, a typically Shakespearian recognition of the difference between
appearance and reality. The fair without may not cover a fair within, after all. Her
unjustified accusations, leading up to her rhetorical question, form a sequence
of oxymoronic epithets: “Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical, . . . honorable villain!”
(75–79) W. H. Auden, in a recent comment on these lines,3 cannot believe they
would come from a heroine who had been exclaiming shortly before: “Gallop
apace, you fiery-footed steeds . . . !” Yet Shakespeare has been perfectly consistent
in suiting changes of style to changes of mood. When Juliet feels at one with
Romeo, her intonations are genuine; when she feels at odds with him, they
should be unconvincing. The attraction of love is played off against the revulsion
from books, and coupled with the closely related themes of youth and haste, in
one of Romeo’s long-drawn-out leavetakings:
Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books;

But love from love, towards school with heavy looks. (II.ii.157–158)3
The school for these young lovers will be tragic experience. When Romeo,
assuming that Juliet is dead and contemplating his own death, recognizes the
corpse of Paris, he will extend the image to cover them both:
O give me thy hand,

One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book! (V.iii.82)
It was this recoil from bookishness, together with the farewell to

compliment, that animated Love’s Labour’s Lost, where literary artifice was so
ingeniously deployed against itself, and Berowne was taught—by an actual
heroine named Rosaline—that the best books were women’s eyes. Some of
Shakespeare’s other early comedies came even closer to adumbrating certain

features of Romeo and Juliet: notably, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with its
locale, its window scene, its friar and rope, its betrothal and banishment, its
emphasis upon the vagaries of love. Shakespeare’s sonnets and erotic poems
had won for him the reputation of an English Ovid. Romeo and Juliet, the
most elaborate product of his so-called lyrical period, was his first successful
experiment in tragedy.4 Because of that very success, it is hard for us to realize
the full extent of its novelty, though scholarship has lately been reminding us
of how it must have struck contemporaries.5 They would have been surprised,
and possibly shocked, at seeing lovers taken so seriously. Legend, it had been
heretofore taken for granted, was the proper matter for serious drama; romance
was the stuff of the comic stage. Romantic tragedy—“an excellent conceited
Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet”, to cite the title-page of the First Quarto—was
one of those contradictions in terms which Shakespeare seems to have delighted
in resolving. His innovation might be described as transcending the usages of
romantic comedy, which are therefore very much in evidence, particularly at
the beginning. Subsequently, the leading characters acquire together a deeper
dimension of feeling by expressly repudiating the artificial language they have
talked and the superficial code they have lived by. Their formula might be that
of the anti-Petrarchan sonnet:
Foole said My muse to mee, looke in thy heart and write.6
An index of this development is the incidence of rhyme, heavily concentrated

in the First Act, and its gradual replacement by a blank verse which is realistic
or didactic with other speakers and unprecedentedly limpid and passionate
with the lovers. “Love has no need of euphony”, the eminent Russian translator
of the play, Boris Pasternak, has commented. “Truth, not sound, dwells in its
heart.”7
Comedy set the pattern of courtship, as formally embodied in a dance.
The other genre of Shakespeare’s earlier stagecraft, history, set the pattern
of conflict, as formally embodied in a duel. Romeo and Juliet might also be
characterized as an anti-revenge play, in which hostile emotions are finally
pacified by the interplay of kindlier ones. Romeo sums it up in his prophetic
oxymorons:
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create! (I.i.162–164)
And Paris, true to type, waxes grandiose in lamenting Juliet:
O love! O life! not life, but love in death! (IV.v.58)

Here, if we catch the echo from Hieronimo’s lament in The Spanish Tragedy,
O life! no life, but lively form of death,
we may well note that the use of antithesis, which is purely decorative with
Kyd, is functional with Shakespeare. The contrarieties of his plot are reinforced
on the plane of imagery by omnipresent reminders of light and darkness,8
youth and age, and many other antitheses subsumed by the all-embracing one
of Eros and Thanatos, the leitmotif of the Liebestod, the myth of the tryst in
the tomb. This attraction of ultimate opposites—which is succinctly implicit
in the Elizabethan ambiguity of the verb to die—is generalized when the Friar
rhymes “womb” with “tomb”, and particularized when Romeo hails the latter
place as “thou womb of death” (I.iii.9, 10; V.iii.45). Hence the “extremities”
of the situation, as the Prologue to the Second Act announces, are tempered
“with extreme sweet” (14). Those extremes begin to meet as soon as the initial
prologue, in a sonnet disarmingly smooth, has set forth the feud between the
two households, “Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (4). Elegant
verse yields to vulgar prose, and to an immediate riot, as the servants precipitate
a renewal—for the third time—of their masters’ quarrel. The brawl of Act I is
renewed again in the contretemps of Act III and completed by the swordplay
of Act V. Between the street-scenes, with their clashing welter of citizens
and officers, we shuttle through a series of interiors, in a flurry of domestic
arrangements and family relationships. The house of the Capulets is the logical
center of action, and Juliet’s chamber its central sanctum. Consequently, the
sphere of privacy encloses Acts II and IV, in contradistinction to the public
issues raised by the alternating episodes. The temporal alternation of the play,
in its accelerating continuity, is aptly recapitulated by the impatient rhythm of
Capulet’s speech:
Day, night, late, early,

At home, abroad, alone, in company,
Waking or sleeping . . . (III.v.177–179)
The alignment of the dramatis personae is as symmetrical as the antagonism

they personify. It is not without relevance that the names of the feuding families,
like the Christian names of the hero and heroine, are metrically interchangeable
(though “Juliet” is more frequently a trochee than an amphimacer). Tybalt the
Capulet is pitted against Benvolio the Montague in the first street-fight, which
brings out—with parallel stage-directions—the heads of both houses restrained
by respective wives. Both the hero and heroine are paired with others, Rosaline
and Paris, and admonished by elderly confidants, the Friar and the Nurse.
Escalus, as Prince of Verona, occupies a superior and neutral position; yet, in the

interchange of blood for blood, he loses “a brace of kinsman”, Paris and Mercutio
(V.iii.295). Three times he must quell and sentence the rioters before he can
pronounce the final sestet, restoring order to the city-state through the lovers’
sacrifice. He effects the resolution by summoning the patriarchal enemies, from
their opposite sides, to be reconciled. “Capulet, Montague,” he sternly arraigns
them, and the polysyllables are brought home by monosyllabics:
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love. (291–293)
The two-sided counterpoise of the dramatic structure is well matched by the

dynamic symmetry of the antithetical style. One of its peculiarities, which
surprisingly seems to have escaped the attention of commentators, is a habit of
stressing a word by repeating it within a line, a figure which may be classified in
rhetoric as a kind of ploce. I have cited a few examples incidentally; let me now
underline the device by pointing out a few more. Thus Montague and Capulet
are accused of forcing their parties
To wield old partisans in hands as old,

Cank’red with peace, to part your cank’red hate. (I.i.100, 102)
This double instance, along with the wordplay on “cank’red,” suggests the
embattled atmosphere of partisanship through the halberds; and it is further
emphasized in Benvolio’s account of the fray:
Came more and more, and fought on part and part. (122)
The key-words are not only doubled but affectionately intertwined, when Romeo
confides to the Friar:
As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine. (II.iii.59)
Again, he conveys the idea of reciprocity by declaring that Juliet returns “grace
for grace and love for love” (86). The Friar’s warning hints at poetic justice:
These violent delights have violent ends. (II.vi.9)
Similarly Mercutio, challenged by Tybalt, turns “point to point”, and the

Nurse finds Juliet—in antimetabole—“Blubb’ring and weeping, weeping and
blubbering” (III.ii.165; iii.87). Statistics would prove illusory, because some
repetitions are simply idiomatic, grammatical, or—in the case of old Capulet
or the Nurse—colloquial. But it is significant that the play contains well over a

hundred such lines, the largest number being in the First Act and scarcely any
left over for the Fifth.
The significance of this tendency toward reduplication, both stylistic and
structural, can perhaps be best understood in the light of Bergson’s well-known
theory of the comic: the imposition of geometrical form upon the living data
of formless consciousness. The stylization of love, the constant pairing and
counterbalancing, the quid pro quo of Capulet and Montague, seem mechanical
and unnatural. Nature has other proponents besides the lovers, especially
Mercutio their fellow victim, who bequeathes his curse to both their houses. His
is likewise an ironic end, since he has been as much a satirist of “the new form” and
Tybalt’s punctilio in duelling “by the book of arithmetic” as of “the numbers that
Petrarch flowed in” and Romeo’s affectations of gallantry (II.iv.34, 38; III.i.104).
Mercutio’s interpretation of dreams, running counter to Romeo’s premonitions, is
naturalistic, not to say Freudian; Queen Mab operates through fantasies of wish-
fulfilment, bringing love to lovers, fees to lawyers, and tithe-pigs to parsons; the
moral is that desires can be mischievous. In his repartee with Romeo, Mercutio
looks forward to their fencing with Tybalt; furthermore he charges the air with
bawdy suggestions that—in spite of the limitations of Shakespeare’s theatre, its
lack of actresses and absence of close-ups—love may have something to do with
sex, if not with lust, with the physical complementarity of male and female.9 He
is abetted, in that respect, by the malapropistic garrulity of the Nurse, Angelica,
who is naturally bound to Juliet through having been her wet-nurse, and who
has lost the infant daughter that might have been Juliet’s age. None the less,
her crotchety hesitations are contrasted with Juliet’s youthful ardors when the
Nurse acts as go-between for Romeo. His counsellor, Friar Laurence, makes
a measured entrance with his sententious couplets on the uses and abuses of
natural properties, the medicinal and poisonous effects of plants:
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart. (II.iii.25, 26)
His watchword is “Wisely and slow”, yet he contributes to the grief at the
sepulcher by ignoring his own advice, “They stumble that run fast” (94).10 When
Romeo upbraids him monosyllabically,
Thou canst not speak of that thou doest not feel,
it is the age-old dilemma that separates the generations: Si jeunesse savait, si

vieillesse pouvait (III.iii.64). Banished to Mantua, Romeo has illicit recourse to
the Apothecary, whose shop—envisaged with Flemish precision—unhappily
replaces the Friar’s cell, and whose poison is the sinister counterpart of
Laurence’s potion.

Against this insistence upon polarity, at every level, the mutuality of the lovers
stands out, the one organic relation amid an overplus of stylized expressions
and attitudes. The naturalness of their diction is artfully gained, as we have
noticed, through a running critique of artificiality. In drawing a curtain over the
consummation of their love, Shakespeare heralds it with a prothalamium and
follows it with an epithalamium. Juliet’s “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”,
reversing the Ovidian “lente currite, noctis equi”, is spoken “alone” but in breathless
anticipation of a companion (III.ii.1). After having besought the day to end, the
sequel to her solo is the duet in which she begs the night to continue. In the ensuing
débat of the nightingale and the lark, a refinement upon the antiphonal song of the
owl and the cuckoo in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo more realistically discerns “the
herald of the morn” (III.v.6). When Juliet reluctantly agrees, “More light and light
it grows”, he completes the paradox with a doubly reduplicating line:
More light and light—more dark and dark our woes! (35,36)
The precariousness of their union, formulated arithmetically by the Friar as “two

in one” (II.vi.37), is brought out by the terrible loneliness of Juliet’s monologue
upon taking the potion:
My dismal scene I needs must act alone. (IV.iii.19)
Her utter singleness, as an only child, is stressed by her father and mourned by
her mother:
But one, poor one, one poor and loving child. (v.46)
Tragedy tends to isolate where comedy brings together, to reveal the uniqueness
of individuals rather than what they have in common with others. Asking for
Romeo’s profession of love, Juliet anticipates: “I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’” (II.
ii.90). That monoysllable of glad assent was the first she ever spoke, as we know
from the Nurse’s childish anecdote (I.iii.48). Later, asking the Nurse whether
Romeo has been killed, Juliet pauses self-consciously over the pun between “Ay”
and “I” or “eye”:
Say thou but ‘I,’

And that bare vowel ‘I’ shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice.
I am not I, if there be such an ‘I’;
Or those eyes shut that make thee answer ‘I.’
If he be slain, say ‘I’; or if not, ‘no.’
Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe. (III.ii.45–51)

Her identification with him is negated by death, conceived as a shut or poisoning

eye, which throws the pair back upon their single selves. Each of them dies
alone—or, at all events, in the belief that the other lies dead, and without the
benefit of a recognition-scene. Juliet, of course, is still alive; but she has already
voiced her death-speech in the potion scene. With the dagger, her last words,
though richly symbolic, are brief and monosyllabic:
This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die. (V.iii.170)
The sense of vicissitude is re-enacted through various gestures of staging;

Romeo and Juliet experience their exaltation “aloft” on the upper stage; his
descent via the rope is, as she fears, toward the tomb (III.v.56).11 The antonymous
adverbs up and down figure, with increasing prominence, among the brief sounds
that determine Juliet’s woe (e.g., V.ii.209–210). The overriding pattern through
which she and Romeo have been trying to break—call it Fortune, the stars,
or what you will—ends by closing in and breaking them; their private world
disappears, and we are left in the social ambiance again. Capulet’s house has
been bustling with preparations for a wedding, the happy ending of comedy. The
news of Juliet’s death is not yet tragic because it is premature; but it introduces a
peripety which will become the starting point for Hamlet.
All things that we ordained festival

Turn from their office to black funeral—
the old man cries, and his litany of contraries is not less poignant because he has
been so fond of playing the genial host:
Our instruments to melancholy bells,

Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change;
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse;
And all things change them to the contrary. (IV.v.84–90)
His lamentation, in which he is joined by his wife, the Nurse, and Paris, reasserts
the formalities by means of what is virtually an operatic quartet. Thereupon
the music becomes explicit, when they leave the stage to the Musicians, who
have walked on with the County Paris. Normally these three might play during
the entr’acte, but Shakespeare has woven them into the dialogue terminating
the Fourth Act.12 Though their art has the power of soothing the passions
and thereby redressing grief, as the comic servant Peter reminds them with a
quotation from Richard Edward’s lyric In Commendacion of Musicke, he persists
in his query: “Why ‘silver sound’?” (131) Their answers are those of mere hirelings,

who can indifferently change their tune from a merry dump to a doleful one, so
long as they are paid with coin of the realm. Yet Peter’s riddle touches a deeper
chord of correspondence, the interconnection between discord and harmony,
between impulse and discipline. “Consort”, which can denote a concert or a
companionship, can become the fighting word that motivates the unharmonious
pricksong of the duellists (III.i.48). The “sweet division” of the lark sounds harsh
and out of tune to Juliet, since it proclaims that the lovers must be divided (v. 29).
Why “silver sound”? Because Romeo, in the orchard, has sworn by the moon
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops. (II.i.108)
Because Shakespeare, transposing sights and sounds into words, has made us
imagine

Like softest music to attending ears! (167–168)
Notes
1. Line-references are to the separate edition of G. L. Kittredge’s text (Boston,
1940).
2. On the long and rich history of this trope, see the sixteenth chapter of
E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (New
York, 1953).
3. In the paper-bound Laurel Shakespeare, ed. Francis Fergusson (New York,
1958), p. 26.
4. H. B. Charlton, in his British Academy lecture for 1939, “Romeo and Juliet”
as an Experimental Tragedy, has considered the experiment in the light of Renais-
sance critical theory.
5. Especially F. M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies
(San Marino, 1957), pp. 63–88.
6. Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge,
1922), p. 243.
7. Boris Pasternak, “Translating Shakespeare”, tr. Manya Harari, The Twenti-
eth Century, CLXIV, 979 (September, 1958), p. 217.
8. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York,
1936), pp. 310–316.
9. Coleridge’s persistent defense of Shakespeare against the charge of gross
language does more credit to that critic’s high-mindedness than to his discern-
ment. The concentrated ribaldry of the gallants in the street (II.iv) is deliberately
contrasted with the previous exchange between the lovers in the orchard.
10. This is the leading theme of the play, in the interpretation of Brents Stir-
ling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Themes and Characters (New
York, 1956), pp. 10–25.
11. One of the more recent and pertinent discussions of staging is that of
Richard Hosley, “The Use of the Upper Stage in Romeo and Juliet”, Shakespeare
Quarterly, V, 4 (Autumn, 1954), 371–379.

12. Professor F. T. Bowers reminds me that inter-act music was probably not a
regular feature of public performance when Romeo and Juliet was first performed.
Some early evidence for it has been gathered by T. S. Graves in “The Act-Time in
Elizabethan Theatres”, Studies in Philology, XII, 3 (July, 1915), 120–124—notably
contemporary sound cues, written into a copy of the Second Quarto and cited by
Malone. But if—as seems likely—such practices were exceptional, then Shake-
speare was innovating all the farther.
QQQ
1964—Norman N. Holland.
“Romeo and Juliet,” from The Shakespearean Imagination
Norman N. Holland (1927– ) has been a professor in the English
Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo and is
currently the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of
Florida. His books include Meeting Movies (2006), The Dynamics of Literary
Response (1968), and Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966).
People usually say about Romeo and Juliet that it is a tragedy of young love, and
so—in a way—it is. We should keep in mind, though, that there are many kinds
of love in Romeo and Juliet. There is the love of parent for child, in this case, a
somewhat misguided love as old Capulet tries to make Juliet marry the County
Paris. There is religious love, the love of the Friar for his flock. There is political
love, the Prince’s care for the citizens of Verona. And we have unrequited love,
Paris’ love for Juliet, for example, and, even more important, the love of Romeo
for that character whom even critics tend to forget, Rosaline. People apparently
prefer not to remember that Romeo doesn’t simply fall in love with Juliet. When
we first see him at the opening of the play, he is pining away, not for Juliet, but
for Rosaline, who has sworn that she will still live chaste. It isn’t until the fifth
scene of the play that Romeo meets Juliet and falls in love with her.
The tragedy has many different kinds of love. It also has hate and conflict,
naturally enough, in a way, for the god of love is an archer and he shoots fatal
arrows. We speak of the “victims” of love, of women “surrendering,” or of love
“conquering” all. At this point, I suppose, we stretch out our Freudian antennae,
but the Elizabethans needed no psychoanalyst come from the couch to tell them
how close love is to fighting. Shakespeare makes it very clear, very ribaldly clear,
in the opening fight among the servants.
Sampson: I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his
maids to the Wall. . . . When I have fought with the men, I will be cruel
with the maids—I will cut off their heads.

Gregory: The heads of the maids?

Sampson: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in
what sense thou wilt. (I. i. 15–25)
When this tragedy puts love and fighting side by side, it touches the oldest and
deepest part of our minds, and we should call Romeo and Juliet not a tragedy
of young love, but a tragedy of young love and old hate, a tragedy of “the fatal
loins.”
What people usually say about Romeo and Juliet is that it is a tragedy of
fortune, or as the Prologue at the opening of the play has it, the tragedy of “a
pair of star-crossed lovers.” Now, most Elizabethans firmly believed in astrology,
in the influence of the stars on human affairs. The stars were the agents of
fortune; as Romeo says after he has slain Tybalt, “Oh, I am fortune’s fool!” (III.
i. 134), meaning he is fortune’s plaything. As we saw, when we were dealing
with Macbeth, most Elizabethans believed in fortune, fate, and the stars, but they
were also Christian, and they believed in free will. Thus, though a man’s fate
is predetermined, he determines it by choosing as he goes along. God knows
everything that is going to happen, but we make it happen. Perhaps the best way
of thinking of “the stars” in Romeo and Juliet is more or less the way we think of
luck. The stars, however, have an advantage over luck in that one can use them
to read one’s fate, as by casting a horoscope. In fact, this is more or less what
Romeo does when, just before he first meets Juliet, he has a foreboding of what
is to come:
My mind misgives
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
With this night’s revels . . .
But he that bath the steerage of my course

Direct my sail! (I. iv. 106–113)
In effect, like a modern scientist, Romeo thinks of the stars as embodying and
revealing the laws behind physical events; they tell us what is going to happen.
Man chooses, as Romeo himself chooses to go to the Capulets’ ball, but man
chooses to fulfill the course that has been plotted for him by God. In effect,
Romeo describes the stars as a way to read his future.
There is a lot in this play about reading and books and the rules they can
teach you. For example, in Act I, scene ii, an illiterate servant comes to Romeo to
ask him to read the guest list that he is supposed to deliver for a party. The second
time that Romeo kisses her, Juliet says, “You kiss by the book,” meaning he kisses
politely, formally. (What a horrible thing to say to a young man she’s just kissed!)

Mercutio, after he has been stabbed by Tybalt, complains that he was stabbed
by a villain “that fights by the book of arithmetic” (the two references to doing
things “by the book” establish another parallel between loving and fighting).
The idea of doing things by the book runs all the way through the play; it’s
all part of Romeo and Juliet’s rather rigid and artificial style. Romeo and Juliet is a
play with a great deal of formality in it, formality in its broadest sense as well as
its narrowest. In a narrow sense, the style of Romeo and Juliet is formal. We find
a great deal of rhyme in this play, as in most of Shakespeare’s other early plays.
And the rhyme is not wholly successful, as, for example, in the closing couplet
of the play,

Not only do we have rhyme in this play, there are even whole little lyrics
embedded in the dialogue. Juliet recites an epithalamium, or marriage song, as
she waits for Romeo to climb her balcony the night after Friar Laurence has
married them. After that wedding night, as the lovers watch the dawn break that
will separate them, they recite another traditional kind of poem, an aubade, or a
day-song as it is called, a poem in which trysting lovers lament the coming of
day. The very moment they meet and declare their love, Romeo and Juliet speak
an impromptu sonnet:
Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this;
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take, (I. v. 93–106)
and he kisses her, after dutifully filling out the rhyme-scheme abab cbcb dede ff.
Romeo and Juliet was apparently written in the period when Shakespeare was
more interested in writing poetry than plays. There is some evidence that he
wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1591, at the very start of his career, and then revised it

in 1596. In any case, Shakespeare wrote this play sometime in the first quarter
of his career, the period when he wrote Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece
and apparently began writing his sonnets, the greatest collection of sonnets
in English. Shakespeare’s imagination in Romeo and Juliet is lyric, rather than
dramatic. Instead of the rich, complex metaphors of Shakespeare’s middle style,
Romeo and Juliet relies instead on mere word play, puns. Juliet, tormented by her
nurse’s delays, cries out,
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ‘I,’

I am not I, if there be such an ‘I’ . . . (III. ii. 45–48)
and so on. Could Lady Macbeth have talked that way, expressing her emotions
by a hail of puns? The puns get particularly thick in the battles of wits between
the young men of the play, Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio. Romeo, for example,
jokes about his pump, that is, his shoe, to Mercutio, and that worthy replies:
“Follow me this jest now till thou hast worn out thy pump, that, when the single
sole of it is worn, the jest may remain, after the wearing, solely singular.” “O
single-soled jest,” Romeo comes back, “solely singular for the singleness!” And a
modern audience sits on its hands.
Along with this interest in puns and poems and books, there is, naturally
enough, a preoccupation with names, as in the famous, “A rose by any other
name” (which should probably be “word”). The passage begins with Juliet asking,
“Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo” (wherefore, of course, means
why, not where, are you Romeo). Romeo goes on to answer and deny his name:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,

Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I it written I would tear the word. (II. ii. 55–57)
And later, Romeo says to Friar Laurence:
O, tell me, Friar, tell me,

In what vile part of this anatomy
Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack
The hateful mansion. (III. iii. 105–108)
This interest in words and names extends even to the letters of the alphabet.
At one point the Nurse has to deliver a message to Romeo, and she tells him of a
poem Juliet has written based on the fact that Rosemary and Romeo both begin
with the letter R. (Like many other things the Nurse says, this turns out to be

rather a ribald remark if you know some Elizabethan slang.) Juliet herself plays
on the letter “I” when she asks,
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ‘I,’

I am not I, if there be such an ‘I’
Or those eyes’ shot that makes thee answer ‘I.’ (III. ii. 45–49)
These two letters, R and I, are the initials of the two principal characters in the
play, for the Elizabethans, like the Romans, used I for J when they felt like it as
on the title page of the First Quarto text of this play. This careful playing around
with the initials of the two lovers is just one such element in the very stylized
and formal texture of this tragedy.
The tragedy also uses a number of the Elizabethan conventions about love.
There is, for example, a great deal in Romeo and Juliet about eyes. Mercutio says
of Romeo that he is “stabbed with a white wench’s black eye,” with a blonde’s
dark eye. Again, love and fighting, but this idea of stabbing with an eye also
refers to an Elizabethan notion of optics. We say that when we see an object,
light waves or photons or some mysterious thing from the object enters our
eyes. The Elizabethan was much more humanistic, and he thought that when
we saw something our eyes shot beams toward the object. Our theory is all very
nice for physics; their theory explains how people fall in love. The girl looks at
the boy, wiggles her eyelashes, and thus shoots darts into the pupils of his eyes
which descend and stab him to the heart. Thus, when Juliet warns Romeo that
her kinsmen will murder him he says, “Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye
than twenty of their swords,” one more case of that age-old link between love and
fighting. And that link suggests that now we are beginning to see the essence of
the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.
The tragedy seems to be working itself out in a series of oppositions. We’ve
already noticed Romeo versus Juliet, or, if you wish to generalize it, male versus
female, in the delightful battle of love. Juliet says before her wedding night:
Learn me how to lose a winning match,

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods, (III. ii. 12–13)
as though love were a game between two opponents. Then there is the obvious
opposition between the houses of Montague and Capulet, which is expressed
in still another contrast: the Montagues are often called dogs; the Capulets
are associated with cats, Tybalt, for example, being called “prince of cats”
and “Good king of cats.” A very important contrast in this tragedy plays
off romantic love against physical love: romantic love as represented, say, by
Romeo and Juliet themselves or by Romeo’s idealizing of Rosaline; physical

love as represented by Mercutio’s ribald comments or those of Juliet’s long-

winded Nurse. Romeo and Juliet, for all that it is supposedly a tragedy of young
love, is one of Shakespeare’s most obscene plays. For example, the Nurse in the
process of taking thirty-odd lines to explain to us that Juliet is slightly less than
fourteen years old recalls a time when she tripped and fell and her husband
took up the child.
‘Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face?

Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?’ (I. iii. 41–43)
Falling on one’s face as against falling on one’s back is only one in the play’s
long series of contrasts or oppositions. We have water as against fire when
Romeo, in one of the poems embedded in the dialogue of this play, speaks of
turning tears to fires. At one point one of his friends asks him, “What sadness
lengthens Romeo’s hours?” and Romeo replies “Not having that which having
makes them short.” Having and not having; long and short. At another point
Juliet says to the Nurse:
Though news be sad, yet tell them merrily;

If good, thou shamest the music of sweet news
By playing it to me with so sour a face. (II. v. 22–24)
The contrast is between good news and bad, sweet and sour. Again, Juliet cries
out when she learns who Romeo is:
My only love, sprung from my only hate!

Too early seen unknown, and known too late! (I. v. 138–139)
Love and hate; unknown and known; early, late—this is the way Shakespeare’s
imagination is working in Romeo and Juliet: opposites juxtaposed. Macbeth
has such contrasts, for example, “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” and we said that
Shakespeare’s imagination was finding for itself a particular figure of speech in
Macbeth, antithesis. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, there is also a characteristic
figure of speech; it is oxymoron (a word particularly handy for crossword puzzles
and cocktail parties). Like antithesis, oxymoron involves the joining of opposites,
but joining them in a closer and more extreme way, often by coupling an adjective
with a noun to which it cannot apply. We see this adjective-noun combination
in such a statement as Juliet’s cry of anguish when she learns that Romeo has
killed her cousin Tybalt:
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

Dove-feathered raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!

Despised substance of divinest show!

Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st
A damnèd saint, an honorable villain! (III. ii. 75–79)
We hear the same kind of stuff when Romeo comes upon the scene of the fight
with which the play begins. He translates the fight into an oxymoron for his own
unrequited love for Rosaline:

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! (I. i. 178–184)
Oxymoron, of course, is a verbal figure of speech, but Romeo and Juliet has
another kind of oxymoron, a visual oxymoron based on light. Light permeates
this play, pervades almost every scene with all the ardor and warmth of young
love—or old hate. The action of the play takes place in four days so that three
times we see the dawn rise. As Romeo says, “More light and light—more dark
and dark our woes” (III. v. 36). Light seems linked to love. On the first night of
the action we go to Capulet’s feast with its gay, sparkling torches. After the feast
there is the balcony scene under the night sky studded with stars. The next day
Romeo and Juliet are married and that night again there is a bright scene of love
against the dark sky and then the dawn. The final scenes of the play take place
in the darkness of the Capulets’ tomb, lit by the troubled flickering of a lantern,
and again the dawn, this time a reluctant gray dawn, breaks. Sometimes the light
in Romeo and Juliet is like a brief flash against the darkness; we hear of lightning
and the sudden flash of gunpowder. Friar Laurence moralizes,
These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. (II. vi. 9–11)
More often, the light is a bright spot against a black ground, a torch or a lantern
or a star, as in the phrase, “a pair of star-crossed lovers.” Thus, Romeo, after he
has met Juliet at the Capulets’ ball, climbs over her garden wall and looks up at
her balcony where suddenly she appears.
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.
* * *
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night. (II. ii. 2–22)
Juliet, too, sees Romeo in terms of a bright spot against a dark ground, day in
night, snow on a raven’s back, or stars against the night:
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;

For thou wilt he upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night;
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. (III. ii. 17–25)
This image of light against dark is, of course, not confined to stars; it can
become the rather strange simile with which Romeo comments on his first sight
of Juliet:
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
* * *
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows. (I. v. 45–49)
That was his first sight of Juliet; we find the same image of light against darkness
in his last sight. He has just killed his rival Paris and says to him:
I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave.

A grave? O, no, a lanthorn, slaught’red youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light. (V. iii. 83–86)

The very grave becomes “a feasting presence full of light,” a place of gaiety, even
of love. Romeo speaks of it as the “bed of death” and then again as the “womb of
death.” When he buys the poison with which he commits suicide he says, “Well,
Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night” (V.i.34), thinking of dying together as an
ecstasy of love.
Just as the opening scenes of the play bring together the act of love and the act
of hate, sex and fighting, the closing scenes of the play bring together the place
of birth and the place of death. These equations, love and hate, sex and dying,
marriage and funeral, womb and tomb, such thoughts, modern psychologists
are quick to tell us, occupy some of the oldest and deepest levels of the human
mind. So, too, the strict and extreme contrasts of ideas are characteristic of our
most primitive thinking, a child’s feeling that things are either to be taken in
the mouth or spat out. In fact, Friar Laurence puts this rigid, black-and-white
pattern in images of food when he says:
The sweetest honey

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately: long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. (II. vi. 11–15)
It is Friar Laurence who, in one sense, is the spokesman for the play, who, if
this were a modern play, we would call the raisonneur, the man who speaks for
the author. At the intellectual center of the play stands Friar Laurence’s speech
about flowers. Throughout the play it is the love of Romeo and Juliet that has
been called a flower. For example, Juliet in the balcony scene says,
This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,

May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. (II. ii. 121–122)
But the flower is struck by the chillness of death. Juliet dies and
Death lies on her like an untimely frost

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field (IV. v. 28–29)
Life turning into death, the flowered Juliet into the poisoned Juliet, light into
darkness, love into conflict, womb into tomb, bright spots fading against a dark
ground—all these images and ideas come together in Friar Laurence’s great
tribute to nature and the dawn and the harmony of good and evil in the larger
purposes of the universe:
The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,

Check’ring the Eastern clouds with streaks of light;

And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels

From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels.
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye
The day to cheer and the night’s dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers.
The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb.
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Virtue herself turns vice, being misapplied.
And vice sometime ’s by action dignified.
Poison hath residence, and medicine power;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposèd kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant. (II. iii. 1–30)
Two opposèd kings encamped in man—this is the vision Romeo and Juliet gives
us of ourselves. In a later speech Friar Laurence, speaking over the supposedly
dead Juliet, defines these two parts of man as the heavenly and the earthly.
Heaven and yourself

Had part in this fair maid—now heaven hath all,
And all the better is it for the maid. (IV. v. 66–68)
As so often in drama and particularly in Shakespearean drama, these two

parts—the heavenly and the earthly parts of the principal characters—are
projected outward onto the characters around them. There are, for example, two
sets of parents in the play, the lovers’ real parents and their spiritual parents.
We see the real parents briefly, old Montague a little more conciliatory than his
fiery opposite Capulet. We see the Capulets impetuously forcing Juliet to marry

Paris. We hear at the end of the play that Lady Montague has died of grief.
Behind these real parents are what we might call the spiritual parents of the
lovers, a set of parents who project the most fundamental aspects of the lovers’
characters. They are Friar Laurence, Mercutio, Rosaline, and the Nurse. These
four spiritual parents are in turn divided into heavenly and earthly parts. That is,
Friar Laurence on the masculine side becomes a heavenly father. Mercutio, on
the other hand, who seems almost an older brother to Romeo, is masculine but
far more earthy. He seems to look only on the physical or sexual side of love, and
when his imagination turns to spiritual things, it finds expression in paganism:
the grand speech about Queen Mab and the fairies, or his conjuration of the
hidden Romeo:
The ape is dead, and I must conjure him.

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,
That in thy likeness thou appear to us! (II. i. 16–21)
Rosaline, too, is pagan, but “She hath Dian’s wit,” that is, the temperament of
the goddess of chastity. Rosaline herself projects another kind of spirituality:
that hankering after the ideal, the absolute, which is so much a part of the young
love of Romeo and Juliet. “She hath sworn that she will still live chaste.” “She
hath forsworn to love.” Finally, at the opposite end of the scale from the holy
father, Friar Laurence, is the profane mother, the Nurse. “Ancient damnation,”
Juliet calls her, “O, most wicked fiend.” When she advises Juliet that, since
Romeo has gone away, she might just as well marry Paris, Juliet rejects her evil
parent and turns to the good one, saying, “I’ll to the Friar to know his remedy.”
Figure C shows all these character relations in a kind of diagram—male–female;
Christian–pagan; chaste–unchaste. There is another, rather curious justification
for pairing the Friar and the Nurse this way: the Nurse has a helper, Peter; the
Friar is associated with “St. Peter’s Church.”
This must seem very cold-blooded and schematic, but you should remember
this is a very rigid and schematic sort of play. Romeo and Juliet is not just a tragedy
of young love, but a tragedy of young love and old hate and that phrasing keeps
us in mind of two of the dualities in the tragedy: love–hate, young–old. The
whole tragedy, in a sense, depends on the contrast between the impulsive, hasty
qualities of youth and the delays of old age. That is, Romeo and Juliet rush to
get married; Mercutio and Tybalt rush into a deadly sword fight. On the other
hand, old Montague, old Capulet, and the Prince delay—and have delayed for
years—in trying to straighten out their quarrel.

We could put all these fragments of the play together by saying that the
essence of Romeo and Juliet, the principle that informs and characterizes the
play’s distinctive world, is opposition: Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy of the way
opposites are so close in this world. How often two and two-ness appear in the
play, beginning with that crucial phrase of the prologue, “a pair of star-crossed
lovers,” and ending with the Prince’s mournful comment at the tomb that he
has “lost a brace of kinsmen.” All through the imagery, we find opposites paired:
virtue and vice; water and fire; long and short; quick and slow; sweet and sour;
light and dark; bright spot and dark background; cat and dog; womb and tomb;
birth and death; sex and fighting; but most of all, love and hate.
Not only are there sharp contrasts in the ideas and images, but also in the
characters and action. Mercutio, Rosaline, the Nurse, and the Friar make up
a pair of pairs, projections of the basic oppositions in the tragedy: chastity and
unchastity; Christian and pagan; male and female. Throughout, the tragedy sets
off the earthly aspects of people from the heavenly, just as the Friar separates
medicine from poison in his flowers. The Friar himself, gathering medicines,
bound to poverty, stands as a contrast to that poor apothecary from whom
Romeo buys his poison. He contrasts, too, with Prince Escalus: the Prince
wants to make peace between the two families by enforcing a political decree
from outside the feud; the Friar wants to make peace by encouraging a spiritual
decree (the marriage) that has grown up inside the feud. The humorous word
battles begun by Mercutio contrast with the serious sword battles begun by
Tybalt. Romeo and Juliet achieve a romantic, idealized love that contrasts with
and transcends both the earthy, physical love so ribaldly described by Mercutio

and the Nurse, and the chastity associated with Rosaline and the Friar. In the
action as a whole, Juliet’s wedding turns into a funeral; the lovers, in a hard
irony, “die of love.” In its essence, Romeo and Juliet is a formal tragedy. In
the narrow sense of the word, it is a play much concerned with books, rules,
conventions, poems, puns, words and names, and even letters of the alphabet.
The play is formal, though, in a far broader sense, formal in this very quality of
being composed of a series of sharp oppositions. Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy
of two people who want to compromise, to marry, in a world where everything
is black or white.
These opposites, this formality, typify Shakespeare’s early style. “What early
tongue,” says Friar Laurence, “so sweet saluteth me?” Romeo and Juliet is indeed
Shakespeare’s early tongue and it is indeed sweet, maybe even a little too sweet.
In the last analysis—and this may seem a horrible heresy to some—Romeo and
Juliet, I think, is simply not a very good play. It is, of course, a great favorite
with audiences, but that doesn’t tell us whether it should be a great favorite with
audiences. It’s a great favorite with actresses, particularly aging actresses, who
seem to have an irresistible urge to play the fourteen-year-old Juliet opposite
a handsome young lover. Because it’s such a great favorite, we ordinarily do
include it among Shakespeare’s major plays. If it is a major play, though, it is
certainly the least of Shakespeare’s major plays. But this, too, has its uses. Romeo
and Juliet reminds us that even Shakespeare’s hand can slip a little sometimes,
and it gives us a chance to look at what we might call the lesser Shakespeare
without going through the trials and tribulations of Titus Andronicus or the
Henry VI plays. Perhaps most important, by seeing what Romeo and Juliet is not,
we can see in high relief, as it were, what qualities we prize in the really great
plays of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet gives us a chance to ask what we mean
by greatness or goodness in a literary sense. Of course, this is a problem that
has bothered all the philosophers of all the ages, and I do not mean to offer in
the next few pages any real answer. Nevertheless, Romeo and Juliet does suggest
some defects, some things that keep us from saying “this is great,” which we
can look out for in other Shakespearean plays or, for that matter, in any work
of art.
For example, these rigid, sharp contrasts and oppositions—somehow they all
seem a bit too easy, rather like the villain of the nineteenth-century melodramas
who wore a black frock coat and a black stovepipe hat and would stalk around
and twirl his moustache, foreclose the mortgage, and tie little Nell to the railroad
track. We laugh at the villain of the nineteenth-century melodrama, and the
reason we laugh, I think, is that we expect from a work of art some kind of
complexity. We don’t get it in the nineteenth-century melodrama, and we don’t
get it in Romeo and Juliet. These sharp, rigid oppositions and contrasts are a little
too easy: love–hate, light–dark, sweet–sour, cat–dog—it’s like a word-association
test. In this tragedy, the lovers are “good guys,” and the parents are all “bad guys.”

Now, while there is a germ of truth in that, nevertheless, some of my best friends
are parents and occasionally parents are right—but you would hardly know it
from Romeo and Juliet.
The same thing holds true for the poetry. The figures of speech Shakespeare
uses in Romeo and Juliet are not complex as they were in Macbeth, but simple, the
ordinary stock-in-trade of any Elizabethan poet. Romeo, for example, says,
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;

Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears. (I. i. 188–190)
These are trite, hackneyed figures of speech; you could find them in dozens of
Elizabethan lyrics. At the end of the play, Juliet, wanting to commit suicide,
grasps Romeo’s dagger and cries: “This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me
die.” Old Capulet comes upon his stabbed daughter and says, “This dagger
hath mistak’n, for, lo, his house is empty on the back of Montague,” that is, the
scabbard is empty, “And it missheathèd in my daughter’s bosom.” The figure
of speech is that the dagger has been sheathed in Juliet’s body instead of in its
proper scabbard. Now this is surely a very small leap of the poetic imagination.
Contrast the great passage in Macbeth, where Macbeth, who has murdered
Duncan, describes the two grooms sleeping beside him whom he is accusing of
the murder; he speaks of
The murderers,
Steeped in the colors of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breeched with gore, (II. iii. 110–112)
of the daggers as wearing blood like breeches. It is a rather drastic figure of

speech, but an effective one, unlike the much cruder idea in Romeo and Juliet that
the dagger is sheathed in the body of its victim. The idea in the earlier play is too
easy; it demands no complexity from us in our response. The figure of speech in
Macbeth, on the other hand, does demand a complex response.
When critics speak of a too simple metaphor, they speak of it as relying on
our “stock response.” That is, crude works of art tend to use the way we would
react anyway; you can see this trick any Sunday in the poetry columns of the
Sunday supplements. We read a poem about a little boy who has died and gone
to heaven and become an angel and we feel sad. Naturally enough. But it was
not the poem that made us sad, but the thought of a little boy dying. In other
words, the poem used our stock response to gain its emotional effect. It cheated.
The poem generated no emotion itself; it only tapped a preexisting emotion. The
good poem or the good play, on the other hand, uses our stock response only a
little bit, only somewhat, only as the start for something bigger and better. If it

did not use our stock response at all, we would feel that it was foreign, strange to
us, too complicated. We would complain, as many people do about some modern
poetry and fiction, that it is too obscure, which, I take it, means simply that it is
too far removed from the way we ordinarily think or feel, too far removed from
our stock responses.
If, then, the great work of art uses our stock responses but is not subservient
to them, we would expect to find a kind of peak or optimum point in the
complexity which makes for great art, a point where there is neither too much
complexity nor too little. Yet there seems to be no one level of complexity
which automatically guarantees great art. That is, some great art is very complex,
while other great art relies pretty heavily on our stock responses. For example,
James Joyce’s Ulysses, probably the greatest novel of our century, uses our stock
responses relatively little. On the other hand, Spenser’s Faerie Queene or the
novels of Dickens or, in our century, the great Western movies such as High
Noon, these build very heavily on our preexisting ideas of what constitutes good
and bad. In other words, merely using or not using our stock responses is not
itself a determining factor in literary value; we must also consider how our stock
responses are used, either simply or complexly. Thus, in the case of Romeo and
Juliet, not only does the play rely heavily on our stock responses about parents
and children; it also uses those stock responses in a stock way. Contrast Macbeth.
Surely our stock response to the man who assassinates his guest, kinsman, and
king is that he is a bad man, but in the case of Macbeth this is complicated and
enriched by the whole question of fate, the role of the witches, the role of Lady
Macbeth, and the rest.
There is still another factor in the way a good work of art uses our stock or
ready-built responses: it uses them always more or less at about the same level.
For example, Juliet hears that Romeo is banished and she says,
‘Romeo is banishèd’—to speak that word

Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet,
All slain, all dead. ‘Romeo is banishèd’—
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word’s death; no words can that woe sound. (III. ii. 122–126)
This is a sort of stock response, a young reaction. There is no end, no limit, no

measure, no bound, in Juliet’s response to the banishment. Romeo, on the other
hand, when he speaks of his banishment to Friar Laurence, says,
Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife,

No sudden mean of death, though ne’er so mean,
But ‘banishèd’ to kill me—‘banishèd’?
O friar, the damned use that word in hell;

Howling attends it! How hast thou the heart,

Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,
A sin-absolver, and my friend professed,
To mangle me with that word ‘banishèd’? (III. iii. 44–51)
Romeo is also saying that the word carries in it a kind of infinite death, but
our response to his words is more complicated, more ironical. Romeo expresses
his despair in religious terms, and those very religious terms suggest that he
overstates his despair. After all, if we want to be cold-blooded and middle-
aged—and religious—about it, the fact that Romeo has been banished from
Verona is not the same as going to hell. Now one could make a play out of Juliet’s
response, somewhat crude and childish though it is; and one could make a play
out of Romeo’s response. But if a writer mixes these two attitudes in a single play,
we get the feeling of an unevenness. It can be really disastrous if you mix these
two different levels of response in a given speech. For example, at the beginning
of Romeo’s speech about being banished he cries,
’Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here,

Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her;
But Romeo may not. More validity,
More honorable state, more courtship lives
In carrion flies than Romeo. They may seize
On the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand
And steal immortal blessing from her lips. (III. iii. 29–37)
Suddenly the speech shifts from cats and dogs and little mice, soft, furry things,
to a carrion fly and, at that, a carrion fly which is stealing immortal blessing
from Juliet’s lip. It’s grotesque! Now it is possible, I expect, to write love poetry
about a fly on one’s beloved’s lips—John Donne wrote a famous love poem about
a flea biting first him, then his mistress—but it seems to me that it is probably
not possible to write a love poem which starts out with little furry kittens and
puppies and mice and then suddenly shifts to a carrion fly. The shift in tone is
too sharp, too radical, and we simply don’t go along with it. It doesn’t succeed.
In a good work of art, then, we ask for a certain consistency, a certain unity
or evenness in the tone; not so even that it becomes monotonous, but not so
disjointed that it becomes disturbing.
Another thing we ask for in a good work of art is a certain intensity or, if I can
use a scientific word, density. In one of the great plays of Shakespeare’s middle
period, like Macbeth, in line after line and word after word, something new is
happening, not just in the plot, in the action of the play, but in the language. It

is constantly moving and involving itself. Contrast this speech from Romeo and
Juliet: the Nurse is bewailing Juliet’s supposed death:
O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!

Most lamentable day, most woeful day
That ever ever I did yet behold!
O day, O day, O day! O hateful day!
Never was seen so black a day as this.
O woeful day! O woeful day! (IV, v. 49–54)
Now surely, if Shakespeare’s hand ever slipped, it slipped there. We don’t like that
kind of poetry because nothing seems to happen in it. In six lines we learn only
it is a black and woeful day. The lines lack intensity or density.
Finally, there is a fourth thing that we ask of a good work of art, namely,
that everything in it contribute to the total effect. In Macbeth, for example,
the Porter’s speech, the one bit of comedy in that tragedy, contributes its
own strange little bit to the effect of the whole. The Porter brings out in
a different form the same themes and images that run through the larger
aspects of the tragedy. He gives us a different perspective, a different attitude
toward the play as a whole. He adds something. In Romeo and Juliet the
scenes where Mercutio and Romeo match wits and engage in perfect volleys
of puns, these work into the play as a whole. They don’t add much, but they
do add something to the general atmosphere of the play, the general tone of
leisure or, if you prefer, delinquency. They suggest another attitude toward
love besides Romeo’s rather idealistic view, and often they develop particular
words and themes from the main action. In the comic scene in Act IV, scene
v, however, where Peter, the Capulets’ servant, comes to the musicians who
were supposed to play for Juliet’s wedding and tells them now they must play
for the funeral, these fifty lines contribute virtually nothing to the rest of the
play. There is a good deal of talk about musicians being paid in silver because
music has a silver sound, and this feeble witticism faintly echoes Romeo’s
remark in the balcony scene,

Like softest music to attending ears! (II. ii. 166–167)
It hardly adds much to the play, though, and in that sense, there are parts
of Romeo and Juliet which do not contribute to the unity of the total artistic
experience.
It may seem as though I am trying to shred Romeo and Juliet, but this
calculated brutality has a purpose. We should not set Shakespeare up as a little

tin god without fault or flaw. Shakespeare is no more perfect than other men,
and Romeo and Juliet is one of the less perfect of his plays. In fact, by looking at
some of the blemishes in Romeo and Juliet we can see better the virtues in the
greater plays. We can see the importance of four things to the value we give a
literary work:
1. The balancing of stock response and complexity.

2. Unity of tone.
3. Density.
4. Unity in general.
Note that these four criteria in no sense make up an invoice against which
to check the work; we cannot simply pronounce a literary work good because
it seems to deliver these four things. Such criteria as these really suggest
only a certain way of reading, namely, looking for these four things we value:
complexity, density, unity of tone, unity in general. We would read Romeo
and Juliet differently had we set up other criteria, for example, realism in an
absolute sense, instead of asking simply that a writer maintain a consistent
degree of realism (part of the idea of unity of tone). In that sense, canons or
criteria like these serve as a guide to our perception of a work rather than as a
checklist of rules to be obeyed by writers.
In fact, by considering the flaws and virtues of Romeo and Juliet in terms of
these four things, we can see that one thing in this tragedy which critics often call
a flaw is not really a flaw at all. Aristotle, the wisest of literary critics, said that the
best tragic effect is produced when the events come on us by surprise; the effect
is heightened further when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The
tragic wonder, he said, will then be greater than if they happened of themselves
or by accident. Now Romeo and Juliet falls woefully short of this standard. From
the very prologue of the play, from the point where we first realize that these
two young lovers are falling in love despite a family feud, I suppose we feel that
things are not going to turn out well. Yet, while the family feud causes much of
the trouble that leads to the lovers’ deaths, there is a crucial link in the chain of
cause and effect that is very weak indeed. It comes after Juliet has taken Friar
Laurence’s potion and apparently died. The Friar tries to send to Romeo to tell
him that Juliet is not really dead, but the message is never delivered and therefore
Romeo, when he comes back to Verona, thinks Juliet dead and commits suicide.
Juliet, in turn, seeing him dead, herself commits suicide. Why, wasn’t the message
delivered?
John: Holy Franciscan friar, brother, ho!

Enter [Friar] Laurence.

Laurence: This same should be the voice of Friar John.

Welcome from Mantua. What says Romeo?
Or, if his mind be writ, give me his letter.
John: Going to find a barefoot brother out,
One of our order, to associate me
Here in this city visiting the sick,
And finding him, the searchers of the town,
Suspecting that we both were in a house
Where the infectious pestilence did reign,
Sealed up the doors, and would not let us forth,
So that my speed to Mantua there was stayed.
Laurence: Who bare my letter, then, to Romeo?
John: I could not send it—here it is again
Nor get a messenger to bring it thee,
So fearful were they of infection. (V. ii. 1–16)
In short, Friar John could not deliver the message because he got stuck in
quarantine. The catastrophe of Romeo and Juliet, then, is purely and simply
accidental. In fact, Friar Laurence, when in the end he has to explain to friends
what he has done, says, “He which bore my letter, Friar John, was staid by
accident.”
Yet if we look back at the reason the message failed to reach Romeo, there
is a certain fitness to it. For one thing, Friar John got quarantined because
he was looking for another friar with whom to associate himself. In other
words, he was trying to make one friar into two. And as we have seen, the very
essence of this tragedy is that it is involved with two warring houses, two cities,
two star-crossed lovers. The very essence of the tragedy is that it deals with
pairs of things, and it therefore makes a certain sense for the catastrophe to
come about because friar number one went looking for friar number two.
Then, too, that “infectious pestilence.” It also makes a certain devious poetic
sense. It serves as a symbol for the moral disorder that surrounds the love and
harmony of the two lovers themselves. An “infectious” plague of hatred surrounds
the lovers just as a black background so often in this tragedy surrounds and
engulfs a bright spot of light. Here the single message which will save Romeo
and Juliet is engulfed and surrounded by the blackness and darkness of the
plague. In the same way, the weakness of the tragedy as a whole, its schematic
and artificial style, its rigid use of opposites: womb, tomb; love, hate; light, dark;
in short, its formality, makes up a background which engulfs the one great virtue
of Romeo and Juliet, its kernel of psychological truth.
QQQ

1970—Francis Fergusson. “Romeo and Juliet,”

from Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet
Francis Fergusson (1904–1986) was a theater scholar, critic, and pro-

fessor at Rutgers University and Princeton University. His books include
Trope and Allegory: Themes Common to Dane and Shakespeare (1977) and
Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet (1970).
Shakespeare wrote his play about youthful love and death in 1594 or 1595, when
he himself was only about thirty years old. At about the same time he was writing
some of his sonnets, the melodious fairy tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and
Richard II, the most lyrical of his histories. He was learning to lift whole plays to
the level of poetry while increasing their theatrical power. Romeo and Juliet tells a
swift story, and it is full of rich characterization and sharp, bawdy humor. At the
same time the sequence of its contrasting scenes, and the sound and imagery of
its verse, affect us like music.
The story of the doomed young lovers is very old. Shakespeare’s immediate
source was a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall History of Romeus
and Juliet (1562). Brooke had it from the French of Boaistuau, who had it from
the Italian of Bandello, who had it from Luigi Da Porto. Beyond that it may be
traced back to such classical myths as that of Hero and Leander. The medieval
narrative of Tristan and Isolde, familiar to us in Wagner’s opera, is on a related
theme. Shakespeare used Brooke for his plot and for sketches of some of the
characters. But, as usual, he transformed his sources. Brooke’s galloping narrative
is still readable, and the Italian versions are good of their kind. But Shakespeare
seems to have seen the full meaning and pathos of the story for the first time.
He saw it as a tale of the passions of youth. His lovers are very young and
innocent when love overwhelms them. So are the bored young men, loafing
about town, in whom the passions of the feuding Capulets and Montagues
explode so fatally. The old Capulets and Montagues and the worried Prince
of Verona feel partly responsible for the feud, and try to control it. The Friar,
when Romeo and Juliet confide in him, does his best to guide their love to life
and safety. But the moving force which Shakespeare saw in the old story is that
glamorous and dangerous passion that everyone feels in youth, and no one fully
understands at any age.
He presents this many-sided theme with humor and clarity in Act I, scene 1.
A silly squabble between serving-men of the feuding houses starts, out of sheer
boredom and animal spirits, when they meet in the street. It builds suddenly
from bawdy insults to blows, and from blows to a full-scale brawl which the
Prince himself is obliged to quell. The moment the stage is cleared, Benvolio
reports to the elder Montagues about their son Romeo, who sighs in the orchard

early in the morning: love’s helpless victim already, though at the moment be
longs for Rosaline, not Juliet. The music of Benvolio’s tale of Romeo contrasts
with the clatter of the fight, but we already sense that the pugnacious and erotic
feelings stirring the young come from the same moody source. And when
Romeo wanders on and sees the signs of the brawl, he tells us so:

When then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O any thing of nothing first create!
We are already in the “world” of the play, sharing the moods of the troubled
young people; we are ready for the story, which begins at the Capulet party, the
last scene of Act I. All the dangerous elements of the plot are brought together
against the background of music, masks, and summer night. Romeo and Juliet
bashfully recognize the love which is their fate, while Juliet’s savage cousin Tybalt
recognizes Romeo as a Montague and vows to kill him.
Act I, which prepares everything, is marked off by the Chorus who speaks at
the beginning and the end of the act. The Chorus, speaking in sonnet form, is
the impersonal, musing voice of the storyteller:
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.
That famous melody removes us to a distance from the scene, and reminds us
that we are watching not only the immediate crisis in Verona but the return of a
very old story. The change in point of view may be very effective in the theater.
It produces a sense of fate behind what the characters do and say, increases the
suspense, and prepares for the poetic scope of the poetry to come.
With the first scene of Act II we are back in the rush of events, which never
stops until all is over. In Brooke the story takes months, while Shakespeare
concentrates it into about five days. By that means alone he achieves the
rhythm of youth, when patience is unknown and every experience of joy or
pain is met headlong, for the first time. By means of his setting, Verona in
the dog-days, he sharpens all the feelings. Scenes in the still, sunny streets,
where the feud breeds in the hot blood of Tybalt and Mercutio, alternate with
scenes of starry night or earliest dawn when the lovers steal their moments
of “extreme sweet.” During Acts II and III the passion of the lovers and the
passions of the feud seem to be racing. Meanwhile we learn that Count Paris
is pressing for Juliet’s hand, and that the Friar is trying to devise a way to save
the situation.
In Act II the lovers seem to be winning. The Friar marries them secretly, and
Romeo, with that arranged, has his one moment of carefree kidding with his

friends Mercutio and Benvolio. But in Act III, scene 1, the feud overtakes them.
Tybalt kills Mercutio in the street, and then Romeo kills Tybalt. At almost the
same time Paris gets old Capulet’s consent to marry Juliet on “Thursday next.”
Against the background of these misfortunes—accidental, yet all too probable
in that risky situation—the lovers have their one night together. We see their
parting when the birds wake them at dawn; Romeo flees to Mantua, and Juliet
is told that she must marry Paris the next day—Wednesday—for the impatient
Capulet has advanced the date. This is the climax and turning point: the lovers’
night coincides with the fatality that dooms them.
In Act IV fate, or chance, catches up with the Friar also. He is obliged to
arrange Paris’ marriage to Juliet, but desperately tries to prevent it by giving Juliet
the sleeping-potion. Juliet, when she drinks it alone, must face the thought of
death. Next morning Paris and the Capulets must see their wedding celebration
turn into a funeral. The complicated effect of wedding-as-funeral and funeral-as-
wedding dominates Act IV. It must have pleased Shakespeare, for he used it for
a similar purpose in Much Ado. It expresses, in theatrical terms, both the pathos
and the irony of the situation.
Romeo does not appear in Act IV, but in Act V, scene 1, we see him in
Mantua. He has had a dream with some of the ambiguity of Juliet’s wedding-
funeral:
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead—

Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think—
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips,
That I revived and was an emperor.
He has not received the Friar’s messages; instead he gets the false news of Juliet’s
death. He is resolved at once:
Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars.
This moment corresponds to Juliet’s when she drinks the potion; both lovers
find the courage to do what love seems to demand. Romeo turns from the Friar,
who he thinks has failed him, to the Apothecary, whose poison is sure. In some
early versions of the story the Friar himself is suspected of “black magic” but
Shakespeare reserves that sinister art for the Apothecary. His Friar, whom we
first see at dawn, rejoicing in the beauty of nature, has “white magic.” He knows
the natural properties of plants, minerals, and human love. The Apothecary is
his dark opposite; he knows how to use minerals and plants against nature, to
produce death. Armed with his poison, young Romeo races to Juliet’s tomb.
He outruns the Friar who, with his reverence for life, arrives too late to save
the lovers.

The final scene (Act V, scene 3) brings the end which we have felt was “on
the cards” all along. The rhythm of the play—that of the heedless, “accident-
prone” young—is speeded up for the final crash. Romeo’s fight with Paris; the
lovers’ farewells; the Friar’s belated arrival and confused retreat, follow swiftly.
With Romeo and Juliet lying dead in the tomb, the churchyard (downstage,
no doubt) fills with officers, citizens, Capulets, Montagues, and the Prince.
We are reminded of the street brawl that opened the play; of the fight where
Tybalt and Mercutio were killed, and of poor Paris’ wedding morning with
Juliet lying in the semblance of death: the older generation is again mistaken
and too late. In the final sequence the Friar and Romeo’s and Paris’ serving-
men explain everything to the Prince. This part of the scene often seems too
long to the modern producer, and it is usually cut in performance. But after
the confusion of fights, cries, torches, and running people, Shakespeare felt the
need of a quieter moment. He wants the audience to reflect on the form and
meaning of the swift events they have just seen. By means of the Friar’s sad
testimony, Shakespeare modulates once more into the detached point of view
of the storyteller. “For I will raise her statue in pure gold,” says Romeo’s father;
and old Capulet chimes in:
As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie,

Poor sacrifices of our enmity.
The final words of the Prince echo the music of the Chorus which we heard at
the beginning of the play:

The plot, or rather the form, that Shakespeare gave the old story holds one
completely. The swift yet dreamy alternation of dawn, noon, and starlight seems
right, and in reading, or watching a good performance, we do not stop to inquire
what day of the week it is. But if, on thinking it over, we do inquire, we find
certain inconsistencies in the calendar of the play. The main events seem to occur
as follows:
Sunday: The street fight, the Capulet’s party (Act I) and the balcony
scene (Act II).
Monday: Romeo and Juliet are married (Act II); Tybalt is killed,
Romeo is banished; Paris’ wedding day is set, and the lovers
have their one night together (Act III).
Tuesday: The lovers part at dawn, Romeo flees to Mantua, and
Juliet learns she must marry Paris the next day (Act III).

The wedding preparations are begun, and Juliet drinks the

potion (Act IV).
Wednesday: The wedding party discovers Juliet apparently dead (Act IV).
Thursday: The race for the tomb. The final scene lasts through Thursday
night to Friday morning.
The inconsistencies appear in certain references to the time which has elapsed.
For instance, in Act II, scene 4, the Nurse tells Romeo, “I anger her sometimes
and tell her Paris is the properer man.” She seems to imply that weeks, rather than
hours, have elapsed since Juliet met Romeo. There is also some trouble about the
time when Juliet comes out of her coma, for the Friar has said she would sleep
longer than she does according to the calendar. Such inconsistencies probably
show that Shakespeare was careless. They also show that he was, as usual, using
time only for poetic and dramatic effect, knowing that his audience would never
demand scientific accuracy. In studying the time-scheme of the play one must, as
always, remember the theater for which Shakespeare wrote. On the permanent
setting, in daylight, the scenes follow one another with no intermissions and
no pauses for change of setting. The place, the time of day, and the atmosphere
of each scene are conveyed imaginatively by what the actors do and say. If one
imagines the play performed in that way one can see that Shakespeare used time
with great theatrical mastery to speed up, or to slow the action; to give us, not
clock-chronology, but the rhythm of the life he was portraying.
Much of the touching quality of the play is due to the setting Shakespeare
gave it in the town of Verona. Ostensibly Verona, with its ancient feud, is
Italian. But it must have seemed familiar to his English audience, and it seems
oddly familiar to us, in spite of its daggers and ruffs and poisons. The Capulets
are such parents as we all know: doting, apprehensive, always doing the wrong
thing with the best intentions. They are not great nobles, but provincial gentry
from Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford. Old Capulet bothers the cook;
his lady (like our ambitious mamas) is impressed with Paris’ money and social
position. The Nurse is practically a member of the family, and can indulge in
her impudent garrulity while Lady Capulet merely groans and bites her lip. The
Capulets’ parties are the kind that our wistful parents give for their marriageable
daughters. Romeo and his friends are more elegant than our young men, not in
the least embarrassed to wear gorgeous clothes, or to play with poetic and bawdy
conceits when they make jokes to kill time. They carry weapons, and their fights
(like those Shakespeare must have seen in London streets) are more dangerous
than our student riots. But it is not hard to recognize them as youths in the
bored, restless period before marriage and settling down. The Friar is perhaps
less familiar. He is related to countless intriguing priests in French, Spanish, and
Italian plays, but he also expresses much of the wisdom of the play: its delight in
the order of nature, and in human love in the natural world.

Romeo and Juliet fit naturally into the life of their town when we first see
them. Their adolescence is quieter and moodier than Mercutio’s or Benvolio’s,
but they are not strikingly unusual until love transforms them. Even then
Shakespeare keeps us reminded of their extreme youth, and he shows us how
their infatuation looks to their friends. When Romeo learns (Act III, scene 3)
that he is banished, he has a tantrum in which he sounds more like a child than
a hero of tragedy. The Friar scolds him properly:
Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts denote

The unreasonable fury of a beast.
The Nurse is on hand to bring out the comic effect. She has just been through
Juliet’s hysterics:
Even so lies she,

Blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering.
Producers are sometimes embarrassed by these tears. They fear that the audience
will not be robust enough to see the lovers in this unflattering light and still be
moved by their love-death. But the strength of the play is partly in its homey
realism, and the love of Romeo and Juliet is the more touching and frightening
for the familiar, domestic scene in which it appears.
The modern producer does, however, have real difficulty with the lovers’
tantrums because of the style in which they are written. When the Nurse (Act
III, scene 2) cruelly hints at Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment, Juliet,
thinking that Romeo is dead, has a long aria of despair:
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ay,

And that bare vowel I shall poison more
I am not I, if there be such an I—
and the rest. There is a curious interest, and some psychological subtlety in the
puns and conceits, all stemming from “I.” But a modern audience cannot accept
such dexterity at a moment of high feeling. Shakespeare himself soon learned to
rely less on rhetoric and more on his flexible blank verse and his actors’ emotion,
at moments of this kind. It is in these scenes that we notice Shakespeare’s
immaturity: he was still experimenting with verse-technique when he wrote this
play. The producer is obliged to cut the difficult speeches, but in doing so he must
be careful to leave the strong underlying dramatic build intact.
While we see the lovers in the little daylight world of Verona, we are given
the scenes that initiate us into the secret, nocturnal world of their love: the

Capulets’ party, the balcony scene, Juliet’s monologue as she waits for night and
Romeo; the parting at dawn, and the final scene in the tomb. In these scenes the
overpowering sweetness of love is the point, rather than the characters of Romeo
and Juliet. When Juliet says (Act II, scene 2)

My love as deep,
we ought to feel the love that dwarfs the little girl who speaks, almost forgetting
the girl herself. That is why these scenes, miraculous as they are, are not easy to
act. The actors should be young enough to charm us in these roles, and at the
same time understanding enough to lose their egos in the simplicity of feeling
and imagery that Shakespeare provides.
To mark the course of love as Romeo and Juliet follow where it leads,
Shakespeare drew on the long tradition of European love-poetry. When they
first confess the love that unites them (at the party, Act I, scene 5) they have a
delicate duet in the form of a “Petrarchan” sonnet in which religious imagery is
half-playfully used to express their human delight:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips two blushing pilgrims ready stand
While Juliet impatiently waits for Romeo after their secret marriage (Act III,
scene 2) she echoes the movement and imagery of the classical epithalamion, or
wedding song:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phoebus’ lodging; such a wagoner
As Phaeton would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
The epithalamion was a joyful song with which the wedding guests were
supposed to accompany the ceremonious progress of bride and groom to their
nuptial chamber. But Juliet must sing hers alone, in her child’s voice; and as
we listen we know that her Romeo is banished already. The scene of the lovers’
dawn parting is more frightening still (Act III, scene 5). It is based on the
“daysong,” a form which the twelfth-century troubadors used in the cult of
courtly love. No one knows where Shakespeare learned about the daysong,
for it was not cultivated in England, but the fact that this scene is based on it
was noticed more than a hundred years ago. As in the daysong, the lovers have

enjoyed a single night, in secret; day comes too soon, with the voices of the
birds; their faithful watcher (the Nurse, in this scene) calls to warn them that
they must part. In all of these scenes what the lovers say naturally expresses
the way love looks at that moment in the story; and as we read we may not
be aware of the old lyric forms that Shakespeare used. But the forms are part
of the magic: they suggest, behind Juliet and her Romeo, the mysterious and
ancient force of love itself.
There is something sinister about courtly love and its daysongs. In that
tradition love is always amoral, all-powerful, and so wonderful that it can be
fulfilled only in or through death. The common, daylight world is always love’s
enemy, the secret night its only friend. It is appropriate that the daysong should
be the form of the scene which marks the turning point in the story. In the early
parts of the play Romeo and Juliet do not know that their love cannot survive in
daytime Verona. But Shakespeare prepares their love-death from the beginning,
with his symbolism of day and night. The lovers see each other, again and again,
as light which is paradoxically visible only in the dark of night. They see each
other that way before they realize what it means. So Romeo sees Juliet when he
first spies her at the party:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.
Shakespeare saw something terrifying, if not in their love itself, at least in their
absolute (and too literal and impatient) obedience to it. That is why the end of
their story in the dark tomb, surrounded though it is by so many merely chance
misfortunes, is the only psychologically and poetically right conclusion.
Shakespeare gives us the full poignancy of Romeo’s and Juliet’s story, but also
the real world of Verona in which it runs its course. He establishes the wider
setting before the lovers appear; he makes us aware of it throughout, and he
returns to it after their tale is told. He never loses touch with common experience
and its sober wisdom, and so he suggests that Romeo and Juliet know love in
only one of its forms.
QQQ
1970—Susan Snyder. “Romeo and Juliet:

Comedy into Tragedy,” from Essays in Criticism
Susan Snyder (1934–2001) was a professor of English at Swarthmore
College. She is the author of The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies

(1979), Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvel, Milton (1998), and Shakespeare:

A Wayward Journey (2002).
Romeo and Juliet is different from Shakespeare’s other tragedies in that it

becomes, rather than is, tragic. Other tragedies have reversals, but in Romeo and
Juliet the reversal is so radical as to constitute a change of genre: the action and
the characters begin in familiar comic patterns, and are then transformed—or
discarded—to compose the pattern of tragedy.
Comedy and tragedy, being opposed ways of apprehending the real world,
project their own opposing worlds. The tragic world is governed by inevitability,
and its highest value is personal integrity. In the comic world “evitability” is
assumed; instead of heroic or obstinate adherence to a single course, comedy
endorses opportunistic shifts and realistic accommodations as means to an end
of new social health. The differing laws of comedy and tragedy point to opposed
concepts of law itself. Law in the comic world is extrinsic, imposed on society
en masse. Its source there is usually human, so that law may either be stretched
ingeniously to suit the characters’ ends, or flouted, or even annulled by benevolent
rulers. Portia plays tricks with the letter and spirit of Venetian law to save
Antonio. The Dukes in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
when the objects are family reunions and happily paired lovers, simply brush
aside legal obstacles. Even deep-rooted social laws, like the obedience owed to
parents by their children, are constantly overturned. But in the tragic world law is
inherent: imposed by the individual’s own nature, it may direct him to a conflict
with the larger patterns of law inherent in his universe. The large pattern may
be divine, as it generally is in Greek tragedy, or it may be natural and social, as
in Macbeth and King Lear. Tragic law cannot be altered; it does no good to tell
destruction to stop breeding destruction, or to tell gods or human individuals to
stop being themselves.
In these opposed worlds our sense of time and its value also differs. The
action of comedy may be quickly paced, but we know that it is moving towards
a conclusion of “all the time in the world.” The events of tragedy, on the other
hand, acquire urgency in their uniqueness and their irrevocability: they will never
happen again, and one by one they move the hero closer to the end of his own
time in death. In comedy short-term urgencies are played against a dominant
expansiveness, while in tragedy a sense that time is limited and precious grows
with our perception of an inevitable outcome.
In its inexorable movement and the gulf it fixes between the central figure and
the others, tragedy has been compared to ritual sacrifice. The protagonist is both
hero and victim, separated from the ordinary, all-important in his own being,
but destined for destruction. That is the point of the ritual. Comedy is organized
like a game. The ascendancy goes to the clever ones who can take advantage of
sudden openings, plot strategies, and adapt flexibly to an unexpected move. But

luck and instinct win games as well as skill, and comedy takes account of the
erratic laws of chance that bring a Dogberry out on top of a Don John and, more
basically, of the instinctive attunement to underlying pattern that crowns lovers,
however unaware and inflexible, with final success.
Romeo and Juliet, young and in love and defiant of obstacles, are attuned to
the basic movement of the comic game toward social regeneration. But they are
not successful: the game turns into a sacrifice, and the favored lovers become its
marked victims. This shift is illuminated by a study of the play’s two worlds and
some secondary characters who help to define them.
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 in a move toward marriage. This 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)1
The state that requires this cure is set out in the first scene. The Verona of the
Montague–Capulet feud is like the typical starting point of the kind of comedy
described by Northrop Frye: “a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage,
arbitrary law and the older characters.”2 Even the scene’s formal balletic
structure, a series of matched representatives of the warring families entering
on cue, conveys the inflexibility of this society, the arbitrary division that limits
freedom of action.
The feud itself seems more a matter of mechanical reflex than of deeply
felt hatred. As H. B. Charlton has noted, its presentation here has a comic
aspect.3 The “parents’ rage” that sounds so ominous in the Prologue becomes in
representation an irascible humor: two old men claw at one another 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.
Other aspects of this initial world of Romeo and Juliet suggest comedy.
Its characters are the minor aristocracy and servants familiar in comedies,
concerned 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 the young men 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, “and with unattainted eye /
Compare her face with some that I shall show . . . “ (1.2.89–90) and Rosaline
will be forgotten for some more approachable beauty. Romeo rejects the words,

of course, but in action he soon displays a classic comic adaptability, switching

from the impossible love to the possible just as Proteus, Demetrius, Phoebe, and
Olivia do in their respective comedies.
Violence and disaster are not absent, of course, but they are unrealized
threats. The feast yields a kind of comic emblem when Tybalt’s potential 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, for Tybalt is a recognizably tragic

character, the only one in this part of the play. He alone takes the feud seriously:
It is his inner law, the propeller of his fiery nature. He speaks habitually in the
tragic rhetoric 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. (1.5.57–61)
Tybalt’s single set of absolutes cuts him off from a whole rhetorical range
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 manner, the passing fears of calamity voiced by Romeo, Juliet,
and Friar Laurence are not allowed to dominate this atmosphere. If the love of
Romeo and Juliet is already imaged as a flash of light swallowed by darkness
(an image invoking inexorable natural law), it is also expressed as a sea venture,
which suggests luck and skill set against natural hazards, chance seized joyously
as an opportunity for action. “Direct my sail,” Romeo tells his captain Fortune
(1.4.113); but 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 would adventure for such merchandise. (2.2.82–84)
The spirit is Bassanio’s as he adventures for Portia, a Jason voyaging in quest

of the Golden Fleece.4 Romeo is ready for difficulties with a traditional lovers’
stratagem, one that Shakespeare had used before in Two Gentlemen of Verona: a

rope ladder “which to the high topgallant of my joy / Must be my convoy in the
secret night” (2.4.201–202).
But before the ladder can be used, Mercutio’s death intervenes to transform
this world of exhilarating venture. Mercutio has been almost the incarnation of
comic atmosphere. He is the best of game-players, endlessly inventive, full of
quick moves and counter-moves. Speech for him is a constant play on multiple
possibilities: puns abound because two or three meanings are more fun than one,
and 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—Romeo’s premonition—but Mercutio is not bound by events. They are
merely points of departure for his expansive wit. In Mercutio’s sudden, violent
end, Shakespeare makes the birth of a tragedy coincide exactly with the symbolic
death of comedy. The element of freedom and play dies with him, and 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 moe days doth depend [hang over],
This but begins the woe others must end. (3.1.124–25)
It is the first sign in the play’s dialogue pointing unambiguously to tragic

causation. Romeo’s future action is now determined: he must kill Tybalt, he must
run away, he is fortune’s fool.
This helplessness is the most striking quality of the second, tragic world of
Romeo and Juliet. That is, the temper of the new world is largely a function of
onrushing events. Under pressure of events, the feud turns from farce to fate,
from tit for tat to blood for blood. Lawless as it is in the Prince’s eyes, the feud
is dramatically the law in Romeo and Juliet. Previously external and avoidable, it
has now moved inside Romeo to become his personal law. Fittingly, 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 thy ‘villain’ back again
That late thou gavest me. (3.1.127–31)
Even outside the main chain of vengeance, the world is suddenly full of
imperatives: against his will Friar John is detained at the monastery, and against
his will the Apothecary sells poison to Romeo. Urgency becomes the norm as
nights run into mornings in continuous action 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 feast in Act

2, so in acts 3 and 4 the projected wedding is made grotesque when Shakespeare

insistently links it with death.5 Preparations for the feast parallel those of the first
part, so as to underline the contrast when

Turn from their office to black funeral—
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast. (4.5.84–87)
I have been treating these two worlds as 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 prominence of the
turning point we are aware that premonitions of disaster precede the death of
Mercutio and that hopes for avoiding it continue until near the play’s conclusion.
The world-shift that converts Romeo and Juliet from instinctive winners into
sacrificial victims is thus a gradual one. 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 a whole series of Shakespearean manipulators and stage-managers, those
wise and benevolent figures who direct the action of others, arrange edifying
tableaux, and resolve intricate public and private problems. Notable in the list are
Oberon, Friar Francis in Much Ado, Helena in the latter part of All’s Well, Duke
Vincentio, and Prospero. Friar Laurence shares the religious dress of three of this
quintet and participates to some extent, by his knowledge of herbs and drugs, in
the magical powers of Oberon and Prospero. Such figures are frequent in comedy
but not in tragedy, where the future is not 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 marriage and breeding is
as indiscriminate as the life force itself. But she conveys no sense of urgency in
all this. Rather, her garrulity assumes that limitless time that frames the comic
world but not the tragic. In this sense her circumlocutions and digressions are
analogous to Mercutio’s witty flights and to Friar Laurence’s counsels of patience.
The leisurely time assumptions of the Friar and the Nurse contrast with the
lovers’ impatience, creating at first the normal counterpoint of comedy6 and later
a radical split that points us, with the lovers, directly to tragedy.
For what place can these two have in the new world brought into being by
Mercutio’s death, the world of limited time, no effective choice, no escape? In a
sense, though, they define and sharpen the tragedy by their very failure to find
a place in the dramatic progress, by their growing estrangement from the true
springs of the action. “Be patient,” Friar Laurence tells the banished Romeo, “for

the world is broad and wide” (3.3.16). But the roominess he assumes 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 (3.3.17).
Comic adaptability again confronts tragic integrity when Juliet is faced with
a similarly intolerable situation—she is ordered to marry Paris—and turns to
her Nurse for counsel as Romeo does to the Friar. The Nurse replies with the
traditional worldly wisdom of comedy. Romeo has been banished and Paris is
very presentable. Adjust yourself to the new situation.
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! (3.5.218–20)
She still speaks for the life force. Even if Paris is an inferior husband, he 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 such advice has become irrelevant, even shocking, in this context. There
was no sense of jar when Benvolio, a spokesman for accommodation like the
Nurse and the Friar, earlier advised Romeo to substitute a possible for an
impossible love. True, the Nurse is urging violation of the marriage vows; but
Romeo was also sworn to Rosaline, and for Juliet the marriage vow is a seal on
the integrity of her love for Romeo, not a separate issue. The parallel points up
the progress of tragedy, for while Benvolio’s advice sounded sensible and was
in fact unintentionally carried out by Romeo, the course of action outlined by
the Nurse is unthinkable to the audience as well as Juliet. The memory of the
lovers’ dawn parting that began this scene is too strong. Juliet and the Nurse
no longer speak the same language, and estrangement is inevitable. “Thou and
my bosom henceforth shall be twain,” Juliet vows privately (3.5.242).7 Like
the death 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
alternate 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 a usual comic solution, and we have at hand the
usual manipulator to engineer it.
The Friar’s failure to bring off that solution is the final definition of the
tragic world of the play. Time is the villain. Time in comedy generally works

for regeneration and reconciliation, but in tragedy it propels the protagonists to

destruction; there is not enough of it, or it goes wrong somehow. The Friar does
his best: he makes more than one plan to avert catastrophe. The first, typically, is
patience and a broader field of action. Romeo must go to Mantua and wait
till 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, and 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, to create the necessary freedom
through a faked death. This is, of course, another comic formula; Shakespeare’s
later uses of it are all in comedies. It is interesting that 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, unlike Juliet’s, are designed to produce a change
of heart in other characters.8 Time may be important, as it is in The Winter’s
Tale, but only as it promotes repentance. Friar Laurence, less ambitious and
more desperate than his fellow manipulators, does not hope that Juliet’s death
will dissolve the families’ hatreds but only that it will give Romeo a chance to
come and carry her off. Time in the comic world of The Winter’s Tale cooperates
benevolently with Paulina’s schemes for Leontes’ regeneration; but for Friar
Laurence it is both prize and adversary. Romeo’s man is quicker with the news
of Juliet’s death than poor Friar John with the news of the deception. Romeo
himself beats Friar Laurence to the Capulets’ tomb. 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 is only emphasized when he seeks to avert the other half by
sending Juliet to a nunnery. It is the last alternative to be suggested. Juliet quietly
rejects the possibility of adjustment and continuing life: “Go, get thee hence, for
I will not away” (5.3.160).
The Nurse and the Friar illustrate a basic principle of the operation of comedy
in tragedy, which might be called the principle of irrelevance. In tragedy we are
tuned to the extraordinary. Romeo and Juliet gives us this extraordinary center
not so much in the two individuals as in the love itself, its intensity and integrity.
Our apprehension of this intensity and integrity comes gradually, through the
cumulative effect of the lovers’ lyric encounters and the increasing urgency of
events, but also through the growing irrelevance of the comic characters.
De Quincey perceived in the knocking at the gate in Macbeth the resumption
of normality after nightmare: “the re-establishment of the going-on of the

world in which we live, which first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful
parenthesis that has suspended them.”9 I would say rather that the normal
atmosphere of Macbeth has been and goes on being nightmarish, and that it is
the knocking at the gate that turns out to be the contrasting parenthesis, but
the notion of a sharpened sensitivity is valid. As the presence of alternate paths
makes us more conscious of the road we are in fact traveling, so the Nurse and
the Friar make us more “profoundly sensible” of Romeo’s and Juliet’s love and
its true direction.
After Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare never returned to the comedy-into-tragedy
formula, although the canon has several examples of potential tragedy converted
into comedy. There is a kind of short comic movement in Othello, encompassing
the successful love of Othello and Desdemona and their safe arrival in Cyprus,
but comedy is not in control even in the first act. Iago’s malevolence has begun
the play, and our sense of obstacles overcome (Desdemona’s father, the perils of
the sea) is shadowed by his insistent presence. The act ends with the birth of his
next plot.
It is not only the shift from comedy to tragedy that sets Romeo and
Juliet apart from the other Shakespeare tragedies. Critics have often noted,
sometimes disapprovingly, that external fate rather than character is the principal
determiner of the tragic outcome. For Shakespeare, tragedy is usually a matter of
both character and circumstance, a fatal interaction of man and moment. But in
this play, although the central characters have their weaknesses, their destruction
does not really stem from these weaknesses. One may agree with Friar Laurence
that Romeo is rash, but it is not his rashness that propels him into the tragic
chain of events but an opposite quality. In the crucial duel between Mercutio and
Tybalt, Romeo tries to make peace. Ironically, this very intervention contributes
to Mercutio’s death.
Mercutio: Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your
arm.
Romeo: I thought all for the best. (3.1.108–9)
If Shakespeare wanted to implicate Romeo’s rashness in his fate, this scene is

handled with unbelievable ineptness. Judging from the resultant effect, what he
wanted to convey was an ironic dissociation between character and the direction
of events.
Perhaps this same purpose dictated the elaborate introduction of comic
elements before the characters are pushed into the opposed conditions of tragedy.
Stress on milieu tends to downgrade the importance of individual temperament
and motivation. For this once in Shakespearian tragedy, it is not what you are
that counts, but the world you live in.

Notes
1. All Shakespeare references in this essay are to The Complete Works, ed. G. L.
Kittredge (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1936).
2. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 169.
Although the younger generation participates in the feud, they have not created it;
it is a legacy from the past.
3. Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948),
56–57.
4. Merchant of Venice, 1.1.166–74.
5. 3.4.23–28; 3.5.202–03; 4.1.6–8; 4.1.77–86; 4.1.107–8; 4.5.35–39; 5.3.12.
6. Clowns and cynics are usually available to comment on romantic lovers
in Shakespeare’s comedies, providing qualification and a widened perspective
without real disharmony. A single character, like Rosalind in As You Like It, may
incorporate much of the counterpoint in her own comprehensive view.
7. Later, in the potion scene, Juliet’s resolve weakens temporarily, but she
at once rejects the idea of companionship. The effect is to call attention to her
aloneness:
I’ll call them back again to comfort me.
Nurse!—What should she do here?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone. (4.3.17–19)
8. The same effect, if not the plan, is apparent in Imogen’s reported death in
Cymbeline.
9. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), in Shakespeare Criticism: A
Selection, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 378.
QQQ
1973—James H. Seward. “The Height,”

from Tragic Vision in Romeo and Juliet
James H. Seward (1928– ) is a poet and scholar. His collection of
poems is entitled Atlantis and Other Poems.
I
One cannot talk about poetry, and least of all Shakespeare’s poetry, as if it were
merely a collection of ideas, and nothing could be wider of the mark than to
imagine that as the play develops Romeo and Juliet will emerge as little more
than premises in some sort of moral syllogism. As a poet, and more particularly
as a poet who writes tragedies, Shakespeare’s concern is with human beauty
and with the agony of its destruction. No doubt the fact that he can account
for this destruction in intellectual terms, in this case in terms of a moral
system, is important, but it is not the important fact. The focus is always upon

the destruction itself, a destruction which can only be understood in terms

of our response to the aesthetic fact. As a relatively inexperienced playwright,
Shakespeare may not have always been successful in this attempt, but as we shall
shortly see the new breath of life which he breathes into his characters at the end
of the First Act marks a shift in emphasis from a statement which is largely one
dimensional in character to one which reflects something of the full complexity
of human nature.
Before we consider this question, however, we must first face the enigma of
the Second Chorus. No one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully refuted Dr.
Johnson’s snorting comment that this chorus “conduces nothing to the progress
of the play, but relates what is already known, or what the next scene will show;
and relates it without adding the improvement of any moral sentiment.”1 It is
of course possible to quibble with this judgment. When one understands the
Elizabethan conception of passionate love, there appear to be moral overtones
in the observation that “young affection gapes to be” the “heire” of “old desire.”
Similarly, the line, “Alike bewitched by the charme of lookes,” would have had
a special significance for Elizabethans. But even if one admits the presence of
something which Dr. Johnson might accept as a moral sentiment, it is difficult to
think of a need for such a statement. Shakespeare has already made his position
quite clear, and will continue to do so, through the action of the play. The same
objection applies to the expository content of the chorus. Why describe an action
which the audience has just witnessed or which “the next scene will show”?
But whatever mysteries may be connected with the chorus, the action of the
play itself contains no such ambiguities, and it is to this that we must now turn.
Since the key to the first part of the Second Act is contained in the balcony
scene, we shall, with apologies, reverse our usual procedure and begin our
examination with an analysis of this scene, a scene which from the standpoint
of audience comprehension is probably the most difficult in the play. This is
why, as we shall see, Shakespeare has been preparing for it ever since Romeo’s
first appearance, and why the scenes which immediately precede and follow are
designed to comment upon it. But however difficult for Shakespeare’s audience
to understand, it is infinitely more so for us because the point of view which
emerges, and which is largely implicit, is one with which, as post-Renaissance
readers, we are likely to be unfamiliar. We shall therefore try to simplify matters
further by dealing first with Romeo and then with Juliet. Admittedly, such an
analytical procedure is unnatural in that it disrupts the total effect for which
Shakespeare is striving, but considering the difficulties involved no other course
seems feasible.
Critics generally agree that the Romeo who warbles his love in the balcony
scene is not the same as the Romeo who cried out his passion for Rosaline in
the streets. Bradley, for example, agrees with Coleridge “in finding an intentional
contrast between this feeling [that is, Romeo’s infatuation for Rosaline] and the

passion that displaces it;”2 and the nature of this contrast is clearly suggested
by Donald Stauffer who believes that Romeo’s “moonstruck calf-love” soon
gives way to a “true love” which “echoes through the play.”3 Unfortunately, the
evidence makes it difficult to accept this rather sentimental reading of the text.
At the first meeting of the two lovers, Shakespeare has made it unmistakably
clear, at least to an Elizabethan audience, that Romeo’s feelings have not been
transformed, merely transferred to another person. And when Romeo himself
reappears in the Second Act, nothing he says or does dispels this impression.
The two lines he speaks in the first scene serve to put us on the scent:
Can I go forward when my heart is here?

Turne backe dull earth and find thy Center out.
Romeo, the passionate lover, circles in love and misery around his mistress. The
reason for his unhappiness may not be the same—Juliet has responded to his
advances—but the fact that she seems unreachable because of her name is all the
excuse Shakespeare needs to suggest the basic similarity of the two passions.
To fulfill this promise, Romeo, when he steps center stage, continues to
exhibit in all of their excessive silliness the various symptoms of passionate love.
In the process of unfolding his feelings for Juliet, he hymns a paean of fleshly
praise: Her eyes might “twinckle” in the heavens, the “brightnesse of her cheek”
would outshine the stars, and even the radiant moon is envious:
Arise faire Sun and kill the envious Moone,

Who is alreadie sicke and pale with greefe,
That thou her maide art far more faire then she.
Playing still further upon the color of the moon, he reveals in unmistakable terms
the complexion of his own desires:
Be not her maide since she is envious,

Her vestal livery is but sicke and greene,
And none but fooles do weare it, cast it off.
Moreover, he persists in addressing her in language saturated with religious

imagery. She is a “winged messenger of heaven,” a “bright Angel,” a “deare saint.”
And this, as we have seen, is probative evidence of a man who has inverted
the natural order of things and made his mistress, not God, the center of his
being. Even the visual image—Romeo below and Juliet above in the balcony—
reinforces the suggestion of worship and deity. But perhaps most revealing of all,
when Juliet pleads her innocence in a tremulous and moving speech, Romeo can
only reply:

Lady, by yonder blessed Moone I vow,

That tips with silver all these frute tree tops
—the moon, “th’inconstant moon,” arch-symbol of the passionate lover because

such a lover, being at the mercy of his eyes, is, as Romeo has already demonstrated,
somewhat changeable in his affections! Little wonder that Juliet protests,
O swear not by the moone th’inconstant moone,

That monethly changes in her circld orde.
No one would deny that Romeo’s display of passion in this scene is

considerably different from his earlier outpourings. The Romeo who could strike
such poses as,

Maintaines such falshood, then turn teares to fiers:
And these who, often drownde, could never die,
Transparent Hereticques, be burnt for liers.
One fairer then my love? the all seeing Sun,
Nere saw her match, since first the world begun,
is surely not the same who cries,
her eyes in heaven,

Would through the ayrie region streame so bright,
That birds would sing, and thinke it were not night.
In the first instance, lines verging on doggerel; in the second, poetry that
manages to catch in its trembling net something of the sublimity of love.
But the point is that we cannot account for this difference on the basis of
the traditional distinction between infatuation and true love, for the same
attitudes which are put down as silly in his “calf-love” for Rosaline are equally
characteristic of his feelings for Juliet. “The difference,” as Dickey remarks, “is
not altogether one of kind.”4
The problem disappears, however, when we realize that this difference is due,
not to a change in the nature of Romeo’s love, but to a change in Shakespeare’s
emphasis. Romeo’s feelings in the balcony scene do not represent “true love;”
they are simply a restatement in terms of the full complexity of human nature
of the same sort of feelings he felt for Rosaline. Such a shift in emphasis, a
shift which enables Shakespeare to present Romeo as a person whose feelings
are capable of moving us deeply even while he continues to display the absurd
and potentially dangerous attributes of passion, is quite consistent with the

Elizabethan conception of lust, for they knew perfectly well that the behavior
of a passionate lover is likely to represent something more than the sum total
of his folly. All human action, because it is human, involves the totality of man’s
being. That is to say, the mind is not “one part flesh, and another part spirit:
but the whole minde is flesh, and the whole minde is spirit,” and “the same
is to be said of the will and affection,” for “even as the ayre in the dawning of
the day, is not wholly light, or whollie darke . . . but the whole aire is partly
light, and partly darke thorowout . . . so is the flesh and the spirit mingled
together in the soule of man.”5 If this is so, and if we remember that the will
was considered as a source of emotion as well as choice, it would seem to follow
that one consequence of dwelling upon the typical excesses of infatuation, as
Shakespeare did with Romeo’s earlier passion, is that it inevitably leads to a
caricature of young love, a caricature which belies the emotional complexity of
the experience.
Perhaps this involvement of man’s higher faculties in even the lowest of his
actions would make little difference in the case of someone hardened to lust, for
the emotions which arise from his depraved will would hardly be distinguishable
from the movements of his sensitive appetite, but the case would be otherwise
for a person not deeply committed to passion. If we remember that passionate
love, like any form of sin, results from the misapplication of faculties which
are themselves good, and that the corruptive process is a gradual one, there is
no reason why the emotions which arise from the will’s early involvement in
passion should not be quite similar to those feelings of the virtuous whose love
springs from a proper moral choice. This would be especially true of the young,
for, as we have observed, their confusion of sex with love does not arise so much
from a viciousness of will as from inexperience and the fact that the force of
appetite rages most strongly at this time of life. In the young, man’s capacity to
love, though attaching itself to an unworthy object, is still essentially sound; it is
merely suffering from a temporary giddiness.
If we now bring these attitudes to bear upon Romeo’s behavior in the balcony
scene, we see that there is no necessary contradiction between the belief of most
critics that there is something deeply moving in Romeo’s lyric exaltation and our
own contention that he displays the various attributes of passion. When Romeo
speaks such lines as
O speake againe bright Angel, for thou art

As glorious to this night being ore my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white upturned wondring eyes,
Of mortalls that fall backe to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazie passing Cloudes,
And sayles upon the bosome of the ayre,

or,
The brightnesse of her cheek wold shame those stars,

As day-light doth a lampe, her eyes in heaven,
Would through the ayrie region streame so bright,
That birds would sing, and thinke it were not night,
the reactions of an Elizabethan audience, or at least of its more sensitive

members, would almost certainly have been mixed. They would have seen that
Romeo’s vision has been colored by passion; but they would also have recognized
something appealing in this excitement of a person who suddenly finds himself
in the presence of beauty, and, what is equally important, something admirable as
well. Romeo may lust after Juliet’s body (though of course not admitting as much
to himself ), but because he is young and because he is encountered early in his
passion, his commitment to the bestial part of his nature has not as yet seriously
impaired his capacity to feel that kind of love which, in the Renaissance view,
links man with the angels.
The critics, then, have not been altogether mistaken in their interpretation of
this scene. Romeo’s love for Juliet is in many ways a joyous thing, but they have
erred in their failure to bring this reaction into proper focus. Shakespeare’s point,
if this is not putting it too crudely, is that Romeo’s flirtation with passion is a
dangerous thing. The “purpose” of this scene, therefore, is not only to show this
danger to the audience, but also to remind them of that which is threatened, the
beauty of Romeo’s nature as a properly fulfilled human being. In other words,
Romeo’s capacity for love, a capacity which is so movingly illustrated in this
scene and which still shines through the murkiness of his passion, defines in
human terms the meaning of the tragedy which appears to be building before
their eyes.
None of this, of course, means that Shakespeare is merely stating moral
doctrine. Even though his conception of Romeo’s character fits into the moral
perspective which an Elizabethan audience would bring to the play, the central
fact which underlies Shakespeare’s vision of life is his realization that man’s
nature when uncorrupted by passionate love or other blighting emotions is a
thing of extraordinary beauty. It is, for example, the beauty of a person in love
which is for Shakespeare the palpable, living reality and not the philosophical
or moral system which might explain this love. The ultimate “goodness” of love,
therefore, lies in the human fact, in that equal, if different, excitement which is
aroused in us by the sight of a man who is himself stirred by love, and in the
last analysis this excitement can only be conveyed by the quality of the verse
itself.
Be this as it may, such an interpretation of Romeo’s behavior obviously
poses a problem. If his love for Juliet is no different from his earlier “unheroic

dejection,”6 why does Shakespeare dwell at such lengths on the Rosaline

episode? Part of the answer lies in the nature of Shakespeare’s theme. Infatuation
is a necessary stage through which all men must pass, and as such it is essentially
wholesome. It is part of Romeo’s tragedy that he is presented to us in the early
parts of the play as a young man undergoing this apprenticeship, for the warmth
which underlies our amusement, like the excitement which characterizes our
reaction in the balcony scene, is a measure of the tragedy to come. But there is
still another reason for this emphasis, a reason which arises from the nature of
the medium in which Shakespeare is working. When we consider that Romeo’s
language makes it unmistakably clear that his will’s response to love, though
entangled in passion, is still largely uncorrupted, a moment’s reflection will
serve to show that an audience totally unprepared for such a display might be in
serious trouble. As they watch this rapidly unfolding action, they could not help
observing that Romeo’s behavior displays many of the symptoms of passion; but
they would also be aware of that which is manifestly beautiful in his character.
Now surely, it would be asking a great deal of an audience, even one supposedly
familiar with the values involved, to sort out their conflicting feelings before the
moment itself would be gone and with it the intended effect. Either they would
be more or less tolerant than Shakespeare wished them to be, or else, assuming
that in the end they were not confused by this mixture of folly and beauty,
there is still the danger that so much of their energy would be devoted to the
task of trying to figure out the proper relationship between these two responses
that the sense of impending danger and waste implicit in Romeo’s surrender to
passion would be largely dissipated. The way out of this difficulty, or at least the
way Shakespeare chose, was to condition his audience to think of Romeo as a
passionate lover before they came to this scene. Once this largely one-dimensional
impression has been implanted in their minds, and the danger of passion hinted
at, Shakespeare is then free to re-state his conception of young love in terms of
the full richness and complexity of human nature without running the serious
risk of confusing his audience.
Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the capacity of his audience also accounts for both
the substance and the placement of the first scene in Act II. This action, which
we recall takes place immediately before the balcony scene, is given over almost
entirely to bawdy humor. Again and then again, Mercutio alludes to what he
takes to be the sensual basis of Romeo’s love for Rosaline:
I conjure thee by Rosalines bright eyes,

By her high forehead, and her Scarlet lip,
And the demeanes, that there adjacent lie
twould anger him
To raise a spirit in his mistresse circle

Of some strange nature, letting it there stand

Till she had laid it, and conjurde it downe
O Romeo that she were, o that she were

An open ars and thou a Poprin Peare.
Now because this action immediately precedes the balcony scene, the scene
in which the love between Romeo and Juliet will be unfolded as something
“pure” (and some say “holy”), the tendency of the critics is to make the most
of Mercutio’s mistake. The key to this scene, they argue, lies in the fact that he
is joking about Romeo’s infatuation for Rosaline, not his friend’s new-found
passion for Juliet. From this it is only a step to the conclusion that this action
serves as a kind of foil against which the passion of the young lovers will blaze
forth in all its purity. “The discord thus struck,” so Granville-Barker tells us,
“is perfect preparation for the harmony to come; and Mercutio’s ribaldry has
hardly died from our ears before Juliet is at her window.”7 Vyvyan is even
more impressed. “Not even Shakespeare could have contrived antitheses more
arresting than the medlar-tree and Juliet’s balcony, the poperin pear and love’s
pilgrim, who has come to the shrine of his own heart’s saint—a place so beautiful
that we know it must be holy.”8
Although in this instance the critics would seem to recognize the importance
of dramatic structure, it must be pointed out that in doing so they have put the
cart before the horse. They start with the balcony scene and what they consider
to be its tender expression of true love, and when they observe that the exchange
between Benvolio and Mercutio is ribald in the extreme, they naturally attempt
to explain its bawdry in a way that will not interfere with the love which is to
follow. It seems to me much more sensible to start with Mercutio’s bawdry, and
then, and only then, to consider what effect its impact would have upon an
audience as they watch the next action. But isn’t this merely a quibble? All critics
accept the fact that the Mercutio episode affects the audience’s response to the
balcony scene. What difference does it make how we arrive at our knowledge of
this influence? Perhaps none, but then if we do approach the play from the point
of view of an unfolding sequence, which is the way it would be received by an
audience, it is interesting to note that Shakespeare sends his audience into the
balcony scene only after he has forcefully and repeatedly reminded them of the
sensual basis of Romeo’s passion for Rosaline.
From an Elizabethan point of view, the reason for such an emphasis is
clear. Although Shakespeare’s principal concern at the moment is with the
attractiveness of the lovers, he cannot afford to let his audience forget that if a
man surrenders too often to the desires of the appetite, the will, as it increasingly
finds pleasure in interdicted things, eventually becomes so enmeshed in the flesh
that one cannot distinguish between it and the sensitive appetite. In moral terms,

such a man acts like an animal; in aesthetic terms, he destroys the beauty of his
nature. But the fact that Shakespeare felt it necessary to remind his audience that
Romeo’s golden dreams ultimately spring from the same source as Mercutio’s
dirty jokes does not mean that he intended them to see Romeo as some sort of
gross sensualist. His purpose is simply to qualify the delight of his audience with
the sobering thought that if Romeo’s sense-rooted passion grows out of control
it may well destroy him. And once we grasp the purpose of Mercutio’s bawdry, it
should be obvious why the information it contains is presented to us immediately
before, and not during, the balcony scene. If we assume that Shakespeare
recognized the significance of this information, we should also assume that he
would have been able to recognize that the manner of relating it to Romeo posed
a problem for him. He could call attention to the folly of Romeo’s behavior, and
hence have him speak of a “winged messenger” and swear by the moon, without
much danger, but how could he introduce the idea of lust without spoiling the
vision of that which is still lovely in Romeo’s love? The answer, as we might
suspect, lies in Mercutio’s bawdry. Instead of trying to intertwine love and lust in
the balcony scene itself, Shakespeare, well aware of the effect of juxtaposed scenes
on the Elizabethan stage, immediately precedes the meeting between the two
lovers with a reminder to his audience that passionate love is rooted in lust. The
memory of this statement will then linger on through the next scene, and in so
doing will qualify the beauty of the vision without interfering with its creation.
When we come at last to Juliet and her place in the scene, it is clear that our
reaction to her must be colored by our knowledge of Romeo’s passion—what we
have learned of him is or could be equally true of her. But there is an important
difference in the way the two characters are presented, a difference which has
been anticipated in their previous appearance. When the play opens it is evident
that Romeo has been doting on Rosaline for some time, evident that he is deeply,
albeit not hopelessly, committed to the pleasure he is pursuing. But Juliet’s
capacity for love, at least for adult love, is just beginning to unfold. At fourteen,
she is, emotionally speaking, a tabularasa. And when the bud opens, as it does
in this scene, a flower of amazing beauty is displayed. When we turn to Juliet,
therefore, the tragedy which we have seen taking shape in Romeo’s soul threatens
to assume even more aching proportions.
This is especially true since whatever difference there may be in the degree of
their innocence, there is little, if any, in their situation. As a young person on the
brink of that age most fraught with perils, Juliet is as much subject to the raging
storms of passion as Romeo. And, unfortunately, there are indications that the
clouds may be gathering. She speaks of Romeo as the “god of my Idolatrie,” and
she seems vaguely aware that there may be something amiss in her love:
Well do not sweare: although I joy in thee,

I have no joy of this contract to night,

It is too rash, too unadvisd, too sudden,

Too like the lightning which doth cease to bee,
Ere one can say it lightens.
Perhaps this is nothing more than foreshadowing, a mere trick to heighten the
tension, but one wonders. Certainly it was a widely held belief in Shakespeare’s
day that conscience immediately reacts when we do something wrong. Even if it
does not succeed in dissuading us from error, it at least darkens our pleasure. This
is “the remorce of conscience, which in the very act of sinning, keeping the watch
of our soules, adviseth us by barking, that enimies are present.”9
It would be a mistake, however, to overemphasize the folly, not to mention
the sinfulness, of Juliet’s behavior. Shakespeare has no intention of portraying her
as a fallen woman; he simply wishes to stress the danger she is in. Indeed, to put
this danger in its tragic perspective, he must emphasize her essential innocence,
the essential purity of her feelings for Romeo. And this he seeks to accomplish
to two ways. To begin with, since Elizabethans always associated honest love,
including its emotional aspect, with virtue, it is, I think, suggestive of Juliet’s
state of mind that while Romeo’s head is filled with visions of her “loveliness”
she has not one word to say about his appearance. Romeo, though blind to the
fact, is deeply involved in the flesh; Juliet is not. Again, she is concerned lest he
think her behavior light, and it is she, not Romeo, who remembers that the end
of love is (or ought to be) marriage. And when she says that she will throw all
her fortunes at his feet and “follow thee my Lord throughout the world,” she is
perhaps being rash, but even so, her attitude reveals her awareness of a woman’s
proper role in marriage. But surely, from a moralist’s point of view, the clearest
indication that she has not been contaminated lies in her definition of love:
And yet I wish but for the thing I have,

My bountie is as boundlesse as the sea,
My love as deepe: the more I give to thee
This sort of circular love that grows as it is given, that is “a round circle still from
good to good,”10 is amazingly similar to that sort of love which was thought to
flow from heaven to man and back again.
But if Juliet is not a sinner, neither is she a saint, for while this emphasis
upon the virtuous aspects of her behavior qualifies our judgment, it is not the
only means Shakespeare uses to establish a favorable response to her character.
Pulsing within the moral framework and forever beyond the reach of the
analytical mind, is a warmly-conceived and almost living human being. Before
she is anything else, Juliet is a young girl in love and as such a vision of loveliness.
Her wish that

This bud of love by Sommers ripening breath,

May prove a bewtious floure when next we meete
comes very close to celebrating an accomplished fact, not a promised fulfillment.

The urgency in her voice when, in response to Romeo’s departure, she calls out
Hist Romeo hist, o for a falkners voyce,

To lure this Tassel gentle back againe,
Bondage is hoarse, and may not speake aloude,
Else would I teare the Cave where Eccho lies,
And make her ayrie tongue more hoarse then mine
With repetition of my Romeos name
reflects something of the power of love which has suddenly illuminated

and surged through her being, and perhaps, barely suggested, something of
astonishment as well. And when in tender agony, she says
I would have thee gone,

And yet no farther then a wantons bird,
That lets it hop a litle from his hand,
Like a poore prisoner in his twisted gives,
And with a silken threed, plucke it backe againe,
So loving Jealous of his libertie,
the peculiar mixture of love, selfishness, and self-awareness, not to mention

the faint suggestion that woman’s love is never far removed from her maternal
instinct, sets in motion responses which reverberate deep in our own experience.
But nowhere is Shakespeare’s sensitivity to human nature more evident than
in his handling of the parting of the two lovers. Although during this action
Juliet speaks her “boundlesse as the sea” speech, and although it is here that
Shakespeare prepares us for the impending wedding, his primary concern is
with the bittersweet quality of young love, that sensation of delicious pain in
those who have become so much a part of one another that to separate is to have
one’s self pulled away. But it is quite impossible to find a conceptual equivalent
for this experience. Indeed, strictly speaking, Shakespeare is not at this moment
dramatizing an idea. He is simply presenting his audience with the beauty of a
human being in love, a beauty which explains in the most profound sense what
his tragedy is about.
Still, one must not forget the moral overtones, must not forget, as Ben Jonson
reminds us, that “it is a dangerous thing when men’s minds come to sojourn
with their affections.”11 Juliet may be a thing of beauty, and her beauty may defy
analysis, but the fact remains that she is in grave peril, and unknowingly so. For

an Elizabethan audience, therefore, this scene would be charged with a suspense,

a sense of impending doom, which we rarely recognize. As far as both of the
lovers are concerned, but especially Juliet, they would see not simply beauty, but
beauty in mortal danger. It would be much as if they were asked to watch a fawn
nibbling its way toward a bush behind which they knew a panther lay hidden.
After Juliet withdraws from the balcony and Romeo exits below, the pace of
the drama changes from the charged and poignant dialogue of the lovers to the
rather long-winded moralizing of the Friar. One of the reasons for this speech,
and especially for its length, is Shakespeare’s obvious need to provide Romeo with
the time to travel from Juliet’s garden to the Friar’s cell. But once this function is
admitted, critics are usually content to explain the Friar’s garrulity on the grounds
of character. Granville-Barker, for example, believes that the Friar, who is full of
“maxims” and “pedagogic kindness” is “just such a picture of an old man as a young
man draws, all unavailing wisdom.”12 The Friar may be a kindly old man from
whom we would expect such homiletic wisdom, but to account for the substance
of his speech on these grounds alone is to completely miss its point.
We do not have to read the Friar’s “maxims” very carefully to discover that
they bear a considerable relevance to the action which the audience has just
witnessed. There is some question whether the first four lines belong to the Friar
or Romeo,13 but whether it takes him six or two lines to establish the time of day,
the main portion of his speech is concerned with something else. As he picks the
“balefull weedes, and precious juyced flowers” with which he is filling his basket,
he begins to moralize. He notes that the earth which is Nature’s tomb is also her
womb, and from this he moves easily to the observation that
O mickle is the powerfull grace that lies

In Plants, hearbes, stones, and their true quallities:
For nought so vile, that on the earth doth live,
But to the earth some speciall good doth give.
And in the theologically sound conviction that all things are good, if properly
used, the Friar discovers, as we might expect, a special moral for men:
Nor ought so good but straind from that faire use,

Vertue it selfe turnes vice being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.
Within the infant rinde of this weake flower
Poyson hath residence, and medicine power:
For this being smelt, with that part cheares each part,
Being tasted, slaies all sences with the hart.
Two such opposed Kings encamp them still,

In man as well as hearbes, grace and rude will:

Full soone the Canker death eates up that Plant.
The relevance of this statement to the love of Romeo and Juliet should be
obvious. Love as love is natural and therefore essentially good. If it remains under
the control of man’s higher nature, under the control of “grace,” then it thrives;
but if it succumbs to sensitive desire, it if comes under the dominion of man’s
“rude will,” then “vertue it selfe turnes vice,” and nothing but disaster can be
expected, for, as the Friar says, “full soone the Canker death eates up that Plant.”
And surely it is no accident that Romeo enters, and hence stands on the stage
for all to see, midway through this speech.
The rest of this brief scene, of course, makes it even plainer that the Friar’s
miniature sermon is meant to apply to Romeo. When he finally learns of Romeo’s
new love, his comment cuts like a knife through Romeo’s pretensions:
Is Rosaline that thou didst love so deare,

So soone forsaken? young mens love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eies.
And when Romeo rather peevishly replies,
Thou chidst me oft for loving Rosaline,
the Friar bluntly retorts,
For doting, not for loving, pupill mine.
If it is wondered why Shakespeare should now undertake to state more or less

explicitly those moral values which he has thus far been content to convey
implicitly through the action, the answer is probably to be found in the fact
that for every intelligent person in his audience there were at least three of
the “common sort” and possibly more. It seems quite likely, therefore, that the
explicit pointing in this scene was intended for their benefit, for however much
Shakespeare might deplore the common fondness for dumb shows he could not
afford to ignore it. In any event, pointing there is, which brings us back to our
earlier statement that the meeting between Romeo and Juliet is conceived of
in three parts. Immediately before the balcony scene the audience is reminded
through Mercutio’s ribaldry of the fleshly basis of passionate love. Immediately
after the meeting between the two lovers, and under the thin disguise of the
Friar’s character, the audience is given a straightforward statement in moral
terms of the dangers involved in passionate love. Short of breaking through the

illusion of real action altogether, it is difficult to see what more Shakespeare, the
playwright, could do to assure himself that his audience would be able to follow
the development of the tragedy.
II
At first glance, scene iv appears to be something of an irrelevancy. Little is done
with Romeo’s character, and although a certain amount of essential information
is presented—Tybalt’s vendetta is recalled to the audience, Mercutio is
developed as his opponent, and Romeo arranges his rendezvous with Juliet—the
importance of this information hardly seems commensurate with the length
of the scene. Even some of the intensity seems to have gone out of the drama.
Indeed, the flashing exchange of wit between the three young men, the broad
jokes, and the portly behavior of the Nurse are enough to make us rub our eyes
and wonder if we are watching the same play. But surely this slowing down of
the action, and the consequent emphasis upon laughter is easily accounted for.
The attention of the audience has been screwed to the stage from the beginning
of the play. Even Romeo’s half-comic display of passion in the Friar’s cell, though
producing a natural drop in tension from the balcony scene, takes place against
the Friar’s thought-provoking moralizing. Under these circumstances, it would
make excellent dramatic sense for Shakespeare to give his audience a chance to
relax before he plunges them once again into the vortex of the tragedy.
This emphasis upon laughter, however, does not mean that character is
abandoned altogether; nor does it mean that the laughter itself is irrelevant to
Shakespeare’s tragic purpose. The audience’s awareness of the foolishness of
irrational behavior is not opposed to, but complements, their awareness of the
danger which hangs over the lovers’ heads. Since the laughter of Democritus and
the tears of Heraclitus, as Renaissance writers constantly remind us, are thus but
two different approaches to the same reality—that is, since passionate behavior
justifies both of these responses—Shakespeare may stress either without destroying
the focus of his tragedy.14 At this particular point in the play, and for the reason
stated, it serves his purpose to concentrate upon the comic aspects of self-love.
Romeo’s good spirits are about what we might expect from a man who
believes that the world is turning at his command. And Mercutio, the gentleman
who “loves to heare himselfe talke,” and who “will speake more in a minute, then
hee will stand too in a moneth,” fulfills the expectation of his earlier appearance.
However, of all the characters in this scene, the Nurse is clearly the best and most
amusingly drawn. The unequal struggle between her assumed gentility—from
head to toe she is a lady or would be thought so—and her native vulgarity verges
on the hilarious. Her entrance signals what is to follow. “Peter,” she cries, “my
fan.” And thus standing on her dignity, as well as much that doesn’t belong to
her, it is not a great climb to reach the position of Juliet’s protector, and in stern,
if not altogether coherent terms, to lecture Romeo on the right and proper. “But

first let me tell ye, if ye should leade her in a fooles paradise, as they say, it were
a very grosse kind of behavior as they say.” “And therefore,” she continues, “if
you should deale double with her, truly it were an ill thing to be offred to any
Gentlewoman, and very weake dealing.” Truly, the “lady” is more conscious of the
dignity of her office than of the terms on which it rests.
But the grossness of her nature will not be denied, and it is not long before
these starched and unfamiliar attitudes are utterly forgotten. “Well sir,” she
beams as soon as Romeo has crossed her palm with gold, “I anger her sometimes,
and tell her that Paris is the properer man, but ile warrant you, when I say so,
she lookes as pale as any clout in the versall world.” Granville-Barker shrugs
this off as a slip of the pen, but while Shakespeare was capable of such slips, it
seems doubtful that this is one.15 After all, at this moment, when the Nurse is
expanding under the warmth of Romeo’s golden generosity, what does a little
exaggeration matter? Unfortunately, she is soon out of her depths and at the
letter “R” her clumsy attempt at flattery falters badly:
Nurse: . . . doth not Rosemarie and Romeo begin both with a letter?
Romeo: I, Nurse, what of that? Both with an R.
Nurse: A, mocker, thats the dogs name, R is for the—no, I know it
begins with some other letter.
But then this doesn’t matter either. The spirit, not the letter, counts, and it all
started as a compliment.
With Juliet’s soliloquy at the beginning of scene v, we are once again back
in the main stream of the tragedy. The skill with which Shakespeare portrays
her impatience has been justly celebrated, though not, I think, fully understood.
When we see Juliet dancing on her toes before the Nurse’s deliberate age, our
tendency is to cry, how true, and then, as always when in the presence of beauty,
to walk silently and reverently around it, for so clearly does her behavior embody
human nature in one of its rarer moments that the terms of our understanding
must be as much emotional as intellectual. The charming way she fights the bit,
turning the excitement of her pulse into the exaggerated beat of
But old folks, many fain as they wer dead,

Unwieldie, slowe, heavie, and pale as lead,
captures perfectly that amusing blend of exasperation and impatience which

characterizes her at this moment. Or again, when the Nurse says,
Your love sayes like an honest gentleman,

And a Courteous, and a kinde, and a handsome,
And I warrant a vertuous—where is your mother?

Juliet’s incredulous reply,
Where is my mother? why she is within,

Wher shuld she be?
reminds us forcefully of the continent of time that separates her from the
Nurse. Perhaps even more amusing is her almost desperate attempt to squeeze
compassion and cajolery into two breathless lines as she is driven nearly out of
her mind by the Nurse’s preoccupation with her grumbling bones:
I faith I am sorrie that thou art not well.

Sweete, sweete, sweete Nurse, tell me what sayes my love?
And yet, while warmth amounting almost to awe is clearly the main response
intended from the audience, it would not, for an Elizabethan audience, have
been the only response. Enraptured though they may have been by Juliet’s
behavior, they would also have seen cause for alarm. We gaze in unclouded
enjoyment only because nothing in our set of values instructs us to condemn.
But the Renaissance, as we have seen, tended to view even mild forms of
passion with suspicion. An Elizabethan audience would have been keenly
aware that the love with which Juliet sports so innocently, her passion for
Romeo, though still only shallow enough to cause her to ripple with impatience,
is nevertheless capable of engulfing her. And the more they are moved
by her beauty, the more they would be disturbed, especially so, since now they
can detect no echo of virtue in her speech. Hence, the sight of something
which they recognize as potentially evil interacting with their emotional
response to Juliet’s beauty would create for them a new emotion, one tinged
with uneasiness. And it is by means of this roiled drop, this composite of
feelings, that Shakespeare attempts to realize the tragic potential of her
character.
The attitude of the Nurse, though principally designed to serve as a foil to
Juliet’s impatience, would have further heightened their uneasiness. The basis of
her admiration for Romeo is plain enough:
yet his leg excels all mens, and for a hand and a foote and a body,
though they be not to be talkt on, yet they are past compare.
The sense of values implicit in this description is more or less explicitly driven
home near the end of the scene:
I am the drudge, and toyle in your delight:

But you shall beare the burthen soone at night.

Like Mercutio’s bawdry immediately before the balcony scene, the Nurse’s
sensuality allows Shakespeare to suggest the presence of something dangerous
without at the same time interfering with the creation of another impression
equally important, that of Juliet’s beauty. In any event, the fact that the Nurse,
who is Juliet’s closest companion (and presumably, her advisor), is herself
drowned in sensuality would have done nothing to relieve the audience’s sense
of alarm.16
The action now flows into the marriage, and the strokes though few are
telling. The haste of the marriage continues to disturb the Friar:
So smile the heavens upon this holy act,

That after houres, with sorrow chide us not.
But Romeo, who now rides the very crest of his passion, sweeps on unheeding,
or at least unbelieving:
Amen, amen, but come what sorrow can,

It cannot countervaile the exchange of joy
The Friar can only shake his head and repeat his warning, choosing this time the
sterner form of a rebuke:
These violent delights have violent endes,

And in their triumph die like fier and powder,
Which as they kisse consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his owne deliciousnesse,
And in the taste confoundes the appetite.
Therefore love moderately, long love doth so,
Too swift arrives, as tardie as too slowe.
And the Friar is entitled to his concern. Time and again, Shakespeare has
emphasized the rapidity with which the action is unfolding. “I stand on
sudden hast,” Romeo cries, and now to prove it the marriage is taking place in
the afternoon of the day which follows his first meeting with Juliet. It is true,
we can turn to human nature, even as we understand it, to find verification
for the impatience of young love, but it is also true that to an Elizabethan
audience this haste would suggest a mind governed by passion, not reason.
In spite of the Friar’s warning, however, Romeo refuses to be bridled, and his
greeting to Juliet (who enters, if we may believe the First Quarto, “somewhat
fast”) shows how little inclined he is to climb down from the pinnacle of his
happiness:

Ah Juliet, if the measure of thy joy

Be heapt like mine, and that thy skill be more
To blason it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbour ayre, and let rich musicks tongue
Unfold the imagind happines that both
Receive in either, by this deare encounter.
Juliet’s reply is no less passionate:
Conceit more rich in matter then in words,

Brags of his substance, not of ornament,
They are but beggers that can count their worth,
But my true love is growne to such excesse,
I cannot sum up sum of halfe my wealth.
Of course, the fact that the lovers are reckless, impatient, and completely
caught up in the happiness of the moment does not mean that we can simply
condemn their love. Their present intoxication may result from the realization
of a false dream, but their happiness is nevertheless intense and for this reason
not without its attraction. It is not so much a question of condemning the
lovers, therefore, as it is of being heartsick at the thought of what they may do
to themselves. And surely it is this conjunction of feelings which lies behind the
Friar’s outcry:
Here comes the Lady, Oh so light a foote

Will nere weare out the everlasting flint,
A lover may bestride the gossamours,
That ydeles in the wanton sommer ayre,
And yet not fall, so light is vanitie.
Churchman though he may be, his moral astonishment softens in the presence
of that loveliness which still shines through her passion. But is not this precisely
the point? Without the beauty of the vision, what is the meaning of the ache at
the thought of its loss?
Notes
1. Variorum, I, 85.
2. Bradley, Oxford Lectures, p. 326n.
3. Donald A. Stauffer, “The School of Love: Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare:
The Tragedies, pp. 29, 32.
4. Dickey, p. 78.
5. Dent, sig. B8.
6. Joseph, p. 126.

7. Granville-Barker, p. 11.
8. Vyvyan, p. 158.
9. Wright, sig. V2.
10. Burton, p. 623.
11. Jonson, p. 72.
13. Williams, Shakespeare/The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie . . . ,
pp. 119–121.
14. “One should . . . both weep for those who deserve mockery and mock those
who deserve tears.” The Enchiridion of Erasmus, trans. & ed. Raymond Himelick
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), pp. 143–144.
16. Dickey sees the Nurse as “an antidote to the romantic conception of
love,” concluding that “her presence reminds us continually that even the most
exalted passion of the lovers contains a tincture of sexuality, and that sexuality
may be a laughable human frailty.” p. 75. I agree with this as far as it goes, but
Shakespeare’s emphasis upon her bawdry in this scene is more than comic, it is
also ominous.
QQQ
1986—Northrop Frye. “Romeo and Juliet,”

from Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
The Canadian scholar Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was one of the

most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. Harold Bloom
has called him “the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English
language” since Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. One of Frye’s most
famous books is The Anatomy of Criticism.
Shakespeare, we remember, got started as a dramatist by writing a series of

plays, four in all, about the period 1422–85, from the death of Henry V to
the accession of Henry VII. During this period England gradually lost all
the land it had conquered in France (except Calais, which it lost a century
later), then suffered a disastrous civil war between Lancastrians and Yorkists,
and finally acquired the Tudors after leaving the last Yorkist king Richard
III dead on a battlefield. The political moral of all those plays seemed clear:
once feuding nobles get out of hand, there’s nothing but misery and chaos
until a ruler appears who will do what the Tudors did—centralize authority,
turning the nobles into courtiers dependent on the sovereign. Romeo and
Juliet is a miniature version of what happens when feuding nobles get out
of hand. The opening stage direction tells us that servants are on the street
armed with swords and bucklers (small shields). Even if you came in late and

missed the prologue, you’d know from seeing those servants that all was not
well in Verona. Because that means there’s going to be a fight: if you let
servants swank around like that, fully armed, they’re bound to get into fights.
So in view of Tudor policy and Queen Elizabeth’s personal dislike of duels and
brawling, this play would have no trouble with the censor, because it shows the
tragic results of the kind of thing that the authorities thoroughly disapproved
of anyway.
The first scene shows Shakespeare in his usual easy command of the situation,
starting off with a gabble of dialogue that doesn’t contribute much to the plot,
but gets over the latecomer problem and quiets the audience very quickly because
the jokes are bawdy jokes, the kind the audience most wants to hear. The servants
have broadswords: they don’t have rapiers and they can’t fence; such things are
for the gentry. They go in for what used to be called haymakers: “remember thy
swashing blow,” as one of them says. The macho jokes, “draw thy tool” and the
like, are the right way to introduce the theme that dominates this play: the theme
of love bound up with, and part of, violent death. Weapons and fighting suggest
sex as well as death, and are still doing so later in the play, when the imagery
shifts to gunpowder.
Then various characters enter, not at haphazard but in an order that
dramatizes the social set-up of the play. The servants are on stage first, then
Benvolio and Tybalt, then old Montague and old Capulet, and finally the
Prince, who comes in to form the keystone of the arch. This sequence points to a
symmetrical arrangement of characters corresponding to the two feuding houses.
Later on we meet Mercutio, who “consorts,” as Tybalt says, with the Montagues,
and Paris, who wants to become a Capulet by marrying Juliet. Both are relatives
of the Prince. Then come the two leads, first Romeo and then Juliet, and then
the two go-betweens, the Nurse and Friar Laurence.
The scene turns farcical when old Montague and old Capulet dash for their
swords and rush out into the street to prove to themselves that they’re just as
good men as they ever were, while their wives, who know better, keep pulling at
them and trying to keep them out of trouble. But something much more serious
is also happening. By entering the brawl, they’ve sanctioned it, because they’re
the heads of the two houses, and so they’re directly responsible for everything
that follows. The younger people seem to care very little about the feud: the only
one keen on it is Tybalt, and Tybalt, we may notice, is not a Capulet by blood
at all; he’s expressly said to be a cousin of Lady Capulet. In the next scene, even
old Capulet seems quite relieved to be bound over to keep the peace. But once
the alarm is given and the reflexes respond, the brawl is on and the tragedy set in
motion. After that, even Capulet’s very sensible behaviour in restraining Tybalt
from attacking Romeo in his own house comes too late. Of course we are never
told what the original feud was about.

The Prince begins:
Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,

Profaners of this neighbor-stainèd steel—
Will they not hear? (I.i.79–81)
The timing is accurate to the last syllable: two and a half lines before they’ll stop
whacking each other and listen. If it took more, the Prince would seem impotent,
stuck with a situation that’s beyond his power to control; if it took less, we
wouldn’t have the feeling of what it would be like to live in a town where that
sort of thing could happen at any time. We notice that the crowd is saying what
Mercutio is to say so tragically later on: “A plague a both your houses!” They’ve
had it with feuds, and are on the Prince’s side, even though they can express their
loyalty only by increasing the brawling. After the Prince leaves, the Montagues
pick up the pieces, and the conversation seems to get a bit aimless. But we can’t
skip anything in Shakespeare. Lady Montague says:
Oh, where is Romeo? Saw you him today?

Right glad I am he was not at this fray. (I.i.114–15)
It would overload the play to build up the Montagues as much as the Capulets
are built up, and these are almost the only lines she gets to speak—certainly the
only ones with any punch. But slight as they are they tell us that the sun rises
and sets on her Romeo, and so when at the end of the play we’re told that she
died, offstage, at the news of Romeo’s exile, that detail seems less arbitrary and
dragged-in than it would otherwise.
The next episode is Paris’s suit to the Capulets for Juliet’s hand. In the third
scene Lady Capulet proposes a family conference to discuss the prospective
marriage, and dismisses the Nurse. But, being a conscientious as well as a slightly
prissy young woman, she remembers that noble families don’t do that to old and
trusted servants—or perhaps she realizes that the Nurse is closer to Juliet than
she is—so she calls her back again. She soon regrets her concession, because the
Nurse goes into action at once with a long reminiscing speech.
This is the kind of speech that looks at first sight like a digression, introduced
for comic relief and to give us an insight into the Nurse’s character and idiom.
But Shakespeare doesn’t do things for second-rate reasons: he almost never drags
in a scene, and I say “almost” because I can think of only one clear example, the
scene about the teaching of Latin to the boy William in his one potboiler, The
Merry Wives of Windsor. Again, he’s not like Dickens or anyone else for whom
characterization might be an end in itself. His conventions are different: the
action of the play is what is always primary with him, and anything that seems

to be a detour in the action is probably advancing that action on another level. Of

course the speech does give us an insight into the Nurse’s character, as well as into
that of a man who has died years before the play begins, the Nurse’s husband. We
know him only from this:
“Yea,” quoth he, “dost thou fall upon thy face?

Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?” (I.iii. 41–43)
and that is all we ever want to know about him. As usual with raconteurs of the
Nurse’s type, we get the punch line four times.
The real reason for the speech, I think, is to sketch in a background for Juliet,
whom we see but have barely heard speak yet. We suddenly get a vision of what
Juliet’s childhood must have been like, wandering around a big house where her
father is “Sir” and her mother is “Madam,” where to leave she must get special
permission, not ordinarily granted except for visits to a priest for confession, and
where she is waiting for the day when Capulet will say to his wife, in effect: “I’m
sure we’ve got a daughter around this place somewhere: isn’t it time we got rid
of her?” Then she would marry and settle into the same mould as her mother,
who was married at the same age, about fourteen. Meanwhile, there is hardly
anybody for the child to talk to except the Nurse and the Nurse’s husband with
his inexhaustible joke. Of course there would be a great deal more to be said
about her childhood. But there was also, one gathers, a good many deaths (“The
earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” Capulet says to Paris, and the Nurse
has lost a daughter as well as a husband), and there would be enough loneliness
to throw Juliet on her own resources and develop a good deal of self-reliance. So
when, at her crisis in the play, she turns from a frightened child into a woman
with more genuine courage and resolution than Lady Macbeth ever had, the
change seems less prodigious if we were listening closely to all the overtones in
the Nurse’s harangue.
After the Nurse finally stops, there’s a speech from Lady Capulet which
settles into couplets—occasionally a sign in Shakespeare that something is a bit
out of key. To the Nurse, marriage means precisely one thing, and she is never
tired of telling us what it is. Lady Capulet would like to be a real mother, and
say things more appropriate to a well-born girl awaiting courtship and marriage.
But she really has nothing to say, communicates nothing except that she approves
of the match, and finally breaks down into, “Speak briefly, can you like of Paris’s
love?” Juliet can only mumble something to the general effect that “It must be all
right if you say so: you’re looking after these things.” If she hadn’t seen Romeo,
Juliet would probably have been talking in the same way to her daughter fifteen
years or so later.

So Capulet gets a chance to throw a party, which he loves doing, and does his
best to keep things properly stirred up:
Welcome, gentlemen! Ladies that have their toes

Unplagued with corns will walk a bout with you.
Ah ha, my mistresses! which of you all
Will now deny to dance? She that makes dainty,
She I’ll swear hath corns. Am I come near ye now? (I.v. 16–20)
Well, that gives us the quality of Capulet’s humour: it’s corny. Meanwhile, a
group of Montagues have crashed the party, disguising themselves in masks, as
was customary: Romeo sees Juliet, makes his way to her after narrowly escaping
death from Tybalt, and the two of them enter into a dialogue that’s an exquisitely
turned extended (eighteen-line) sonnet. That’s not “realistic,” of course: in
whatever real life may be, lovers don’t start cooing in sonnet form. What has
happened belongs to reality, not to realism; or rather, the God of Love, as I’ll
explain in a moment, has swooped down on two perhaps rather commonplace
adolescents and blasted them into another dimension of reality altogether.
So Capulet’s speech and the Romeo-Juliet sonnet, two verbal experiences as
different as though they were on different planets, are actually going on in the
same room and being acted on the same stage. This is the kind of thing we can
get only from Shakespeare.
Romeo and Juliet is a love story, but in Shakespeare’s day love included many
complex rituals. Early in the Middle Ages a cult had developed called Courtly
Love, which focussed on a curious etiquette that became a kind of parody of
Christian experience. Someone might be going about his business, congratulating
himself on not being caught in the trap of a love affair, when suddenly the God
of Love, Eros or Cupid, angry at being left out of things, forces him to fall in
love with a woman. The falling in love is involuntary and instantaneous, no
more “romantic,” in the usual sense, than getting shot with a bullet. It’s never
gradual: “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” says Marlowe, in a line
that Shakespeare quotes in As You Like It. From that time on, the lover is a slave
of the God of Love, whose will is embodied in his mistress, and he is bound to
do whatever she wants.
This cult of love was not originally linked to marriage. Marriage was a
relationship in which the man had all the effective authority, even if his wife was
(as she usually was) his social equal. The conventional role of the Courtly Love
mistress was to be proud, disdainful and “cruel,” repelling all advances from her
lover. The frustration this caused drove the lover into poetry, and the theme of
the poetry was the cruelty of the mistress and the despair and supplications of the
lover. It’s good psychology that a creative impulse to write poetry can arise from

sexual frustration, and Elizabethan poets almost invariably were or pretended to

be submerged in unhappy love, and writing for that reason.
Back in the thirteenth century, we have Dante, whose life was totally
changed by seeing Beatrice at her father’s home when he was nine years old.
He devoted the rest of his life to her, even though he survived her by many
years. But he had no further relations with her, certainly no sexual relations,
and his devotion to her had nothing to do with his marrying someone else
and fathering four children. His successor in poetry was Petrarch, whose
mistress, also out of reach, was Laura, and it was Petrarch who popularized
the convention in sixteenth-century England. In the 1590s, when the vogue
was at its height, enormous piles of sonnets more or less imitating Petrarch
were being written. By Shakespeare’s time the convention had become more
middle-class, was much more frequently linked to eventual marriage, and the
more overtly sexual aspects of such relationships were more fully explored. So
“love” in Romeo and Juliet covers three different forms of a convention. First,
the orthodox Petrarchan convention in Romeo’s professed love for Rosaline at
the beginning of the play. Second, the less sublimated love for which the only
honourable resolution was marriage, represented by the main theme of the
play. Third, the more cynical and ribald perspective that we get in Mercutio’s
comments, and perhaps those of the Nurse as well.
On the principle that life imitates art, Romeo has thrown himself, before the
play begins, into a love affair with someone called Rosaline, whom we never see
(except that she was at Capulet’s party, where she must have wondered painfully
what had happened to Romeo), and who tried to live up to the proud and
disdainful role that the convention required. So Romeo made the conventional
responses: he went around with his clothes untidy, hardly heard what was said
to him, wrote poetry, talked endlessly about the cruelty of his mistress, wept and
kept “adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs.” In short, he was afflicted
with love melancholy, and we remember that melancholy in Shakespeare’s
time was a physical as well as an emotional disturbance. More simply, he was
something of a mooning bore, his love affair a kind of pedantry, like Tybalt’s
fighting by the book of arithmetic. Juliet, to her disgust, is compelled to adopt
some of the same coy and aloof attitude in her edgy dialogue with Paris in Friar
Laurence’s cell.
It’s obvious that there was no sexual relationship between Romeo and
Rosaline, a fact that would have disappointed Mercutio, who takes it for granted
that Romeo has spent the night of what we now call the “balcony scene” in
Rosaline’s arms. Romeo enters the play practically unconscious that he has
walked in on the aftermath of a dangerous brawl, and then starts explaining to
Benvolio how firm and unyielding his attachment to Rosaline is, even though
Rosaline, playing along as best she could, has told him that she has sworn to “live
chaste.” The dialogue between Romeo and Benvolio seems to us a curiously long

one, for the amount said in it, but it’s essential to round out the situation Romeo
has put himself in.
I said that the Courtly Love convention used an elaborate and detailed
parody, or counterpart, of the language of religion. The mistress was a “saint”; the
“god” supplicated with so many prayers and tears was Eros or Cupid, the God of
Love; “atheists” were people who didn’t believe in the convention; and “heretics”
were those who didn’t keep to the rules. Benvolio suggests that Romeo might
get Rosaline into better perspective if he’d compare her with a few other young
women, and Romeo answers:

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;
And these, who, often drowned, could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! (I.ii. 90–93)
This is close to another requirement of the convention, that the lover had to
compare his mistress to the greatest heroines of history and literature (heroines
from the point of view of love, that is), always to their disadvantage. These
included Helen of Troy, Dido in the Aeneid, Cleopatra, heroines of Classical
stories like Hero and Thisbe, and, of course, Laura. Mercutio, who knows all
about the convention even though he assumes that Romeo has taken a different
approach to it, says:
Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura, to his lady,
was a kitchen wench . . . Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen
and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the
purpose. (II.iv. 38–43)
However, Romeo takes Benvolio’s advice, goes in the Capulet party, sees Juliet,
and the “real thing” hits him. Of course, the “real thing” is as much a convention,
at least within the framework of the play, as its predecessor, but its effects on both
Romeo and Juliet are very different.
Before we examine those effects, though, we have to notice another aspect
of the convention that’s woven into the play. In the love literature of the time
there were very passionate and mutually consuming friendships between
men: they also were usually sublimated, and distinguished from “homosexual”
attachments in the narrow sense. In fact, the convention often tended to put male
friendship even higher than love between men and women, simply because of
this disinterested or nonsexual quality in it. Shakespeare himself, in his sonnets,
represents himself as loving a beautiful young man even to the point of allowing
the latter to steal his mistress, which in this context indicates that neither man
has a sexual interest except in women. In this age we’d think of “sexual” much

more broadly, but the elementary distinctions are the ones that apply here. The
predominance of male friendship over love gets a bit grotesque at the end of a
very early comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a puzzling enough play if we try
to take it seriously.
In this play the “two gentlemen” are named Valentine and Proteus, which
means that one is a true lover and the other a fickle one. Valentine loves Silvia,
but is blocked by the usual parental opposition; Proteus loves Julia, but discards
her as soon as he sees Silvia. He then deliberately betrays Valentine in order to
knock him out as a rival for Silvia; Julia disguises herself as a male page and sets
out in pursuit of Proteus. At the end of the play Proteus finds Silvia alone in a
wood, tries to rape her, and is baffled when Valentine bursts out of the bushes and
says: “Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil touch . . . !” All very correct melodrama, and
we wait for Proteus to get the proper reward of his treachery to Valentine. What
happens next is so incredible that I can only resort to paraphrase. Proteus says in
effect: I know it was a dirty trick to try to rape your mistress; it just seemed too
good a chance to miss.” And Valentine responds, in effect: “Oh, that’s all right,
old man, and of course if you really want Silvia so much she’s yours.” Fortunately,
the disguised Julia, who’s been following closely behind, puts an end to this
nonsense by fainting. They pick her up and see who she is; Proteus now finds her
more attractive than he did before, and everything ends happily. So far as all this
has a point, the point seems to be that love for women is to be subordinated in
a crisis to male friendship.
Getting back to our present Verona gentlemen, Tybalt tries to force Romeo
into a duel, which Romeo tries to avoid because he’s now more of a Capulet
than Tybalt is. Mercutio is disgusted with Romeo’s submissiveness and takes
Tybalt on for himself. In the duel Romeo makes a bungling effort at interference,
and Mercutio gets a fatal wound. When he is dying, he asks Romeo why he
interfered, and Romeo can give only the miserably helpless answer, “I thought
all for the best.” Mercutio says only:
Help me into some house, Benvolio,

Or I shall faint. (III.i. 103–104)
The name “Benvolio,” at the climax of this terrible scene, means that he has
turned his back contemptuously on Romeo. At that point Juliet drops out of
Romeo’s mind, for the first time since he saw her, and all he can think of now is
vengeance on Tybalt for his friend’s death. Once again, male friendship overrides
love of women, but this is tragedy: by killing Tybalt and avenging Mercutio,
Romeo becomes irrevocably a tragic figure.
Someone once raised the question of whether Shakespeare’s audience would
have assumed that Romeo was damned for committing suicide, suicide being
regarded by the church as one of the most heinous of sins. The simplest answer

is that the question is tedious, and Shakespeare avoids tedium. But it could
be said also that the audience would understand that Romeo, as a lover-hero,
really belongs to another religion, the religion of love, which doesn’t collide with
Christianity or prevent him from confessing to Friar Laurence, but nonetheless
has different standards of what’s good and bad. It also has its own saints and
martyrs, those who lived and died for love, and Romeo and Juliet certainly belong
in that calendar. Chaucer, two hundred years earlier, had written The Legend of
Good Women, in which the women chosen, including Helen and Cleopatra and
Dido (also Thisbe, whom Mercutio mentions and whom we’ll meet again), are
“good women” from Eros’s point of view: the great erotic saints. When Romeo
suddenly feels uneasy just before going into the Capulet party, he says:
But he that hath the steerage of my course

Direct my sail! (I.iv. 112–13)
We are not sure whether he is referring to the God of Love or the Christian
God here, and neither, perhaps, is he. But later in the play, when he gets the false
feeling of euphoria that so often precedes a tragic catastrophe, and says, “My
bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne,” he clearly means Eros.
Coming back to the effects of love on the two main characters, the most
dramatic change is in their command of language. Before she sees Romeo we
hear Juliet making proper-young-lady noises like, “It is an honour that I dream
not of ” (“it” being her marriage to Paris). After she sees Romeo, she’s talking
like this:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phoebus’ lodging! Such a wagoner
As Phaëton would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night immediately. (III.ii. 1–4)
It appears that Juliet, for all her tender years and sheltered life, has had a
considerably better education than simply a technical training to be a wife and
mother. The point is that it would never have occurred to her to make use of her
education in her speech in the way she does here without the stimulus of her
love.
As for Romeo, when we first meet him he’s at the stage where he hardly
knows what he’s saying until he hears himself saying it. We don’t hear any of
the poetry he wrote about Rosaline (unless the “religion of mine eye” lyric I
quoted from a moment ago belongs to it), and something tells us that we could
do without most of it. But after he meets Juliet he turns out, to Mercutio’s
astonishment and delight, to be full of wit and repartee. “Now art thou what
thou art, by art as well as by nature,” Mercutio says, and even Mercutio knows

nothing of the miraculous duets with Juliet in the great “balcony scene” and
its successor. When he visits Friar Laurence, the Friar sees him approaching
and feels rather apprehensive, thinking, “Oh no, not Rosaline again,” and is
considerably startled to hear Romeo saying, in effect, “Who’s Rosaline?” More
important, especially after Juliet also visits him, he realizes that two young
people he has previously thought of as rather nice children have suddenly
turned into adults, and are speaking with adult authority. He is bound to
respect this, and besides, he sees an excellent chance of ending the feud by
marrying them and presenting their furious parents with a fait accompli.
After disaster strikes with the death of Tybalt and the Prince’s edict of
banishment, we get very long speeches from both the lovers and from Friar
Laurence. The rationale of the Friar’s speech is simple enough: Romeo thinks of
suicide, and the Friar immediately delivers an involved summary of his situation,
trying to show that he could be a lot worse off. The speech is organized on lines
of formal rhetoric, and is built up in a series of triads. The point of the length of
the speech is its irony: the Friar is steadily adding to Romeo’s despair while he is
giving reasons why he should cool it. With Romeo and Juliet, the reason for the
loosening of rhetorical control is subtler. Take Juliet:
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but “I,”

And that bare vowel “I” shall poison more
I am not I, if there be such an “I”
Or those eyes’ shot that makes the answer “I.” (III.ii. 45–49)
It all turns on puns, of course, on “I,” “Ay” (meaning yes, and often spelled “I”
at the time), and “eye.” But she’s not “playing” with words: she’s shredding them
to bits in an agony of frustration and despair. The powerful explosion of words
has nowhere to go, and simply disintegrates. Some critics will tell you that this
is Shakespeare being immature and uncertain of his verbal powers, because, after
looking up the probable dates, they find it’s an “early play.” Don’t believe them. It
is true that the earlier plays depend on formal rhetorical figures much more than
the later ones: it doesn’t follow that the use of such figures is immature. There are
other examples of “playing on words” that indicate terrible distress of mind: John
of Gaunt’s death speeches in Richard II, for example.
It is through the language, and the imagery the language uses, that we
understand how the Liebestod of Romeo and Juliet, their great love and their
tragic death, are bound up together as two aspects of the same thing. I spoke of
the servants’ jokes in the opening scene associating sexuality with weapons, love
and death in the context of parody. Soon after Romeo comes in, we hear him
talking like this:


Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create! (I.i. 173–75)
The figure he is using is the oxymoron or paradoxical union of opposites:

obviously the right kind of figure for this play, though Romeo is still in his
Rosaline trance and is not being very cogent. From there we go on to Friar
Laurence’s wonderfully concentrated image of
fire and powder

Which, as they kiss, consume, (II.vi. 10–11)
with its half-concealed pun on “consummation,” and to Juliet’s
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say it lightens. (II.ii. 119–20)
suggesting that their first glimpse of one another determined their deaths as well
as their love.
The love-death identity of contrasts expands into the imagery of day and
night. The great love scenes begin with Juliet hanging upon the cheek of night
and end with the macabre horrors of the Capulet tomb, where we reluctantly
can’t believe Romeo when he says:
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes

This vault a feasting presence full of light. (V.iii. 85–86)
The character who makes the most impressive entrances in the play is a
character we never see, the sun. The sun is greeted by Friar Laurence as the
sober light that does away with the drunken darkness, but the Friar is speaking
out of his own temperament, and there are many other aspects of the light
and dark contrast. In the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet, the bird of darkness,
the nightingale, symbolizes the desire of the lovers to remain with each other,
and the bird of dawn, the lark, the need to preserve their safety. When the sun
rises, “The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,” and the energy of youth and love
wears itself out in scrambling over the blockades of reality.
The light and dark imagery comes into powerful focus with Mercutio’s speech
on Queen Mab. Queen Mab, Mercutio tells us, is the instigator of dreams, and
Mercutio takes what we would call a very Freudian approach to dreams: they are
primarily wish-fulfilment fantasies.


Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love. (I.iv. 70–71)
But such dreams are an inseparable mixture of illusion and a reality profounder
than the ordinary realities of the day. When we wake we carry into the daylight
world, without realizing it, the feelings engendered by the dream, the irrational
and absurd conviction that the world as we want it to be has its own reality, and
perhaps is what could be there instead. Both the lovers carry on an inner debate
in which one voice tells them that they are embarking on a dangerous illusion,
and another says that they must embark on it anyway whatever the dangers,
because by doing so they are martyrs, or witnesses, to an order of things that
matters more than the sunlit reality. Romeo says:
O blessèd, blessèd night! I am afeard,

Being in night, all this is but a dream,
Too flattering-sweet to be substantial. (II.ii. 139–41)
Perhaps so, but so much the worse for the substantial, as far as Romeo’s actions
are concerned.
Who or what is responsible for a tragedy that kills half a dozen people, at
least four of them young and very attractive people? The feud, of course, but in
this play there doesn’t seem to be the clearly marked villain that we find in so
many tragedies. We can point to Iago in Othello and say that if it hadn’t been
for that awful man there’d have been no tragedy at all. But the harried and
conscientious Prince, the kindly and pious Friar Laurence, the quite likable old
buffer Capulet: these are a long way from being villainous. Tybalt comes closest,
but Tybalt is a villain only by virtue of his position in the plot. According to his
own code—admittedly a code open to criticism—he is a man of honour, and
there is no reason to suppose him capable of the kind of malice or treachery that
we find in Iago or in Edmund in King Lear. He may not even be inherently more
quarrelsome or spoiling for a fight than Mercutio. Juliet seems to like him, if not
as devoted to his memory as her parents think. Setting Tybalt aside, there is still
some mystery about the fact that so bloody a mess comes out of the actions of
what seem to be, taken one by one, a fairly decent lot of human beings.
The Nurse, it is true, is called a “most wicked fiend” by Juliet, because she
proposes that Juliet conceal her marriage to Romeo and live in bigamy with
Paris. But Juliet is overwrought. The Nurse is not a wicked fiend, and wants to
be genuinely helpful. But she has a very limited imagination, and she doesn’t
belong to a social class that can afford to live by codes of honour. The upper class
made their names for the lower classes—villain, knave, varlet, boor—into terms
of contempt because the people they described had to wriggle through life as best
they could: their first and almost their only rule was survival. The deadliest insult

one gentleman could give another then was to call him a liar, not because the one
being insulted had a passion for truth, but because it was being suggested that he
couldn’t afford to tell the truth.
Besides, Shakespeare has been unobtrusively building up the Nurse’s attitude.
On her first embassy to Romeo she is quite roughly teased by Mercutio, and
while she is a figure of fun and the audience goes along with the fun, still she is
genuinely offended. She is not a bawd or a whore, and she doesn’t see why she
should be called one. Romeo, courteous as ever, tries to explain that Mercutio
is a compulsive talker, and that what he says is not to be taken seriously; but
it was said to her, seriously or not, and when she returns to Juliet and takes so
long to come to the point in delivering her message, the delay has something
in it of teasing Juliet to get even. Not very logical, but who said the Nurse was
logical? Similarly when she laments the death of Tybalt and Juliet assumes that
she’s talking about Romeo, where the teasing seems more malicious and less
unconscious. The Nurse has discovered in her go-between role that she really
doesn’t much like these Montague boys or their friends: as long as things are
going well she’ll support Romeo, but in a crisis she’ll remember she’s a Capulet
and fight on that side.
The question of the source of the tragic action is bound up with another
question: why is the story of the tragic love and death of Romeo and Juliet one
of the world’s best-loved stories? Mainly, we think, because of Shakespeare’s
word magic. But, while it was always a popular play, what the stage presented
as Romeo and Juliet, down to about 1850, was mostly a series of travesties of
what Shakespeare wrote. There’s something about the story itself that can take
any amount of mistreatment from stupid producing and bad casting. I’ve seen
a performance with a middle-aged and corseted Juliet who could have thrown
Romeo over her shoulder and walked to Mantua with him, and yet the audience
was in tears at the end. The original writer is not the writer who thinks up a
new story—there aren’t any new stories, really—but the writer who tells one
of the world’s great stories in a new way. To understand why Romeo and Juliet
is one of those stories we have to distinguish the specific story of the feuding
Montague–Capulet families from an archetypal story of youth, love and death
that is probably older than written literature itself.
The specific story of the Verona feud has been traced back to a misunderstood
allusion in Dante’s Purgatorio, and it went through a series of retellings until we
come to Shakespeare’s main source, a narrative poem, Romeus and Juliet, by one
Arthur Brooke, which supplied him not only with the main theme, but with
a Mercutio, a counterpart of Friar Laurence, and a garrulous nurse of Juliet.
Brooke begins with a preface in which he tells us that his story has two morals:
first, not to get married without parental consent, and second, not to be Catholic
and confess to priests. That takes care of the sort of reader who reads only to see
his own prejudices confirmed on a printed page. Then he settles down to tell

his story, in which he shows a good deal of sympathy for both the Friar and the
lovers. He is very far from being a major poet, but he had enough respect for his
story to attract and hold the attention of Shakespeare, who seems, so far as we
can tell, to have used almost no other source. Brooke also says he saw a play on
the same subject, but no trace of such a play remains, unless those scholars in
the guesswork squad are right who see signs of an earlier play being revised in
the first Quarto.
But the great story of the destruction of two young lovers by a combination
of fate and family hostility is older and wider than that. In Shakespeare’s time,
Chikamatsu, the Japanese writer of Bunraku (puppet plays), was telling similar
stories on the other side of the world, and thousands of years earlier the same
story was echoing and re-echoing through ancient myths. Elizabethan poets used,
as a kind of literary Bible, Ovid’s long (fifteen books) poem called Metamorphoses,
which told dozens of the most famous stories of Classical myth and legend: the
stories of Philomela turned into a nightingale, of Narcissus, of Philemon and
Baucis turned into trees, of Daphne and Syrinx. Ovid lived around the time of
Christ, but of course the stories he tells are far older. He has many stories of
tragic death, but none was more loved or more frequently retold in Shakespeare’s
day than the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the two lovers separated by the walls
of hostile families, meeting in a wood, and dying by accident and suicide.
In this play we often hear about a kind of fatality at work in the action, usually
linked with the stars. As early as the Prologue we hear about “star-crossed lovers,”
and Romeo speaks, not of the feud, but of “some consequence still hanging in the
stars” when he feels a portent of disaster. Astrology, as I’ve said, was taken quite
seriously then, but here it seems only part of a network of unlucky timing that’s
working against the lovers. Romeo gets to see Juliet because of the sheer chance
that the Capulet servant sent out to deliver the invitations to the party can’t read,
and comes to him for help. There’s the letter from Friar Laurence in Verona to
Friar John in Mantua, which by accident doesn’t get to him, and another hitch in
timing destroys Friar Laurence’s elaborate plan that starts with Juliet’s sleeping
potion. If we feel that Friar Laurence is being meddlesome in interfering in the
action as he does, that’s partly because he’s in a tragedy and his schemes are
bound to fail. In Much Ado about Nothing there’s also a friar with a very similar
scheme for the heroine of that play, but his scheme is successful because the play
he’s in is a comedy.
But when we have a quite reasonable explanation for the tragedy, the feud
between the families, why do we need to bring in the stars and such? The
Prologue, even before the play starts, suggests that the feud demands lives to feed
on, and sooner or later will get them:
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove.

The answer, or part of the answer, begins with the fact that we shouldn’t assume
that tragedy is something needing an explanation. Tragedy represents something
bigger in the total scheme of things than all possible explanations combined. All
we can say—and it’s a good deal—is that there’d have been no tragedy without
the feud.
This, I think, is the clue to one of those puzzling episodes in Shakespeare
that we may not understand at first hearing or reading. At the very end of the
play, Montague proposes to erect a gold statue of Juliet at his own expense, and
Capulet promises to do the same for Romeo. Big deal: nothing like a couple of
gold statues to bring two dead lovers back to life. But by that time Montague
and Capulet are two miserable, defeated old men who have lost everything
that meant anything in their lives, and they simply cannot look their own
responsibility for what they have done straight in the face. There’s a parallel with
Othello’s last speech, which ends with his suicide, when he recalls occasions in
the past when he has served the Venetian state well. T.S. Eliot says that Othello
in this speech is “cheering himself up,” turning a moral issue into an aesthetic
one. I’d put it differently: I’d say it was a reflex of blinking and turning away from
the intolerably blazing light of judgment. And so with Montague and Capulet,
when they propose to set up these statues as a way of persuading themselves that
they’re still alive, and still capable of taking some kind of positive action. The
gesture is futile and pitiful, but very, very human.
So far as there’s any cheering up in the picture, it affects the audience rather
than the characters. Tragedy always has an ironic side, and that means that the
audience usually knows more about what’s happening or going to happen than
the characters do. But tragedy also has a heroic side, and again the audience
usually sees that more clearly than the characters. Juliet’s parents don’t really
know who Juliet is: we’re the ones who have a rather better idea. Notice Capulet’s
phrase, “Poor sacrifices of our enmity!” Romeo and Juliet are sacrificial victims,
and the ancient rule about sacrifice was that the victim had to be perfect and
without blemish. The core of reality in this was the sense that nothing perfect
or without blemish can stay that way in this world, and should be offered up to
another world before it deteriorates. That principle belongs to a still larger one:
nothing that breaks through the barriers of ordinary experience can remain in
the world of ordinary experience. One of the first things Romeo says of Juliet is:
“Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!” But more than beauty is involved:
their kind of passion would soon burn up the world of heavy fathers and snarling
Tybalts and gabby Nurses if it stayed there. Our perception of this helps us to
accept the play as a whole, instead of feeling only that a great love went wrong.
It didn’t go wrong: it went only where it could, out. It always was, as we say, out
of this world.
That’s why the tragedy is not exhausted by pointing to its obvious cause
in the feud. We need suggestions of greater mysteries in things: we need the

yoke of inauspicious stars and the vision of Queen Mab and her midget team
riding across the earth like the apocalyptic horsemen. These things don’t explain
anything, but they help to light up the heroic vision in tragedy, which we see so
briefly before it goes. It takes the greatest rhetoric of the greatest poets to bring
us a vision of the tragic heroic, and such rhetoric doesn’t make us miserable but
exhilarated, not crushed but enlarged in spirit.
Romeo and Juliet has more wit and sparkle than any other tragedy I know:
so much that we may instinctively think of it as a kind of perverted comedy.
But, of course, tragedy is not perverse: it has its own rightness. It might be
described, though, as a kind of comedy turned inside out. A typical comic
theme goes like this: boy meets girl; boy’s father doesn’t think the girl good
enough; girl’s father prefers someone with more money; various complications
ensue; eventually boy gets girl. There’s a good deal in the Romeo and Juliet
story to remind us of such comedy themes. Look at the way the Chorus begins
Act II:
Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie

And young affection gapes to be his heir.
If we tried to turn the play we have inside out, back into comedy, what would
it be like? We’d have a world dominated by dream fairies, including a queen,
and by the moon instead of the sun; a world where the tragedy of Pyramus
and Thisbe has turned into farce; a world where feuding and brawling
noblemen run around in the dark, unable to see each other. In short, we’d
have a play very like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the one we’re going to
discuss next.
QQQ
1986—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from Romeo

and Juliet (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations)
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University,

where he teaches Shakespeare and poetry. He has edited many anthol-
ogies of literature and literary criticism and is the author of more than
30 books, including The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon, and
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
Except for Hamlet and Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet seems the most popular of
Shakespeare’s tragedies, though it is necessarily dwarfed by the heroic sequence

of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Some critics
prefer Coriolanus to the High Romanticism of Romeo and Juliet, and I myself
would rather reread Julius Caesar than turn again to Romeo and Juliet. Yet the
massive, permanent popularity of Romeo and Juliet is well-deserved. Its appeal
is universal and world-wide, and its effect upon world literature is matched
among the tragedies only by Hamlet. Stendhal, who with Victor Hugo is the
great partisan of Shakespeare in equivocal France, wrote his own sublime
tribute to Romeo and Juliet in his last completed novel, The Charterhouse of
Parma.
I desire here to make some brief reflections upon the relative aesthetic
eminence of the play in the full context of Shakespeare’s achievement. So
prodigal was Shakespeare’s inventiveness, particularly in the creation of
personalities, that I myself, in earlier years, tended to undervalue Romeo and
Juliet in the full panoply of Shakespeare. There are perhaps twenty plays by
him that I rated higher, even if some of them lacked the enormous popularity
of Romeo and Juliet. I do not know whether I merely have aged, or have
matured, but Juliet herself moves me now in many of the same ways that
I find Desdemona and Cordelia to be almost unbearably poignant. What
Robert Penn Warren called her “pure poetry” remains astonishingly vital and
powerful, as when she wishes her lover’s vow to Romeo could be inaugurated
again:
But to be frank and give it thee again;

My love as deep: The more I give to thee
That is a transcendently persuasive utterance of love’s reality, as rich as

literature affords, so distant from vainglory or self-deception that Romeo is
transfigured by receiving it. Shakespeare is reputed to have said that he had
to kill off Mercutio lest Mercutio kill the play. I think it likelier that the full
revelation of Juliet’s greatness made it necessary to dispose of the prurient
Mercutio, whose lively blasphemies against the splendors of Juliet’s love might
well have wearied us.
Juliet’s is a difficult role to play, for the curse of our theaters are “highconcept”
directors, and some of them do not seem to know clearly the difference between
Juliet and the Cressida of Troilus and Cressida! Properly performed, or adequately
interpreted by a sensitive reader, Juliet is an essential part of Shakespeare’s
unmatched invention of the human.
QQQ

1991—Thomas McAlindon. “Romeo and Juliet,” from

Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos
Thomas McAlindon (1932– ), senior lecturer in English at the University
of Hull in England, is the author of Shakespeare Minus “Theory” (2004),
Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (2001), and
Doctor Faustus: Divine in Show (1994).
I
Titus Andronicus (1593?), Richard III (1593?), and Romeo and Juliet (1595–6),
Shakespeare’s first attempts in the tragic medium, are strikingly different both
from each other and from the tragedies of Shakespeare’s maturity in many
obvious respects. As I have already indicated, however, it is possible to detect
in Titus certain shaping concepts which will prove to be essential in the mature
tragedies; and these same concepts can be detected in the other two early
tragedies as well. The three plays rest on a common substructure of ideas about
the nature of the tragic experience and its relation to reality as a whole.
Titus, we have seen, is the tragedy of a civilised warrior in whom the stable
partnership of martial valour and loving-kindness is shattered, so that the
violence which had brought honour on the field to ‘kind Rome’, to his family, and
to himself is turned against all three. This tragedy of lost oneness and identity is
reflected in the condition of Rome, a city renowned for its combination of civility
and martial virtue; its present degenerate state is summed up in the submissive
marriage of its emperor to a ruthless barbarian queen. The tragedy of both Rome
and its representative hero are in turn traced to the double nature of ‘kind’.
Unlike Titus, Richard III is not a creature of double impulse. He is spiritually
as well as physically ‘deform’d, unfinish’d’, sent by ‘dissembling Nature’ into the
world ‘scarce half made up’ (I.i.19–21). His performances as an amiable friend
and kinsman and as a ‘jolly thriving wooer’ (IV.iii. 43) are fiendish dissembling:
his doubleness is perfect duplicity. Wholly without ‘tenderness of heart, / And
gentle, kind, effeminate remorse’ (III.vii.210–11), he is ‘kind in hatred’ only (IV.
iv. 172). The embodiment of domineering egoism (‘I am myself alone’), and an
agent of strife and division, he identifies himself in his opening soliloquy with
Mars (‘grim visag’d war’), promising to wreck the peace and pastimes which
his war-weary nation is preparing to enjoy under King Edward (I.i.9). Not for
Richard the pursuits of Venus: lute, dance, my lady’s chamber, love’s majesty
(lines 12–16). The tragedy is his only in the sense that he ‘plots’ it (line 32); in
the other sense, it is England’s tragedy, that of a nation at war with itself, torn
between the rival claims of the House of Lancaster and the House of York.
In these plays, then, tragic experience is identified with strife, hate, disunity,
and violent change and confusion, and traced to the contrarious order of nature.
This underlying similarity is reinforced by the plays’ conclusions. The natural

longing for love, peace, and unity which Richard contemptuously acknowledges
at the outset, and exploits in his treacherous hypocrisies, is answered at the
end by Richmond, his conqueror. Lightly sketched though it is, Richmond’s
character is that of a man ‘full made up’. He is a good warrior and a good friend,
a conquering peacemaker. Through his marriage to Elizabeth he combines in
himself the rival claims of the two houses; he is a reconciler who will ‘unite the
white rose and the red’ in ‘fair conjunction’ (V.v.19–20). So too at the end of
Titus Andronicus, the dead hero’s brother addresses the people of Rome thus:
You sad-fac’d men, people and sons of Rome,

By uproars sever’d, as a flight of fowl
Scatter’d by winds and high tempestuous gusts,
O let me teach you how to knit again
This scatter’d corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs into one body. (V.iii.67–72)
Like all Shakespeare’s tragedies, both plays postulate a contrarious natural order
which is cyclical as well as dialectical. The impulse towards unity is expected
to assert itself as inevitably as its opposite, and may even be dependent on it.
However terrible the violence which has been unleashed, and however muted
and qualified the hint of reintegration and renewal, these plays intimate that
pure tragedy, like pure comedy, is an image of the world only half made up. As
we shall see, that suggestion is more conspicuous in Romeo and Juliet than in any
other of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Yet to link so exquisitely beautiful a play with Titus and Richard III might
well seem a forced and fruitless exercise. Unlike theirs, its narrative lacks all
potential for high tragedy. The story of two very young lovers who lead private
lives, and who are driven to suicide by the pointless feuding of their families
and the practice of arranged marriages, is potentially very moving; but it is not
calculated to present a spectacle of evil and suffering that will stir us profoundly
with questions about the human condition. Shakespeare, however, was obviously
very conscious of the inherent limitation of the story as material for tragic drama,
and addressed himself to the problem with quite remarkable thoroughness and
subtlety. In consequence, to treat the play as uncertain, simple, or lacking in
generality of implication, or as a tragedy of fate and passive suffering, is quite
wrong. Increasing critical emphasis of late on its rare poise and complexity is
fully justified.
Essentially, Shakespeare’s solution to his problem was to generalise and
complicate the tragedy by making the city in which it is set a microcosmic
reflection of the great world. ‘There is no world without Verona’s walls’ (III.iii.17),
says Romeo, and he is at least right in assuming that Verona is a world in itself.
And what matters to Shakespeare in the correspondent relationship between the
little and the great world is not their hierarchical but their contrarious structure.

Verona is made up of servants, citizens, gentry or nobility, and a princely ruler;

but the social fact of prime importance in this hierarchical society is that it is
split between two rival families whose mutual hatred erupts periodically into
‘black strife’ (III.i.175). This hatred has no causal or temporal beginning; it seems
to have been always there, like a fact of nature. Its only justification lies in the
honour code, with its demand that every slight to one’s own or one’s family’s
good name must be violently repudiated. But the honour code, as exemplified in
the duelling Tybalt, is shown to be thoroughly irrational; it is male aggressiveness
given a veneer of legitimacy, the militarism of chivalry broken loose from the
claims of love and peace: ‘. . . talk of peace! I hate the word / As I hate hell, all
Montagues, and thee’ (I.i.68–9). A sixteenth-century Italian lawyer spoke of the
duel as entirely natural, a manifestation of the hate which permeates the whole
physical world;1 and on the evidence of this play he was right. Shakespeare not
only implies that the mutual hostility of the two families was always there (and
therefore ‘natural’), he also locates it very firmly in the dynamics of a world whose
functioning turns off the interaction of Love and Strife (Hate). The tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet, who reject hatred and division at the cost of their lives, and
whose doomed marriage brings about the ‘jointure’ (V.iii.296) of their warring
families, is fully implicated in the drama of the natural order. This connection is
established by means of the play’s rich pattern of elemental imagery,2 and, more
overtly, by the Friar’s famous set speech on the properties of plants:3
The gray-ey’d morn smiles on the frowning night,

Check’ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light;
And fleckel’d darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels.
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb.
We sucking on her natural bosom find;
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that off the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain’d from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;

And vice sometime’s by action dignified.
Poison hath residence, and medicine power;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will;
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant. (II.iii.1–30)
The Friar here envisages a spatio-temporal order of great dialectical

complexity (that it is a temporal as well as a spatial order is an important point
habitually missed in critical commentary). Thanks to the regular cycle of day and
night, and of generation and decay, the elements of moisture, warmth, air and
earth combine in a fruitful partnership from which human art can profit. Human
art, however, requires a patient, discriminating awareness of nature’s moving,
changing, oppositional character. The fruitful earth yields both poisonous weeds
and medicinal flowers. But the flowers may contain both poison and medicine;
furthermore, poison can prove beneficial and medicine fatal. And in human
nature the same laws apply. Each member in every opposition breaks down into
a further opposition: contrarious structure and dynamics are inescapable. Here is
a view of nature as at once comforting and treacherous, stable and ambiguous. It
posits a world where opposites can change places all ‘too soon’, where confusion
and grave error are perennial hazards, and where to ‘mean well’ (I.iv.48) is seldom
enough. Of course the Friar makes no mention of the love–strife or love–hate
antinomy; but Romeo, his ‘only love sprung from’ his ‘only hate’, enters just as
(or just before) the speech ends, and the Friar is soon discussing the possibility
of turning ‘rancour to pure love’ (line 92; I.v.136). It is clear both here and
throughout that the play’s rich (and much noted) cluster of polarities has nature’s
most basic opposition at its heart.
II
While it is necessary to observe the underlying affinities between Romeo and
Juliet and the earlier (and later) tragedies, its unique character must be fully
acknowledged. This can be ascribed mainly to its comic and its lyric dimensions.
Yet to examine these is to perceive even more clearly the basic elements
in Shakespeare’s conception of the tragic: violent change and confounding
contrariety reflecting a collapse in the tenuous balance and measured pace of
nature’s oppositional order.
The total effect of the play’s richly comic dimension is to counteract the
heavily explicit indications of tragic inevitability by suggesting that the story

could have ended quite differently.4 The silliness of the servants and the two
paterfamilias in the opening scene, the ludicrous affectations of Romeo in his
role as Rosaline’s unrequited lover, the ebullient mockeries of Mercutio, the
sentimental babblings of old Capulet, and the enchanting garrulity of the Nurse:
all these combine to make us feel throughout the first two acts (and in defiance
of the Prologue) that the lovers’ problem will resolve itself in the time-honoured
fashion of comedy—constancy and skilful intrigue will overcome all obstacles,
hard-nosed parents will be reconciled to a marriage of true love. Not until the
entirely unexpected killing of the great jester in Act III does the atmosphere
become genuinely tragic. But even then there is more comedy to come: not just
the absurd, nocturnal bustling of Father Capulet as he prepares for the wedding
feast, but, more importantly, the entrance of the clown at the end of the funeral
lamentations over the presumed-dead Juliet. At this point the comedy clearly
becomes part of a general, self-reflexive strategy. When Peter asks the dejected
musicians to play him some ‘merry dump’ (i.e. some merry sad song), and they
retort, ‘’tis no time to play now’ (IV.v.105–7), the original audience was to ask
itself, ‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’ What artistic justification
can there be for disregarding so flagrantly the classical and neoclassical insistence
on excluding all traces of comedy from tragic drama? The answer has in fact
been prepared for in the proleptic ironies that occur in so many of the comic and
satiric passages. To take but one example. Romeo’s ‘He [i.e. Mercutio] jests at
scars that never felt a wound’ (II.ii.1) anticipates the dying Mercutio’s jest on his
fatal wound (‘No, ’tis not so deep as a well, not so wide as a church door. But ’tis
enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man’)
(III.i.93–5); and the link tells us that comedy and tragedy cannot be separated
without adopting a static and monocular view of a world which is inescapably
kinetic and duplex: each genre or mode is the tomb and womb of the other.
Old Capulet’s lament, however, prepares much more decisively than these early
anticipations of generic exchange for the clown’s untimely intrusion, and fully
involves it in the imaginative design of the whole play:

Turn from their office to black funeral:
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change;
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse;
And all things change them to the contrary. (IV.v.85–91)
Shakespeare implicitly acknowledges that popular demand for clowning in the

midst of tragedy results in a ‘Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms’ (I.ii.177).
But he also presents himself as a successful Friar Lawrence, one whose art is

effective in producing ‘confusion’s cure’ (IV.v.65): that is, a complex, meaningful

unity; a controlled discordia concors which holds the mirror up to nature in all its
unpredictability.
As I have already remarked, Shakespeare’s metadramatic justification for
the new mixed mode of tradegy was borrowed from Kyd’s The Spanish Tradegy,
echoes of which are strongly felt throughout this play.5 However, the audacity
and invention with which Shakespeare incorporates the comic element are
entirely his own. His use of lyric conventions in such a way as to reinforce the
special emphases in this new kind of tragedy was also suggested by Kyd; but
again what he accomplishes on the basis of Kydian precedent represents a huge
leap in imaginative expressiveness.6 There are three aspects of lyric convention
which call for special attention here. The first and most obvious is the Petrarchan
rhetoric of pun, antithesis, paradox, and oxymoron. This is a source of comedy
in the posturings of Romeo in Act I; but thereafter it serves to articulate a
pervasive sense of tragic duality, conflict, confusion, and swift contrarious change.
The sonnet-prologue somewhat ostentatiously foretells this raid on Petrarchan
idiom, and moulds it perfectly to the tragic conception. In ‘the two-hours’ traffic
of our stage’, the audience will see a tragedy set in one place and concerning
‘Two households, both alike in dignity’. ‘Ancient grudge break[s] to new mutiny.’
‘Civil blood [civil war] makes civil [peaceful] hands unclean.’ ‘From forth the
fatal loins of these two / Foes, a pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life [are
born/kill themselves].’ Their ‘death-mark’d love’ (and that alone) serves to ‘bury
their parents’ strife’. As Leonard Forster has remarked, the whole play is devoted
to bringing the Petrarchan cliché of the ‘dear enemy’ to life.7 By setting that
cliché in so firmly dualistic a framework, by insinuating a conception of human
nature as both gentle and violent, by postulating a repetitive cycle of peace and
violence, by showing the paradoxical interdependence of fundamental opposites,
and by repetition of the words ‘love’ and ‘strife’, the sonnet-prologue indicates
just why the old cliché proves so attractive to the tragic dramatist. But it is not
just in rhetorical figures such as paradox, oxymoron, pun, and antithesis that the
principle of contrariety affects the expressive mode of the tragedy. It is manifest
everywhere: in character contrasts and in opposed attitudes to love, in imagistic
and symbolic patterning, and in scenic juxtaposition.8
The second inheritance from lyric tradition of special relevance here is the
symbolic representation of love as a religion. The imagery of religion serves in the
play to characterise love as the supreme value and the one source of redeeming
grace; but it also points to the governing principles of contrarious unity and
tragic doubleness. It comes into prominence when Romeo sets eyes on Juliet for
the first time. A scene of exceptional lyric charm and wit, this is also a highly
complex and illuminating microcosm of the given play-world; and religious
symbolism is central to it. Romeo has spoken in a previous scene of ‘the devout
religion of mine eye’ (I.iii.88), but this is where the trite Petrarchan phrase

becomes meaningful. Indifferent to the dance, a silent watcher holding a candle,

Romeo suddenly catches sight of Juliet. From that moment he is transformed,
filled with a kind of reverent joy; and in words which evoke the birth of chivalry
itself, he asks: ‘What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder knight?’
(I.v.39–40). He feels that if his hand touches hers, a redeeming grace will pass
into it: ‘I’ll watch her place of stand, and touching hers, make blessed my rude
hand’ (where ‘rude’ means ‘uncivilised’ and ‘unregenerate’, as in the Friar’s phrase,
‘rude will’). Of course the pair join words as well as hands, and most artfully. The
first fourteen lines of their dialogue constitute a perfect sonnet in which Romeo
has the first quatrain and Juliet the second; the sestet is broken up between them,
and the concluding couplet is shared. It is obvious that the sonnet form and its
complex rhyming scheme is designed to work in conjunction with the music and
the dance to establish the idea of opposites harmonised: the concordant discord
of a Montague and a Capulet.9
What is rather less obvious (or at least has not attracted critical attention) is
that nine of the lines in this sonnet refer to the hand: to the profaning of hands,
to the joining of hands, to praying hands, and to hands which impart a blessing.
There is also a linking pun on ‘palmer’ (meaning ‘pilgrim’) and ‘palm’ which
neatly reinforces the significance of the key image and connects it with the fact
that Romeo, whose name is an Italian word for ‘pilgrim’ (‘pellegrino che va a
Roma’), has come to the masque in the disguise of a palmer (hence the candle).
But what completes the significance of the hand image is the visible fact that
Romeo, while praying and receiving grace in a perfect communion, is being
watched by a very rude young man whose hand (I assume) flies instinctively to
his hip in anger and frustration. ‘Fetch me my rapier, boy’, exclaims Tybalt to
his servant (line 53), eager to fulfil the Prologue’s prediction: ‘civil blood makes
civil hands unclean’. Temporarily restrained by Capulet, who cites Romeo’s
reputation as ‘a virtuous and well govern’d youth’ (line 66), Tybalt represents
himself in soliloquy as the emergent alternative to the meeting of contraries
we have just witnessed:
Patience perforce with wilful choler meeting

Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting.
I will withdraw; but this intrusion shall,
Now seeming sweet, convert to bitterest gall. (lines 87–90)
Throughout the play attention is drawn repeatedly to the hand, so that we

observe it at work revealing the twin possibilities of human nature. There is the
gentle hand that prays, pleads, blesses, appeases, parts antagonists, unites lovers,
forgives and makes friends: the hand of palmer, saint, helpless mortal, holy friar,
peacemaker, reconciled enemy. And there is the violent hand that strikes, divides,
and destroys—‘cut[s] . . . youth in twain’ (V.iii 99): the ‘cursed hand’ (III.iii.104)

not only of the indignant gentleman who would avenge a wrong or an insult (‘He
draws’), but also of the furious patriarch who feels like strangling his daughter
when she pleads against his rude will: ‘My fingers itch’ (III.v.164).10
The symbolism of the hand exactly pinpoints the tragedy of Romeo. When he
comes married from the Friar’s cell (‘God join’d my heart and Romeo’s, thou our
hands’ (IV.i.55)), he is insulted and challenged by ‘the furious Tybalt’ (III.i.118);
but he responds in conciliatory and even loving terms. However, the blessed hand
of love (first extended, it would seem, from a kneeling posture) is scorned by the
hand of Mars, and twice over:
Romeo . . . spoke him fair, and bid him bethink

How nice the quarrel was, and urg’d withal
Your high displeasure. All this, uttered
With gentle breath, calm look, knees humbly bow’d,
Could not take truce with the unruly spleen
Of Tybalt, deaf to peace, but that he tilts
With piercing steel at bold Mercutio’s breast;
Who, all as hot, turns deadly point to point,
And, with martial scorn, with one hand beats
Cold death aside, and with the other
Sends it back to Tybalt, whose dexterity
Retorts it. Romeo he cries aloud
‘Hold, friends! friends, part!’ and, swifter than his tongue,
His agile arm beats down their fatal points,
And twixt them rushes; underneath whose arms
An envious thrust from Tybalt hit the life
Of stout Mercutio . . . (lines 150–66)
Tybalt’s ‘dexterity’ is (by way of an etymological pun) his ‘right hand’ (Latin
dexter); but the passage seems to suggest that the symbolic distinction between
one hand (arm) and the other is quite lost here; and that confusion becomes
Romeo’s. With Mercutio’s death, he abruptly subscribes to the code of honour;
momentarily convinced that Juliet’s love has ‘soft’ned valour’s steel’ and made
him ‘effeminate’, he calls on ‘fire-ey’d fury’ to be his ‘conduct now’ (lines 108–
21). And so ‘Tybalt is slain’—he ‘whom Romeo’s hand did slay’ (line 149; cf.
III.ii.71; III.iii.104, 108). It is perhaps true that ‘we want him to show himself
a man against the detestable Tybalt’;11 but we must also perceive that the
decision which proves fatal to both Juliet and himself represents a regression
from full humanity as imaginatively defined by the play. It is only at the end,
when he kills Paris in self-defence (after having tried conciliation), and then
effects a moving atonement (at-one-ment) with his dead rival, that Romeo
achieves heroic integrity:

O, give me thy hand,

One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!
I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave. . . .
O, what more favour can I do to thee
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin. (V.iii.81–3, 98–101)
III
A third and much more important inheritance from lyric tradition which has
been adapted and developed to fit the play’s tragic design is the theme of time
and its associated imagery. In lyric and sonnet, and especially in Shakespeare’s
own sonnets, Time is the great enemy of both the poet-lover and the beloved.
Capriciously, Time retards his pace when the lovers are separated and accelerates
it when they are together. With his scythe and his frosts, he destroys the flower
of youth and withers the rose of beauty. The poet’s lines are in themselves an
attempt to counteract his evil work: they distil the perfume of the rose before it
withers, win fame and lasting memory for rare beauty and virtue. In the aubade
or dawn song, too, Time figures as the lovers’ enemy: the rising sun curtails their
secret happiness and contradicts their sense of ecstatic transcendence.
The extreme youth and immaturity of the doomed lovers in Romeo and Juliet
is the chief indication of time’s cruel speed. According to Capulet, his ‘child is yet
a stranger in the world’ and has ‘not seen the change of fourteen years’ (I.ii.8–9)
(she is sixteen in Shakespeare’s principal source, and eighteen in other versions of
the story). And when she is found as dead in her bridal clothes, Capulet speaks
of death as lying upon her ‘like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower
of all the field’; as ‘a flower . . . deflower’d’ by Death (IV.v.28–9, 37). Here, and
in Capulet’s earlier reference to Juliet as ‘the hopeful lady of my earth’ (I.ii.14),
Shakespeare implicitly invokes the most poignant of all the myths of untimely
death: that of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres (goddess of earth’s plenty), who was
seized while gathering flowers by Pluto, god of death and of funerals, and taken
by him to live as his wife in his infernal kingdom. Among the most powerful
images in the play are those of Death as Juliet’s surrogate husband;12 they are all
echoes of this myth which embodies the idea of time’s intrusion on a timeless,
unchanging, paradisal world.13
Shakespeare will deploy this myth more overtly and extensively in relation to
the love of Perdita and Florizel in The Winter’s Tale (IV.iv.111–33). The allusion
is pertinent here, since Romeo, like Florizel, is also identified with the flower
of youth. There is even a significant play on his name which works in the same
way as Florizel’s: when the Nurse notes that ‘rosemary and Romeo begin both
with a letter’, and implies that he is ‘the flower of courtesy’ (II.iv.200, v.43),
Shakespeare must be recalling that the Spanish word romero (= Ital. romeo) means

both ‘pilgrim’ and ‘rosemary’. But the flower image works comprehensively in the
play, and in the final scene is superbly literalised to provide a vivid stage image
of time’s hostility to almost all Verona’s youth. At the end, Benvolio is the only
surviving representative of the younger generation: Mercutio and Tybalt are ‘yet
but green in earth’ (IV.iii.42), the bodies of Romeo, Juliet, and Paris (described
earlier as ‘a very flower’ (I.iii.78–80)) are before us, and lying about the stage
are the flowers brought by Paris to the tomb and scattered everywhere in the
violence of his fight with Romeo.
No less important in relation to the time theme than the floral imagery is the
imagery of light (often fiery) and of darkness, amplified in numerous references
to day and night, sun, moon, and stars. The function of this complex of images
as expressing the transience as well as the splendour of the lovers’ passion is
strengthened by their own conviction that ‘the garish sun’ (III.iii.25) is hostile to
their secret love, whereas night is friendly, allowing it to shine in all its brilliance.
The aubade theme of unwelcome daylight and reluctant parting is introduced
after their only night together, and acquires an altogether new force in the
circumstances of this particular relationship: if Romeo does not leave before
sunrise, he will be killed.
As in Julius Caesar and Othello, two other tragedies in which time is of
unusual significance, a narrative which originally extended over a much longer
period is compressed into a very short time frame (here, four days) so as to give
the impression of events unfolding with dangerous speed in a highly charged
atmosphere.14 Moreover, the familiar question as to whether or not this is a
tragedy of mischance rather than of character arises mainly from the fact that
so many of the actions which advance the tragedy are in some way mistimed:
asynchrony is almost the determining principle of the action. If the wedding of
Juliet to Paris had not been brought forward from Thursday to Wednesday; if
Friar Lawrence’s message had reached Romeo in time; if Romeo had reached
the vault a minute later, or Juliet awakened a minute earlier; or if the Friar had
not stumbled as he ran to the vault: if any one of these conditions had been met,
then the tragedy would not have occurred. It does indeed seem as if a malignant
outside force is responsible for destroying the lovers’ happiness. Fortune and the
stars are blamed from the start, but their malign influence is incorporate in the
more palpable hostility of time: ‘O lamentable day! O woeful time!’ (IV.v.30); ‘Ah,
what an unkind hour / Is guilty of this lamentable chance!’ (V.iii.145–6).
However, anyone coming to the play from a Renaissance epithalamium or
marriage masque, or from Spenser’s unconventional sonnet sequence, Amoretti
(published with his ‘Epithalamion’, in 1595), would quickly find evidence to
suggest that the typical sonneteer’s notion of time as the enemy of human
happiness is only half-endorsed by Shakespeare’s text. Such an intertextual
approach is not at all necessary in order to perceive the wider implications of the
time theme, but it certainly seems to have been presupposed by Shakespeare, and

it does make one more fully responsive to the play’s complex pattern of meaning.
The Amoretti sequence is the record not of unrequited love but of a courtship
which leads to the marriage day of ‘Epithalamion’. The sonnet lover frequently
complains against Time’s cruel protractions and contractions (Sonnets XXV,
XXXVI, LXXXVI), but his complaints are woven into the cycle of the seasons,
to whose constraining order he painfully submits his passionate impatience.
The same tension and reconciliation between time and desire is enacted in the
extraordinary mimetic structure of ‘Epithalamion’, the poem which triumphantly
celebrates the culmination of the twelve-months’ courtship. The poem consists
of twenty-four stanza units; the wedding takes place on midsummer day, and
the bride arrives at the church (stanza 12) when the sun, whose progress from
dawn to dusk is duly marked, is at its height. It ends with the prayer that ‘a large
posterity’ will be the ‘timely fruit of this same night’ (lines 404, 417), and with
the description of the poem itself as ‘an endless monument’ erected by the poet
to his bride (line 433): permanence is achieved through accommodation to time’s
cyclical order, and through a poetic art structured on the numbers of time.15
The poem is born of the assumption that harmony with the rhythm of time is
the major pre-condition for enduring happiness in love and for fruitfulness in
all undertakings. In his continuation of Marlowe’s unfinished tragic narrative,
Hero and Leander, George Chapman, who assuredly had read this poem as well
as Romeo and Juliet, rendered Spenser’s governing idea quite explicit when he
wrote:
Time’s golden thigh

Upholds the flowery body of the earth
In sacred harmony, and every birth
Of men and actions makes legitimate,
Being us’d aright; the use of time is fate. (III.60–4)
Epithalamic tradition reinforces the comic dimension of Romeo and Juliet in

that it points to the alternative ending, enhances the sense of waste and loss, and
enables us to view the story from the widest possible perspective. The tradition
is overtly invoked in Juliet’s great soliloquy in III.ii (‘Gallop apace’)—often
referred to as her epithalamium. The epithalamic norm of timeliness and
ripeness is expressed on several occasions in the play, twice with specific relation
to marriage. As befits a father, Capulet restrains the impatient suitor Paris,
tying respect for time to a regard for interpersonal harmony and the ideal of
‘multilateral consent’ in marriage that was advocated by English moralists from
about 1570 onwards:16
Let two more summers wither in their pride

Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart;

My will to her consent is but a part,
And, she agreed, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent and fair according voice. (I.ii.10–11, 16–19)
Juliet echoes her father’s words when she restrains Romeo and expresses the hope
that ‘This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, / May prove a beauteous
flower when next we meet’ (II.ii.121–3). And if the sun is scorned by the lovers
it is referred to by others as ‘the worshipp’d sun’ (I.i.115) and ‘the all-cheering sun’
(line 133). Partnered by the moon, its presence is felt throughout, manifesting
a dualistic temporal order which is not intrinsically capricious or malign; Juliet
speaks of the ‘variable’ and ‘inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her
circled orb’ (I.ii.109–11), but her phrasing unintentionally acknowledges that the
moon’s changes are ordered. And the last image of the sun is as a kindly father
grieving over the ‘untimely death’ (V.iii.233, 258) of the young: ‘The sun for
sorrow will not show his head’ (line 305).
Of course references in Romeo and Juliet to the timely order which promises
fruitfulness and permanence serve but to highlight the prevailing ‘violence’—a
key term which denotes both haste and destruction.17 As its first word
indicates, Juliet’s ‘Gallop apace’ soliloquy is not so much an epithalamium as
an epithalamium subverted.18 Central to the meaning of the speech is Juliet’s
self-identification with Phaeton, the ‘runaway’ (III.ii.3, 6) son of Phoebus
who sought to manage his father’s fiery chariot, failed, and brought in ‘cloudy
night immediately’ (line 4);19 the speech is a superb manifestation of intense,
erotic passion verging on willed self-extinction. Juliet herself had anticipated
this perception when she warned the much more impulsive Romeo that their
contract was ‘Too like the lightning which doth cease to be / Ere one can say “It
lightens”’ (II.ii.119–20). It is in the scene which follows this ominous remark that
the lyric image of the flower loses its simple significance (or innocence) by being
projected into the contrarious order of all nature: ‘Within the infant rind of this
weak flower / Poison hath residence, and medicine power.’
However, it is important to avoid undue emphasis on the rashness of the
lovers, for a fiery, passionate impatience animates and agitates the whole society
into which they have been born. Capulet enjoins patience and concord on both
Tybalt and Paris, but subsequently delights in the speed with which he sets up
an enforced marriage; and he reacts with a frightening display of rude will and
itching hands to the kneeling Juliet’s plea for time. Mercutio ‘make[s] haste’
to take up the challenge rejected by Romeo: his bitter, ‘I am sped’, is a fitting
epitaph (III.i.78, 88). And the effect of his death is that Tybalt and Romeo ‘to’t
. . . go like lightning’ (line 169). Paris proves to be as provocative and furious in
quarrel (V.iii.63, 70) as he was impatient in love. Even the Prince contributes to
the prevailing ethos. Distressed by the death of his kinsman Mercutio, he is ‘deaf

to pleading and excuses’ and sentences Romeo to exile ‘in haste’ (III.i.189–92):
patient consideration might have resulted in a more equitable judgement, and
averted tragedy. And of course the Friar becomes deeply involved in the haste
he deplored: his exclamation, ‘Saint Francis be my speed! How oft tonight /
Have my old feet stumbled at graves!’ (V.iii.121–2), ironically echoes his advice:
‘Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast’ (II.iii.94).
Shakespeare has thus created a hectic environment where fatal accidents
brought about by unfortunate mistimings are in the end inevitable.20 More
important, it is presented as an environment in which haste is a poison that
spreads to infect almost everyone: all references to poison, plague, infection, and
pestilence combine to form a central symbol for Verona’s passionate impatience
and fatal speed. The Friar speaks of poison in the flower just before Romeo
enters demanding to be married to his new love ‘today’ (II.iii.64). Mercutio’s ‘I
am sped’ is preceded and followed by the famous ‘A plague a both your houses’
(III.i.88, 97). Friar Lawrence’s messenger is delayed because he is suspected of
having been in ‘a house where the infectious pestilence did reign’ (V.iii.9–10) (the
symbolic intent is evident from the fact that in Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet the
infected house is in Mantua, not Verona; and from the synonymity of ‘infection’
and ‘rank poison’ at I.ii.49–50). And Romeo, swiftly opting for suicide obtains
from the apothecary ‘A dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear / As will
disperse itself through all the veins . . . / As violently as hasty powder fir’d / Doth
hurry from the fatal cannon’s womb’ (V.i.60–5). We may conclude that although
the rashness of the lovers contributes to their tragedy, it is a pestilence caught
from others. And we have to remember that there is a huge difference between
the impetuosities of love and those of anger and hate—although they can work
tragically towards the same end.
IV
It is apparent, then, that in Romeo and Juliet time is not a blind, external
force hostile to youth and love but rather a complex ruling order which can
be creative or destructive according as men and women are able to function
within its inescapable limits. And in that sense the philosophy of the sonnets
is heavily qualified. However, it seems to be in the nature of Shakespeare’s
tragic environment that time is already out of joint, so that the protagonists
are compelled, as it were, to journey across a heavily mined battle-field.
Furthermore, the greatness of the tragic hero and heroine, and especially of
heroic lovers, lies precisely in their need to transcend limits; they can only be
fully themselves if they ‘soar above a common bound’ (I.iv.18) and so court
destruction. Around Capulet’s house, ‘the orchard walls are high and hard to
climb; / And the place death’ if Romeo is discovered; but he declares that he
will ‘o’erperch these walls’ since ‘stony limits cannot hold love out’ (II.ii.64–7).
Juliet’s rejection of limit derives from her eloquently expressed awareness

that love’s bounty is ‘boundless as the sea’, ‘infinite’ (lines 131–5; see also
II.vi.32–4).
No less important in the complex vision of this tragedy is the fact that
although their own violence and that of their families makes the lovers the
victims of time, they are, in the deepest sense, triumphant over time’s destructive
action.21 It is this triumph which makes possible the reconciliation of their
families; and although we may consider that to be a poor reward for the sacrifice
of two such individuals, their resolute refusal to accept change and division when
everything conspires to enforce it upon them is itself a thing of supreme value,
something that endures like the statue of ‘pure gold’ which their parents erect
in their memory—or like the legend of their loves. This triumph over change
is all the more distinct in that it was not a foregone conclusion; somewhat
awkwardly, but obviously enough, Shakespeare delineates in their characters and
relationship a process of maturing, of fall and recovery, of constancy undermined
and restored; and this in turn hints at the paradox that time’s destructive action
can be seen as part of a creative cycle.
In the orchard scene, Juliet expresses fears about Romeo’s constancy, but
her own constancy is clearly threatened after Tybalt’s death. Her notorious
oxymoronic outburst against Romeo (‘O serpent heart, hid with a flow’ring
face! . . . Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical’ etc.) is intended to disclose a fierce
struggle between hatred for the man who killed her cousin and love for her
banished husband (III.iii.73–84). It is, however, an artificial crisis; not simply
because of the overdone rhetoric, but also and mainly because Juliet’s love
for Tybalt is not an imagined nor even an imaginable reality—we have never
once seen her with that thoroughly unlovable thug. Very different is the test
to which she is put when she has to be buried alive in the family vault in
order to remain ‘an unstain’d wife to my sweet love’ (IV.i.88). The horrors of
death and putrefaction engulf her imagination, and the way in which she
defeats them comes across very forcefully as a heroic act of love’s constancy.
It would be reasonable to say that the young girl clearly becomes a woman
here. However, the text compliments her in a manner which few women
today would deem agreeable, but which must be read in its historical context.
The idea is that she transcends her sex, or rather the weakness traditionally
ascribed to her sex; she is warned by Friar Lawrence that the whole plan to
salvage her marriage will fail if any ‘inconstant toy’ or ‘womanish fear’ abates
her ‘valour’ (IV.i.119–20). (We will encounter the same idea in the last act of
Antony and Cleopatra.)
Characteristically, however, Shakespeare deconstructs the opposition of
male constancy and female inconstancy in his delineation of the early Romeo.
Romeo makes his debut with a carefully framed act of inconstancy, as ludicrous
as anything to be found in the comedies; in the space of seconds, he transfers
to Juliet his much publicised devotion to the frosty Rosaline: ‘What a change

is here!’, exclaims the Friar (II.iii.65). This change indicates a kind of maturing,
a progress from fanciful to authentic passion. But its main purpose may be to
highlight the issue of constancy and to hint at Romeo’s potential unworthiness.
His eagerness in the orchard scene to swear everlasting fidelity is what provokes
Juliet’s fear that he will prove ‘variable’ and ‘inconstant’, like the moon; and
events show that she has good cause to be uneasy. As I have already noted, it is
his lapse from love to male ‘honour’ that brings the world crashing about their
heads. And it is finely ironical that he should decide there that her beauty has
‘soften’d valour’s steel’ and made him ‘effeminate’; because when he is told of his
banishment, he falls weeping and screaming to the floor, and even attempts to
commit suicide—thinking only of his loss and not of what Juliet will have to
endure. The gravity of this moral fall—emblematised, as in a comparable scene
in Othello, by his prostrate position—is spelt out by the Friar: he is not ‘a man’;
his ‘tears are womanish’; his ‘wild acts denote the unreasonable fury of a beast’
(III.iii.108–13).
In his recovery, Romeo’s growth as a man and as a lover are coincident,
interdependent. When the next piece of terrible news (that Juliet is dead) is
brought to him, he has been buoyant with the expectation of good news; but
now there is no wild ranting. Instantly he decides to die with Juliet, keeps the
decision to himself, and gives an astonishing display of quiet stoicism in dealing
with the servant who brought the news and must be made to serve his dark
purpose. Moreover his dialogue with the wretched apothecary reveals in him a
whole lifetime’s understanding of human misery. And it is in the role of valiant
and gentle manhood that he deals with Paris’s insulting provocations: ‘Good
gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man’; ‘Wilt provoke me? Then have at thee,
boy!’ (V.iii.59, 70). The union of the houses of Capulet and Montague follows
logically from the constant oneness—the union of opposites—which the lovers
achieve both individually and as a married pair. To consider the ‘jointure’ of the
families in dissociation from that complex oneness is inevitably to devalue it, and,
of course, to simplify the play’s conclusion.
V
Perhaps the most discussed and problematic of the play’s oppositions is that of
character and fate. Some critics have taken extreme positions on this issue, either
holding that everything in the action is determined by the initial stress on ‘star-
cross’d lovers’, or insisting that the lovers are free agents whose uncontrolled
passion brings upon them a morally just punishment. Others have speculated
whether the two concepts coexist in a state of pure contradiction or whether
they are reconciled.22 The double perspective originates in Brooke’s Romeus and
Juliet, where the lovers are berated for their irresponsibility in the preface and
sympathetically presented in the body of the poem as the victims of a malign
fate (‘the restles starres’, ‘the fatall sisters three, and Fortune full of chaunge’).

Shakespeare has fully integrated this double view into the play, partly, perhaps,
because the dualistic conception which governs the whole could so easily
accommodate it.
There will always be disagreement on whether the issue of free will
and pre-determination is a resolvable paradox or a pure contradiction we
simply have to live with. This disagreement must inevitably be reflected in
interpretations of a play which manipulates the question so conspicuously.
But two points are worth making here. First, given the whole design of Romeo
and Juliet, many in Shakespeare’s audience would probably have reflected
on the issue in the manner of Sir Kenelm Digby, who, in considering the
problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, argued that liberty
and a constrained necessity are mutually compatible and entirely consistent
with the creation of a world whose order rests on the concord of contrarious
and disagreeing qualities; they might reasonably have felt that in the end the
play achieves a discordia concors of fatality and responsibility. Second, and as
already implied here, insofar as the paradox is resolved within the play, the
resolution is accomplished in terms of time, haste, and impatience. When the
prince begins the inquiry intended to ‘clear these ambiguities’ (V.iii.216), his
chief witness is the Friar, who tells a tale of untimely and mistimed actions.
Lawrence does not practice astrology, but like Prospero (who does), he is a
wise man who uses ‘art’ (V.iii.242) to control nature; and like Prospero he
has the astrologer’s awareness that timing—knowing the propitious and the
unpropitious moment, and acting accordingly—is of the utmost importance
in negotiating the changeful complexities of life (‘ruling the stars’). His tale is
one of sustained efforts to control a sequence of events whose problematical
nature was temporal throughout. From the beginning of the play, we should
recall, the hostility of external circumstance to the lovers is expressed in
terms both of the stars and of time. Romeo fears that he and his friends will
arrive at the Capulets ‘too early’, for his ‘mind misgives / Some consequence
yet hanging in the stars’ that will lead to ‘untimely death’ (I.iv.106–11); and
Juliet exclaims: ‘My only love sprung from my only hate! / Too early seen, and
known too late!’ (I.v.135–6). Being what they are, however, they rush, and are
driven by others, to actualise the fate which they see as prepared for them. For
his part, the Friar accepts that he cannot stop Romeo’s headlong commitment
and accepts it as inevitable; but he also perceives the possibility of turning it
to the good. However, when he agrees to the marriage, and yet again when
he devises plans to cope with unexpected problems (Romeo’s banishment
and the Paris–Juliet marriage), he stresses that a happy outcome will depend
entirely on exact timing (II.iii.90–4; III.iii.149–71; IV.i.69–117). Increasingly
‘desperate’ (line 69), his art, as we have seen, is defeated less by accident than
by the passionate impatience with which the characters involved in the plot
he is trying to control react to changing circumstance. In the end, he declares

himself responsible for the tragedy and yet innocent: ‘myself condemned and
myself excus’d’ (V.iii.226). Much the same, perhaps, can be said both of the
stars (if literally understood) and of the lovers.
In subsequent tragedies, and especially in Othello, we will have the same
sense of an inescapable doom working itself out through the choices, passions,
and errors of men and women; the same sense, too, that ‘the use of time is fate’.
The limitation of this play as tragedy is that the compulsion to embrace a fatal
destiny is too closely identified with mere haste, and too dependent on verbal
and imagistic expression. In the later tragedies, by contrast, it is deeply embedded
in character and linked to a capacity for violence and destruction which is truly
frightening.
Notes
1. Giulio Ferretti, Equitis et comitis lateranensis Palatii consilia et tractatus
(1562), cited in Frederick R. Bryson, The Sixteenth Century Italian Duel (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. xxiii. Cf. M.H. Keen, The Laws of War in
the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge; 1965), pp. 8–9.
2. Marion Bodwell Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto: Toronto Univer-
sity Press, 1966); pp. 79–109.
3. Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 36–40.
4. For discussion of the comic element, see Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s
Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 87–94; 98, 104; Rosalie L. Colie,
Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp.
56–70; Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1919); pp. 56–70.
5. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen,
1968), p. 80.
6. The play’s relation to lyric and Petrarchan tradition has been much dis-
cussed. See especially Colic, Shakespeare’s Living Art, pp. 56–70; A.J. Earl; ‘Romeo
and Juliet and the Elizabethan Sonnets’; English, 27 (1978), 99–119; Jill L. Leven-
son, ‘The Definition of Love: Shakespeare’s Phrasing in Romeo and Juliet’, ShakS,
15 (1979), 21–36; Brian Gibbons, ed. Romeo and Juliet (London: Methuen, 1980),
pp. 42–52.
7. The Icy Fire: Six Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; 1969), p. 8. For examples of this paradox, see Spenser’s Amoretti;
Sonnets XIV, XLIX, LXIX.
8. Cf. Harry Levin, ‘Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet’, SQ, 10 (1960),
6–9.
9. The whole conception of this scene derives from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, II.ii,
II.iv. See my English Renaissance Tragedy (London: Macmillan; Vancouver: Univer-
sity of British Columbia Press, 1986), pp. 74–5, and below, p. 147.
10. The gentle and the violent hands are important images also in Julius Caesar
(p. 84), Macbeth (p. 203.), and Titus Andronicus.
11. T. J. B. Spencer, ed. Romeo and Juliet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1967), p. 30.
12. I.v.132–3; III.ii.138; V.iii.92–6, 102–8.

13. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, V.386–571. The agreement whereby Proserpina

(Persephone) was allowed to return to her mother Ceres from the underworld for
six months of each year constitutes a mythical explanation of seasonal change.
14. The nineteenth-century critic, Bernhard Ten Brink, gives an excellent
account of this aspect of the play’s technique. See his Five Lectures on Shakespeare,
trs. Julia Franklin (London: Bell; 1895), pp. 130–8.
15. For an elucidation of the poem’s complex numerological design, see, A.K.
Hieatt’s pioneer study, Short Time’s Endless Monument: the Symbolism of Numbers in
Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ (New York; Columbia University Press, 1960).
16. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570–1640
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 136–8.
17. ‘Violence’ in the sense of ‘haste’, ‘speed’, is not recorded in OED; for exam-
ples, see Chapman, Hero and Leander, III.59–64; Hamlet, V.ii.289–90; Middleton
and Rowley, The Changeling, ed. N.W. Bawcutt (London: Methuen 1961), I.i.191.
For discussion of Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy of ‘the guarded haste of youth’, see
Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: the Interplay of Theme and Character
(New York: Gordian Press, 1966), pp. 10–25. As suggested below, however, the
haste/patience polarity is not identical with that of youth and age.
18. See Gary M. McCown, ‘“Runnawayes Eyes” and Juliet’s Epithalamium’,
SQ, 27 (1976), 165–70. McCown details several inversions of epithalamic conven-
tion in the soliloquy, but does not touch on the whole notion of timeliness. Brooke,
Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies, p. 101, points out that there is a notable absence in
Juliet’s epithalamium of all reference to fertility and growth.
19. McCown, pp. 150–9, argues against identifying Juliet’s ‘runaway’ as Pha-
eton, pointing out that ‘runaway’ or ‘fugitive’ was an epithet conventionally applied
to Cupid. I would contend, however, that in its poetic and dramatic context ‘run-
away’ functions as a pun linking blind Cupid with reckless Phaeton.
20. See M.C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1951), p. 109.
21. On this aspect of the play’s meaning, see especially M.M. Mahood, Shake-
speare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 66–9, 72.
22. The problem of fate and character, innocence and guilt, is closely related
to the ‘curious wavering between. moralistic and romantic interpretations of love
suicides’ found in much of the fiction and drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
period. See Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 113–18.
QQQ
1993—Maynard Mack. “The Ambiguities

of Romeo and Juliet,” from Everybody’s Shakespeare:
Ref lections Chief ly on the Tragedies
Maynard Mack (1908–2001) was Sterling Professor Emeritus of

English at Yale University. He is the author of Everybody’s Shakespeare:
Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies (1993) and Alexander Pope: A Life

(1986). He was also the general editor of The Norton Antholog y of World
Masterpieces (1997).
1
Shakespeare’s re-visioning of love in Romeo and Juliet owes much of its
continuing popularity to variety. In mood and plot a tragic work, presenting
with a rare sympathy the ecstatic passion of two very young lovers doomed by a
combination of impetuousness, bad luck, and the total incomprehension of their
families and friends, the play offers at the same time many of the attractions of
high comedy. The characters are individualized, it is true, well beyond the usual
comic types; but they show nonetheless some recognizable blood-ties with the
kinds of people we expect to meet with in stage and film comedy: the Beautiful
Ingenue, the Convention-Ridden Parents including the Irascible Father, the
Parent-Approved Suitor, the Dashing Romantic Suitor, the Male Confidant and
Female Confidante, the Bumbling Well-Meaning Counselor, and the rest.
In the great majority of its scenes, moreover, the play keeps firmly before
us a detached comic perspective on events whose tragic intensities we are
simultaneously being asked to share. This is the case for nearly all the lovers’
scenes, where our sympathy for their rapture or peril is likely to be qualified by a
certain amusement at their total self-absorption. It is also true of the two scenes,
frequently misunderstood by critics though rarely by audiences, in which the
lovers respond, successively, with embarrassingly exaggerated rhetoric, to the new
circumstance of Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment (3.2–3). No rhetoric
that Shakespeare meant us to take seriously would have been accompanied, we
may be sure, by (in Juliet’s case) the hilarious obbligato of the Nurse as she tries
to escalate to the upper registers of romantic grief—“Ah, weraday! he’s dead,
he’s dead, he’s dead!” (3.2.37) and (in Romeo’s case) by the irrelevant relevancies
of the Friar. The Friar’s fussy moralism as he flutters about the prone body of
his hysterical charge, trying with wise saws and edifying examples to poultice a
wound inaccessible to any verbal comforts, let alone these, is as laughable in its
way as the adolescent antics that call it forth. Audiences sense this instinctively.
Though their hearts may go out to the lovers in their helplessness, they laugh at
everyone concerned—and they should. No one knew better than the author of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written either just before or just after Romeo and
Juliet) that young love, even in anguish, can be extremely funny as well as, on
occasion, breathtakingly beautiful.
Even more complicated feelings arise during the Capulets’ mourning for
Juliet (4.5). On the one hand, our knowledge that they are not bereaved in fact
makes for a detachment in our attitudes that is only increased by the comic
fluency, not to mention the imaginative barrenness, of their grief: “But one, poor
one, one poor and loving child” (4.5.46)—“O day, O day, O day! O hateful day!”

(4.5.52)—“O love! O life! Not life, but love in death!” (4.5.58). On the other
hand, we can hardly help compassionating in some degree a sense of loss that
we know is real for them, and this compassion is inevitably deepened by what we
sense or know they have in store. Comic now, this grief ironically looks forward
to the tragic grief to come. Such episodes create a tragicomic texture for the play
in which fooling is almost as much at home as feeling, and in which each way of
looking at the world casts light upon the other.
Yet more important than these comic elements in the play’s total effect is
its incorporation of romance—meaning by romance the conventions and value
systems of popular romantic fiction. The very fact that the tragedy depicted is
a tragedy of lovers must have emphasized for its first audiences that its deepest
roots lay in romance, not tragedy; for true tragedy, Elizabethan pundits never
tired of declaring, should deal with graver matters than love—with the fall
of princes or the errors and sufferings of actual historical men and women in
high place. Shakespeare’s venture in conceiving Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy
was therefore in some degree an innovation, possibly an experiment. Instead
of personages on whom the fate of nations depended, it took for its hero and
heroine a boy and girl in love; and instead of events accredited by history, its
incidents were culled from the familiar props of the romantic tall tale: deadly
feuds, masked balls, love-at-first-sight, meetings and partings by moonlight and
dawn, surreptitious weddings, rope-ladders, sleeping potions, poison, reunions
in the grave—an intoxicating mix!
Furthermore, having decided to make young love his theme, Shakespeare
went all the way. His only source—a long narrative poem by Arthur Brooke
called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet58—had used its romantic yarn to
carry a sober moral. “To this ende (good Reader),” Brooke tells us in his preface,
“is this tragicall matter written”:
to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves

to unhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and
frendes, conferring [i.e. keeping] their principall counsels with dronken
gossyppes [like the Nurse], and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte
instrumentes of unchastitie) [Brooke shows marked hostility throughout
his poem to the institutions of Roman Catholicism], attemptyng
all adventures of peryll, for th’ attaynyng of their wicked lust, usyng
auricular [i.e. aural] confession (the key of whoredome, and treason) for
furtherance of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull
mariage to cloke the shame of stolyn contracts, [and] finallye, by all
means of unhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye death.
In the poem itself, Brooke shows more sympathy with his young lovers
than this prefatory warning would lead us to expect; but, for all that, their

affair remains in his telling largely what it had been in several earlier tellings
in Italian prose: a pathetic but commonplace attachment, memorable mainly
for the sensational incidents and bizarre ironies of mischance with which it
is entwined. Only in Shakespeare’s hands did the love-story itself become the
lyrical celebration of youthful passion that we all associate with the names of
Romeo and Juliet today.
2
Certainly, nowhere in literature has such passion been more winningly—and
more flatteringly—portrayed. Juliet is given by her creator, besides beauty, a
loving woman’s selfless devotion together with a child’s directness, and both
qualities remain undimmed to the end:

My love as deep. (2.2.133)
O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop

To help me after? (5.3.163)
Romeo, though much more self-conscious than she, is provided with an energy
of imagination that, once he has met Juliet, a genuine high passion kindles into
bursts of adoration that no one who has been in love easily forgets:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear— (1.5.44)
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,

Then love-devouring death do what he dare. (2.6.6)

O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancéd there. (5.3.91)
The transforming effects of love are further evidenced in the fact that it brings
both lovers whatever personal maturity their short lives allow them to attain.
Under its strong direction, Juliet advances swiftly from the little-girl naiveté
of her first responses to the idea of marriage (“It is an honor that I dream not
of ” 1.3.66), then through deceptions and stratagems and thence to her cry of

physical longing as she waits for the horses of the sun to bring night and night to
bring Romeo: “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (3.2.1). From there it is yet
another giant step to the choice that her resolution to remain “an unstained wife
to my sweet love” (4.1.88) requires of her, yet she makes it without an instant’s
hesitation or regret: “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.244).
Romeo, who has further to go than she, begins more derivatively. His love-
melancholy at the play’s opening is obviously in some part a pose. It evidently
gives him pleasure to see himself in the role of Disappointed Suitor, Victim of a
Cruel Cruel Maid, and he accordingly acts out for his friend Benvolio most of the
attitudes that in his time were supposed to accompany that role—sleeplessness,
avoidance of company, lassitude, despair—not forgetting the voguish language of
antitheses, paradoxes, and strained metaphors that he voices in his first explosion
about the feud and his frustrated love for Rosaline:
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! (1.1.174)
What Shakespeare shows us in such speeches is a young man more interested in

parading his symptoms than in the cure of his disease.
Thanks, however, to the feelings set aglow in him by Juliet, all this changes.
From preoccupation with his symptoms, he rises to raptures that are real even
if excessively self-conscious in the so-called first balcony scene (“How silver-
sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night” 2.2.166), and later to the tenderly insistent
realism of his replies to Juliet during the second balcony scene:
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops. (3.5.9)
Now it is she, not he, who longs to linger in the flattering dream: “Yond light is
not daylight; I know it, I.”
Then follows his lonely encounter with the apothecary: “I sell thee poison;
thou hast sold me none” (5.1.83). This, more than any other episode, seems to
mark symbolically Romeo’s coming of age. Its function in the play is much like
that of similar encounters in folktale and romance where the hero shows his
worthiness by attaching value to some unprepossessing gift or secret obtained
from a sinister old man or woman. Certainly Romeo’s emphatic rejection here of
gold—not only, as he puts it, “poison to men’s souls,” but an appropriate emblem
of all the materialists in the play who would make love serve their ends—

constitutes his ultimate accreditation as a romantic hero. This is only confirmed

by his recognition that poison is for him “cordial and not poison” since by its
means he will “lie . . . tonight” with Juliet in senses earlier unimagined.
Though Shakespeare allows to neither of his protagonists in this play the
full tragic realization of what has happened to them that he will allow such later
figures as Hamlet and Othello, much less any anguished questionings about their
own contribution to it, both do eventually reach a maturity of feeling, if not of
understanding, that was not theirs at the play’s beginning.
Of climactic significance in this exaltation of romantic love is the fact
that the lovers are permitted to maintain, in the face of all the influences that
might corrupt or compromise it, an absolute integrity of devotion to each
other, and to express it with a lyricism untouched by the playful cynicism or
teasing sexual badinage so often indulged by Shakespeare’s lovers elsewhere.
That the play has been unfailingly popular through so many centuries onstage
(as well as, nowadays, in several film versions) may be traced in some part
to this fact. Audiences respond to this love-story as to an exemplum, a
model, an ideal. And though the vision it delineates has about as much
resemblance to our ordinary human gropings in these areas as the Aphrodite
of Praxiteles to the efforts of a pottery class, the effect is all the more
ingratiating on that account “Here”—we can tell ourselves, knowing full well
that we doubt as we tell it—“is young love realized in its full delicacy, the
slim bright edge of the new moon: here is what the experience of first love
ought to be, can be, at rare moments perhaps has been—for others if not for
us: vivat Eros!”
3
Around this idealized love-affair Shakespeare sets swirling a host of competing
ideas, giving each its own idiom. Sampson and Gregory, for instance, with
their crude talk of maidenheads, weapons, pretty pieces of flesh and the like,
announce a cluster of attitudes in which love appears mainly as a form of male
aggressiveness: “I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his maids
to the wall” (1.1.15). Soon after this, when the noise of the street-brawl (verbal
aggression having exploded into physical aggression) subsides, we hear Romeo
and Benvolio discussing the inaccessibility of Rosaline. Here we have the other
side of the coin—not male aggression but female coquetry carried to the point of
tyranny and in its pride rejecting not simply Romeo’s advances but all advances:
“She hath forsworn to love” (1.1.221).
The idiom now is Petrarchan—drawn, that is to say, from a tradition of
images and poetic conventions that goes back ultimately to poems addressed
by the Italian poet Petrarch to a woman named Laura, whom (for what reasons
is not clear) he was content to worship from afar. Over the centuries, it had
become a standard literary love-language, used most often, as in Petrarch’s

case, to explore and express the emotions involved in a lover’s longing for
an unattainable beloved—whether unattainable because indifferent (like
Rosaline in the play), or simply sequestered from the company of young
men (as well-bred Elizabethan girls normally were till married), or already
bespoke in marriage (as Juliet would have been had Romeo met her for the
first time a week later). Longing being its chief subject-matter, much of the
vocabulary of this tradition features love as a perpetual, forever unavailing
amorous warfare, with Venus as patron of the battle, Cupid as archer, and the
beloved as unconquerable stronghold or invulnerable foe. This is the imagery
that Romeo and Benvolio resort to in describing Rosaline as one who goes
“in strong proof of chastity well armed” and “will not stay the siege of loving
terms” (1.1.208). It is also the imagery that Mercutio parodies whenever he
and Romeo meet.
In this conversation, as noticed earlier, we are introduced to Romeo’s own
affectations, and then, as if to complete a sequence from “brutal” (Sampson and
Gregory) to “coquettish” (Rosaline) to “faddish” (Romeo) to “conventional,”
we turn to Paris and old Capulet. The young wooer, as Elizabethan protocol
dictated, approaches the young lady’s father with a proposition. The father
predictably replies (with an apparent unconcern that soon fades): Why hurry?—
Still, it’s all right with me if you can obtain her consent (1.2.17). Predictably also,
the mother visits the daughter and dwells upon the attractions of the suitor,
especially on how fitting it will be for a Capulet to be the binding that locks in
so much wealth:
That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory,

That in gold clasps locks in the golden story. (1.3.91)
No nonsense about love’s embraces here: only gold clasps.

Meantime, to these materialist attitudes, the Nurse plays shrill echo. One
of Shakespeare’s most brilliant early character sketches, she is a shrewd but
garrulous, warmhearted but naively vulgar soul, who finds it impossible to answer
a simple question without dredging up with it all the seaweed that clings about
it in her memory. The question is only about Juliet’s age, but by the time the
Nurse has settled it she has included her dead daughter Susan, an earthquake,
Juliet’s weaning, an absence of the elder Capulets in Mantua, and a vulgar
witticism of her dead husband’s about Juliet’s falling and bumping her head. The
unfading pleasure she takes in this little sexual joke (not to mention the kind of
comparison that springs instantly to her mind when she describes the size of
Juliet’s bump) tells us most of what we need to know about her understanding of
romantic love. After hearing her on the subject of “falling backward,” we are not
likely to be much surprised by her response to the proposal for Juliet’s marriage:
“Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days” (1.3.105). Or by her later utilitarian

response to Juliet’s agony, when, being already married to Romeo, she faces a
second forced marriage to Paris:
Beshrew my very heart,

I think you are happy in this second match,
For it excels your first; or if it did not,
Your first is dead—or ’twere as good he were
As living here and you no use of him. (3.5.223)
This contrast between the Nurse and Juliet is reinforced by Mercutio’s

contrast with Romeo. Mercutio knows all about the supposed pangs that love
occasions and can speak that language as well as Romeo:
You are a lover. Borrow Cupid’s wings

And soar with them above a common bound. (1.4.17)
But he speaks it only to mock it. Knowing well that such feeling is often self-
deceived—a disguise, in fact, for simple appetite—he appears to cherish the
conviction that such it must always be: all that is real is sex. To every protest
that Romeo makes about the preoccupations of his heart, Mercutio replies
with a bawdy quip. He knows all about Queen Mab, too, and can describe her
equipage with childlike wonder, enchantingly—until again he mocks her: he
has no serious interest in what she represents. Our psychic inner-world of fancy,
longing, mystery, and dream (on which Juliet will later confer a cosmic rhythm
and splendor by associating it with the chariot of the sun god Apollo: 3.2.1),
Mercutio here dismisses and shrinks to insignificance by associating it with
the minuscule chariot of Mab, in whose Skinnerian world we are all reduced to
programmed stimulus and response:

Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O’er lawyers’ fingers, that straight dream on fees;
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream . . . (1.4.70)
On the same “rational” grounds, Mercutio refuses credence to Romeo’s dream

and his consequent misgiving about going to the Capulet feast.
The play is to prove him wrong on several of these points, and the first
instance occurs at once. For the “conjuration” of Rosaline that Shakespeare puts
into his mouth as he and Benvolio look for their vanished companion after the
ball (2.1.6) places this washroom chatter in immediate juxtaposition with the
luminous beauty of Juliet and the exalted feelings she has stirred in Romeo—

both of which we have just witnessed. Useful as an antidote to the maudlin

worship of the Beautiful Cruel Lady (La Belle Dame sans Merci) whose caprices
have enslaved Romeo, Mercutio’s witty pruriencies are now seen to have come
up against something to which they are irrelevant. Irrelevant, most obviously
because directed at the wrong girl. But more deeply irrelevant, too, because so
determinedly excluding the capability that men and women have of valuing
each other as persons rather than sexual objects and of placing that value above
all other imaginable values—exactly what we have just seen taking place a few
moments earlier as Romeo and Juliet stand isolated from the rest of the world in
the fourteen lines of a love-sonnet.
The rapt unanimity of feeling that they share within that sonnet unfolds,
as the play proceeds, into the radiant experience that the coarser attitudes we
have just been examining help to define and set apart. To earn our belief in
that experience, or at the very least a suspension of our disbelief, Shakespeare
undertakes to validate it for us by showing us that he is aware of crasser
possibilities, even if his lovers are not. That he knows what he shows us in them
is not within the reach of all—not, for instance, the County Parises of the world,
however admirable they may be for other virtues. That he knows, even where
it exists, such love as this is always under threat, not only from those whose
values are determined by convention, like the Capulets, and no doubt equally the
Montagues; but from those, like Mercutio, whose appraisal of human capabilities
it considerably transcends, and from those, like the Nurse, with whose jovial
but crude sensibility it is quite out of tune. And, moreover—a sufficiently tragic
concession in itself—that he knows it must in the long run face defeat—if not
by the world, then by our mortal nature, which allows nothing to remain in
perpetuity, or even for very long, the thing it was. Everything that grows, he
laments repeatedly in his Sonnets, “Holds in perfection but a little moment”
(15.2). In some part, Romeo and Juliet seems a poignant elaboration of that
thought, in dramatic terms.
4
Just here, the play may intend to raise questions as well as paeans around the
romantic experience it so much exalts. What, for instance, do the repeated
hints that this love is as dangerous as it is beautiful—perhaps beautiful because
dangerous—signify? Like the blaze of gunpowder, says Friar Laurence:
These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. (2.6.9)
To be sure, the friar is an old man, skeptical of youth’s ways; yet can we help
reflecting on this diagnosis when we recall at the play’s end that five young

people have died: Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, Juliet? Does it suffice to hold
the feud alone accountable?
Then there is the repeated situation of enclosure. With the exception of
their marriage scene at the exact center of the play, we see Romeo and Juliet
together only in the interval between evening and dawn, and always in a kind
of enclave or special space which is threatened from without. At the ball, they
are framed by a sonnet and by a sudden quiet that is made the more striking
and precarious by Tybalt’s attempted intrusion. In the first balcony scene,
their enclosure is the Capulets’ walled garden, and the interview is twice on
the point of interruption by the Nurse. In the second such scene, where the
setting is Juliet’s chamber, their leave-taking is interrupted, first by the Nurse’s
warning and then by Lady Capulet’s appearance. Even in the tomb the social
order intervenes, in the person of the Friar, between Romeo’s suicide and
Juliet’s.
What goes on here, apart from the requirements of the plot, is a playwright’s
rendering of the feeling of intense but vulnerable privacy that all lovers know.
So much the play clearly tells us. Does it also tell us that the unreconcilability of
this love with the ordinary daylight world is a tragic consequence of its nature, a
trait not separable from it without destroying the thing it is—and so more tragic
on that account?
Similar ambiguities hover about the relationship established between
the passion of Romeo and Juliet and the death that seems to be implicit in
it. Significantly, the last scene takes place in a tomb. This is a remarkable
dénouement, and we have been prepared for it by a succession of references,
prophetic of the outcome even when dropped casually or in ignorance, in which
love and death are identified or closely linked. First, by Juliet herself:
Come, cords; come, nurse. I’ll to my wedding bed;

And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead! (3.2.136)
Soon after, by her mother, angered at Juliet’s disinclination to marry Paris:

“I would the fool were married to her grave” (3.5.141). Next, by her father,
supposing that his daughter’s apparent death on the eve of her wedding is real:
“Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir” (4.5.38) Later, by Paris, acting on the
same supposition at the tomb: “Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew”
(5.3.12). And finally by Romeo:
Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that I still will stay with thee. . . . (5.3.102)

The playwright’s insistence throughout on pairing the bride-bed with the grave
reaches a climax in the tomb-scene, where death and sexual consummation
become indistinguishable as Romeo “dies” (a word often used in Renaissance
literature to refer to the culmination of the sexual act) upon a kiss, and Juliet,
plunging the dagger home, sighs: “there rust, and let me die” (5.3.120,170).
We must recall, too, that from the moment they acknowledge their love these
lovers have been made to sense that it spells or may spell doom:
Is she a Capulet?
O dear account! my life is my foe’s debt. (1.5.117)
If he be married,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed. (1.5.134)
Their apprehension can be attributed in part to the feud, but only in part. Juliet’s
lines above are spoken while she is yet in ignorance of Romeo’s identity, and
Romeo’s premonitions of “Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars” (1.4.107)
precede even his visit to the ball. We in the audience, moreover, have been assured
from the very beginning that this love is “death-marked” (Prologue, 9).
What are we to make of such evidence? Does the play urge us to conclude
that every high romantic passion, by its very finality and absoluteness, its
inwardness and narcissism, is necessarily allied with death, even perhaps
(however unconsciously) seeks death? being oblivious of all competing values
to a degree that ordinary human lives cannot afford and determined to hold
fast to a perfection that such lives cannot long sustain? and therefore tending
irresistibly to a “love-death” because unable or unwilling to absorb the losses
imposed by a “love-life”? Or is the implied connection at once simpler and
more universal: that death is always the “other pole” required to generate love’s
meaning—the little negotiable domestic loves that most of us aspire to as much
as the austerest romantic pang? that our loves, too, are “death-marked” and (in
the senses that matter most) “star-crossed,” because both marked and crossed by
the general human fate, which is to die? and therefore that those audiences are
right after all who, despite the play’s concern with a particular pair of lovers in a
particular situation, sense in it a universal parable that speaks eloquently to their
own condition?
5
There are no certain answers to these questions, or even to the question whether
the playwright intends them to be asked. What is certain is that when we see
Romeo and Juliet in performance, or perform it alertly for ourselves in the theater
of the mind, such problems tend to vanish in an experience that is altogether
dramatic: an experience that owes more to gestures, groupings, movements

onstage, stunning intensities and reversals of human feeling, breathtaking effects

of color, light, and sound, than to theoretical considerations of the sort we have
just been examining.
Consider, for instance, the first scene. Two swaggering boneheads in Capulet
livery—the livery very probably a little frowsy like their manners and speech,
their swagger only making more conspicuous the fear it is meant to hide—meet
two similar figures wearing the contrasting colors of the Montagues. A scuffle
follows. The stage resounds with cries, grunts, heavy-footed lunges, clumsy
whacks and thwacks of short swords on small shields—the habitual armor of the
lower classes. Though violent, the scene has at first a comic coloring, thanks to
the ineptitude of the contestants, who show a marked disinclination to get hurt.
Then, in almost instantaneous counterpoint, comes the encounter of the two
young gentlemen. In dress, speech, and physical grace, they are “civilized” to a
degree that the household servants are not; but once engaged they are far more
deadly, for they fight with rapiers and are animated by a code of honor that stakes
life itself on skills of hand and eye.
Thus comic violence draws in tragic violence—a foretaste of much to come—
while around the two contending groups a general fracas grows. Some elderly
citizens rush in carrying weapons as ancient as themselves and labor, farcically, to
quell the fighting. On their heels come old Capulet and Montague, comic figures
likewise, since neither their manifest years and frailty nor the supposed wisdom
of old age has been able to abate their mindless commitment to the feud. Finally,
his entry no doubt announced by a trumpet fanfare, the Prince arrives with his
retinue. The authority of the state, expressed now in the regular declamatory
rhythms of the Prince’s “sentence” (1.1.79), prevails for the time being over
individual passions, and the crowd drifts rapidly away.
What we have been shown is the susceptibility of a whole society to be cleft
from top to bottom by an inherited vendetta (in our world it could as easily be
some inflexibly racial frame of mind) in which, we soon discover, no one but
Tybalt has more than a face-saving interest. Yet thanks to the atmosphere the
feud has given rise to, even the peace-making Benvolio—the man of “good will,”
as his name implies—can be drawn into a street riot against his better judgment,
and the security of the entire community can be put in jeopardy on the whim
of a determined fool—a Malvolio, or man of “ill will,” as Tybalt might equally
have been called.
The entrance of Romeo is timed for this moment, following the outbreak
rather than before it, to make the encumbrance of the feud, his blood-
inheritance, crystal clear. Over the conversation that Benvolio holds with the
elder Montagues, which prepares us for Romeo’s appearance (alone, distracted,
his clothing very possibly disheveled as the clothing of those subject to love-
melancholy was popularly supposed to be), and also over the conversation that
Benvolio holds with him, the shadow of the violence we have just seen hangs

heavily. The condition of “death-marked love,” to which the Prologue has called
attention (line 9), is thus acted out in a half-comic form that will quickly become
tragic. Like Hamlet, who in some ways resembles him, Romeo has inherited a
time which is “out of joint” and which nothing short of his own and several other
“misadventured piteous overthrows” (Prologue, 7) can redeem. Still comparatively
detached from the feud as we encounter him now (though already “in love” with
a Capulet), he will be drawn moment by moment further into quicksands, each
apparent escape—e.g. the marriage with Juliet, which should unite the two
families—becoming an additional step in the progress of events that sweeps both
lovers to their doom.
Here, then, is one way in which Romeo and Juliet comes powerfully home
to us in performance: as a fast-moving succession of situations, each gripping
in itself but also making part of a headlong race to ruin, even though that
race does not lack for the little ironical postponements and detours that allow
an audience teasing hopes of a happier issue. But the play registers in other
emphatic ways as well. As an experience of vivid contrasts, for instance, in
a world that is tense with polarities of every sort. Extreme youth—Juliet is
only fourteen, Romeo (we may guess) in late adolescence—tugs at extreme
age, for despite Lady Capulet’s odd comment (1.3.71) all four parents give
the impression of being somewhat along in years, as are obviously the Friar
and Nurse. Passionate love grapples with passionate hate, and eventually, at
great cost enjoys an ambiguous triumph. The brightness of the lovers, in their
images of each other, dazzles against the darkness of their situation, while at
the same time, paradoxically, the night world becomes more and more their
sole resource and the daylight world more and more the possession of forces
inimical to them. Then there are the sharply conflicting attitudes toward
love and sex, already touched on; the extremes of haste and deliberation; the
great joys giving way to overwhelming griefs; the noise, bustle, and uproar of
public affairs juxtaposed against the hushed inward-turning ecstasies of lovers’
longing and lovers’ meeting.
All these opposites and many more make part of our experience in this play,
but again not as theoretical contraries—only as vivid impressions of eye and ear.
To take one more example, worldliness and innocence—an innocence not yet
broken by the world—are among the polarities on which Romeo and Juliet is
founded, but they take shape onstage only in the particularized form of Juliet,
sitting (in 1.3) a little apart from her elders, perhaps wearing some white garment
in keeping with the impression she seems intended by her words to make on us;
while her nurse and mother, each with characteristic motives and preoccupations,
preside over what we recognize as a coming of age, a tribal rite of passage, a
“debut,” in short, into what both older women take to be her appropriate next
phase in the human life-cycle of birth, copulation, and death. Eventually, her
innocence outwits their wisdom, but the price exacted is appalling.

6
In conclusion, something must be said about what for many of today’s readers and
spectators is the most striking single feature of Romeo and Juliet: its formalism.
The pronounced general symmetries that have gone into its configuration are
obvious enough. Three confrontations of the warring houses, each followed by a
pronouncement from the Prince, mirror each other successively at 1.1, 3.1, and
5.3—except that the consequences crescendo in seriousness: no one dies during
the first, two are dead after the second, and three, including the protagonists,
after the third. Equally visible at a glance are the variations played on balancing
personalities: a bawdy Nurse flanks Juliet in 1.3 and a bawdy Mercutio flanks
Romeo in 1.4; or, again, a sober Benvolio, trying to cool a hot Tybalt in 1.1,
parallels a sober Benvolio trying to cool a hot Mercutio in 3.1. Yet curiously
enough this stress on “forms” only evokes more keenly, when the play is seen and
heard, our sense of its immense reserves of dramatic and linguistic power. As a
highbred horse shows his truest fire when curbed, so the artifices of the play’s
style and structure create a condition of containment from which its energies
break out with double force. Energies that explode on the slightest provocation
into horse-play, sword-play, wordplay, love-play. Energies that smolder in Tybalt’s
and Lady Capulet’s hatred of the Montagues and bubble over in Mercutio’s
witty scorn of everything that looks like posturing or fakery, whether Romeo’s
premonitions and dreams (1.4), Tybalt’s dancing-masterish fencing style (2.4.20),
or the Nurse’s affectation of being a grande dame, all got up in her best fineries
with a man-servant to go before (2.4.95). Energies, furthermore, that flow
like a high-voltage current through the love scenes, idealizing everything they
touch, and in the potion and tomb scenes so overpower all other considerations
that Juliet can drink off the Friar’s potion despite her terror, and Romeo can
unhesitatingly storm the Capulet tomb in order to be reunited with his wife on
their mutual death-and-marriage-bed.
Behind all these energies, of course, releasing but at the same time shaping
them, stands the energy of Shakespeare’s own imagination, in sheer exuberance
of creation melting down old forms to make them new. The ancient conceit
comparing the beloved lady’s beauty to various kinds of dazzling light becomes
in his hands Juliet hanging upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an
Ethiop’s ear (1.5.46), Juliet showing at her window like a sunrise in the East
(2.2.2), Juliet making even the grave “a feasting presence full of light” (5.3.86).
Similarly the time-worn conception of the lover as a ship tossed by storms of
passion or misfortune in the attempt to reach safe harbor in his lady’s favor takes
on in Shakespeare’s reinterpretation of it a passionate urgency:

As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea,
I should adventure for such merchandise. (2.2.82)

Later, when Romeo swallows the apothecary’s drug, this time-worn metaphor is
strikingly reinterpreted:
Come, bitter conduct; come, unsavory guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!
Here’s to my love! [Drinks.] O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die. (5.3.116)
So too with the lover’s “blazon.” Properly speaking, the blazon in Renaissance
love-poetry is a descriptive inventory of the beloved’s charms, moving lingeringly
and luxuriously, item by item, from her golden hair to her shapely foot. In Romeo
and Juliet, the convention reappears, but is significantly displaced from the true
beloved ( Juliet) to the imagined beloved (Rosaline), is subordinated to a formula
of conjuration derived from demonology (possibly a further insult), and is
spoken not by the lover in praise of the beloved but by the scoffer, who throws
doubt on the whole spectrum of high romantic feeling by indicating very clearly
what he believes to be its crass sources:
I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,

By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie,
That in thy likeness thou appear to us! (2.1.17)
But these verbal transformations are only the surface outcroppings of

Shakespeare’s originality in Romeo and Juliet. What many in his audiences must
have responded to at a deeper level, unanalyzed but felt, is the presence of certain
psychological experiences familiar to all who have ever loved, for which he has
managed to find in his story of two hapless lovers unobtrusive but unforgettable
dramatic forms. One such experience is the mysterious mix in every sexual
passion of attraction and repulsion, love and hate. Odi et amo: “I hate and I love,”
wrote the Roman poet Catullus, and Shakespeare has captured the phenomenon
memorably in his play, not simply in dramatizing a quite literal mixture of
attraction and repulsion in Juliet when her husband kills her kinsman, but in
keeping at all times clear the psychological interface between the love story itself
and its environment of hate. The very phrases in which contemporary and earlier
poets had summed up the latent antagonism of the sexes as well as the power of
a particular beloved woman to hurt her lover by disdain—woman seen as “dearest
enemy,” an unconquerable “fortress,” a warrior with “killing” eyes—become
charged with new meaning in Romeo and Juliet through their radical implication
in the plot itself:

My only love sprung from my only hate! . . .

Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathèd enemy. (1.5.138)
Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye

Than twenty of their swords! (2.2.71)
Thou are not conquered—Beauty’s ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there. (5.3.94)
Similarly with the masculine sense of woman as a mysterious being

withheld—a being to be wooed, not conquered, and only to be fully known
when given by her own free choice. This sense—a constant theme of
Elizabethan love-poetry—pervades the play, and again the favorite images and
phrases of the literary tradition take on a new and glowing life through being
reinterpreted in action. In his chatter about Rosaline, Romeo had invoked idly
the Petrarchan image of woman as unyielding fortress, but when this image
returns at the play’s end, in the last passage quoted above, the unyielding
fortress is plain to be seen on the stage in Juliet’s yet living form, and it is only
to the paramour death, not Romeo, that she lies unyielding. When Romeo
reclaims her for his own by freely choosing to be her husband in death as
well as life, she gives herself in turn to be again his wife by her free choice in
falling upon his dagger. What is also to be observed is that this same sequence
of events has already been acted out in the happier setting of the Capulet
garden. To that garden—which is itself partly a dramatic realization of the
parallel that from Biblical times had been drawn between a virgin and a hortus
conclusus or closed garden—Romeo is attracted by desire. The girl he meets
there, however, though virgin, is so far from being an Unconquerable Fortress
or a Belle Dame sans Merci, that she can show her love for him more freely and
less self-consciously than he can show his for her:

My love as deep; the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite. (2.2.133)
It is no more than appropriate, therefore, that when he ascends to her chamber

for their wedding night, it is by means of a rope-ladder that he has supplied and
she has lowered to him. The Petrarchan image of woman as fortress, unyielding
and therefore to be taken only by assault (as in the macho language of the servants
in the first scene), yields, like his own experience of Rosaline, to a truer definition
in which love is a gift to be freely given and received.

The most remarkable among the ancient phrases that Shakespeare regenerates
by causing them to be acted out in front of us is every lover’s conviction that
love must conquer death: Amor vincit omnia. Around this phrase and the
corresponding psychological urgencies, the play’s last scene is plainly built.
Romeo, as has already been pointed out, asserts his claim to Juliet against
death’s claim; in the person of the Lover he breaks open the Tomb, which by the
power of his passion and her beauty is transformed to a presence-chamber filled
with light; and though he dies beside her, he manages to carve out through his
idealizing imagination an enigmatic space—last of the many enclaves in which
we see them—in which death and sexual consummation coincide—“Thus with
a kiss I die” (5.3.120). “There rust, and let me die” (5.3.170).
7
An awesome close to a lavish pageant of romantic feeling. Yet we must
not suppose that Shakespeare intends us to let it go entirely unchallenged.
Against its idealized shape, complete with operatic deaths and high-flown
lyric utterances, he has already set for our contemplation a far messier, prosier,
less predictable death-scene—one much more like those we meet with in our
own world: Mercutio’s. Mercutio’s death is anything but a consummation
and far from being lyrical in either content or form. Like his parody of the
lover’s blazon earlier, his last words seem calculated to puncture and shrivel
up yet another body of posturing and pretense: that a man’s death is to be
reckoned some sort of special or heroic occasion—that it comes about, as in
romantic literature generally, only after great deeds, great wounds, or meeting
with a great adversary (in fact, even a scratch will do it)—and that it must not
be accompanied by expressed resentments or ironies, but only by such noble
expressions of magnanimity and acceptance of one’s fate as accord with the
idea of making a good end.
Romeo: Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.

Mercutio: No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door;
but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me
a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague a both
your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to
death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic!
Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.
(3.1.93)
No pithy “last words” here: only scorn and anger at the sheer contingency and
arbitrariness of what was quite unnecessary but has nevertheless taken place.
This death and these speeches—indeed all of Mercutio’s speeches—suggest a
possible other scale in which the lovers’ devotion to each other and their “victory”

at the close may be weighed. Looked at through his perspective, the lovers’ ideal
experience of each other, the exalted images they feed on, the absolute fidelity
to which they sacrifice their lives may be reckoned among the fictions by which
men and women deceive themselves about their true natures and the nature of
their world. On the other hand, looked at through their perspective, his reading
of reality must appear near-sighted and reductive, for the fictions men and
women live by are often their best throw at truth, whether about themselves or
about the world.
In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare has juxtaposed these two divergent value
systems—the last and climactic pair of contraries in that scheme of contrasts
at which we earlier glanced—without allowing them to touch. Mercutio never
learns of Romeo’s mature love for Juliet, and his death is well behind us when
we encounter theirs. Perhaps the playwright feared that either view, if brought
too close to its opposite, would shatter. Later, he will be more venturesome.
His tragic heroes from Hamlet on are required to know the world in both
perspectives simultaneously and the experience tears them apart, as it still does
some today.
Note
58. Published in 1592.
QQQ
1996—Harold Bloom.
“Introduction,” from Romeo and Juliet (Bloom’s Guides)
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University,

where he teaches Shakespeare and poetry. He has edited many anthol-
ogies of literature and literary criticism and is the author of more than
30 books, including The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon, and
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
Harold C. Goddard, in his The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), remarked upon how
much of Shakespeare turns upon the vexed relationships between generations of
the same family, which was also one of the burdens of Athenian tragedy. Except
for the early Titus Andronicus, which I judge to have been a charnel-house
parody of Christopher Marlowe, Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare’s first venture
at composing a tragedy, and also his first deep investigation of generational
perplexities. The Montague–Capulet hatred might seem overwrought enough to
have its parodistic aspects, but it destroys two immensely valuable, very young

lovers, Juliet of the Capulets and Romeo of the Montagues, and Mercutio as
well, a far more interesting character than Romeo. Yet Romeo, exalted by the
authentic love between the even more vital Juliet and himself, is one of the first
instances of the Shakespearean representation of crucial change in a character
through self-overhearing and self-reflection. Juliet, an even larger instance, is the
play’s triumph, since she inaugurates Shakespeare’s extraordinary procession of
vibrant, life-enhancing women, never matched before or since in all of Western
literature, including in Chaucer, who was Shakespeare’s truest precursor as the
creator of personalities.
Juliet, Mercutio, the nurse, and to a lesser extent Romeo are among the
first Shakespearean characters who manifest their author’s uncanny genius at
inventing persons. Richard III, like Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, is a
brilliant Marlovian cartoon or grotesque, but lacks all inwardness, which is true
also of the figures in the earliest comedies. Faulconbridge the Bastard in King
John and Richard II were Shakespeare’s initial breakthroughs in the forging of
personalities, before the composition of Romeo and Juliet. After Juliet, Mercutio,
and the nurse came Bottom, Shylock, Portia, and most overwhelmingly Falstaff,
with whom at last Shakespeare was fully himself. Harold Goddard shrewdly
points out that the nurse, who lacks wit, imagination, and above all love, even
for Juliet, is no Falstaff, who abounds in cognitive power, creative humor, and
(alas) love for the undeserving Hal. The nurse is ferociously lively and funny, but
she proves to be exactly what the supremely accurate Juliet eventually calls her:
“most wicked fiend,” whose care for Juliet has no inward reality. In some sense,
the agent of Juliet’s tragedy is the nurse, whose failure in loving the child she
has raised leads Juliet to the desperate expedient that destroys both Romeo and
herself.
Mercutio, a superb and delightful role, nevertheless is inwardly quite as cold
as the nurse. Though he is Shakespeare’s first sketch of a charismatic individual
(Berowne in Love’s Labor’s Lost has brilliant language, but no charisma), Mercutio
is a dangerous companion for Romeo, and becomes redundant as soon as Romeo
passes from sexual infatuation to sincere love, from Rosaline to Juliet. Age-old
directorial wisdom is that Shakespeare killed off Mercutio so quickly, because
Romeo is a mere stick in contrast to his exuberant friend. But Mercutio becomes
irrelevant once Juliet and Romeo fall profoundly in love with one another. What
place has Mercutio in the play once it becomes dominated by Juliet’s magnificent
avowal of her love’s infinitude:


Contrast that with Mercutio at his usual bawdry:
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.

Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
O, Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open-arse, thou a pu’rin pear!
Since Juliet develops from strength to strength, Romeo (who is only partly a
convert to love) is inevitably dwarfed by her. Partly this is the consequence of
what will be Shakespeare’s long career of comparing women to men to men’s
accurate disadvantage, a career that can be said to commence with precisely this
play. But partly the tragic flaw is in Romeo himself, who yields too readily to many
fierce emotions: anger, fear, grief, and despair. This yielding leads to the death of
Tybalt, to Romeo’s own suicide, and to Juliet’s own farewell to life. Shakespeare is
careful to make Romeo just as culpable, in his way, as Mercutio or Tybalt. Juliet,
in total contrast, remains radically free of flaw: she is a saint of love, courageous
and trusting, refusing the nurse’s evil counsel and attempting to hold on to love’s
truth, which she incarnates. Though it is “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,” the
lovers are tragic in wholly different ways. Juliet, in a curious prophecy of Hamlet’s
charismatic elevation, transcends her self-destruction and dies exalted. Romeo,
not of her eminence, dies more pathetically. We are moved by both deaths, but
Shakespeare sees to it that our larger loss is the loss of Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet
in the Twenty-first Century
q
The two essays included below, only a brief representation of the Romeo and
Juliet scholarship produced within the last few years, address different issues,
but are nonetheless linked by an identification of various tensions and unre-
solved issues that have endured through the centuries. The issues attended to
here include the interpretation of mixed genres and the correct approach to
explaining the transition from comedy to tragedy; the proper identification of
the underlying themes to be found in Shakespeare’s earliest work; and the rela-
tionship between the play and previous works and writers.
In his essay “Romeo and Juliet: An Innovative Tragedy,” John Russell Brown
discusses the preliminary Shakespearean works that serve as the background
for the play, namely the early comedies, which depict a whimsical and childlike
view of the world where problems and misunderstandings are short-lived and
lovers always marry, as well as a series of sonnets concerning the passions and
complexities of love. Russell maintains that even in these early works there is an
undercurrent of death, thwarted desire, and unreliable intelligence, all of which
are the subject matter of Romeo and Juliet. After pointing out the prefatory aspects
of Shakespeare’s early writings, Russell discusses the nature of the play’s dialogue,
which is both complex and simple; the status of fate and free will; and, finally,
the social context of the play. As to fate and free will, Russell maintains that
Shakespeare here had broken from the need to recount the history of monarchs
and, thus, was able to apply these larger issues to a domestic drama: “An audience
senses that these persons think and do as they wish, whatever happens to them.
In their last moments they act decisively and in unshakeable independence.”
Taking a philosophical approach, Daryl W. Palmer argues persuasively that
Romeo and Juliet stages an ancient debate on the nature of motion, a debate that he
traces back to Plato’s Theaetetus, in which the philosopher declares “[e]verything
flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” Palmer
establishes the applicability of this premise to Shakespeare and Elizabethan
theater audiences in general, given that Plato was known through a wide range
of sources at that time. He also points out that intense interest in the study
of motion is a predominant theme of Renaissance fencing manuals. Given the
293

importance of fencing in Romeo and Juliet, Palmer analyzes Mercutio’s character

as that of a “philosopher” based on his ability to reflect on the concept of motion:
“Unafraid of motion, he can, nonetheless, step back and observe. In ways no
other character in the play does, Mercutio recollects knowledge; he understands
numbers and technical terms. As the Queen Mab speech brilliantly shows, he
has the capacity to reflect on the nature of motion and Shakespeare indulges him
with impressive set speeches. . . .” Finally, Palmer situates Mercutio’s balanced
understanding of motion by contrasting him with Romeo and with the friar, who
applies his “distilling liquor” in a failed attempt to slow motion down.
2001—John Russell Brown. “Romeo and Juliet:

An Innovative Tragedy,” from Shakespeare: The Tragedies
John Russell Brown has been a professor of theater at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of many scholarly works,
including Shakespeare: The Tragedies (2001), William Shakespeare: Writing
for Performance (1996), and New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience,
and Asia (1999), as well as the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of
Theatre (1997).
While writing the earliest tragedies and a series of history plays about the long
and jarring wars of the two noble houses of York and Lancaster, Shakespeare was
imaginatively involved with two very different projects, each demanding special
knowledge and techniques and as full of innovation as his other work. One
resulted in the comedies that reached the public stages throughout the 1590s.
Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury of 1598 noted that
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best [writers] for Comedy and
Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is most
excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen
of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labours Lost, his Love’s Labours Won, his
Midsummer’s Night Dream, and his Merchant of Venice . . . .
In contrast with the tragedies, the earliest comedies seem written as if

in sport. For all their profusion of ingenious wit and complicated wordplay,
mythological references and elaborate rhetorical speeches, they offer a world of
fantasy that is almost innocent and childlike. Whatever happens in these plays
does so lightly, with a freedom of invention which seems to spring effortlessly
as if in release from the actualities of life and mortality. Anger, pain, and
misunderstandings seldom last for long and almost all journeys end in lovers’
meetings. The clashes between generations—or between town and country,

Romeo and Juliet in the Twenty-first Century 295
masters and servants, royalty and subjects, learning and ignorance, riches and
poverty—provide occasions for both argument and laughter as the narratives
of romantic and adventurous courtship twist and turn towards their neat
conclusions. Increasingly, Shakespeare introduced elements that are destructive
or irreconcilable and some individuals who stand apart from others to remind an
audience that ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ or that all the men and women are
‘merely players’ (Twelfth Night, II.iii.51; As You Like It, II.vii.140), but nothing
of this disturbs for long the surface of the earliest comedies written at the same
time as the violent and harshly unsentimental tragedies. Only when we look
closer can we see that, within the apparently fickle wordplay, a deeper current
of thought is at work and, on second viewing, discern beneath the surface a
carefully considered and developing view of love, involving service, idealism,
unappeasable desire, and the unstable meeting of intelligence with sensual and
sexual necessities. Death, too, is a lurking presence, in various and, often, insidious
forms, familiar, unexpected, and irresistible, infecting even carefree thoughts and
feelings. After more searching scrutiny, Shakespeare’s comedies are seen to come
from the same creative mind as the early tragedies and it was, perhaps, inevitable
that these two lines of work should come together, sooner rather than later, as
they did in Romeo and Juliet, first published in 1597 and probably first performed
some two years earlier.
During the same early and productive years, Shakespeare was also engaged
with non-dramatic poetry, writing numerous sonnets that circulated in manuscript
‘among his private friends’ (the phrase is from Francis Meres), a few of which
were published in The Passionate Pilgrim, an anthology of poems by several
hands of 1599. A collected edition appeared later, in 1609, but vocabulary tests
and a few topical references indicate that many of these sonnets were written
in 1593–5, the years of the early tragedies, others in 1598–9, and comparatively
few in the early years of the seventeenth century. By 1598, on the strength of the
poems that had come to his notice, Meres called Shakespeare one of the ‘most
passionate amongst us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of Love’, and his
achievement in this manner obviously informed the writing of Romeo and Juliet.
The lines:
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate . . . (Sonnet XXIX)
were not written about Romeo banished from his Juliet, but the ‘passionate’
impression they give, their images and ideas concerning ‘disgrace’, ‘outcast
state’, ‘sullen earth’, and ‘heaven’s gate’ are almost entirely relevant. In both the
sonnets and this early tragedy, eyes are ‘famished for a look’, a ‘heart in love

with sighs himself doth smother’, and a lover is ‘happy to have thy love, happy
to die’ (Sonnets XLVII and XCII): a wide range of very personal and inward
experiences are common to both.
Besides the sonnets and comedies, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece
(1593–4) helped to prepare Shakespeare for Romeo and Juliet. Written, it seems,
while the theatres were closed on account of outbreaks of the plague, the stories
told in these poems led Shakespeare to imagine an obsession with sexuality and
resistance to its compulsions. Decorated and often decorous verses conduct a
reader carefully into these narratives so that certain moments are held still, out
of the pressure of action, illuminated by sensitive description (especially in the
earlier poem) or explored almost methodically as rhetorical tropes are worked
out to their last detail. Both poems give the impression that their author was in
complete control of his subject and chosen mode of presentation as he extended
his treatment of sexual experience beyond the pleasures and limitations of
comedy.
All these imaginative streams flowed into the writing of Romeo and Juliet and
seem to have encouraged a closer and more sustained commitment to its leading
characters than in earlier tragedies. Here passionate complexity, expressed
in sensuous and restless language, is linked in harness with direct and even
simple engagement in the moment-by-moment life of the story. Images drawn
from everyday experience carry speaker and listener into worlds of experience
seldom realizable with words and still less often capable of being shared. The
changing pulse of the dialogue suggests a wide range of feeling, from destructive
compulsion to silent tenderness. In the sonnets, the poet claims frequently that
his verses will give a deathless existence to his beloved and Shakespeare might
have written the same of the heroine and hero of this first tragedy of love. In
his own day, its success was immediate even though it was highly unusual for
two young and inexperienced people to be the central figures of a tragedy, a
form of drama thought to require noble persons of great consequence for its
heroes. In its own day, Romeo and Juliet defied many generally accepted critical
pronouncements and the flush of adventure can still be sensed in the energy and
freshness of much of the writing; even today, it is still a tragedy that stands very
much on its own.
Lifelike and Complex Dialogue

In Romeo and Juliet, speech is sometimes both highly contrived and extraordinarily
ordinary—ordinary in the sense that it moves and breathes as if in life itself, as
an audience will know it. Much of its dialogue can be spoken as an instinctive
involvement with what is happening at the moment. As we read the text, these
people come alive in our minds and, when presented on stage, they can convince
us completely, carrying us away from our own thoughts so that we seem to share
in theirs.

Not all the tragedy is written in this way, but that could hardly be: other
tasks had to be done and an audience can respond to only so much immediacy.
The play starts with a very formal sonnet as the Chorus addresses the audience,
its tone and tempo respectful and its utterance obviously composed. Yet, even
here, rhythms suggest that deeper feelings are involved and will be aroused
later. The solemn forward flow of ‘The fearful passage of their death-marked
love . . . ’ is off-set by the three close-linked stresses of ‘death-marked love’ that
disturb the iambic measure and, two lines later, by the compact parenthesis
within ‘Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove.’ A lighter return
to the present moment and practicalities—‘Is now the two hours’ traffic of our
stage’—prepares for a concluding couplet that politely requests an audience’s
attention. The fourteen rhymed iambic lines make a strong impression before
the play itself begins, but that force is controlled delicately and, it seems,
without effort.
Shakespeare also used a sonnet to bring Romeo and Juliet together for the first
time, its lines and images shared between them, so that each speaker modifies the
other’s speech as if sharing a playful and sensitive consciousness. Formal verse-
patterns establish a grave thoughtfulness while the words require the touching of
hands and exchange of kisses. These specific actions ensure that the focus of an
audience’s attention is on the two bodies as much as—perhaps more than—what
is said. Before the second kiss, the lovers’ words have overflowed the measure of
the sonnet, but their further speech has its own rhymes to show a new confidence
in accepting both ‘trespass’ and necessity:
Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
[He kisses her.]
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purged.
Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

Give me my sin again.

Juliet: You kiss by th’ book.
[They kiss.]
With a skill honed in a long series of sonnets, verse-making has been used to
suggest the strength and wonder of shared sexual arousal. Developing imagery
implies the solemn and carefully restrained impulses of a first, holy, and life-
changing love: good pilgrim, holy palmer, prayer, and devotion. Management of the
sonnet form captures the fresh sensations and creativity, mixed with pains-taking
and irrepressibility, that can be experienced in the act of writing, and uses this to
give credibility to the tragedy’s two young heroes.
The word ‘hero’ sits uncomfortably on Romeo and Juliet in the first and longer
part of the action when neither has any further intention than those arising from
the moment and each other’s presence. They do, however, even before their first
meeting, show that other thoughts are deep within them, not moving easily with
their immediate desires. This is most noticeable in Romeo’s:
my mind misgives
With this night’s revels . . . (I.iv.106–13)
But Juliet’s reply to her mother’s enquiry about her ‘dispositions to be married’—
‘It is an honour that I dream not of ’ (I.iii.66)—may also express, even if spoken
lightly, an inner gravity of spirit and fear of ‘consequence’.
Once they have met and kissed, their speech is bolder, quickly responsive
to each moment and freely supplied with images that draw them far away
from their former selves as they interact without impediment. By description,
suggestive imagery, and varying syntax, physical presence is frequently implied
in the words spoken, as if the flesh-and-blood actuality of the two speakers,
their heart-beats, hands and bodies, and their eyes (especially) are all involved
as they express wonder, fear, excitement, tenderness, solemnity, and an over-
riding happiness that is instinct with both laughter and tears. The dialogue
operates as music to which they move as in a dance, both together and apart,
swiftly and slowly, forgetting every other need. The comparatively simple
beginning can illustrate the new actuality and intimacy:
Juliet: My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words

Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound.
Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?
Romeo: Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike. (1)

Juliet: How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?

The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here.
Romeo: With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls; (2)
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.
Juliet: If they do see thee, they will murder thee.
Romeo: Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye (3)
Than twenty of their swords! Look thou but sweet,
And I am proof against their enmity.
Juliet: I would not for the world they saw thee here.
Romeo: I have night’s cloak to hide me from their eyes, (4)
And but thou love me, let them find me here.
My life were better ended by their hate
Than death proroguèd, wanting of thy love.
Juliet: By whose direction found’st thou out this place?
Romeo: By love, that first did prompt me to inquire. (5)
He lent me counsel, and I lent him eyes.
As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea,
I should adventure for such mechandise. (II.ii.58–84)
Juliet speaks of hearing Romeo’s voice as if this were drinking and had a physical
effect, but she keeps some distance by speaking, not of his presence, but only of
his ‘tongue’. When questions follow, both speakers seek some reassurance and
restrict themselves to practicalities. Romeo’s first response is both respectful
and assertive but his second has a far wider range of feeling with talk of
levitation, stone walls or cliffs, risk, physical resistance. His third reply shows
him to be gazing at her eyes in fear that he may not be loved, his imagination
leading him to think of a brawl, lethally one-sided, and then of life-saving,
protective armour. The fourth time he replies, confidence stems from Juliet’s
concern but is laced through with an assertion that again considers opposition
and, at the same time, speaks of ‘death’. In his fifth reply, Romeo again speaks
of eyes, as if gazing at each other were still, for him, the one certain reality, but
then he moves on to the more sustained image of merchants venturing across
whole oceans. He speaks of the farthest limit of exploration, an idea that had
captured many minds in London since Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation
of the globe in 1580 and treasure brought from across the seas had become
a more common sight. The rhythms are longer in this fifth response as if in

making the assertion Romeo’s tensions were eased and his mind had accepted
the possibility of infinite riches from a hitherto far-off and unknown world
reached only by risking one’s entire life on unknown seas. In these exchanges,
speech seems to spring from two independent consciousnesses influenced
by interplay between each other; it gives an impression of instinct and
improvisation, not of deliberation.
The next sentence Juliet addresses to Romeo is carefully phrased and
extended through three lines of verse, but then rhythms change as if speech had
become more improvised. Faltering repetition and rapid contradiction reveal a
renewed insecurity:
Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face;

Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.
Fain would I dwell on form—fain, fain deny
What I have spoke; but farewell compliment!
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’
And I will take thy word. Yet, if thou swear’st
Thou mayst prove false. (ll. 85–92)
Romeo says nothing while Juliet continues to take the lead in speech, her mind
veering away from the present moment to imagine other times and idle talk
about false love and the laughter of Jove, the greatest of gods in the strange,
mind-haunting world of ancient myth: ‘At lovers’ perjuries, / They say Jove
laughs.’ Then, immediately, in yet another tone, she answers Romeo’s continuing
silence:
O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully,
Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won,
I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo; but else not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond, . . .
The speech is finely balanced and needs to be played delicately, in hesitation,

emphasis, and repetition. Perhaps Juliet has instinctively laughed at her own
contradictory feelings or at the excitement within her mind and body, and that
has made her think of Jove. Perhaps she then continues in new confidence
because Romeo has laughed too. Perhaps she remains solemn throughout all the
variations in her speech.
Soon Romeo swears his constant love, or rather attempts to swear it and is
stopped by Juliet who is afraid their contract is:

. . . too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens. (II. 118–20)
A moment later, they do exchange ‘faithful’ vows and then it is Juliet who finds
an image with which she is so satisfied that it sustains speech over three verse-
lines. Like Romeo’s earlier extended image, it summons up a vision of the ocean,
but now that lends its size to Juliet’s capacity for giving and expresses no desire
for possession:
Romeo: O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

Juliet: What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?
Romeo: Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.
Juliet: I gave thee mine before thou didst request it;
And yet I would it were to give again.
Romeo: Wouldst thou withdraw it? For what purpose, love?
Juliet: But to be frank and give it thee again,
The more I have for both are infinite. (II. 125–35)
Although separated on different levels of the stage, the two lovers will be still and
rapt in thoughts of each other and in sensations that seem to have changed their
very beings, but what happens next is not of their choosing:
I hear some noise within. Dear love, adieu!

Anon, good nurse! Sweet Montague, be true.
Stay but a little, I will come again. (II. 136–8)
Another voice and, in effect, another world have made themselves heard and
Juliet takes command, quickened by fear that her ‘Sweet Montague’ might not be
true. In her haste, only simple words and short phrases carry the play forward but
tenderness and desire are also able to speak even in the fears of such a moment.
Phrasing, rhythm, tension, relaxation, metrical variations, and the breathing
needed for utterance all require the actors’ physical engagement, and this conveys
the characters’ involvement in the situation as much as the words themselves,
and sometimes more. In performance, the activities in the actors’ bodies, that
are the necessary means of responding to the technical demands of the dialogue,
become a significant part of the play’s effect. These are not fixed signs, like
words, and define no clear intentions, but they are an instinctive and dynamic
response to the play as it evolves moment by moment. The physical presence of

each actor changes before the eyes of the audience and, with their bodies, their
minds and feelings will also change, half lost, perhaps, in sensation but quickened
and transformed by what is happening. Responding to this dialogue, they speak
physically as well as verbally, communicating to the senses of an audience,
perhaps more than to their minds.
On stage in Shakespeare’s day, a young man would have played the part of
Juliet. He could not provide the sexual attractions of a girl of fourteen (the age
specified in the text), but an audience was free to imagine those in whatever
forms were attractive to their individual minds. What the male actor could
provide was mental and physical activity, the succession of changes in mind
and body that make it possible to speak the words. In giving form and pressure
to each moment, this was sufficient instigation for an audience to follow the
play and re-create it in their own minds. The use of a young male actor meant
that the task of completing the illusion of a young woman in love had to be
left to the audience, and this may be one reason why in this tragedy actors and
actresses are so often able to give an impression of actual sexual arousal and
ardent love: actors speaking this dialogue can quicken an audience’s instinctive
desire to complete—and so, momentarily, to re-create and possess—what it sees
and hears enacted on the stage. In retrospect, we can see that this achievement
was to be crucial in the writing of Shakespeare’s later tragedies in which what
happens on stage goes far beyond what any one actor has experienced or can
adequately imagine.
Fate and Free Will

Freeing himself from the need to recount the ‘true’ history of monarchs and the
state of England, Shakespeare shaped this more domestic tragedy with two other
themes in mind and, against his usual practice, announced both in an opening
Chorus: the operation of fate and the conflict between private ‘strife’ and social
well-being. Both themes were present in Shakespeare’s main source, Arthur
Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a narrative poem
translated from a French version of still earlier Italian accounts, but the play’s
presentation of them is very different.
Fate often plays a part in the action as if by accident. Off-stage a messenger
is prevented from delivering a letter because he has happened to stop in a
plague-stricken house and this keeps Romeo in ignorance of what the Friar
and Juliet have contrived and so provokes his suicide and, consequently, brings
the tragedy to its close. Shakespeare has been criticized for using such a crude
plot-mechanism, but it is at one with other accidental circumstances that seem
to propel Romeo and Juliet forward in the ‘fearful passage’ of their love. Romeo
had gone to Capulet’s ball only to give himself more reason for loving Rosaline
and so happened to see Juliet. For her part, she believes that some necessity has
directed her choice:

Prodigious birth of love it is to me

That I must love a loathed enemy. (I.v.139–40)
Prodigious meant ominous and fateful, as well as astonishing, monstrous, or

oversized. A more general impression that events are being driven forward is
given by Shakespeare’s rearrangement of the narrative so that everything takes
place in four or five days, and not over several months as in Brooke. Repeatedly,
and without comment, the timing of entries seems fated, notably Tybalt’s,
Romeo’s, and, in the last scene when exact timing is particularly crucial, the
Friar’s and the watchmen’s.
Both Romeo and Juliet acknowledge fate’s influence. Before he has even seen
her, Romeo confesses:
my mind misgives
With this night’s revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life clos’d in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death. (I.i.106–11)
After killing Tybalt, Romeo is silent and then cries out, ‘O, I am Fortune’s fool’
(III.i.138); for the moment, his own will seems paralysed and he has to be urged
to leave the place where he is bound to be arrested. Juliet’s premonitions of fate
do not ring out so strongly, but she is repeatedly preoccupied by thoughts of
death: in the midst of her ‘joy,’ she senses that lightning will strike (see II.ii.116–
20) and, while she waits for Romeo on their wedding night, she imagines him
lying like ‘snow upon a raven’s back’ and then metamorphosed into stars (III.
ii.17–25).
This emphasis on fate is new in Shakespeare’s tragedies and may have
been suggested by the narrative presenter in Brooke’s poem. From the start his
Romeus is seen as a pawn:
How happy had he been had he not been forsworn

But twice as happy had he been had he been never born,
For ere the moon could thrice her wasted horns renew,
False Fortune cast for him poor wretch, a mischief new to brew.
Events follow each other inevitably:
Whom glorious Fortune erst had heavéd to the skies

By envious Fortune overthrown on earth now grovelling lies.

Brooke’s Friar sums up the outcome as ‘the wreck of frantic Fortune’s rage’
(l. 2840).
Shakespeare retained something of Brooke’s sense that no one could stop
what was fated to happen, but he did not leave the matter there. After Romeo’s
death, the Friar concludes that ‘A greater power than we can contradict / Hath
thwarted our intents’ (II. 152–3), but his view does not go unchallenged, not
least because it is his conscious decision to leave Juliet alone in the tomb where
she follows Romeo in suicide. After Romeo and Juliet have spent their night
together, she sees death as imminent:
Juliet: [looking down from her window]

O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale.
Romeo: And trust me, love, in my eye so do you.
Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu. (III.v.54–9)
Significantly, both lovers have a rational explanation for this premonition of

death and nowhere in the play does the operation of fate release them, or anyone
else, from making choices for which they may be held responsible.
The new immediacy of the lovers’ speeches is of crucial importance in the
presentation of fate because the spontaneous freedom, with which their minds
seem to function underneath the words spoken, is the polar opposite of an
inevitable and directed response to events. An audience senses that these persons
think and do as they wish, whatever happens to them. In their last moments they
act decisively and in unshakeable independence: Romeo insists on being alone in
the tomb where Juliet lies, drugged as if in death, and although he honours Paris
as ‘One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book’ (I. 82), he has already resolved to
take his own life. Juliet disregards the Friar’s advice which until now has guided
her: ‘Go, get thee hence, for I will not away’ (I. 160). Fate or accident decrees
that her suicide must be swift, but it is, essentially, the result of a long process of
self-determination.
When all is known at the end of the play, the Prince reconciles free will and
fate in a traditional way that accepts the outcome of events as the response of
divine justice to human actions:
Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love;
And I, for winking at your discords too,
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punish’d. (II. 290–4)

This is not the only change from Shakespeare’s source. To the very end, human
decisions are seen to influence what happens. In the play, but not in the poem,
the two families announce their reconciliation and clearly articulate their mutual
remorse; Brooke’s explanation of their reconciliation in a distant future is, simply,
‘so mighty Jove it would’. After the two fathers have taken each other’s hands
and promised to erect golden statues to each other’s children, the Prince takes
up his duties as a mortal judge, calling on everyone to understand and to accept
responsibility:
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things.

Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished. (II. 304–7)
The Social Context

While the Prologue speaks of the lovers as ‘star-crossed’, it also implicates ‘fair
Verona’ in their fate, declaring that the wrongs of ‘civil strife’ between Capulets
and Montagues preceded the beginning of the play and influenced Romeo and
Juliet from their births; it warns that only ‘their children’s end’ could change the
families’ deadlocked antagonism.
To widen the context of the love-story and so raise these issues, Shakespeare
used devices that had been well tried in the comedies. He developed other
characters—Benvolio, Tybalt, Paris, and Mercutio—well beyond their status
in Brooke’s poem so that they both spur Romeo to reveal more of himself and
serve as reflectors in which the consequences of his thoughts and actions can
be shown to the audience. Together they function in much the same way as
Thurio, Launce, and Sir Eglamour in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or Costard,
Jacquetta, Armado, and Moth in Love’s Labours Lost. Benvolio shows Romeo’s
capacity for friendship. Tybalt’s passionate sense of family honour contrasts with
Romeo’s willingness to ‘consort’ with both Rosaline and Juliet. Paris, courteous
and amenable, shows how powerful families expected to arrange their children’s
affairs. Together these three provide a context in which Romeo’s single-minded
love is more clearly viewed.
Mercutio, the fourth companion figure in Romeo and Juliet, is developed
in an exceptional way. Like Tybalt, he dies because of the family feud but he
fights out of personal choice, being kin to the Prince and neither a Capulet
nor Montague. More significantly, he shares Romeo’s immediacy and freedom
of speech, in the more variable pace of prose as well as in verse, which means
he can at times take command of everyone else on stage. He articulates
an independent view of Romeo while Romeo responds to his company by
becoming both ‘sociable’ and ‘solely singular’, his wit running a ‘wild goose
chase’ (II.iv.72–4, 89, 65–6). Actors take great pleasure in creating their own
interpretations of Mercutio. The role is so full of detail that they can surprise
an audience by emphasizing what is reckless in the character, or what is

disappointed, doomed, idealistic, immature, cynical, or frightened. He can be

a prey to fantasies and sexually frustrated, or someone in love with Romeo or
with himself. Every interpretation must, in some way, make credible Mercutio’s
combative energy of mind and persistent use of lewd sexual allusions. When
explaining Mercutio’s ‘saucy’ behaviour to the Nurse, Romeo provides a few
clues to his personality which only deepen the mystery:
One, . . . that God hath made, himself to mar . . . .
A gentleman . . . that loves to hear himself talk, and will speak more in a
minute than he will stand to in a month. (II.iv.114–15, 144–6)
This is no satisfactory explanation of Mercutio’s buoyant comedic sense, his

ability to turn any occasion into a carnival of laughter and bravado. Shakespeare
has, through him, set Romeo over against an intellectually brilliant, physically
alert, and highly sexed contemporary, with a generous capacity for friendship
and, perhaps, an instinctive love of danger. Because Mercutio is in the tragedy,
an audience cannot miss the ‘mannerly devotion’ (I.v.97) of Romeo’s love or his
attempts to make peace with Tybalt after he has been insulted by him.
Juliet does not have the support of companions as Romeo does. Except in
soliloquies or scenes when the two are alone together, she becomes known to an
audience through confrontations with her nurse, her mother and father, and Paris,
her parents’ choice of husband. However, the Nurse, like Mercutio, is presented in
freely associative speech and intimate exchanges with Juliet. Her prose also has
a kinship with Shakespeare’s earlier writing for clowns such as Costard, Launce,
or Bottom, and her role responds similarly to strongly independent and wittily
timed performance. Hers is another role that has proved exceptionally attractive
to actors: she takes time to speak self-indulgently from a long memory and quick
affection; her frequent sexual innuendoes seem intuitive rather than calculated.
She shares memories of a ‘pretty fool’ that is ‘techy and fall[s] out with the dug’
and of the time when ‘She could have run and waddled all about’ (I.iii.30–2, 37)
and encourages an audience to imagine the ‘prettiest babe that ere I nurs’d’ and
so appreciate the praise and affection that Juliet has always received, although
not, it seems, from her mother.
As in the comedies, the relevance of these contrasts must speak for itself, but
at a few crucial moments a clash of purpose has an effect that cannot be missed.
When Mercutio associates Queen Mab with maids losing their virginity, Romeo
interrupts him with:
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace.

Thou talk’st of nothing. (I.v.95–6)

In a flash, Mercutio accepts the charge, completing the half-line with ‘True, I talk
of dreams’ and continuing to speak of ‘an idle brain’ and ‘vain fantasy’. As if an
entertainment had been completed, Benvolio urges them all to move off to the
feast but Romeo, who had become silent, now holds them back to voice a very
private misgiving of ‘Some consequence yet hanging in the stars’ which threatens
‘untimely death’. Mercutio has shown Romeo to be alone in holding back and
fearing such misfortune.
After Romeo’s intervention has caused him to be fatally wounded by Tybalt,
Mercutio’s ‘A plague o’ both your houses’ reaches beyond the accident of his death
to mark the underlying antagonisms which are its less immediate causes. The
next moment, his question, ‘Why the devil came you between us?’ marks personal
responsibility just as clearly and provokes Romeo’s helpless and ineffectual ‘I
thought all for the best’. Mercutio continues to insist on the wider view as he
turns to Benvolio, leaving Romeo speechless:
Help me into some house, Benvolio,

Or I shall faint. A plague o’ both your houses,
They have made worms’ meat of me.
I have it, and soundly too. Your houses!
Exit Mercutio with Benvolio. (III.i.92–110)
When Mercutio’s death off-stage has been announced and Tybalt returns,
fighting starts again and Romeo kills his opponent rapidly but then, again, falls
silent. Benvolio urges him to leave at once, saying that the Prince will have him
killed for what he has done, but he has to repeat this message three times before
Romeo responds with ‘O, I am Fortune’s fool’ (I. 138). He still does not move,
until Benvolio’s further effort: ‘Why dost thou stay?’ In this scene, full of action
and tension, first Mercutio and then Benvolio are the means whereby Shakespeare
draws an audience to follow Romeo closely and fill out his speechlessness with
its own imaginations.
By consciously taunting Juliet as she longs to be with Romeo and, later,
unconsciously tormenting her with a muddled account of Tybalt’s death and
Romeo’s banishment, the Nurse encourages Juliet to express her feelings more
fully and strongly than she would to a more rational messenger. Later this
intimate companion makes still greater impact when Juliet refuses to confide in
her. The Nurse has argued that it would be better to marry Paris than stay faithful
to her banished husband and have ‘no use of him’ (III.iv.212–25) and Juliet has
listened in silence except for a brief hint of contrary feelings before pretending
to acquiesce. Only when the Nurse has left does a passionate refusal break out
with ‘Ancient damnation’ (I. 235). These two words have the greater strength
by contrast with Juliet’s earlier intimacy with the Nurse; they can suggest to an

audience, that her words that soon conclude the third Act—‘If all else fail, myself
have power to die’—are likely to be no less than truth.
For the young male actors who were the first to play Juliet, the Nurse provided
a contrast against which the complex and deep emotions of this scene could be
expressed step by step and given credibility by a comparatively simple show of
independence and strength of mind. Moreover, by encouraging an audience
to pay attention to Juliet’s silent presence while the Nurse has to wait for a
response—an incomplete verse-line, 218, marks at least one pause—and when
Juliet waits for the Nurse to leave, Shakespeare has ensured that an audience’s
imaginations will work to comprehend and fill out those silences. The scene may
well find its fullest dramatic life, not on stage, but in the minds of spectators.
The Play’s Structure

While its two lovers are an undisputed triumph, the rest of this tragedy is
sometimes dismissed as crudely written, ineptly plotted, and far too long.
Brutal sexual innuendo, clumsy literary artifice, rhymed moralizing, unnecessary
amplification and repetition can all be held against Shakespeare’s management of
the drama. Directors, staging the play in present-day theatres, are apt to cut large
sections of the text as well as making many smaller excisions. Yet in the face of
these adverse judgements, the play has a long record of success in performance,
regardless of changes in taste and methods of production. This implies that its
basic structure is sound and outweighs any defects, both real and imagined.
The text has survived in two versions. By far the better is the second Quarto of
1599 (Q2), which was printed from an authorial manuscript. The Quarto of 1597
(Q1) is a shorter text, at some 2215 lines to Q2’s 2986, and seems to represent a
purposefully cut version, with longer speeches reduced in length, some phrasing
simplified (and some muddled in consequence), some dialogue replaced with
descriptive stage directions, and a number of smaller roles removed. What is
notable about Q1 is that, in spite of some rewriting (or reliance on an earlier
Shakespearean draft) and a smaller role for Juliet—its length and complexity in
Q2 made greater demands on a young male actor than was usual—the structure
of the play remains very much the same. The alternation of intimate love scenes
with those involving the Capulet family, the Friar, and Romeo’s companions,
seems to have been accepted as necessary and effective at whatever length the
text was played. The presentation of the story in this sequence of scenes—the
‘argument’ or ‘plot’ of the play, as Elizabethans would call it—was a great source
of this tragedy’s appeal, even in a greatly shortened version.
Its dramatic structure makes large demands on any company staging the play.
In the first minutes a civic mutiny must build up rapidly with improvised fighting
involving an unusual assortment of weapons. The arrival of the Prince with his
peace-keeping force requires still more actors and changes the scene radically as
they bring order and comparative silence for the pronouncement of judgement.

On his order, large-scale exits follow, leaving the stage with signs of the recent
‘fray’ still visible (see I.i.115). Much the same happens all over again in Act III,
scene i, except that its fighting is restricted to three young principals. In between
these two violent crowd scenes is placed another which requires the entire
company to change into other clothes that are suitable for dancing and lavish
feasting. Again the spectacle has to be of two kinds, one more formal than the
other: one with the excitement of ‘lusty’ masquers (I.iv.113), with their ‘beetle-
browed’ vizors and torch bearers; the other more decorous for the entertainment
provided by the Capulets. When the two parties eventually join in courtly dance,
its concord is threatened by Tybalt’s intervention and then reaffirmed and
intensified by the formal sonnet shared between Romeo and Juliet.
At the end of the tragedy, for a fourth time, a crowd is required with two
contrasting elements again opposing unruly improvisation and authoritative
control. This time the build-up is very much slower over a series of short scenes
and episodes that grow ever more fearfully alarmed before concluding with a
stage crowded by awed and silent spectators. The process starts with busy entries
and music that herald a formal wedding for Paris and Juliet. Before the expected
order is fully achieved, it is fractured and replaced with violent expressions of
grief and outrage. The scene then shifts to Mantua where Romeo has gone after
being banished from Verona: here a frightened Balthasar arrives with news of
Juliet’s death and Romeo, ‘pale and wild’ (V.i.28–9), resolves to return and kill
himself at his love’s side. In another short scene, the Friar learns that his message
to Romeo telling him to rescue the drugged Juliet from the grave had never
reached him: it finishes with rushed preparations for breaking into the grave.
The scene now shifts to the Capulet’s monument and action is briefly both
formal and tense as Paris sets a watch on the grave and mourns his intended
bride. This carefully controlled business is disturbed very quickly, as Romeo and
Balthasar arrive with ‘a torch, a mattock and a crow[bar] of iron’. Despatching his
attendant to keep a look-out, Romeo forces open the tomb and is challenged by
Paris; they fight; the Page hurries to summon the watch; and Paris is killed. This
violence over, nothing further disturbs Romeo until, in his own time, he poisons
himself and dies kissing his bride. Immediately after this, Friar Laurence enters,
frightened and hurried; he finds, successively, the opened tomb, blood, and the
dead bodies. Knowing that the watch is coming, and failing to get Juliet to leave,
he hurries off. Juliet has only a short time alone, but kisses Romeo and then very
swiftly kills herself with his dagger. After this, two different sets of watchmen
enter and the alarm spreads; at first, even the Prince’s entry does not stop the
startling cries and shrieks of fear (V.iii.183, 189–93). After Montague’s entry,
the Prince takes complete charge and starts an investigation. Unlike the three
earlier occasions when the stage has been crowded, everyone naturally becomes
very still and quiet while the Friar tells the whole story as he knows it. For forty
lines of verse, too involved in syntax to be spoken quickly, no one from either

family interrupts, but as the Friar speaks of one person after another, he may
well provoke audible cries and visible signs of grief and guilt: the text gives no
guidance about this so the actors must improvise their characters’ reactions as if
drawn forth instinctively.
All four crowd scenes must be managed with both freedom and control as
they alternately express unruly and dangerous reactions and peaceful acceptance
of authoritative suppression. The same contrast is found elsewhere in the play,
especially in reactions to the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt where the text is
usually heavily cut for performance. When the Nurse brings news of Tybalt’s
death and Romeo’s banishment, the verse, wordplay, and rhetorical forms are
stretched and broken repeatedly, as misunderstandings jostle with forceful
repetitions, exclamations, and antitheses. Only rarely does strained and unruly
speech yield here to simple statement or instruction. The next scene, in Friar
Laurence’s cell, sees Romeo ‘on the ground with his own tears made drunk’ (III.
iii.83–9) and on the point of committing suicide. The Friar’s arguments and
hopes for a peaceful solution at last calm the violent behaviour and lead the
narrative forward. Capulet’s plans for Juliet’s marriage to Paris bring further
violence of language and action, and this time relief comes only when Juliet, left
alone, steadfastly resolves, ‘if all else fail’, to commit suicide. In following scenes,
Juliet accepts the Friar’s plan to take a potion which will render her as if dead and
then, on her own and on her marriage bed, she faces, in her vivid imagination,
the horrors of death itself before taking the drink as if in tribute to her love: she
has controlled the most unruly fears imaginable. The alternation of violence and
calm formality in these scenes is seldom managed with confidence in twentieth-
century productions of the play, and their text is often heavily cut. Nor will a
reader find them any more acceptable without a sense of the skill and energy
needed to bring the highly formal speeches alive in performance.
The new immediacy of thought and feeling returns to the text as the tragedy
moves to its deeply affecting climax. Briefly, Romeo offers his own death as a
‘favour’ to Tybalt and asks for his forgiveness and then turns towards his wife and
marvels at her beauty: ‘Ah, dear Juliet, / Why art thou yet so fair? . . . ’ A jealously
possessive and strangely fantastic question follows:
Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
Before he kills himself, he must embrace Juliet and
Seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing Death.

This kiss, in which formality and passion mix, is bound to be different each
time the actor takes hold of Juliet’s inert body and that will ensure that his acting
is, in part, improvised and draws instinctively on his deepest sense of what is
happening. His mind reverts to the sea that had come, as if unsummoned, when
he had first declared his love (see above, pp. 82–3); only this time the image
draws together violent desperation and decisive control:
Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide,

Thou desperate pilot now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark.
After this, Romeo is in command and can ceremoniously drink to his love and
die with another kiss.
What an audience experiences here is both the brutal fact of Romeo’s suicide
and the utmost sensitivity of his feelings. It will know, as he does not, that he
dies unnecessarily because Juliet is alive and not dead, and yet neither accident
nor waste is likely to make the strongest impression: that stems rather from his
physical and emotional courage when faced with appalling loss, and his calm
resolve. In his eyes and, almost certainly, in an audience’s, death is a shaking off
‘the yoke of inauspicious stars’ as he sets up his ‘everlasting rest’ (V.iii.110–12).
Juliet’s suicide is no less remarkable, although hurried as she hears the
watchmen’s approach. Her dismissal of Friar Laurence, ‘Go, get thee hence, for I
will not away’, marks decisively her inner assurance. In kissing Romeo’s poisoned
lips, she hopes to ‘die with a restorative’ and she does indeed respond to the
warmth of their touch. She then becomes conscious of noise off-stage and, with
two compact and charged lines, kills herself:
Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger.

This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die.
Although an audience hardly has time to follow each rapid step, the effect of all
she has said and done is absolutely clear: however uncertainly the actor completes
the hurried words and actions, Juliet so outpaces an audience’s comprehension
that her self-control is likely to be more amazing than her suffering. As in
Romeo’s death, a sense of achievement is present and here, possibly, a sense of a
consummating sexual arousal, as strong or stronger than that experienced earlier
in the play.
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare brought an intense dramatic focus to bear
on the last moments of its hero and heroine, and required of his actors the
imaginative strength to sum up their involvement in the entire play, controlling
wildest thoughts and feelings in consistent and compelling performance.
Outwardly the result can be very simple and probably should be so that an

audience’s imagination will be aroused by what seems to be happening deep

within the two young lovers. Wonder is likely to be its dominant response
but it may also feel shocked, bruised, depleted, indignant, outraged, trapped,
or bemused, implicated in some immediate and very personal way. The play
proceeds to show the effect of the deaths on almost all the remaining characters
and to invite an audience to search for degrees of responsibility and possible
consequences of what has happened.
QQQ
2006—Daryl W. Palmer. “Motion and Mercutio

in Romeo and Juliet,” from Philosophy and Literature
Daryl W. Palmer is associate professor of English at Regis University in

Denver, Colorado. He is the author of Hospitable Performances: Dramatic
Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England (1992).
There is nothing permanent that is not true, what can be true

that is uncertaine? How can that be certaine, that stands upon
uncertain grounds?1
It is by now a commonplace in modern scholarship that drama, particularly

Tudor drama, poses questions, rehearses familiar debates, and even speculates
about mere possibilities.2 In 1954, Madeleine Doran spelled out some of the
ways in which debate “affected the structure of Elizabethan drama.”3 In turn,
Joel B. Altman, having eloquently extended Doran’s examination, concludes
that “the plays functioned as media of intellectual and emotional exploration
for minds that were accustomed to examine the many sides of a given theme,
to entertain opposing ideals, and by so exercising the understanding, to move
toward some fuller apprehension of truth that could be discerned only through
the total action of the drama.”4 Altman points to Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and
Lucres (c. 1490) as an exemplar of this practice. Although the interlude instructs
and entertains, “the center of interest has shifted from demonstration to inquiry.
The action develops not from an abstract assertion, but from a specific question:
who is the nobler man, Cornelius or Gaius?”5 By the time William Shakespeare
began to write his plays, inquiry was an essential part of dramatic construction.
So Juliet asks, “What’s in a name?”6 Hamlet opens with the question: “Who’s
there?” (1.1.1), and achieves a kind of apotheosis in the figure of its hero: “To
be, or not to be, that is the question . . . ” (3.1.55). Everyone recognizes these
familiar questions, and we know (or think we know) how to describe the most

viable answers. I want to suggest, however, that this familiarity has dulled
our appreciation of the drama’s interrogative range. As a way of resisting this
tendency, I want to argue that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet takes up an ancient
conversation about motion, a dialog that originates with the pre-Socratics. This
is not to say that the play is ultimately about motion. It obviously engages a
panoply of thematic materials. I have simply chosen, in this limited space, to
concentrate on the way the playwright stages his questioning as a kind of fencing
lesson. My goal is to produce neither a “reading” of the play nor an allegory
of philosophy, but rather to recollect the ways in which Shakespeare’s drama
qualifies and extends an ancient interrogative tradition. In so doing, I follow
Stanley Cavell who maintains “that Shakespeare could not be who he is—the
burden of the name of the greatest writer in the language, the creature of the
greatest ordering of English—unless his writing is engaging the depth of the
philosophical preoccupations of his culture.”7
Some of the most venerable documents of Western philosophy fix on the
problem of motion. If we go back more than 2,300 years, we come upon Plato’s
Theaetetus, in which Socrates explains a “first principle” to the title character,
namely that “the universe really is motion and nothing else.”8 A kind of
history lesson in ontology and epistemology, this tentative explanation has its
origins in Heraclitus or Empedocles or Protagoras or some combination of the
aforementioned. Perhaps the most famous expression of this ideal comes from
Heraclitus: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet
others go ever flowing on.”9 More to the point is the following declaration from
the same philosopher: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives
way and nothing stays fixed.”10 In this spirit, Protagoras declares, “All matter is
in a state of flux.”11 Such precedents provide the backdrop for Socrates in the
Theaetetus as he summarizes: “The point is that all these things are, as we were
saying, in motion, but there is a quickness or slowness in their motion” (Thea,
156c). In this historical spirit, he identifies “a tradition from the ancients, who
hid their meaning from the common herd in poetical figures, that Oceanus and
Tethys, the source of all things, are flowing streams and nothing is at rest” (Thea,
180d–e).
To be sure, the dialog depends on the rehearsal of such positions, but far
more important for our purpose is Plato’s attempt, through the figure of Socrates,
to grasp motion through dialog. More inclined toward Parmenides’ distrust of
motion, Socrates has, from the outset, been setting up the terms of inquiry in a
form that anticipates the dramatic shape of the Renaissance play by fixing the
(ineffable) object of study so that it gives up its essence, its being. Contemporary
critics and philosophers will of course raise many objections to this motive,12
and rightly so; but in the conversation I want to trace, the motive endures
dramatically. Plato even pays attention to character. From the outset, Theaetetus
marks himself as a green pupil, charming and polite. The young fellow finds

Socrates’ talk hard to follow. He becomes wary: “Really, I am not sure, Socrates. I
cannot even make out about you, whether you are stating this as something you
believe or merely putting me to the test” (Thea, 157c). As Shakespeare will always
emphasize, character emerges out of dialog. Human disposition inflects inquiry.
Maturity affects analysis.
Assuming that every change is a “motion,” Socrates proceeds to confront his
pupil with the difficult task of studying motion only in terms of motion, change
in terms of change. That which fixes undoes what we study, but how difficult
to adhere to such an injunction! Later in this dialog, Theodorus complains of
thinkers who attempt such a task: “Faithful to their own treatises they are literally
in perpetual motion; their capacity for staying still to attend to an argument or a
question or for a quiet interchange of question and answer amounts to less than
nothing . . .” (Thea, 179e–180a). According to his plan, Plato is preparing his
readers to admit that they can only have knowledge of being. That which is ever
becoming (something other) may be perceived, but not known. Motion, if it can
be probed at all, will register as perception, not knowledge, a crucial distinction
for what follows because literary scholarship often conflates perception and
knowledge (Thea, 186e).13
This is not to say that Shakespeare read a given dialog by Plato as a source
the way he read Ovid. To approach the Renaissance is to encounter Plato
in every nook and cranny. We know, in general, that early modern thinkers
read Plato, but his presence was more ubiquitous than simple citation would
indicate.14 Paul F. Grendler explains that “The Renaissance drew upon a
centuries-old tradition whose roots went back to Plato’s Laws and Republic,
as well as Christian antiquity . . . ”15 With more particular application to
Shakespeare’s world, Sears Jayne declares, “at no time during the Renaissance
were the English people ever limited, as the myth suggests, to a single
conception of Plato; rather, they knew about Plato from many different
sources, and entertained several different conceptions of his work.”16 Finally,
Melissa Lane describes the way the philosopher’s heirs have understood their
role in the conversation: Plato “was, after all, Aristotle’s teacher and a key
source for Ciceronian Rome and Augustinian Christianity. And this status
made him a magnet in the search for originality—both as the beginning and
as the inspired genius.”17
I take this “search” to be paradigmatic for subsequent centuries as it pops
up in learned books and busy streets, even among the rapiers and daggers of
Elizabethan London. As J. D. Aylward puts it in The English Master of Arms, most
Englishmen of the period wanted to associate themselves with the practice of
swordplay.18 Theater audiences relished the expert fencing of actors.19 London
buzzed with talk of Continental fencing masters who claimed followings in
their schools and in print. To these masters, fencing was both physical and
mental, a palpable conflict and the basis for intellectual dialog. Vincentio Saviolo

illustrates this motive in his Practice (1595). For Saviolo, combat comes down
to discernment. He complains that “There are many that when they come to
fight, runne on headlong without discretion.”20 In this same spirit, Giacomo
Grassi warns his readers of the need for judgment, noting that, “amongst divers
disorderlie blowes, you might have seen some of them most gallant lie bestowed,
not without evident conjecture of deepe judgment.”21 Disorder must be avoided;
the point, in other words, is to approach the physicality of combat through reason
honed by reading. George Silver, Saviolo’s main English competitor, remarked
the project’s difficulty by foregrounding motion: “The mind of man a greedie
hunter after truth, finding the seeming truth but chaunging, not alwayes one,
but alwayes diverse, forsakes the supposed, to find out the assured certaintie:
and searching every where save where it should, meetes with all save what it
would.”22 No Socrates, Silver nonetheless shares a certain skepticism with the
ancient philosopher.
More confidently than Silver, Saviolo pursues his inquiry in keen prose
carefully tied to illustrations. The combatants appear on a grid that suggests
geometric attention to their motion. The diagram, like the words in a dialog,
seems to stabilize motion and permit thoughtful evaluation. In this manner,
Saviolo scrutinizes the “cut.” An obviously dramatic maneuver, the cut adds a
thrilling sound to motion in ways that modern directors of action films take
for granted. An audience can easily appreciate a cut, and an opponent must
respect the obvious wound. Such satisfactions, however, cannot be the test of a
movement. In order to grasp this argument, the student will want to make the
motion answerable, fixing it in some manner, questioning it, and responding
to it. Saviolo does precisely this when he outlines the cut in a mathematical
diagram.23 With the aid of his illustration, the author explains the move’s limited
effectiveness, numbering positions so as to better fix the represented motion. In
the end, he concludes that the cut may satisfy the passions, but it will not win
the combat.
With this lesson and many others like it, Saviolo returns to his primary theme,
warning his reader about motion inspired by “e-motion.” Indeed, everything in
the treatise aims at distancing the pupil from his passions. Master and pupil sit
on a riverbank. Urging calm attention, this sage spokesman takes advantage of
the stillness to advocate deliberate attention to speed and slowness. Not unlike
Socrates, Vincent encourages his young pupil to “expounde questions.”24
For some time now, scholars have recognized that Shakespeare and his
contemporaries were reading these manuals. Indeed, as Joan Ozark Holmer
explains, Saviolo’s “articulation of the ethic informing the truly honorable duello
. . . significantly illuminate[s] the tragic complexity of the fatal duels in Romeo
and Juliet.”25 What has not been fully appreciated is the way the manuals’
emphasis on Platonic dialectic informs the practice of questioning at the heart
of Shakespeare’s great love story. Depending on the drama’s inquisitive tradition,

Shakespeare could center his love story on scenes of combat in order to expound
questions about motion because he knew that his principal players were capable
swordsmen.
Juliet wants to know what is in a name. Shakespeare, in writing Romeo
and Juliet, might well have answered, motion. We know that “Romeo” suggests
the wandering pilgrim; but long before Shakespeare, Plato emphasized the
physics of such a name. In the Cratylus, Socrates muses about the letter “r,”
suggesting that the great “imposer of names” used the letter “because, as I
imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest
in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express
motion . . . . “26 No mere allusion, the name Romeo demands that players agitate
their tongues so as to play a part in the main character’s motion. Moreover, the
rough “r” of Elizabethan speech would have heightened this effect. There is,
after all, no rest in Romeo, and so it makes sense that his cherished friend is
named Mercutio. As we have already noted, the Greeks thought of any change
as motion. Mercutio embodies that sense of the word as he restlessly engages
his friend’s sphere of activity, even threatening to displace Romeo as the play’s
real interest.
All of this activity takes shape in the streets of Verona, where the play’s initial
questioning turns on the nobility of moving versus standing. Standing, it turns
out, is a kind of obsession in this play: the words “stand” and “stands” occur
some 30 times. Throughout the drama, the words signal a nexus of male identity
in combat, sexual arousal, and simple motionlessness. Sampson and Gregory
quickly announce the theme:
Gregory: I strike quickly, being mov’d.

Sampson: A dog of the house of Montague moves me.
Gregory: To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand; therefore, if
thou art mov’d, thou run’st away.
Sampson: A dog of that house shall move me to stand!
(1.1.6–11)
With breathtaking alacrity, Shakespeare initiates his tale of “star-cross’d love”

with a dialog devoted to motion. Gregory puts his faith in speed, and does not
doubt that he can be moved to anger. Yet he willingly abandons this formulation
in order to sport with Samson’s expression of resolution. Does motion or fixity
define the valiant man? More clown than philosopher, Sampson chooses to stand
even as he boasts of his desire for maidenheads:
Sampson: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis known I
am a pretty piece of flesh.

Gregory: ’Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou hadst been poor-
John. Draw thy tool, here comes [two] of the house of Montagues.
(1.1.28–32)
That all this talk of motion evolves inevitably into talk of manhood may seem
forced to a modern audience, and the playing of this translation on the stage can
easily elide the way that Gregory baits Samson through these stages of “thought.”
A pitiful imitation of Socrates, Gregory adopts that old Platonic device of the
dialog, but his instruction ends in an ambiguous validation of “standing.” Because
of the way it merges with male sexuality, this “proof ” becomes an integral part of
the play’s deadly orchestrations.
Of course the real assay of this discourse in Romeo and Juliet (as in Saviolo’s
treatise) will demand “swords and bucklers” (1.1.1SD). For this reason, Samson’s
battle cry deserves attention: “Draw, if you be men. Gregory, remember thy
washing blow” (1.1.62–63). Primed by his partner, Samson draws his “tool,”
confident that he can determine his manhood by doing so. The caesura
concretizes the character’s recognition that his manhood is linked to “washing
blows” and other sorts of codified motion.
Such is the world inhabited by Romeo, Tybalt, and Mercutio, the main
interlocutors of the play. Extensions of Samson and Gregory, these young
men confound all attempts to tutor them. When Mercutio rhapsodizes of
Queen Mab, Romeo tries in vain to lead him home (1.4.95). For his part,
Capulet fruitlessly tries to teach Tybalt about hospitality (1.5.76–81).
Benvolio fails to lead Mercutio out of the hot day (3.1.1). This list goes on
and on, leaving Shakespeare’s audience with real doubts about the possibility
of successful pedagogy and utter suspicion of all attempts to make motion
answerable.
At the play’s beginning, Romeo and the Friar seem to embody the old
Platonic model as they discuss Romeo’s new love on a “grey-ey’d morn” (2.3.1).
Romeo propounds his notions with an “early tongue” (32). In this pastoral
setting, the counselor challenges his young pupil’s passion with an energy worthy
of Socrates and Saviolo. Adopting the language of fencing that already permeates
the play, the Friar expresses a certain self-confidence in his analytical abilities:
“then here I hit it right— / Our Romeo hath not been in bed to-night” (41–42).
In early modern England, the study of motion seems to hinge on being able
to “hit it right.” Having done so, the Friar presses on: “And art thou chang’d?
Pronounce this sentence then: / Women may fall, when there’s no strength in
men” (2.3.79–80). Galvanized by the sudden appearance of Romeo’s change, the
teacher wants to make the motion answerable. He seizes on the passion with
a question followed by a caesura, indicating the instructor’s cogitation before
he attempts to fix the phenomena with a legalistic phrase: “Pronounce this

sentence.” As in Saviolo’s dialog, this pastoral pedagogy ends up being about

“strength in men.”
As it did in Plato’s dialog, the scene also takes shape through the old tension
between youth and experience as the pupil attempts to come to terms with
motion: “O let us hence, I stand on sudden haste” (2.3.93). Romeo here casts
himself in a comic version of the manly debate between Gregory and Samson.
Shakespeare’s audience would have understood what Romeo meant, but many
probably laughed at the callow bawdy and the embedded contradiction. Literally,
Romeo insists on haste, but his “standing” would also suggest an erection and/or
a kind of standstill that frustrates haste. The typical pupil, Romeo’s passion will
frustrate his execution.
And what of the Friar? His wisdom fits neatly into the second line of a
couplet: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast” (2.3.94). In his own
imperfect way, more Heraclitus than Socrates, Friar Lawrence tries to respond
to this turmoil by attending to the question of speed. He urges slowness, and it
remains his constant focus. A little later in the play, he insists on the due and
proper speed: “Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (2.5.15). To be sure, the
play’s critics have been divided over how they view the Friar’s sagacity, but I
think Socrates provides the perfect measure for his advice. Instead of knowledge,
the Friar deals in perception; and this focus has the ring of common sense even
though it lacks knowledge. It is worth noting that praise for Friar Lawrence’s
mental faculties comes from the Nurse (3.3.160).
In the end, the Friar is so fearful of speed that he orchestrates standstill. When
faced with Romeo’s murder of Tybalt, he counsels waiting so “we can find a time”
(3.3.150). (One could contextualize the Friar’s taste for slowness by pointing
out that the fencing community endorsed it with its formal requirements for a
duel alla stoccata.) Sizing up the lover’s situation, he concludes, “here stands all
your state” (3.3.166). How appropriate then that his plan for peace involves a
vial of “distilling liquor” that will leave Juliet fixed, in a state like death (4.1.95).
Frightened by motion, the Friar’s passion for fixity seems to poison the whole
play. When Paris and Romeo each arrive at the Capulet tomb, they tell their
men to “stand” aloof (5.3.1; 5.3.26), and the two lovers destroy each other. How
ironic that the Friar, having discovered the carnage, misreads the motionless
forms and abandons the sleeping Juliet. The Friar’s absurd reason flows through
a single line: “Come go, good Juliet, I dare no longer stay” (5.3.159). Unable to
make motion answerable, the counselor is reduced to “Come go.” At the play’s
end, he reckons his own part in the action with these words: “here I stand both
to impeach and purge / Myself ” (5.3.226–227).
At the other end of the spectrum, Tybalt buzzes about the stage, all motion
and little scrutiny. Saviolo might have invoked Tybalt as the perfect illustration
of the fighter doomed by his own passions. When Benvolio would part the
contestants in the play’s first scene, Tybalt cries, “What, drawn and talk of

peace?” (1.1.66–67). The very presence of the sword and buckler in his culture
seems to truncate all dialog. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Capulet’s
ball, when the host must rage in order to get his attention: “What, goodman
boy? I say he shall, go to! / Am I the master here or you? Go to!” (1.5.77–78).
In a culture of combat that revered the role of master, Tybalt has no time for
authority. When he announces that he goes “to speak to them” at the beginning
of 3.1, we know that he really seeks what Mercutio offers, namely “a word and
a blow” (3.1.40). The inherently bad pupil explains that, for this, “You shall find
me apt enough” (3.1.41).
Mercutio, by contrast, has more of the philosopher in him, and this aspect
takes shape in terms of fencing. Unafraid of motion, he can, nonetheless, step
back and observe. In ways no other character in the play does, Mercutio recollects
knowledge; he understands numbers and technical terms. As the Queen Mab
speech brilliantly shows, he has the capacity to reflect on the nature of motion
and Shakespeare indulges him with impressive set speeches: “Sometime she
driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, / and then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, /
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades” (1.4.82–84). Whatever we make of
Queen Mab, we may admit that she instantiates, for Mercutio, a deadly dreaming
realm of perception where passion leads men to their doom. If the soldier gives
into passion, we may lay the blame on Queen Mab. Mercutio’s auditors cannot
follow such a poetical lesson. “Peace,” Romeo pleads, “peace, Mercutio, peace! /
Thou talk’st of nothing” (1.4.95–96). We may hear in this complaint (and not
for the only time in the play) something of Theaetetus: “Really, I am not sure,
Socrates. I cannot even make out about you, whether you are stating this as
something you believe or merely putting me to the test.” Whereas Romeo and
Tybalt embody motion, Mercutio puts motion to the test, but his pupils always
fumble over the examination.
Nowhere are Mercutio’s aspirations on this score more apparent than in 2.4.
The scene opens with Benvolio and Mercutio discussing the whereabouts of
Romeo, but it turns quickly into a fencing lesson. Mercutio expands on his theme
with Tybalt as his subject: “He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance,
and proportion; he rests his minim rests, one, two and the third in your bosom:
the very butcher of a silk button, a duellist, a duellist; a gentleman of the very first
house, of the first and second cause. Ah, the immortal passado, the punto reverso,
the hay” (2.4.20–26). Mercutio offers a complex lesson here, laden with technical
vocabulary, real and invented. His reference to “the very first house” identifies
Tybalt with both a family and a school of fencing. As though he were consulting
Saviolo, Mercutio sets forth the terms that always organized a critique of fencing,
namely time, distance, and proportion.27 Meanwhile, words such as “passado,”
“punto reverso,” and “hay” give the instructor the opportunity to demonstrate each
technique, animating the pictures Saviolo made popular. Mercutio even coins
the term “duellist,” a feat that suggests the teacher’s original mind. Yet for all of

this learning and bravado, Mercutio frames his lesson in the most thoughtful
of ways by returning to the Platonic concern “with due occasion, due time, due
performance.”28 For Plato, a life lived among perceptions would have to aim for
the “right” time, occasion, etc. Mercutio notes (rather enviously, I think) that
Tybalt embodies this attention, and so finds his point “in your bosom.” In ways
a modern audience will find difficult to follow in performance, Mercutio aims
to dazzle his auditor with a discourse as applicable to life as it is to fencing. A
veritable Theaetetus, Benvolio tries to follow this brilliant account. He says, “The
what?” (2.4.27). A better teacher would listen to his pupil’s question, perhaps
pause to recollect the matter and begin anew. Mercutio merely presses on in his
pedagogical fury, halting only when he sees Romeo approach.
At this point, Mercutio spies a more intriguing pupil and commences
a history lesson: “Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench . . . Dido a dowdy,
Cleopatra a gipsy . . . ” (39–41). When Romeo attempts to make an apology for
having missed his friends the night before, noting that “in such a case as mine
a man may strain courtesy,” Mercutio diagnoses Romeo’s strain: “That’s as much
as to say, such a case as yours constrains a man to bow in the hams” (50–51,
52–53). Mercutio believes that Romeo has so indulged in amorous motions
that he can no longer perform the simple courtesy of a bow. Romeo catches
on, and Mercutio declares, “Thou hast most kindly hit it” (55). In ways that
Benvolio cannot manage, Romeo proceeds to take up this challenge; and the
two exchange verbal hits until Mercutio cries, “Come between us, good Benvolio,
my wits faints” (67–68). Romeo, for his part, demands more intense motion:
“Switch and spurs, switch and spurs—or I’ll cry a match” (69–70). Brighter than
Benvolio, Romeo knows how to play, but he lacks a certain capacity for reflection.
Mercutio, by contrast, has the prescience to embrace motion and draw away in
the same instant. “Nay,” he chides Romeo, “if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I
have done; for thou hast more of the wild goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure,
I have in my whole five” (71–74). In this lively exchange, we come to understand
Mercutio’s aspirations. Like the Friar, Mercutio wants to be a kind of pedagogue.
At the same time, he envies Tybalt’s passion and remains too interested in the
competition to drive his point home. Mercutio wants to know if he has won the
verbal duel: “Was I with you there for the goose?” (74). Like the Friar, Mercutio
fails. Romeo never learns his lesson.
In fact, Mercutio’s insights into motion were probably lost on the audience
members as well. As Adolph L. Soens remarked some time ago, Mercutio, who
seems to fight by the Italian book after the English habit, identifies Tybalt with
the “Spanish book of fence as mannered and artificial as that book of poetics
by which Romeo makes love and sonnets.”29 Soens argues convincingly that
Shakespeare’s audience would have wanted to dislike Tybalt’s brave manner even
as they respected his technical expertise (Soens, p. 125). What fascinates me about
this set of identifications is less their relative accuracy than their effectiveness in

(apparently) fixing motion in ethnic stereotypes for the Elizabethan audience.

Silver announces this combative agenda in his treatise when he complains that
Englishmen “have lusted like men sicke of a strange ague, after the strange vices
and devises of Italian, French, and Spanish Fencers . . . . 30
To his credit, Soens avoids this trap and offers a stunning description of
motion that I quote at length in order to suggest a more formalistic appreciation
for the way motion matters to Mercutio’s death. At the beginning of 3.1,
Shakespeare envisions a hot street that ensures motion. Soens explains:
The efficient and popular Italian fencing of Mercutio contrasts in

posture and motion, as well as implications with the formal, deadly,
and pedantic Spanish fencing of Princox (I.v.84) Tybalt. Mercutio
and Tybalt circle each other, Tybalt upright, his arm outstretched,
rapier and shoulder in a line, trying to keep his point in Mercutio’s
face; Mercutio, crouched in stoccata, holds his rapier low, by his right
knee, cocked back for a thrust. Both extend their daggers toward the
opponent to parry thrusts or to beat aside a threatening rapier in
preparation for a thrust.
Their motions contrast as effectively, though not so absolutely, as their postures.

Tybalt dances to and fro, attempting to evade his opponent, to catch him off
balance and to gain angular advantage, while Mercutio moves with wider
steps (and both move a great deal) and rushes in a series of tangents to the
circle whose radius is Tybalt’s outstretched rapier and sword-arm. Mercutio,
in other words, rushes rapidly in and out of distance, hoping to catch Tybalt
unprepared, and to throw a thrust from stoccata or imbroccata (in which the
sword is held, knuckles up, over the head) while Tybalt is both off balance and
within distance. Both parry with the dagger as a rule, although stop thrusts
combined with parries can be found in both the Italian and Spanish manuals.
The difference in styles suggests the mechanics of Mercutio’s death. Mercutio
takes his fatal thrust, not by accident, but in a situation where the advantage is
all with the Spanish style . . . (Soens, p. 126).
In ways that no other scholar has done for this scene, Soens helps us to grasp
Mercutio’s death as a matter of contrasting motions. For Soens, this difference is
the point: Romeo’s intervention puts Mercutio’s fighting style at a disadvantage.
More compelling still is Romeo’s well-meaning yet clumsy attempt to bring
all this complex motion to a standstill in the name of “reason” (3.1.62, 70). In
Platonic terms, reason would be precisely what these men need, but Romeo is
talking about “reason” colloquially as “cause,” specifically his marriage to Juliet
(Holmer, p. 182). Romeo wants to stop the motion, but lacks the reason to do so.
For Holmer, this confrontation recalls Saviolo’s condemnation of ill-considered
quarrels spurred on by fury (Holmer, pp. 181–85).

Just as important, I contend, is Saviolo’s pragmatic recognition that some of

the most compromised of motions, say combats between friends and kin, do not
permit analysis. For the teacher who longs for truth and justice in quarreling,
certain situations nonetheless demand an end to thought. In a description that
seems to anticipate the conflict in Romeo and Juliet, Saviolo urges his pupil to
abandon reflection:
consider that he which challengeth him, dooth not require to fight

with him as a freend, but as an enemye, and that he is not to think any
otherwise of his minde but as full of rancour and malice towards him:
wherefore when you see one with weapons in his hand that will needs
fight with you, although hee were your freend or kinseman, take him for
an enemy . . . . 31
Saviolo’s account neatly exposes Romeo’s error. Faced with such a predicament,
Romeo appeals to the “minde” and encourages Tybalt and Mercutio “to think any
otherwise,” contrary to Saviolo’s advice. As Holmer has noted (Holmer, p. 174),
Mercutio’s dying words come straight from Saviolo: “They have made worms’
meat of me” (3.1.107). Only when it is too late does Romeo grasp at the master’s
injunction: “take him for an enemy.”
Even as Shakespeare offers his audience a veritable laboratory of fencing
mechanics and the geometric spectacle of Mercutio’s death, the playwright
spins out a mechanics of catastrophe that cannot satisfy the rational mind.
Romeo’s teacher sends “a friar with speed,” but the messenger arrives too
late (4.1.123). Romeo chooses “quick” drugs that enable him to die before
Friar Lawrence arrives and Juliet awakes. A moment too late, Friar Lawrence
exclaims, “how oft tonight / Have my old feet stumbled at graves!” (5.3.121–
122). In time to see that the “lady stirs,” the counselor determines he can
“no longer stay” (5.3.147, 59). If we step back from this action, I think we
can describe this early tragedy anew: Shakespeare has created a work that
teases us with the possibility of making motion answerable. Who can watch
such motions and not demand an inquiry? Yet with Mercutio dead, who will
expound the questions?
For centuries, audiences have been mesmerized by the character that inspired
Coleridge to write the following encomium:
O! how shall I describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of

youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and
prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she
knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in
the triumph of its smoothness! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and
procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of

its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to
be interested in them . . . . 32
Generations of readers have agreed with this appraisal, but what we have failed to
appreciate is the pedagogical (and therefore interrogative) motive behind all this
“exquisite ebullience.” When Plato bequeathed his brilliant dialogs to posterity,
he left behind more than questioning: the philosopher left us with the idea of
the brilliant teacher whose radiance would always authenticate the asking. This
is precisely the role Socrates gives to himself in the Theaetetus: “And the highest
point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a
young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth” (Thea,
150c). For a dramatist like Shakespeare, the old conversation about motion must
have held all sorts of attractions, but the implications for character must have
been tantalizing. Aspiring to both embody motion and test it, Mercutio longs to
be the young man’s guide: he is the obvious product of Shakespeare’s musing over
motion, on the page, on the stage. Although his lessons never approach the rigor
of Socrates, his “wit ever wakeful” energizes audiences with ambitions worthy
of the ancient Greeks. Were we able to make motion answerable, we would be
very close to the origins of life itself. Mercutio aspires in this direction. Perhaps
Romeo and Juliet feels so profound because we experience this aspiration and
mourn its failure.
Notes
1. George Silver, Paradoxes of Defence (London, 1599), A3r, v.
2. The author would like to thank Jose Ramón Díaz-Fernández and Peter S.
Donaldson for organizing A Boundless Sea: Shakespeare’s Mediterranean on Film at
the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia, Spain, where the initial ver-
sion of this essay was presented. And special thanks to my colleague in philosophy
Alan Hart for his wise reading of the work in progress.
3. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1954), p. 312.
4. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978), p. 6.
5. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, p. 21.
6. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed.,
ed. G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 2.2.43.
7. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 2.
8. Plato, Theaetetus, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 156a; hereafter
abbreviated Thea.
9. Heraclitus, The Presocratics, ed. Philip Wheelwright (New York: Odyssey
Press, 1966), p. 71.
10. Heraclitus, The Presocratics, p. 70.
11. Protagoras, The Presocratics, p. 239.

12. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 65–84.
13. On this fundamental distinction between perception and knowledge, see
Gail J. Fine, “Knowledge and LOGOS in the Theaetetus,” Philosophical Review 88
(1979): 366–97.
14. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), p. 129.
15. Paul F. Grendler, “Printing and Censorship,” The Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, p. 42.
16. Sears Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1995), p. xiii.
17. Melissa Lane, Plato’s Progeny (London: Duckworth, 2001), p. 9.
18. J. D. Aylward, The English Master of Arms (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1956), pp. 17–31.
19. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 4.
20. Vincentio Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice (London, 1595), 14r.
21. Giacomo Grassi, DiGrassi His True Arte of Defence, trans. Thomas Church-
yard (London, 1594), A2r.
22. Silver, Paradoxes of Defence, A3v.
23. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, p. 58.
24. Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice, B4v.
25. Joan Ozark Holmer, “‘Draw, if you be Men’: Saviolo’s Significance for
Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 163; hereafter abbreviated
Holmer.
26. Plato, Cratylus, 426 d,e.
27. On Mercutio’s “debt” to Saviolo, see Holmer, p. 173.
28. Plato, Statesman, 284e.
29. Adolph L. Soens, “Tybalt’s Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 121, 123–25; hereafter abbreviated Soens.
30. Silver, Paradoxes of Defence, A4v.
31. Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice, E2r,v. On Saviolo’s recommendation
not to part combatants, see Holmer, p. 183.
32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate
(London: Penguin, 1992), p. 515.
QQQ

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Acknowledgments
q
Twentieth Century
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1906 (London, Murray, 1906).
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1943), 228–254.
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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 117–139. © 1951 by
University of Chicago Press.
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Quarterly 11, no. 1 (winter 1960): 3–11. © 1960 by Folger Shakespeare
Library.
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(New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 72–90. © 1962 by Norman N. Holland.
Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
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Carpet (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970), pp. 84–92. © 1970 by Francis
Fergusson. Reprinted by permission.
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20 (1970): 391–402. © 1970 Oxford University Press. Reproduced by per-
mission of Oxford University Press.
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(Washington, D.C.: Consortium Press, 1973), pp. 90–112. © 1973 by James
H. Seward. Reprinted by permission.
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Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 15–33.
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Interpretations) (New York, Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 1-8.
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(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 56–75.
© 1991 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of
Cambridge University Press.
329

330 Acknowledgments
Maynard Mack, “The Ambiguities of Romeo and Juliet,” from Everybody’s

Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies (Lincoln, Nebr., and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 69–90. © 1993 by Maynard Mack.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.
Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” from Romeo and Juliet (Bloom’s Guides), (New
York, Chelsea House, 1996), pp. 1-3.
Twenty-first Century
John Russell Brown, “Romeo and Juliet: An Innovative Tragedy,” from
Shakespeare: The Tragedies (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 76–98. © 2000
by John Russell Brown. Reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Reprinted with the permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Index
q
Abram, 5 Benvolio, 5–6, 169

Accident, 153, 203–204, 207, 268 character of, 34
Action Goddard on, 161–162
dramatic, 106–107 Johnson on, 47
unity of, 52, 61 Biography, of Shakespeare, 1–3
Alexander, Peter, 1 Birth, of Shakespeare, 1
Alliteration, 139 Blazon, 287
Altman, Joel B., 312 Bloom, Harold, xi, 132, 254–255,
Antitheses, 180–181, 261 290–292
Apothecary, 29–31, 207 Boas, Frederick S., 51, 53, 115–128
Appearance, versus reality, 178 Book references, 130, 176, 178,
Aristocracy, 131 187–188
Aristotle, 203 Bremond, Abbé, 143, 144
Artificiality, 183, 188 British theaters, 39
As You Like It, 107 Brooke, Arthur, 37–38, 41–42, 85,
Atmosphere, 86–87, 115, 117, 209, 108–109, 111, 116–117, 205, 251–
214–215 252, 275–276, 303–304
Auden, W. H., 178 Brown, John Russell, 293, 294–312
Aylward, J. D., 314 Burbage, James, 2
Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 68,
Balcony scene, 8–9, 111, 222–227, 83
229–232
Balthasar, 5, 13, 14, 30 Capulet-Montague feud. See
Bawdy humor, 157, 182, 227–229, Montague-Capulet feud
240 Chapman, George, 266
Beauty Character configuration, 197
destruction of, 221–222 Charles II, 39
images of, 58–59, 70 Charlton, H. B., 214
of Juliet, 230–232, 236 Chikamatsu, 252
“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” Chivalry, 71
(Ransom), 140–142 Chorus, 5, 206, 222, 254
331

332 Index
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52, 61–63, Density, lack of, 201–202

222, 322–323 Dialogue, 293, 296–302
Comedy, 130, 131, 179, 254, 259–261, Dibdin, Charles, 46, 48–50
274–275, 294–295 Digby, Kenelm, 271
Comedy of Errors, A, 106 Divine justice, 151
Communication, faulty, 28–30, 126, Doran, Madeleine, 312
203–204, 219 Dove, 18
Condell, Henry, 3 Dowden, Edward, 51, 52–53,
Conflict, role of, in drama, 104 83–100
Conquest of Granada, The (Dryden), Drama, 101–107, 165
40, 43 Dramatic structure, 180–181, 308–
Consecrate, 140 312, 312
Contrasts, 190–199, 261, 285 Dreams, 89, 129, 158, 182, 249–250
Conventions Drummond, William, 143
Elizabethan, 190, 222, 225, 244 Dryden, John, 40, 43, 45, 143
love, 243–244 Dualities, 190–199, 258–259
violation of, 175–176
County Paris. See Paris Eastman, Max, 144
Couplets, 242 Education, of Shakespeare, 1
Courtly love, 211–212, 243–244, Edward, Richard, 184
244–245 Eliot, T. S., 147–148, 253
Cromwell, Oliver, 39 Elizabethan conventions, 190, 222,
Cultural studies, 132 225, 244
Cupid, 243, 245, 247 Elliptical poetry, 145–146, 148–149
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 168
Dante, 151, 167, 244, 251 Enclosure symbolism, 282–283
da Porta, Luigi, 37, 79, 82, 116, 205 Epic poetry, 102–104
Darkness imagery, 180, 192–194, 249, Epithalamion, 211, 265–266
265 Eros, 243, 245, 247
Date of play, 115–116 Evil, potential for, 24
Daysong, 211–212 Eyes, 190
Death
contrasted with life, 194–195 False loves, 7
foreshadowing of, 28 Falstaff, 155–156
of Juliet, 14, 80, 127, 173, 184 Family feuds, 62, 180, 252–253, 258
love and, 281–283 Fate, 126, 127, 152–153, 166, 187,
of Mercutio, 94, 114, 165–166, 214, 207, 252, 265, 270–271, 293, 302–
216, 246, 289–290, 307, 321 305
of Paris, 126 Fear, 129, 174
of Romeo, 14, 126–127, 172–173 Feelings, transitions of, 74
of Tybalt, 167, 169–170 Female coquetry, 278
de la Mare, Walter, 129, 132–133 Feminist criticism, 132

Index 333
Fencing, 293–294, 314–315, 317, Greek mythology, 25–26

319–320 Greene, Robert, 1
Fergusson, Francis, 130, 205–212 Gregory, 5–6, 278, 316–317
Figurative language, 77, 79 Grendler, Paul F., 314
Figures of speech, 199 Grief, 138, 140–142, 184, 274–275
First Folio, 3
Fletcher, George, 100n20 Hamlet, 52, 59, 85–86
Floral imagery, 265, 267 Hamlet, compared with Romeo, 59,
Foreshadowing, 230 86
Formalism, 286 Hand symbolism, 262–264
Forster, Leonard, 261 Happy endings, 174
Free will, 127, 187, 271, 293, 302–305 Harting, James, 18
Freytag, Gustav, 108 Haste, 25–26, 28, 30, 237–238, 267–
Friar Laurence, 9–10, 12–14 268, 318
Boas on, 121–122 Hate, 113, 186–187, 191, 206, 258,
character of, 33 287–288
contrasted with the nurse, 156–157, Hathaway, Anne, 1
196 Hazlitt, William, 52, 55–61
Dowden on, 96–97 Heat, 86–87, 110–111, 117
Frye on, 252 Helena, 91–92
Goddard on, 173–174 Helios, 25
Holland on, 194 Hemings, John, 3
Levin on, 182 Heroic figures, 103, 104, 268
McAlindon on, 258–259 History and Fall of Caius Marius
Palmer on, 318 (Otway), 39–40, 43–44
plan of, 26–28 Holland, Norman N., 130,
Seward on, 232–233 186–204
Snyder on, 217–220 Holmer, Joan Ozark, 315
spiritual themes and, 22–24 “Horatio Ode” (Marvell), 148
Frye, Northrop, 131, 214, 239–254 Human nature, 45, 121
Garden scenes, 59 Imagery, 66, 77–78, 120, 223, 264, 267

Generational theme, 154–155, 182, darkness, 180, 192–194, 249, 265
205, 208 grave, 282–283
Genre, 131 light, 180, 192–194, 249, 265
Genre conversion, 130, 212–221 Imagination, 76–77, 78–79, 81
Globe Theater, 2 Imagists, 143, 144
Goddard, Harold C., 129, 152–175, Impatience, 25–26, 28, 30, 237–238,
291 267, 268
Good, potential for, 24 Impurity, 136–137
Grassi, Giacomo, 315 Infatuation, 222, 227, 228
Grave imagery, 282–283 Innocence, 285

334 Index
Inquiry, 312 Key passages, 17–31

Intensity, lack of, 201–202 King’s Men, 2
Irony, 141, 150–151, 198, 248, 253,
260 Lady Capulet, 7, 72–73, 92
Irrelevance, principle of, 219 Boas on, 119
Italy, 86, 115, 117 character of, 34
Frye on, 242
Jameson, Anna, 51, 52, 63–83 Goddard on, 169–170
Jayne, Sears, 314 Mack on, 281–282
Johnson, Samuel, 45–46, 46–48, ten Brink on, 113
222 Lady Macbeth, 92
Jonson, Ben, 3, 143, 231 Lady Montague, 6, 34, 241
Joyce, James, 200 Lammas Eve, 18
Juliet, 7 Lane, Melissa, 314
beauty of, 70, 236 Laws, 213
Bloom on, xi, 132, 255, 292 La Zaïre (Voltaire), 46
Boas on, 119–120, 125–126 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 45, 46
character of, 33 Letters, 189–190
childhood of, 242 Levin, Harry, 129–130, 175–186
death of, 14, 80, 127, 173, 184 Life-death contrast, 194–195
Dowden on, 53, 90–93, 93–95 Life, progression of, 57–58
feigned death of, 13, 93–94, 126 Light imagery, 180, 192–194, 249,
Goddard on, 171–172 265
impatience of, 25–26 London, 2
Jameson on, 52, 64–81 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1–2
Johnson on, 47 Lost love, 139
language of, 176–177, 178, 183, Love
188, 248, 297–301 conventions, 243–244
love for Romeo by, 26, 28, 64–81, courtly, 211–212, 243–244
229–231 death and, 281–283, 284–285
poetry of, 159 Elizabethan conventions of, 190,
proposed marriage of, to Paris, 222, 225, 244
11–12, 125, 218, 279 hate and, 191, 196, 206, 287–288
purity of, 124 Juliet’s, 26, 28, 64–81, 229–231
simplicity of, 66–67 as literary convention, 19
soliloquy of, 175–177 lost, 139
ten Brink on, 112 Mercutio on idealized, 19–22
transformation of, 125, 171–172, as religion, 247, 261–262
269, 276–277 romantic vs. physical, 190–191,
Juliet’s nurse. See Nurse 197–198, 225–227, 278
Justice, human vs. divine, 151 of Romeo for Juliet, 59–60, 71–72,
Juxtapositions, 191–192 89–90, 119, 177, 223

Index 335
of Romeo for Rosaline, 6, 62–63, Dryden on, 40, 45

71, 88–89, 112, 118, 176, 222– fight between Tybalt and, 10–11,
223, 227–228, 244 163–167
transcendent, 22–24, 51, 54, 154– Goddard on, 155, 157–159, 161–
155, 268–269 162, 165–166
transformative power of, 112, Holland on, 196
276–277 on idealized love, 19–22
types of, 186 Johnson on, 45, 48
violence and, 129, 130, 153, 163– Levin on, 182
168, 186–187 Mack on, 280
youthful, 48–49, 52, 55–58, 210– motion and, 319–323
211 Palmer on, 319–323
Love’s Labour’s Lost, 106, 178 Queen Mab and, 18, 19–22, 123,
Lucrece, 102 129, 136, 158–160, 249–250, 280
Lyricism, 188–189, 261, 264 ten Brink on, 113, 114
Tybalt and, 160–164
Macbeth, 92, 200, 219–220 Warren on, 136–137
Mack, Maynard, 131, 273–290 Meres, Francis, 294
Male aggression, 278 Metapmorphoses (Ovid), 252
Male friendship, 245–246 Milton, John, 103
Marlowe, Christopher, 266 Moderation, 96–97
Marriage Mollycoddle, 163
courtly love and, 243–244 Momento mori, 24
subject of Juliet’s, 17–19 Montague-Capulet feud, 5–6, 14–15,
Marvell, Andrew, 148 160, 165–166, 214, 240, 252–253,
Masque, 21, 175–176 258
McAlindon, Thomas, 131, 256–273 Moon, 223–224
Medwall, Henry, 312 Moore, George, 143, 144
Melancholy, 144 Moral values, 226–227, 232–233,
Men, Shakespeare’s, 91 236–237
Merchant of Venice, The, 115, 167 Motion, 313–323
Mercutio, 8 Much Ado about Nothing, 252
bawdiness of, 157, 182, 227–229 Muller, Herbert, 150, 151–152
Bloom on, 132, 291–292 Music, 184–185, 202
Boas on, 122–123
Brown on, 305–306 Names, 189, 316
character of, 34 Nature
Coleridge on, 63 dual aspect of, 24, 258–259
contrasted with Romeo, 280 human passion and, 87
death of, 94, 114, 165–166, 214, in poetry, 135–136, 138–139
216, 246, 289–290, 307, 321 New historicism, 132
Dowden on, 94 Night, 87, 111, 117, 249–250

336 Index
Nurse, 7 death of, 126

Boas on, 119, 125 Dowden on, 95–96
Brown on, 306, 307–308 Levin on, 177–178
character of, 33 marriage of Juliet to, 218, 279
Coleridge on, 63 marriage to, 125
compared with Falstaff, 155–156 Parody, 248–249
contrasted with the friar, 156–157, Passion, 58, 66, 85, 87, 124, 205, 224–
196 225, 226, 236, 253, 276
de la Mare on, 129, 132–133 Pasternak, Boris, 179
Dowden on, 93 Paynter, William, 108
Frye on, 241–242, 250–251 Pepys, Samuel, 39, 42
Goddard on, 155–157 Pestilence, 174, 204
Jameson on, 73 Petrarch, 19, 244
Johnson on, 46, 48 Petrarchan tradition, 3, 211, 261,
Levin on, 182 278–279, 288
Mack on, 279–280 Phaeton, 25–26, 267
persona of, 17–19 Physical love, 190–191, 197–198, 225
Seward on, 234–236 Plato, 293, 313–314, 316, 320, 323
Snyder on, 217–218, 219–220 Plot construction, 106–108
ten Brink on, 113 Plot summary, 5–15
Poe, Edgar Allen, 143–144
Old Capulet, 6–7, 11–12, 92 Poems, 133–134
Boas on, 125 Poetic structure, 149
character of, 34 Poetry, 221
Frye on, 243 drama and, 165
Jameson on, 73 elliptical, 145–146, 148–149
ten Brink on, 113 epic, 102–104
Old Montague, 6, 34 of Juliet, 159
Ophelia, 86 prose elements in, 145–146
Oppositions, 190–199, 216–217, 261, pure and impure, 134–152
270, 285 Polarity, 183, 285
Othello, 220, 250, 253, 272 Political plot, 53, 117–118, 131,
Otway, Thomas, 39–40, 43–44 239–240
Ovid, 25–26, 252 Pope, Alexander, 45
Oxymorons, 179, 192, 249, 261, 269 Portia, 65, 66, 72, 76, 91, 97, 154
Pottle, Frederick, 145–146, 148
Painter, William, 37, 116 Predestination, 121–122, 127, 187,
Palmer, Daryl W., 293–294, 312–324 271
Paradise Lost (Milton), 103 Presentiments, 125, 217
Paradox, 261 Prince Escalus, 6, 14–15, 34, 216, 241
Paris, 6–7, 11–12, 14, 18–19, 179 Private-public contradictions, 180, 282
character of, 33–34 Prologue, 5

Index 337
Prose elements, in poetry, 145–146 Jameson on, 71–72

Prospero, 271 language of, 120, 179, 183, 188,
Puns, 189, 248–249, 261, 262 227, 297–301
Pure poetry, 134–152 love for Juliet by, 59–60, 71–72,
Puritanism, 2, 39 89–90, 119, 177, 223
Purity, 136–137 love for Rosaline by, 6, 62–63, 71,
88–89, 112, 118, 176, 222–223,
Queen Mab, 8, 19–22, 123, 129, 136, 227–228, 244
158–160, 182, 196, 249–250, 280, Mercutio-Tybalt fight scene and,
294, 306–307 160–168
Seward on, 130–131, 223–227
Ransom, John Crowe, 140–142 ten Brink on, 112, 114
Realism, 138 transformation of, 112, 172–173,
Reality, versus appearances, 178 247–248, 269–270, 277–278
Reconciliation, 174, 208, 253, 269 Tybalt and, 162–163
Reduplication, 181–182, 183 Rosaline, 6, 10, 62–63, 71, 88–89, 112,
Religion 118, 176, 196, 227–228, 244, 278,
Juliet’s abandonment by, 174 288
love as, 247, 261–262 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 81
Religious imagery, 223 Rowe, Nicholas, 45
Restoration, 39
Rhyme, 188 Salernitano, Masuccio, 37
Rhythm of play, 208–209 Sampson, 5–6, 278, 316–317
Richard III, 256–257, 291 Saviolo, Vincentio, 314–315, 322
Romantic love, 190–191, 197, 278 Schiller, Friedrich, 68–69
Romantic tragedy, 179, 275–276 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 51–52,
Romeo 53–55, 86
apothecary and, 29–31 Self-consciousness, 89–90, 91, 183
banishment of, 11 Setting, 86–87, 115, 206, 209–210,
Bloom on, 292 214, 257–258
Boas on, 118–119, 120–121, 124 Seward, James H., 130–131, 221–239
capacity for love in, 130–131 Shakespeare, John (father), 1
character of, 33 Shakespeare, William
compared with Hamlet, 59, 86 biography of, 1–3
contrasted with Mercutio, 280 sources used by, 37–38, 41–42, 106,
death of, 14, 126–127, 172–173 108–109, 116–117, 205, 251–252,
Dowden on, 53, 88–90, 92, 94–96 275–276
failure of, 168 ten Brink on, 101–114
Goddard on, 164–168, 168–171, Shelley, Percy, 135, 143, 144
172–173 Sidney, Sir Philip, 143
growth of, 94–95 Silver, George, 315
inconstancy of, 269–270 Snyder, Susan, 130, 212–221

338 Index
Social context, 305–308 Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,

Soens, Adolph L., 320–321 The (Brooke), 41–42, 116–117, 205,
Sonnets, 3, 102, 188–189, 295–298 275–276
Speculum Mundi (Swan), 42 Tragic effect, 203
Spiritual themes, 23–24 Tragic flaws, 154
Staging, 184 Transcendent love, 22–24, 51, 54,
Star-crossed lovers, 152–154, 171, 154–155, 268–269
187, 252, 283 Transitions, 121
Stauffer, Donald, 223 Triumph, 269
Steevens, George, 45 Two Gentleman of Verona, 179,
Stock responses, 199–201 246
Structure, 308–312 Tybalt, 6, 8
Sublimity, 143 Boas on, 118, 123
Suicide, 246–247, 248 character of, 34
Summer heat, 86–87, 110–111, 117 death of, 167
Sun, 25–26, 249, 265 fight between Mercutio and,
Swan, John, 38, 42 10–11, 163–167
Symmetry, 180–181, 286 Frye on, 250
Goddard on, 160–164
ten Brink, Bernhard, 51, 53, 101–114 Mercutio and, 160–164
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 135 Palmer on, 318–319
Theaetetus (Plato), 313–314, 323 reaction to death of, 169–170
Thekla, 68–69 Romeo and, 162–163
Themes, 130, 153 Snyder on, 215
generations, 154–155, 182, 205, ten Brink on, 113–114
208
love and violence, 153 Ulysses, 151
time, 264–268 Ulysses ( Joyce), 200
Theobald, Lewis, 45 Unconscious mind, 129
Time, 25–26, 87, 213 Unity
inconsistencies in, 208–209 of action, 52, 61
pace of, 216–217, 237, 285 impulse toward, 257
passage of, 57–58 of tone, 201
theme of, 264–268
in tragedies, 218–219 Venus and Adonis, 102
Titus Andronicus, 256–257, 291 Verona, 86–87, 115, 206, 209–210,
Tomb, 282–283 214, 257–258
Tone, unity of, 201 Villains, 250
Tragedy, 83–85, 97, 130, 131 Violence, 129, 130, 153, 163–168,
romantic, 179, 275–276 186–187, 267, 284–285
transformation into, 212–221 Virtue, 24

Index 339
Vocabulary, poetic, 144–145 Women

Voltaire, 46 nature of Shakespeare’s, 91–92
Petrarchan image of, 287–288
Wallace, John, 39 Wordsworth, William, 57, 168
Wallenstein (Schiller), 68–69 Worldliness, 285
Warren, Robert Penn, 129,
133–152 Young-old duality, 196, 205
White, Richard Grant, 98n1 Youthful love, 48–49, 52, 55–58,
Wisdom, 318 210–211

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Criticism Through the Ages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

t Romeo and Juliet in the Eighteenth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

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t Romeo and Juliet in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

t Romeo and Juliet in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

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1973—James H. Seward. “The Height,” from

t Romeo and Juliet in the Twenty-first Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

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Juliet, though she is early in Shakespeare’s career, is a superb creation, outshin-

Rom. O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

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William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564

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Romeo insists on being a torchbearer, claiming that he is too lovesick to dance.

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O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

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healing herbs and reveals a wealth of knowledge of the medicinal properties of

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Monday! ha! Well, We’nesday is too soon,

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See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

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Act I, iii, 1–6

This is our first introduction to Juliet’s nurse, a presence to be reckoned with—

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Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

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And more inconstant than the wind, who woos

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With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.

Within the infant rind of this weak flower

This passage, in which Friar Laurence descants on philosophical matters,

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Most important, however, is Friar Laurence’s “sermon” on virtue, which we