Missing and Mending: Romeo and Juliet at Play in the Romance Chronotope

Author(s): G. G. Heyworth
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (2000), pp. 5-20
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3509238
Accessed: 05-12-2018 16:03 UTC

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 Missing and Mending:
Romeo and Juliet at Play in
the Romance Chronotope
G. G. HEYWORTH
Princeton University

Assume for a moment that Romeo and Juliet is not about sta
feuding families, but more profoundly about the generic ins
that afflicts everyone and everything to do with romance,
characters. Poetically and emotionally, temporal insufficien
for romance as a genre, a quality that brings it into close r
tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet succeeds as a romance because it confirms the besetting,
archetypal anxiety of all lovers, that they will not be able to transform the
accident of a single meeting into the necessity of a life together, one moment
into an eternity. And yet the play's success as a tragedy depends upon
preventing the lovers' desired synchronicity from enduring in life, a generic
countermovement to love's dilation of the moment. The interference of
romantic and tragic rhythms, the mutual dependence of temporal modes i
tragic and romance plots, is perhaps the most important poetic issue at sta
in Romeo and Juliet, and one to which Shakespeare was alive. In adapting h
most proximate source, Arthur Brooke's Tragicall Histotye ofRomeus and Jul
(1562), Shakespeare telescopes the chronology of the story from rough
nine months to four days, Thursday to Sunday. Then, as if in a conscio
attempt to fit too much into too little, to force a tragic outcome, the prolog
hurries the events once more, recasting the question of story-time as
dramatic problem,
The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which but their children's end nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (Prologue, 1. 9)1

Sudden angst and unjustified urgency is the mood the Chorus seems to wan
to foist upon us. The fictional journey we are about to embark upon is

Romeo and Juliet, ed. by Blakemore Evans, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridg
Cambridge University Press, 1984). All subsequent quotations from the play will be from this edition

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6 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

'fearful passage', made all the more so by the scant two hours allotted its
course. Is that enough time, we ask, to see the story through to its end?
The answer, of course, is 'no'. Doubtless Shakespeare knew that two
hours, like the lovers' abbreviated four days, is inadequate and would force
the cast to step up what Granville-Barker calls the play's 'quickening
temper',2 even to the point of hurrying lines past an audience struggling to
keep pace with the plot. Indeed, the Chorus anticipates the likelihood of
lines' going unheard, an important motive that strangely has been over-
looked. To counter the 'quickening temper' it incites, the Chorus first begs
the audience's patience: 'if you with patient ears attend'. Then, following the
aural image, it puns on the word 'here', 'What here ['heare' Q ] shall miss,
our toil shall strive to mend', promising to recapture the missing gist of the
story with acting ('our toil') as supplement to dialogue. The prologue's final
couplet is the key to understanding what is going on temporally and spatially
in the rest of the play. Missing and mending is not only the major task of the
plot (lovers' assignations missed, misunderstandings and feuds mended) but
a strategy of dramatic composition, one that acknowledges the insufficiency
of the two-hour playing time and seeks to mend it by stretching the plastic
unity of time and place.
At the risk of subsidizing too heavily the significance of the homonymic
connection between 'here' as location and 'hear' as audition, I would like to
suggest that this pun stands at the threshold to a poetics of romance
mistiming and misplacement. In theatre, hearing or being here establishes a
character's presence or absence. For the most part, Romeo and Juliet are not
here and choose not to hear; for the bulk of the play they are, in the eyes of
their families, missing, an absence which generates the frequent calls of
'where' and returns of 'here'. What follows is an elaborate game of hide and
seek, of watching and calling and missing, part Narcissus and Echo, part
Pyramus and Thisbe in inspiration and all transacted against the chaotic,
foreshortened timeframe of the Phaethon story. My aim, in this essay, is
threefold: first to trace the Ovidian chronology of Romeo and Juliet in terms of
the Phaethon paradigm; next to listen to the lovers 'tear the cave where Echo
lies' as Juliet says, to hear the narcissistic wordplay that measures out the
space in which tragic love abides; and finally to understand Shakespearean
romance as a game turned serious.

Julia Kristeva has remarked upon two symptoms of altered time in Romeo and
Juliet. First is its foreshortenedness, a 'compression of time caused by the
imminence of death'. The second may be called a dramatic asynchronicity
in which the 'rhythms of meetings, developments and mischances' result
from an 'incompatibility between the amorous instant and temporal

2 Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947),
p. 305?

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 G. G. HEYWORTH 7

succession'.3 Bakhtin arrives at a similar conclusion for romance as a whole.

He proposes the term 'chronotope', literally 'time-place', to refer to the
spatio-temporal framework in which romance characters interact, a frame-
work signalled by 'a logic of random contingency, which is to say, chance
simultaneity (meetings) and chance rupture (non-meetings), that is a logic of
random disjunctions in time'.4 Shakespeare's Verona transacts its business
in the rhythms and disjunctions of a romance chronotope and yet syncopates
crucially into tragic timing as well.
'Tragedy', said Aristotle, 'endeavours to keep so far as possible within a
single circuit of the sun' (Poetics, I449b I3- I4). A friendlier model to
Shakespeare's sensibilities is the temporal distortion in Ovid's Phaethon
story in the Metamorphoses.5 The young Phaethon is allowed by his father
Phoebus to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, marking one day. The
chariot soon careers out of control, wreaking worldwide havoc. Though
Ovid's myth opens to spatio-temporal order: Phoebus's attendants, Day,
Month, Year, Century, and the Hours stand about his throne at equal
distances ('spatiis equalibus'), Phaethon's unruly transit soon disrupts that
necessary distance both spatially and temporally. The sun passes scorchingly
close to earth causing the measured passage of hour and season to warp in
slingshot orbit. In his prologue, Shakespeare must certainly have considered
the conjunction of Aristotle's generic sun with Ovid's cosmological version.
Both solar models are present in Shakespeare's concept of generic timing.
In Romeo and Juliet, this hybrid solar motif measures dramatic time
calibrated to the eccentric rhythm of romantic and tragic anxiety. In the
aftermath of the swordplay of Act I, Scene I, Lady Montague asks Benvolio
worriedly where Romeo is. Benvolio replies that he saw him, 'an hour before
the worshipped sun | Peered forth the golden window of the east'
(I. I. 19-IO). From that moment on, 'the fearful passage of [the lovers']
death-marked love' promised in the prologue follows the path blazed
originally by Phaethon's fearful transit. Each mention of time finds the lovers
slightly out of synchronization: Romeo is first spotted an hour before the
rising hour of dawn, then, greeted by Benvolio's 'Good morrow cousin'
several hours later, he responds, as if in his own continuum,
ROMEO Is the day so young?
BENVOLIO But new struck nine.
ROMEO Ay me, sad hours seem long.
Was that my father that went hence so fast?
BENVOLIO It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?

3 Tales of Love, trans. by L. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.
4 The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University
1981), p. 92.
5 Petrarch's image of Time guided in the chariot of the sun in Triumphus Temporis, 1. 46, was influential
in Renaissance poetics. Panofsky argues the importance of Phaethon's chariot to Renaissance
iconography, citing the work of Nicholas Poussin, in Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 93.

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8 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

ROMEO Not having that, which having, makes them short.

BENVOLIO In love?
ROMEO Out -
BENVOLIO Of love?
(I. I. I5I)

Of time, rather. The dilation Romeo experiences is seconded more

succinctly by Juliet's 'in a minute, there are many days' (III. 5. 45). Slow time
moving within an artificially fast frame is at once the motor force behind
Romeo and Juliet's experience of love and the most serious impediment to
its realization.
As the play progresses, its chronology becomes more anxious and more
pronouncedly Ovidian, especially after the lovers meet and look ahead to
the difficulty of future meetings across the barricades of parental oppro-
brium. The wall-divided love of Pyramus and Thisbe which culminates
famously in mistimed tragedy finds close parallel in the difficult love of
Romeo and Juliet whose houses are divided by walls of familial antipathy.
Bakhtin's 'logic of random contingency', of meetings and non-meetings,
incubates into the play's defining obsession, emerging eventually as the fear
that 'one day, one hour, even one minute earlier or later have everywhere a
decisive and fatal significance' (p. 94). Meeting places the lovers at risk of
fatal timing. Thus, when Romeo and Juliet arrange that he will meet the
Nurse at nine on the morning of their marriage (11. 2. I67-69), sunrise
breaks over Friar Lawrence with an ominous charioteering metaphor of
calamity narrowly averted:
The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Check'ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels.
(I- 3. I)
The spectre of Phaethon is disastrously attendant upon the day's nuptials.
As Juliet marks time from nine till the Nurse's return at twelve, the sun's
laboured climb parallels her perception of agonizing slowness, thefestina lente
of anticipated reunion. As Jonathan Bate aptly remarks, 'from this point on,
its [the sun's] motion - and with it that of the play- can only be downward
like Phaethon's'.6 Indeed, Friar Lawrence warns Romeo, 'violent delights
have violent ends' (II. 6. 9), a fate linked intimately with the problem of
asynchronicity, as he says 'too swift arrives as tardy as too slow' (1. 15).
Taken in tandem, these last two phrases express the governing paradox of
the play: how the generic movement of the plot, romance to tragedy, violent
delight to violent end, correlates to the perceived flow of time, too slow
(romance) and too swift (tragedy). Juliet herself seems to recognize this
paradox at the moment she learns Romeo is a Montague. She too augurs

6 Ovid and Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 77.

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 G. G. HEYWORTH 9

tragedy, 'Too early seen unknown and known t

Benvolio's 'Supper is done, and we shall come too lat
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 closed in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
(I. 4. Io6)

The chiasmus of Juliet's too-early-and-too-late conceit expresses in micro-

cosm the temporal structure of the play as a whole. If marriage marks the
highpoint of the romantic plot, one moment of coincidence, then death
represents the crux of the tragic plot and renewed synchronicity. In between,
however, time is one beat out of step to fatal effect. The sun metaphor is
inextricably connected through Ovid's Phaethon to the movement from
romance to tragedy.7
But there is more to say about the poetic reading Shakespeare makes of
Ovid and the complex relationship between tragic and romantic time
signatures in Romeo and Juliet. After the synchronicity of marriage at the
midpoint of the play, time again staggers and becomes oppressive, separating
the lovers and distinguishing the plot-types. A temporal chiasmus occurs.
Formerly time ran retrograde to love's consummation; now it hurries the
lovers against their will toward a determinate end. In the rhetoric of the
latter scenes is a perceptible resistance to closure. When Capulet arranges
Juliet's second marriage to Paris we sense in the old man's disquietude a
shift into a fast-forward, tragic chronotope that runs against his unconscious
will:
CAPULET Acquaint her here of my son Paris' love,
And bid her- mark you me? - on Wednesday next
But soft, what day is this?
PARIS Monday, my lord.
CAPULET -Monday ha, ha! Well, Wednesday
A 'Thursday let it be - a 'Thursday, tell he
She shall be married to this noble earl.
Will you be ready? do you like this haste?
(III. 4. I5)

That 'the time is very short', as Friar Lawrence declares significantly in the
first line of Act iv, manifests itself in the stuttering anacoluthons that
interrupt Capulet's thought and speech. The proximity of a definite date, of
finite time, lends the language of the later acts a frantic, importunate quality.
The Phaethon story engages the question of romance continuity versus
tragic closure on another front. Montague and Capulet end the play hand in
7 See the introduction in Romeo and Juliet, ed. by Brian Gibbons (London: Routledge, I980) p. 58;
Bate, p. I77; J. C. Gray, 'Some Renaissance Notions of Love, Time and Death', Dalhousie Review, 48
(1968), p. 64.

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IO 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

hand. At once a travesty of their children's marriage ceremony and an echo

of the 'pilgrim's hands' clasped at the lovers' first encounter, the final scene
returns us full circle to the feud of the prologue, putting an end at last to 'the
continuance of their parent's rage' (1. o). Peaceful closure may have
replaced the continuance of strife, but it is bought with the sacrifice of a
greater, flesh-and-blood continuity. Romeo and Juliet are only children.
With their death the direct line of each family comes to a dead end: both
fathers will die without a successor. Romeo and Juliet ends, then, with an
image of derelict fatherhood mended in intent by peace, but not restored to
the natural cycle of generation.
Besides its allegory of temporal chaos, Phaethon is also a story of a father
and son. In Romeo and Juliet, the movement of up and down, beginning and
end, sunrise and sunset traces the play's parental argument. We first see
Montague's fatherly concern when he notes the irony of the rising of the sun
as compared to his son's setting retreat into darkness,
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest east begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son
(I. I. 125)

After a brief appearance in Act III, his next and final entrance is accompanied
by the same inversion of up and down, sunrise and sunset as in Act I. The
old man is guided to his son's corpse by the Prince: 'Come, Montague, for
thou art early up I To see thy son and heir now early down' (v. 3. 208-09).
In retrospect, the imagery of an inverted solar cycle stands out as a signal
of the dysfunction inherent in Montague and Romeo's relationship.
Montague is a concerned parent to be sure, but one delinquent in counsel
and control. Fatherhood, like all else in this Ovidian chronotope, is either
mistimed or absent. As if in retribution for their negligence, both fathers
(Montague and then Capulet) make a final gesture at conciliation: they
promise to erect golden statues of each child. Where Ovid commemorates
Phaethon's death with a marble tomb inscribed with an epitaph, Shake-
speare marks their fall with the gaud and irony of competition over a pair of
gold statues.
The Phaethon paradigm opens a chronotopic rift in Romeo and Juliet whose
tragic consequences Shakespeare seeks to contain and mend with closing
promises of romance renewal in despite of tragedy. From this perspective,
the play's ending appears as a concession to generic exigency. The problem
of dramatic asynchronicity and its resolution, however, is not limited to the
generic architecture of beginning and end, and the figures of sunrise and
sunset. The rift is tectonic, penetrating deep into the linguistic structures that
underpin the play's temporal scaffolding, the lines, words, and syllables
which juggle meaning in dialogue.

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 G. G. HEYWORTH II

Staggered time disrupts logical sequences, impedin

fundamental ability to know things either firsthand or
messages and to see clues. Linguistic disjunction, th
opportunities for missed or misheard meaning from th
reaches its incoherent crux in Act II, Scene 2, the sce
'Gallop apace you fiery-footed steeds' soliloquy and the
which the flow of time is most drastically distended. Str
the Nurse's dire message, Juliet sees her doom reduced
vowels' and 'brief sounds'. In her frantic lament we aga
short time within a fast frame whose effect is now
Timing here distorts the significance of sounds and sig
them. Juliet asks a simple question, 'Hath Romeo sl
demands a monosyllabic answer, ay or no, too short for
Say thou but 'ay',
And that bare vowel 'I' shall poison more
Than the darting eye of cockatrice.
I am not I, if there be such an 'ay',
Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answer 'ay'.
If he be slain, say 'ay', or if not, 'no':
Brief sounds determine my weal or woe.8
(1. 45)

The tortured coupling of vowels each charged with a different denotation (I

(self), ay (yes), and eye(sight)) forms a parcel of associations too densely
packed for any playgoer to unravel fully in the few moments in which it is
delivered. But perhaps this is the effect Shakespeare wants to illustrate:
another case of 'What here/hear shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend'.
Juliet's all too brief sounds demonstrate in the audience's too brief
interpretive time the hermeneutic insufficiency she herself is experiencing.
This passage has provoked vexed criticism.9 It may be viewed as a fugue
of jumbled media whose inwrought motif counterpoints sights (eye) with
sounds (I/ay), what is seen with what is articulated. Earlier Juliet,
commenting to Romeo on the celerity of their engagement, inaugurates this
pattern of disjunction in the memorable imagery of lightning 'which doth
cease to be | Ere one can say "It lightens"' (II. 2. 119-20). Lightning is a
deceptive kind of illumination not merely because it is 'too sudden' but
because the thunder does not accompany the flash, the sound the sight.
Later, with the Nurse, the pace of the action is no longer too sudden but too
slow; the decalage between what is seen and heard, however, still obtains. At

8 Q2 substitutes 'I' for 'ay' in lines 45, 48, and 49; see Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of
Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 36, n.
9 Dr Johnson's comment on Shakespeare's penchant for the pun, that it is 'the fatal Cleopatra for
which [Shakespeare] lost the world and was content to lose it', has attracted more credence for its wit
than its substance deserves. Blakemore Evans expresses Johnsonian prejudice in his note on this passage
(p. 32). See also Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. by Robert Sandler (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1986), p. 26; Kristeva, p. 215.

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12 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

this moment in the play what the Nurse has seen does not synchronize with
what she says, causing Juliet to infer mistakenly that Romeo is dead. Her
answer does not conform to the required ay or no, but it does respond to
Juliet's theme of eye and I/ay, visual and verbal signals:
I saw the wound, I saw it with mine eyes
(God save the mark!), here on his manly breast:
A piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse,
Pale, pale as ashes, all bedaubed in blood,
All in gore blood;
(III. 2. 52)

concluding, 'I sounded at the sight'. What she means is 'I swooned at the
sight' or in Elizabethan English 'swounded'. But Shakespeare's choice of the
variant form 'sounded' is not, I think, without significance. There is a
tradition behind the wordplay which, if we swerve to follow, should lead
back again to Ovid, adding method to Juliet's anguished homophony.
At his most froward, Shakespeare creates fruitful misunderstandings in
the plot by shattering language and then playing with the random shards.
Individual letters, their sounds and shapes become pieces in a pedantic game
of misreading and mishearing exploited to humorous and at times cruel
effect. Juliet's 'I am not I, if there be such an "ay" ', is less a sign of verbal
distress or confusion than an articulation of a deep-rooted ambiguity. 'I am
not I' expresses the lack of equation (I 1 I) between sign and signifier, sight/
sound and meaning, and by extension the radical doubt that lovers, like
letters, can ever successfully couple. Consider Juliet's retort to Romeo at the
balcony,
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say 'Ay';
And I will take thy word; yet if thou swear'st,
Thou may'st prove false: at lovers' perjuries
They say Jove laughs.
(II. 2. 90)

Her linguistic cynicism, Ovidian at heart (she quotes Ars Amatoria, (i, 663:
'Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum'), is justified: 'Ay' is both the assent
that inaugurates the lovers' bond and the sound uttered when it is broken.
But it is more too than a sound of pain. 'Ay' in Romeo and Juliet is
simultaneously the basic syllable of grief and of bitter disillusionment with
language, the brief sound of woe uttered in the face of an irrelative world
where language fails to connect people in time and place.
The misunderstandings that plague Romeo and Juliet grow out of a quibble
over letters and grow into an increasingly desperate discontinuity between
intention and expression, literal and figurative, fact and message. Missing
threatens ultimately to isolate the lovers from each other like Narcissus and
Echo, by disrupting the means by which they synchronize in time and place.
In Romeo and Juliet, the Narcissus and Echo myth acts as a model for a
linguistic game of hide-and-seek gone awry: watching which begets hiding

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 G. G. HEYWORTH I3

which begets calling. Romeo, like Narcissus evading pu

Juliet, like Echo, is the caller; and the families part
callers, watchers and seekers. In the rest of the essay, I
the acoustic and visual elements of this game.

In his classic study of the sociology of games, Johan Huiz

salient characteristics of play, the third of which is its
and space.
Play is distinct from 'ordinary' life both as to locality and duration. This is the third
main characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is 'played out' within
certain limits of time and place. [... ] Play begins, and then at a certain moment it
is 'over'. [...] A closed space is marked out for it, either materially or ideally,
hedged off from the everyday surroundings. Inside this space the play proceeds,
inside it the rules obtain.10

Delimiting play time is the express concern of Romeo and uliet's prologue. It
accomplishes a specific task: to survey the limits of the peculiar ludic
dimension that is drama, and to make the audience aware of the spatio-
temporal rules which govern it. We are compelled to share the angst of
mistiming: missed words, missed meetings, missed meaning, personalizing
the experience of romance by making us enter its chronotope.
Missing is also a consequence of location. Shakespeare's romances go to
great pains to define spaces onstage that are just large enough for characters
to conceal themselves or their words yet small enough for them to spy and
eavesdrop on each other. Effectively, Shakespeare opens a romance niche at
the cusp between the public and the private, a space of uncertain signs rife
with echoes and illusions.
The game of hide-and-seek in Romeo and Juliet needs to define ludic space
onstage, to travel the margins between public and private, and generically to
shift from game to earnest, romance to tragedy. Romeo hides three times in
the play, first as part of his lover's game and then, when hiding turns to
enforced banishment, the lusory version to the tragic, out of mortal jeopardy.
Following Tybalt's death, the Prince decrees new, condign rules to hide-and-
seek: 'Let Romeo hence in haste, I Else, when he is found, that hour is his
last' (inI. i. 185-86). Indeed, the next time Romeo is found is in the tomb;
the game has ended. While the lovers live, and even in death, they try to
enclose themselves in a world remote from public traffic, yet still within a
community. Many of Romeo and Juliet's most important moments occur on
the periphery of public space where the rules of Ovidian-style hide-and-seek
obtain. Shakespeare stakes out those boundaries vocally with calls of 'where'
and answers of 'here' that act like sonar to establish a character's presence
or absence and draw the effective perimeters of hearing and mishearing.

o1 Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, I950), pp. 9, 19. See also Roger Caillois, AMan, Play and Games
(New York: Free Press, I 96I), p. 7.

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I4 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

Earlier, I made the claim that the prologue introduces the potential for
mishearing in the play with a pun on the words 'miss' and 'here' [hear],
linking the act of hearing to the fact of being present, comprehension to
synchronicity in time and place. Now, if a character's mishearing is a
consequence of his not being 'here', then it stands to reason that when he
mishears he is not present. But if he is not present then he could not hear at
all. To mishear, therefore, a character would have to be absent-in-presence,
or present-in-absence. How does Shakespeare convey such in-betweenness
on the stage of Romeo and Juliet? Moreover, if the romance chronotope exists
at the juncture between the private and the public, how does Shakespeare
create a space that qualifies as both? In answering these questions, let us
consider how he correlates space to hearing in the initial group scenes and
compare them to later private scenes.
Following the incivilities of the first scene, Prince Escales addresses the
crowd that has gathered:
Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,
Profaners of this neighbour-stained steel
Will they not hear?
(I. I. 72)

Already the potential for mishearing has been realized. Not that the
Montagues and Capulets cannot hear, but that amidst the crowd of citizens,
the Prince's call is not selective enough for the offenders to know they are
being spoken to. Unheard the first time, the Prince must cultivate an intimate
voice for a public arena, one which singles out a group within the group, or
in actor's parlance, he must learn to project. Once the crowd has dispersed,
the Montagues are left alone on stage to talk among themselves. Brilliantly,
the scene records the movement from public speech to private speech, public
hearing to intimate hearing, leaving us with an incipient sense of the vocal
parameters of the stage. "
Capulet's party, the next group scene, heightens the earlier tension
between private and public by narrowing the stage from street to hall and
making presence and absence an enforcible matter. A feeling of dangerous
play, of boundaries transgressed, now pervades the atmosphere of the hall.
First, the Montagues' uninvited attendance compromises its privacy. And
yet, because it is a masked ball everyone is in a sense absent-in-presence.
Anonymity is the presiding rule of this game, allowing guests to 'hear all, all
see' (I. 2. 30) as Capulet advertises to Paris, and yet not be seen or heard per
se. While the stage may be narrow, the scene, as we begin to learn from the
actors' calls, can be made to seem any size necessary simply by showing the
range at which characters fail to hear each others' voices. Of course, artificial

1 James Calderwood sees a similar spatial distinction in the scene between public and private,
commenting upon 'the two divided spheres of the opening scene, the public quarrel in the streets and
Romeo's private dotage on Rosaline' (Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 197 ), p. I I8).

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 G. G. HEYWORTH
I5

acoustic boundaries are easily intruded upon; overhe

privacy from anywhere on the stage since all voices,
must carry into the audience. Tybalt, listening in o
discovers Romeo by his voice: 'This, by his voice, sho
(I. 5. 53) and communicates his discovery in protected w
On such a stage, privacy is a near impossibility. In the
Benvolio acknowledges explicitly the desire to retreat
urging Mercutio to take his quarrel with Tybalt elsewhe
We talk here in the public haunt of men:
Either withdraw unto some private place,
Or reason coldly of your grievances,
Or else depart; here all eyes gaze on us.
(III. I. 43)
Against this backdrop of paranoid surveillance, Juliet employs two vocative
strategies designed to isolate Romeo and herself from the crowd and to
communicate intimately despite intrusive listeners. At first she assumes an
Ovidian voice, 'tearing the cave where Echo lies', whose brief iterations, like
their namesake's, fail to lure her love closer. When she does manage to
summon Romeo into presence, however, it is with the falconer's voice, a
metaphor which evolves delicately during the course of the first balcony
scene. Here she trains her lover to her timbre,
Hist, Romeo, hist! O for a falc'ner's voice,
To lure this tassel-gentle back again:
Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud,
Else I would tear the cave where Echo lies,
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine
With repetition of my Romeo's name.
(I1. 2. 158)

Her predicament is similar in the private sphere to that of the Prince in the
public. Whereas he must project to be heard by his desired audience, she
must whisper her shouts and communicate a message to one person and one
alone so as to combat the kind of overhearing and vocal detection that
Tybalt practised upon Romeo.
In a chapter entitled 'How to Lewre a Falcon litely manned' in The Book of
Faulconrie (I575), George Turberville describes Juliet's intended method,
'goe further off and lewre hir [... ] using the familiar voyce of the Falconers
as they crie when they lewre' (p. I07). Although the word 'hist' is an
unattested example, it probably belongs to falconry's vocabulary of calls.'2
In the process of becoming the other's bird (Romeo cries: 'I would I were
thy bird' (II. 2. 182)) the lovers are learning not merely to recognize each
other's voices, but to use the method and vocabulary of private speech.
Their vocal imprinting finds perfect expression in the metaphor of hawk-
training. When Romeo cries 'My niesse', a renaissance audience would have
12 Turberville cites 'wo, ho, ho', 'hey lo', and 'hey, gar, gar' as various commands.

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16 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

understood that a niesse is a nestling hawk still in its eyrie and an animal at
the ideal age to be captured and trained, just as the young lovers are training
each other. Some would most likely know, as well, that the first lesson in
falconry is 'To make your Hawke know your voyce', and that such training
requires retreat to a dark, secluded, 'secrete place' exactly like Juliet's
garden.13
As is often the case, Shakespeare's extended metaphor here bears a
marked symmetry to the fine details of the subject being compared. Not
merely are the young lovers like young hawks in training, they employ the
same esoteric calls and occupy the same 'secrete places': the balcony as a
niesse's arboreal perch which the Nurse has already prefigured ('I must [ ... ]
fetch a ladder, by the which your love I Must climb a bird's nest'
(n.. 5. 71-73)), the gloaming seclusion of the garden. Their senses are finely
tuned to an accipitrine world, finding private meaning as does the falcon in
bird calls. For Romeo in the second balcony scene, the voice of the lark,
the falcon's most common prey, bids flight while Juliet's nightingale bids a
falconer's return. Finally, both inhabit a domain whose limits are like the
hawk's. At once prisoners bound first by familial ties and then by mutual
love like the falcon by his gyves, they are yet native to a boundless airy realm
augmented in scope by heightened senses of night vision and hearing.

In the Narcissus tale, Ovid illustrates the idea of language as a spatio-

temporal problem in the frustrated dialogue of nymph and ephebe: a call
followed by an answer which, as an echo, is really not an answer but another
call and so on. Emotionally and physically, Narcissus and Echo never
coincide. While Narcissus is absent in feeling, Echo is absent in body (she
withers away), present everywhere in sound but nowhere in flesh. The
paradox of presence-in-absence is one that Shakespeare signals in Romeo and
Juliet with a kind of ubi est topos.
Both Romeo and Juliet are first introduced in the play on a question of
their locale. Lady Montague asks 'O where is Romeo', and Lady Capulet
'Nurse, where's my daughter? call her forth to me'. Elsewhere, Benvolio and
Mercutio call Romeo without success in the first scene. Romeo's removal in
time to the earliest hours of the morning matches his removal in place to the
covert of the wood and later the garden which in turn matches the locus
amoenus Narcissus enters to separate himself from the other youths. Unlike
Juliet's eventual 'Madam, I am here' (I. 3. 7), Romeo answers 'I am not
here, I This is not Romeo, he's some other where' (I. I. I88-89). At each
remove, Romeo's separateness doubles an Ovidian romance paradigm,
while drawing Juliet away into a shared removedness. The vocative topos
emphasizes not only the angst surrounding the lovers' absence, but their

13 Turberville, p. 143.

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 G. G. HEYWORTH
7

joint isolation, an isolation which becomes a unity in tim

own, private chronotope.
The rest of the play's action can be viewed as a series
the lovers' intimate sphere. There are attempts to enter
one out (Mercutio, Benvolio), and claims to belong w
Nurse). Entry, however, is protected by a system of vo
me', an interjection that gains in significance as the pla
the shibboleth for inclusion in Act I. Mimicking a co
spirit from the realm of lovesickness, Mercutio take
calls to the hidden Romeo leave off:
BENVOLIO He ran this way and leapt this orchard wall.
Call, good Mercutio.
MERCUTIO Nay, I'll conjure too.
Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!
Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh,
Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied;
Cry but 'Ay, me!'
(II. I.5)
Romeo resists Mercutio's conjuration as a trespass on his privacy; for the
same reason Paris will resist Romeo's supposed trespass in the tomb scene:
ROMEO Fly hence and leave me [.. ]
Stay not, be gone; live, and hereafter say,
A madman's mercy bid thee run away.
PARIS I do defy thy conjuration.
(v. 3.60; 65)

Similarly, Juliet awakening in the tomb asks the Friar: 'Where is my lord? I I
do remember well where I should be; I And there I am. Where is my
Romeo?' (v. 3. I48-50). He can do no better than urge her to leave her dead
husband, to which she delivers the mordant rebuke 'Go get thee hence, for I
will not away' (v. 3. I6o). In the romance chronotope, the third wheel or
terzo incomodo as Harry Levin calls him, must remain the odd man out.'4
Mercutio's ineffectual request for an 'Ay, me!' contrasts with Juliet's instant
success when she utters the words a scene later to the hidden Romeo and he
replies: 'She speaks' (ii. 2. 25). Hers is truly the falconer's voice that, upon
pronouncement of the magic syllables, brings her bird from absence-in-
presence into full presence, admitting him to the intimate sphere. He knows
her voice. Indeed, intimacy is the only criterion for admission. Juliet also
rejects both her mother and the nurse's bid for coincidence and re-asserts
instead her own separateness. Thus, the consequence of the vocative topos
for both lovers is the same: isolation from the public traffic of the play, and
in their mutual isolation a shared presence-in-absence, a union in their own
chronotope.

14 See Levin's chapter on 'Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet', in Shakespeare and the Revolution of the
Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

Hide-and-seek in the Ovidian mode is tantamount to a game of exclusion

from and inclusion in a private sphere to which recognition of voice or image
is the entrance ticket. All the more complicated, then, is the predicament of
Narcissus who must recognize himself first before he can admit another into
shared intimacy. As with Narcissus, the ultimate obstacle to Romeo and
Juliet's mutual inclusion is self-recognition, while the danger is the illusion
of recognition. Juliet, when she learns he has killed Tybalt, must overcome
her suspicions that Romeo's beautiful image disguises a mirror reality within:
'Despised substance of divinest show! I Just opposite to what thou justly
seem'st' (III. 2. 77-78). And the affected Romeo of the first act, whom
Coleridge rightly blames for being narcissistically 'in love only with his own
idea',15 does learn selflessness in love, such that he may say to his rival and
mirror image Paris, 'I love thee better than myself' (v. 3. 65).
Narcissus, at the moment of recognition, exclaims 'Iste ego sum' (I am
he). The early Romeo and Juliet refuse self-identity: 'I have lost myself [... ]
This is not Romeo'; 'I am not I'. If Shakespeare's wordplayjustifies indulgent
interpretation, 'Ay, me', the only call that successfully brings the couple
together in space and time, represents their moment of self-knowledge,
translating Narcissus's 'Iste ego sum' into a rough equivalent, 'I, me': a
romance anagnorisis.

'In speech', writes John Hoskins in Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599),
'there is no repetition without importance'.16 Repeated words, he suggests,
amplify in psychological significance as they recur. In truth, however, it
would be fairer to say that repetition is a mode of meaning for the spectator.
Blinkered by proximity or participation, the characters in Romeo and Juliet
find instances of repetition random and incoherent. For Romeo and Juliet
as for Narcissus and Echo, the tragic experience is not edifying. For us,
however, their story has meaning as a poetic unity in the Aristotelian sense:
that is, a completeness defined by the limits of time and place imposed upon
an action. It is meaningful because we watch at a remove from the action,
further even and thus wider in scope than the watchers within the play who
yet manage to glean something from their witness. Two kinds of watching
by two different audiences thus take place in Romeo and Juliet: the intimate
and the critical. The first both invites and inhibits the second. Critical
watching must never give way to action lest the watcher be drawn into the
chronotope and lose sight of the action's broader unity; for to enter the
romance chronotope is to abandon the context of meaning.
The closer the watchers in Romeo and Juliet come to involvement, the more
they defeat each others' purposes. In Act iv, the Friar proposes to Juliet that
while she sleeps out her little death in the tomb, he will join Romeo in
15 Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare, ed. by T. Ashe, (London, 1885), p. 323.
16 John Hoskins, Directionsfor Speech and Style, ed. by H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1935), p. 12.

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 G. G. HEYWORTH
I9

watching her wake (iv. I); in the opposing camp, Lord

his intention to stay awake in order to help Paris with
(Iv. 2). A watched pot never boils, so the saying goes, an
watched lovers can never elope, have sex, and kill the
lying assumption is that just as watching invites action, i
Far from preventing tragedy, however, the Friar's vig
once active and disengaged, compounds it. He is neith
watch well nor near enough to act well: he arrives to
Romeo Juliet's revival and prevent his premature su
soon thereafter to prevent Juliet's return coup. Th
Lawrence tries desperately to hide the evidence by dispo
a sisterhood of nuns' before the Watch comes to wa
Ultimately, the Friar's negligence at watching implicate
not acting.
In the final scene, the various games of hide-and-seek, calling and watching
culminate in an indictment not merely of the Friar but of the feuding families
for the time they have let pass without acting, for their indulgence in
meaningless child's play that has served only to forestall real solutions, for
their inability to draft a language strong enough to bridge the gulf between
them. In relief stands the example of Juliet and Romeo who overcome their
temporal and linguistic disjunction through decisive action. Now, with Friar
Lawrence's trial, Shakespeare recapitulates the sequence of mistimed events
that results in tragedy, outlining for the characters and the audience once
again the defining events of a romance chronotope and the problem of
mistiming and misplacement that characterizes it. Friar Lawrence begins and
ends his defence with an admission of guilt by omission:
I am the greatest, able to do least,
Yet most suspected, as the time andplace
Doth make against me of this direful murder [... ]
and if ought in this
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life
Be sacrificed some hour before his time.
(v. 3. 223; 266; my italics)

The Friar's alibi finds him at the right place but always a moment in retard:
But when I came [to the Capulet's vault], some minute ere the time
Of her awakening, here untimely lay
The noble Paris and true Romeo dead.
(1.257)

The servant Balthasar's alibi, on the other hand, mentions only place, and
his departing right after:
I brought my master news ofJuliet's death,
And then in post he came from Mantua
To this same place.
(1. 272)

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20 'Romeo and Juliet' and Romance Chronotope

Effectively, both witnesses exculpate themselves, 'mend' their complicity, by

arguing that because of mistiming they were and yet were not there, an
argument that summarizes the fundamental tragic paradox of presence in
absence which unites the motifs of watching and hiding, calling and echoing.
Tragedy, indeed all poetic expression, arises out of absence and in
opposition to a presence.'7 There must be an unknown, a missing element
that destabilizes the plot productively, that frustrates meaning, while at the
same time providing an authoritative presence against which the characters
struggle in their attempt to mend it. The time it takes for this cycle to be
completed decides the genre of the work. In epic, with its vast scope and
multiple characters, the completion of this cycle or chronotope is long:
Homer, as Northrop Frye reminds us, called itperiplomenon eniauton and Vergil
labentibus annis.'8 In romance, where the plot depends upon the encounters
of a single couple, the chronotope is short. Ovidian time concentrates the
move from absence to presence into a series of actions and verbal exchanges
between two people, or as Bakhtin says meetings and non-meetings.
Meaning appears abrupt in such an abbreviated timeframe. It is not
insignificant therefore, that Shakespeare accords a two-hour time span to a
romance, rather than say a history; a time span which by most accounts is
wholly insufficient for the play to be performed. Two hours is not a mistake,
I would suggest, but the acknowledgement of a chronotope that is inherently
insufficient for its subject, which must truncate and distort its account for a
quick burn, for who could bear a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet?

17 See Harold Bloom, 'Poetic Crossing: Rhetoric and Psychology', The Georgia Review, 30 (I976),
495-524 (p. 495)-
18 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 318.

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