Theatre Survey 34 (May 1993)

E. PEARLMAN

STAGING ROMEO AND JULIET:

EVIDENCE FROM BROOKE'S ROMEUS

In his first plays, Shakespeare exercised great freedom in devising his

plots. The First Part of King Henry VI, it has been said, "darts about the
period in a bewildering way." It is "not so much a Chronicle play as a
fantasia on historical themes."1 Its two episodic sequels are equally or
perhaps even more loosely plotted, while Richard III picks and chooses
among events that took place in the decade and a half before 1485 and
also seems to incorporate matter from earlier plays (Latin as well as
English). In the The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare began with a
groundwork drawn from Plautus's Mencechmi but added the twin Dromios
as well as some material from the Amphitruo. The Two Gentlemen of
Verona integrates plot elements from a number of sources, including
Montemayor's Diana, the well-circulated story of Titus and Giseppus, and
the myth of Robin Hood. In making The Taming of the Shrew, Shake-
speare combined elements from the oral tradition (the drunken peasant,
the taming) with a literary subplot drawn from George Gascoigne's
Supposes. The ancestry of Titus Andronicus remains mysterious, but the
play certainly employs legendary history (whether derived from an earlier
play or from the popular chapbook tradition) along with elements
borrowed from the classical poets, particularly Ovid.
Yet in the case of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare altered his practice
and did not range freely. Instead, he adhered with genuine fidelity to the
story as he found it in Arthur Brooke's poem olRomeus and Juliet. This
is not to suggest that Shakespeare imitated Brooke slavishly, for his

1
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough. 8 vols.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-1975), 3:25.

22

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 BROOKE'S ROMEUS 23

departures and inventions are manifold. Mercutio, for example, is

developed out of the slightest of hints, while the Nurse and her clownish
servant are almost entirely new. Moreover, while Brooke had told his
story in a mercilessly prolix succession of poulter's measure couplets,
Shakespeare now gave voice to the most various linguistic range of any
play that had yet appeared on the English stage. Colloquial prose,
rhymed and unrhymed blank verse, petrarchanism both sincere and
parodic, stichomythia, epithalamion, aubade, bawdy, song, pun, lament,
soliloquy, epistle, flyting, gnomic 'sentence,' the conceits that clownage
keeps in pay, and even an elegant embedded sonnet are among the many
rhetorical styles that vie for center stage in the course of the two hours'
traffic.
Yet even as he gave full scope to his poetic imagination, Shakespeare
kept an exceedingly close eye on Brooke's Romeus. When, for example,
Brooke reports old Capulet's sorrow at the apparent death of Juliet, he
employs these balanced phrases:

Now is the parentes myrth quite chaunged into mone,

And now to soraw is retornde the joy of every one,
And now the wedding weedes for mourning weedes they chaunge
And Hymene into a Dyrge, alas it seemeth straunge,
In stead of manage gloves, now funerall gloves they h a v e . . . .
(2507-2511)

Writing with Brooke at his elbow, Shakespeare virtually transcribes these

sentiments:

All things that we ordained festiuall

Turn from their office to black Funerall:
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheare to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn himnes to sullen dyrges change . . .

Even Shakespeare's change of "Hymene" to "hymn" (an alteration that

loses the wedding-funeral synoeciosis) is a sign of his close attention, for
Brooke's black-letter line is cramped and easily misread.
In addition to mining Romeus for plot, Shakespeare may have followed
his source closely in details of staging. The recovery of the stage business
employed by the first actors of Shakespeare's plays requires both the
cautious evaluation of the exiguous evidence and a degree of tolerance for
uncertainty and conjecture.
In order to perform a play, Shakespeare and his company must have
invented hundreds of movements, gestures, intonations, and visual details

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 24 THEATRE SURVEY

of which only a scant fraction could possibly be reflected in the printed

texts. The representation of the death at the battle of Towton of the
Lancastrian leader Clifford in 3 Henry VI makes it clear that there were
occasions in which Shakespeare could quarry his sources for such details.
The stage direction in the authoritative folio version reads simply "Enter
Qifford Wounded!' (2.6.1)2 and the dialogue offers no further guide to his
appearance; at the conclusion of his lengthy last speech, Clifford says
only that "The ayre hath got into my deadly Wounds, / And much effuse
of blood, doth make me faint" (27-28). It is dear that Clifford is
wounded and rapidly failing, but from the picture provided by the Folio
there is no way to guess that Shakespeare had given his players specific
instructions about the nature of Clifford's wound.
The unauthorized, reported version of this scene in The Tragedy of
Richard Duke of York contains the pertinent stage direction: "Enter
Qifford wounded, with an arrow in his necke" (C3v).3 The arrow might
be dismissed as mere thespian sensationalism were it not demonstrable
that Shakespeare was following his source very closely. In The Union of
the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies ofLancastre and Yorke, Edward Hall
had written that "the Lord Clifforde, either for heat or payne, putting of
his gorget, sodainly with an arrowe (as some say) without an hedde, was
striken into the throte. . . . "* The arrow in Clifford's neck or throat
(with or without its head) seems to have found its way directly from the
source to the stage without leaving a footprint in either the dialogue or
stage directions of 3 Henry VI. If the record of performance contained in
the True Tragedy had failed to reach print, or if it had perished (as did,
for example, the lost "bad" quarto of Love's Labour's Lost), it would not
be known that Shakespeare had incorporated a detail from Hall's
chronicle into the theatrical design of his play. Because the Folio is mute
on the subject of arrows, it is reasonable to assume that it may also be
mute on other details as well. (Why would not Shakespeare, continuing
to follow Hall, have instructed the actor playing Clifford to appear without

2
Cited from The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton,
1967). line numbers follow A. S. Cairncross' Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1954).
3
Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley:
University of California Press), 1981. The complex relationship between folio 3 Henry VI
and the quarto (properly octavo) True Tragedy is summarized in Stanley Wells and Gary
Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare, a Textual
Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) (henceforth Tex Ox), 197-208.
4
Cairncross, 3 Henry VI, Appendix 1,154.

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 BROOKE'S ROMEUS 25

his armor?) The case of Clifford's arrow allows the inference that there
may be instances in plays other than 3 Henry VI in which specific details
drawn from Shakespeare's sources appeared as part of Elizabethan stage
action.
Romeo and Juliet offers a stereoptic view similar to that provided by
3 Henry VI because of the fortuitous survival of both the authoritative
1599 Q2 as well as the "bad" quarto (Ql) of 1597. It is generally allowed
that Ql's title-page is accurate when it claims to be a record of the play
"As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right
Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his servants."5 Ql therefore "represents,
filtered through the verbal and visual memory of the reporter(s), a
contemporary stage version of the play."6 The more authoritative Q2,
that, it is agreed, was set in large part from Shakespeare's "foul papers"
or holograph, lacks many of the stage directions that appear in the
theatrically derived Ql. These chance records of an actual Elizabethan
performance illuminate the script and render the action vivid and
immediate: "They whisper in [Capulet's] eare" (1.5.121/C4r); "Nurse
offers togpein and tumes againe"; (33.161/G2r); "They all but the Nurse
goe foorth, casting Rosemary on [Juliet] and shutting the Curtens" (4.5.95/
I2v). Some of the many actions mentioned in Ql may be inferred from
the dialogue, but others are not implicit in the script and could not have
been imagined had they not been preserved in the "bad" quarto.
Sometimes Ql's stage directions come as a surprise because they
report actions not hinted at by the spoken dialogue. For example, after
the unfortunate killing of Tybalt, when Romeo has been banished from
Verona and has succumbed to the deepest despair, he cries to Friar
Lawrence

Oh tell me Frier, tell me,

In what vile part of this Anatomie
Doth my name lodge? Tell me that I may sacke
The hatefull mansion. (3.3.104-07)

The friar responds, "Hold thy desperate hand" (108). From this exchange

5
Quotations from Ql and Q2 Romeo and Juliet follow the photographic facsimiles in
Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto. The performance which Q l reports must have taken place
between July 1596 and March 1597 when the company to which Shakespeare belonged was
known as Hunsdon's.
6
Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: University Press, 1984), 207-
8. See also Tex Ox, 288-305.

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 26 THEATRE SURVEY

it can be inferred only that Friar Lawrence hopes to dissuade Romeo

from an act of self-destruction. But after the word "mansion," Ql
interpolates a direction that must reflect theatrical practice: "He offers to
stab himselfe, and Nurse snatches the dagger away" (Gv). Without the aid
of Ql, it would soon be confirmed that Romeo has attempted suicide
(Friar Lawrence reproves him a few lines further on, asking "wilt thou
slay thy selfe?"), but the intervention of the Nurse could not possibly be
guessed. Yet the surprising action reinforces the larger design of the play.
While the Nurse responds to the crisis with instinctive good will, Friar
Lawrence's passivity when swift action is required presages his derelictions
in the last scenes of the play.7
In this instance important information about staging survives, like
Clifford's arrow, only by accident in a reported text. The design of
Juliet's suicide presents a more complex problem of interpretation. Q2
renders the action quite simply. Juliet says "Yea noise? then ile be briefe.
O happy dagger / This is thy sheath, there rust and let me dye" (5.3.
168-69). From Juliet's exceedingly succinct lines it can only be deduced
that she has impulsively stabbed herself. In Ql, the poetry is vitiated but
the action itself recorded correctly.

Iul: I, noise? then must I be resolute.

O happy dagger thou shalt end my feare.
Rest in my bosome, thus I come to thee.
She stabs herselfe andfalies. (K2v)

But dearly Shakespeare had a fuller picture in mind when he composed

the dialogue, because an important detail comes shortly to light. Capulet
exclaims

O wife looke how our daughter bleeds!

This dagger hath mistane, for loe his house
Is emptie on the back of Mountague,
And it misheathd in my daughters bosome. (5.3.202-204)

It now becomes dear that Juliet has stabbed herself with the dagger
(presumably the same dagger that the Nurse seized in the earlier scene)

7
In his Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1980), Brian Gibbons rejects this particular
stage direction, arguing that "this piece of business looks like a gratuitous and distracting
bid on the part of the actor in the unauthorized version to claim extra attention to
h i m s e l f . . . " (33107n). But it is difficult to imagine the actor of Friar Lawrence's part
standing idle while the Nurse usurps his role.

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 BROOKE'S ROMEUS 27

that she has snatched from the scabbard resting on Romeo's back. In this
detail Shakespeare was following Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Julief
very closely. In Brooke, Iuliet hears a "sodayne noyse" (2763) and,
turning to Romeus, "With hasty hand she did draw out the dagger that he
ware" (2772); then, with "her ruthlesse hand through gyrt her valiant
hart" (2789). Just as in the case of Clifford's death in 3 Henry VI,
Shakespeare did not immediately explain that Juliet stabs herself with
Romeo's dagger because he was reproducing exactly what he found in the
poem that lay in front of him.
Shakespeare's reliance on Brooke for such details may appear in other
scenes as well. For example, Shakespeare provides no clue to the proper
performance of the moment in which Juliet finds a cup of poison in dead
Romeo's hand.

O churle, drunke all, and left no friendly drop

To help me after, I will kisse thy lips,
Happlie some poyson yet doth hang on them,
To make me dye with a restorative.
Thy lips are warme. (5.3.163-67)

In the poem that Shakespeare had studied so intently, Iuliet looks on

Romeus's face and weeps, and then "with cruell hand she tare her golden
heares" (2724). In addition, she falls upon Romeus's corpse, "lay long
panting on his face" (2727) and "with sighes, with sobs" (2729) "a
thousand times she kist his mouth as cold as stone, / And it unkist agayne
as oft"(2732). In Shakespeare's version, Juliet's sentences, bare upon the
page, reveal only that she kisses Romeo; her succinct lines may even be
construed to suggest that she conducts herself with a degree of restraint.
Such an inference is incorrect if Shakespeare, following Brooke, had in-
structed the actor playing the part of Juliet to abandon himself to a much
fuller grief.
In the scene in which the Nurse tells Juliet that Romeo has been
banished, the dialogue offers barely a clue to performance. At one point
Juliet tries to restrain her weeping. "Backe foolish teares, backe to your
native spring" (3.2.102), she says, but a few lines further on she can no
longer control her emotions: "wherefore weep I then?" (107). These
sparse hints contrast with the much richer picture that Shakespeare offers
later in the play. When the Nurse goes to Friar Lawrence's cell, she

8
Arthur Brooke, The Tragical! Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1S62), Narrative and
Dramatic Sources 1: 284-363.

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 28 THEATRE SURVEY

recalls Juliet's behavior in colorful detail: Juliet "weeps and weeps, / And
now falls on her bed, and then starts up, / And Tybalt calls, and then on
Romeo cries, / And then downe falls againe" (33.98-101). In Q2, Juliet
certainly calls on both Tybalt and Romeo and also gives vent to tears.
But does she also fall on her bed and rise again (as the Nurse would have
it)? It might be thought that the Nurse invents or embroiders Juliet's
passion were it not the case that Shakespeare seems once again to have
silently incorporated details from his source. Brooke's account of Iuliet's
actions is identical to the Nurse's: "overcharged with wo, / Upon her
stately bed, her painfull parts she threw" (1190-91). (It is known that a
bed was present on stage from a later Ql stage direction: "Shefals upon
her bed within the Curtaines" [Ir]). It is far more likely that the Nurse
reports an action that the audience has just seen with its own eyes and
that also appears in the source than that she invents these credible details.
Inasmuch as the quartos neglect to instruct Juliet to throw herself on the
bed, they might also omit other pieces of theatrical business. According
to Brooke, Iuliet is carried away by an excess of emotion. "How doth she
bathe her brest in teares? what deep sighes doth she fet? / How doth she
tear her heare? her weede how doth she rent?" (1076-77). Cries, sighs,
and tearing of the hair and clothes are not out of keeping with the play's
characteristically heightened emotional display.
Juliet's falling and rising may be compared to the undisciplined
grieving of Romeo. When, in Q2, Romeo learns that he has been
banished, he behaves in what must be described as an infantile manner.
If, says Romeo to the Friar, you could appreciate my grief,

Then mightcst thou speake,

Then mightst thou teare thy hayre,
And fall upon the ground as I do now,
Taking the measure of an unmade grave. (3.3.68-70)

Once again, Shakespeare follows Romeus and Juliet very closely. In

Brooke, Romeus first pulls his "golden lockes" (1291) and then "like a
frantike man, hath tome the garmentes that he ware" (1292). "With his
brest [he] doth beate the troden ground. / He rises eft, and strikes his
head against the wals, / He falleth downe again, and lowde for hasty
death he calls . . . "(1294-96). It seems to be important to the symmetry
of the play that both Juliet and Romeo employ the same physical actions
to express their anguish: sobbing, tearing of the hair and clothes, falling
and rising again. The congruity of the lovers' responses is reinforced by
the Nurse (even though her mode of speech is distractingly bawdy): "O

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 BROOKE'S ROMEUS 29

he is even in my mistresse case, / Just in her case. O wofull simpathy"

(3.3.84-85).
Shakespeare even seems to have borrowed several hints from his
source in the staging of the great orchard scene. Brooke says that Iuliet,
"Impatient of her woe . . . hapt to leane one night / Within her win-
dow"(468-469). He elaborates the picture a few lines further along: "In
windowe on her leaning arme, her weary hed doth rest" (S18). While
neither quarto of Romeo and Juliet prescribes an entrance or attitude, it
is obvious from the dialogue that Juliet is at a casement ("what light
through yonder window breaks" [2.22]) and in a melancholy posture
("See how she leanes her cheeke upon her hand" [24]). Having followed
Brooke so far, did Shakespeare also engage in further borrowing?
Although Shakespeare's Juliet is clearly excited to hear Romeo's voice,
but her dialogue does not describe the gestures in which she might
express her enthusiasm. But Brooke says that when Iuliet "espyde her
love, her hart revived, sprang. / And now for joy she dappes her hands,
which erst for woe she wrang" (469-470). Especially in a play in which so
much importance is attached to the symbolism of hands (e.g. "palme to
palme is holy Palmers kis" [1.5.99]), the progress from hand-wringing to
hand-dapping would be an apt and easily appropriated visual index of the
emotional swing that Juliet experiences.9
When dosely examined, Juliet's response to the news that Romeo has
slam Tybalt becomes even more theatrical than it first appears. Shake-
speare expresses Juliet's agitation through the highly figured speech that
begins "O serpent heart, hid with a flowring face" (3.2.73), proceeds
through a remarkable series of oxymora and condudes, "Was ever booke
containing such vile matter / So fairely bound? o that deceit should
dwell / In such a gorgious Pallace" (82-82). The Nurse then responds

Theres no trust, no faith, no honestie in men,

All periurde, all forsworne, all naught, all dissemblers.
Ah wheres my man? give me some Aqua-vitae:
These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old,
Shame come to Romeo. (3.2.85-90)

9
The notion that Shakespeare was especially attentive to the language of hands in
Romeo and Juliet may be supported by a recently discovered detail. The "Monckton Milnes
Manuscript" includes an early transcript of a few lines of I.v. A side-note to "If I prophane
with my unworthiest hand" reads "taking her by the hand." It is asserted that these lines
"were copied from manuscript rather than printed sources" (Sotheby catalogue for 22 July,
1980, 342).

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 30 THEATRE SURVEY

But just as soon as the Nurse utters these complaints, the tone of the
scene alters. Juliet suddenly changes her mind, backtracks, and repudiates
not only die Nurse but also the harsh criticism of Romeo that she herself
has just uttered:

Blisteid be thy tongue

For such a wish, he was not borne to shame:
Upon his brow shame is asham'd to sit:
For tis a throane where honour may be ctownd
Sole Monarch of the universal earth.
O what a beast was I to chide at him? (90-9S)

What causes Juliet to undergo so precipitous a shift in language and

attitude? Perhaps Shakespeare was following in Brooke's wake more
closely than has been acknowledged. In Romeus and Juliet, when Iuliet
learns the bad news about Romeus she immediately falls into a faint:
"Her limmes she stretched forth, she drew no more her breath, / Who
had been there, might well have seene the signes of present death"
(1161-62). Brooke's Nurse tries a variety of methods to revive her
nurse-child from the "traunce" into which she has fallen; eventually, "a
warm and a holesome juyce she powreth down her throte" (1180). Iuliet
awakens in an altered mood: "Why dost thou trouble me (quoth
she) / Goe hence, and let me dye" (1184,1186).
Shakespeare's Nurse calls for aqua-vita, a restorative. It has been
supposed that she desires the liquor for herself and that "there is a hint
of comedy in [the Nurse's] prompt seizure of legitimate, 'medicinal'
excuses for strong drink."10 But is it not more likely that the Nurse asks
her servant for the water of life because Juliet has collapsed and needs
care, and that aqua-vita is Shakespeare's specification of Brooke's
"holesome juyce?" (The same medicine is called for by the Nurse when
Juliet, having drunk Friar Lawrence's potion, fails to awaken on her
wedding morn.) It is more consistent with the evidence (and much more
charitable) to assume that in both cases the Nurse hopes to revive the
unconscious Juliet than to speculate that she has suddenly taken to drink.
Moreover, Juliet's precipitious shift in rhetorical style and attitude may be
explained by her collapse and revival. There is a parallel in Antony and
Cleopatra when Cleopatra faints at the news of Antony's death. Like
Juliet, she comes to consciousness employing a far simpler language ("No
more but in a Woman, and commanded / By such poore passion, as the

10
Gibbons, Romeo and Juliet, 3.2.88n.

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 BROOKE'S ROMEUS 31

Maid that Milkes / And does the meanest chares" [4.15.5-6]). Cleopatra's
collapse is implicit, but the familiar stage direction (She faints) was added
by Rowe. All the signs that Juliet should lose consciousness (sudden
calm, change in manner of speech, call for restorative drink, precedent in
the source) with the exception of a confirming stage direction are present
in the quartos.
The scene in which Juliet comes to Friar Lawrence's cell to be
married is a particularly accomplished piece of writing. The friar has
some words of wisdom for Romeo that conclude (in Q2), "Therefore love
moderately, long love doth so, / Too swift arrives, as tardie as too slowe"
(2.6.14-15). After the stage direction, "Enter Iuliet," the friar continues:

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.

Iu. Good even to my ghostly confessor. (2.6.16-21)

The contrast between the wise saws uttered before the appearance of
Juliet and the more fanciful poesy that follows suggests that the aged friar
has himself fallen just a little in love with the young lady. Ql, which
garbles the delicate comedy quite atrociously, nevertheless preserves an
intriguing stage direction. In place of Q2's minimal "Enter Iuliet," Ql
offers "Enter Iuliet somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo" (E4r). The
juxtaposition of Friar Lawrence's "too swift" and "too slow" with Juliet's
allegretto tripping across the stage is too artistic to be accidental.
Shakespeare clearly toys with notions of haste and delay and deliberately
contrasts the rapidity of Juliet's entrance to the Friar's counsels of moder-
ation. But what happens after Juliet impetuously rushes into Romeo's
arms? Brooke reports that "As soon as she him spied about his neck she
dung / And by her long and slender arms a great while there she hung."
The "great while" explains the length of the Friar's speech—a speech that
serves primarily to cover the time that elapses during the youthful lovers'
prolonged embrace. It is only after this extended romantic moment that
Juliet at last turns to greet the reverend but empathetic friar. Shake-
speare has exploited Brooke's hint to the full and complemented the

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 32 THEATRE SURVEY

friar's poetry with an appropriate and rather lovely physical action. Here
as elsewhere, the source supplies a hiatus in the printed texts and allows
us to appreciate even more tu\ly Romeo and Juliet's astonishing emotional
range.

E. Pearlman is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at

Denver.

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