Although those of high rank, like royalty, or those who would inherit large fortunes, were married, or at least betrothed, when they were very young to cement alliances between families and countries, an eighteen-year-old woman was still considered young to be married. The best age for a woman to be wed was considered to be in her early twenties. Commoners married at an average age of twenty-two; noblewomen at an average age of about sixteen.
This was because most men weren’t financially in a position to marry till they’d finished their apprenticeship and journeyman years and become a master of their trade, or had inherited family land to support a family — so were usually in their mid-twenties and often older. Women had to be old enough and experienced enough to manage a household.
So why did Shakespeare make his heroine so young? Juliet’s youth meant she had less experience of the world outside her home than an older girl would have had. In Juliet’s day, upper-class girls were kept within the seclusion of their family’s home and under constant supervision until they were old enough to take part in formal social occasions. An older Juliet would have been less impulsive and better able to see other choices she might make, like life after Romeo’s death.
Juliet was an heiress. Her marriage to Paris would have been a strategic alliance, between an aristocratic family (Paris is the Prince’s cousin) and a wealthy house like the Capulets, who presumably were merchants as that was the main source of great wealth at the time. Other wealth came from the land: the nobility owned massive estates, which were worked by tenant farmers who paid rent and a share of the crops they grew to their lord.
In the play, Juliet’s mother asks her merely to consider the marriage to Paris; and her father initially objects because she’s so young. It’s only Juliet’s extreme grief after Tybalt’s death that makes them think she would be happier married. Paris is repeatedly referred to as ‘the young Paris’ so he too would have been younger than most men were at the time of marriage. His genuine grief at Juliet’s death shows he had truly fallen in love with her, or at least with what she looked like, or the wife he imagined she would be.
We’re not told how old Romeo is. At the beginning of the play he declares his love for Rosaline, then changes to Juliet; and his family evidently hadn’t yet made any marriage plans for him. He’s probably not much older than Juliet.
Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy wasn’t just that they were lovers from warring families, but that such a young girl and boy were forced to make desperate decisions for themselves in order to escape a future being decided for them by others.
ELIZABETHAN WEDDINGS
What we consider the traditional form of marriage — the bride in white, the vows at the altar — are relatively recent traditions. In Elizabethan times, a marriage could be far more informal: an agreement between two people, attested to by witnesses, with a separate sanctification by the church. While normally notice had to be given — a ‘crying the banns’ on three consecutive Sundays or ‘holy days’ in the parish church before the wedding on a Sunday, in case of objections — by Shakespeare’s time a ‘special licence’ could be bought that would allow a couple to be married at once, if they also signed and paid for a marriage bond that asserted the marriage was lawful and neither party was married or betrothed to anyone else.
Presumably Romeo paid for a ‘marriage bond’ to marry Juliet. I haven’t included it in the story, as Juliet wouldn’t have known about it. Friar Laurence, however, would have pointed out the need to Romeo and even possibly arranged it.
Shakespeare would have known exactly how quickly — and quietly — a marriage could be arranged. He was married quickly, by marriage bond, to the pregnant and much older Anne Hathaway.
If Juliet had been formally betrothed to Paris, the marriage to Romeo may not have been legal. If the marriage to Romeo hadn’t been consummated, it could have been quickly annulled. Only Friar Laurence could testify that the marriage had taken place. And only Juliet’s nurse could testify that the marriage had been consummated. If Friar Laurence had torn up the marriage papers, there’d have been no proof that Romeo and Juliet were married. If the nurse had lied about the marriage being consummated, then Juliet’s father could have applied for an annulment of her marriage to Romeo and married her to Paris instead. Juliet would have been powerless.
What would have happened then? Paris might not have wanted a bride who’d possibly been ‘deflowered’. But the play makes the point repeatedly that Paris is young and loves Juliet, loves her so much he wants to be in her tomb. I suspect he would still have married her, hoping — expecting — that love would come with marriage and the position she would have enjoyed as his wife.
At some stage, Romeo would have been allowed to return to the city to take up his inheritance. Perhaps the enmity between the Montagues and Capulets would have got worse if Romeo saw his bride married to another. Or perhaps his love for Juliet would have been great enough to heal the rift, even if they were unable to marry each other again.
Perhaps each of them might even have been happy with their different wife or husband and their own children. They might have kept the memory of their teenage love to gaze at in private, and then put away and continue with their fulfilled lives. Happily ever after can happen, even after tragedy, although it didn’t for Juliet and Romeo.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN …
Would Romeo and Juliet have been happy together if they’d lived?
Probably. Even if they’d lived in exile for a short while, both families would have eventually forgiven them. Each family had only the one child.
The Prince, as the Juliet in this book realises, would have rejoiced that the two families were joined and the brawling and warfare had stopped. His city would have become even more prosperous with the alignment of the Capulets and the Montagues.
Romeo would have been an excellent heir for the House of Capulet; in the play, even Lord Capulet states to Tybalt that Romeo was known as a sober, industrious and good lad. The combined Montague/Capulet clan would have become even more wealthy and powerful. Romeo and Juliet had similar backgrounds, wanted similar lives, and would continue to do so.
And they loved each other. Love at first sight exists. You can learn a lot from that first glance at someone: the subconscious recognises signals of a similar background, signs of laughter or kindness, and a hundred other signs that we may not be consciously aware of. We only know that we like, and love. I fell in love with my husband if not at first sight, then at the second, although it took a year before I cautiously accepted that this was, indeed, a love to base a lifetime on.
Love at first sight may not last. But a surprisingly large number of people do, in fact, fall in love pretty much at first sight, even if it is rash to rely on those feelings till you know more. Some people are very good at presenting a false face to the world, and you may mistake them for someone you should love. Others are good at pretending that the person in front of them is the person they want them to be, unable to see who is actually there.
Love can grow slowly, a deepening friendship. And love changes too. The love I felt for my husband a quarter of a century ago isn’t the same as the richer love I feel for him now, though the memory of that first ‘love with wings’ is still part of it.
Romeo and Juliet’s love would have changed, grown richer and more fulfilled, with children and a life together. And, yes, they would have been happy.
WHO WAS FRIAR LAURENCE?
The decades before Shakespeare’s birth had been tumultuous. King Henry VIII declared that England was no longer Roman Catholic and was now a Protestant nation. He closed down the monasteries and convents, and took their land and treasures for himself or those he favoured. His son Edward’s brief reign had also favoured Protestants. Anyone who disagreed was guilty of treason, for the King was head of the Church as well as the country. Traitors were locked in the Tower of London or other prisons, tortured, hanged, beheaded and burned. Henry’s daughter Mary I, whose reign followed Edward’s, was sta
unchly Roman Catholic. Those who had become Protestant during the two previous reigns now became traitors, unless they changed their religion again. Once again the Mass was said in Latin. Those who disagreed with the return to Roman Catholicism were burned at the stake, earning the Queen the name ‘Bloody Mary’.
Shakespeare grew up under the reign of Elizabeth I, who made England Protestant again. Those who remained Roman Catholic were regarded as potential traitors, and it was feared they might try to put the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed, on the throne. Church services were changed to English again, not Latin. Shakespeare’s father was at one time given the job of getting rid of all signs of what the English called ‘Popery’ in the Stratford church, including painting over the murals. But many older people, even if they were nominally members of the Church of England, would have felt comfortable with Roman Catholicism, the religion of their childhood.
England was still in transition from one form of Christianity to another, and I suspect this was the reason Shakespeare carefully didn’t include a dramatisation of the wedding in Romeo and Juliet. His play is neither overtly Catholic nor Protestant. At the time it was being performed, Elizabeth I hadn’t named her heir. While it was likely that King James of Scotland, a Protestant, would become King of England after Queen Elizabeth’s death, Shakespeare would have known all too well that if the next monarch were a Roman Catholic, Protestant words on paper might be enough to have him convicted of treason and executed.
So there is no wedding service in the play, nor even a priest or a vicar. But we do have Friar Laurence. He may be there because the play is ostensibly set in Verona, which was Roman Catholic. But more likely he was one of the friars who took the oath of confirmation for the Church of England. As such, he’d have been allowed to perform weddings as well as keep his old title of ‘friar’.
Juliet goes to confession, but a Protestant in the Elizabethan England of the 1590s would also have gone to confession. The difference between the Protestant and Roman Catholic practice of the time was that, for Protestants, confession was no longer a sacrament. In Shakespeare’s time, the old customs and titles still mingled with the new. But Shakespeare was very careful not to be too specific about exactly which religion his characters followed.
OBSCENITY
Modern audiences don’t see Romeo and Juliet as erotica. The Elizabethan words are often explicitly sexual, but modern readers mostly don’t realise what they refer to. They don’t know how truly bawdy Mercutio’s words are when he says, ‘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.’ Most people probably don’t know what a medlar is, or what the fruit looks like. And I’m not going to enlighten you. You’ll have to find your own medlar tree, and sit under it when the fruit is ripe, and look up at the shape of it, then watch the fruit suddenly fall, to realise quite how rude Mercutio’s speech is.
Romeo and Juliet is full of vulgar puns that modern audiences don’t understand (Mercutio again: ‘… and quivering thigh, and the demesnes that there adjacent lie’), either because the meaning of the words has changed, or because we don’t look for bawdiness in elaborate speech. Shakespeare didn’t just talk about sex; he made it funny. His was a bawdy age, when sex was often joked about. Even Queen Elizabeth I, in her fifties, opened the front of her dress to below her waist before the Spanish ambassador, teasing him that she was ‘hot’.
A sexual joke these days is referred to as a ‘dirty joke’. In Elizabethan times, open discussion of sexual matters was acceptable. Although these days a woman can expose her knees without being thought a loose woman, and advertisers use sex to sell everything from soft drinks to tight jeans, talking about sex is far more taboo today than it was back then.
This book is far less erotic than the play. I wanted it to be about the girl, not sex. Sex has a habit of taking over both books and lives, as it did for Romeo and Juliet. If their passion for each other had been less urgent, they might have lived.
In the play Romeo and Juliet, a thirteen-year-old girl marries and has the physical relationship that comes with marriage. That too is a taboo in our culture. Shakespeare had far more freedom to write about his lovers than I do.
MARIE DE FRANCE
Marie de France was a real person, a writer or singer of tales, some that she may have learned, others that she may have made up or retold in her own words. She lived and sang, or told, her stories in about the twelfth century, but nothing else is known of her; not where she lived nor even her true name. ‘France’ back then may have meant she came from the Île de France, now part of Paris. Or Marie might not have been French at all, but was given that name because she told tales from Brittany and France. Marie was the most common of names back then, and might even have been an alias.
Her stories were often passionate, which made them different from the more common morality tales, in which the more abuse a woman accepted from her husband, the more virtuous she was. Marie’s stories may have given women more interesting roles than did others of her time, but as in the tale of Guigemar, her heroines were still often nameless. As Marie herself still is.
ELIZABETHAN POISONS AND REMEDIES
Do not try the poisons or remedies in this book. Even the rue in Juliet’s poison ‘remedy’ is toxic. The lead-based cosmetics, or the eye drops that made Elizabethan women’s eyes look larger and shine brightly, were often deadly; and the remedies for their poisons were usually based on superstition, not science. Most Elizabethans led short lives. Even their poisons were not reliable: the toxicity and other properties of plants vary according to where and how they were grown, and prepared and stored.
ELIZABETHAN FOOD AND DRINK
For the poor, food was whatever they could scavenge: bread when they could afford it; cheese, if possible; sometimes butter or milk; salt cod or other dried fish; and meat as a luxury. The rural poor ate pottage, which was a thick soup made of grain or dried peas stewed with green vegetables or weeds like nettles.
Fruits and vegetables were only available when in season, and included apples, pears, quinces, medlars, parsnips, turnips, peas, broad beans, celery, skirret, sea kale, radishes, onions, wild garlic and cabbages; nuts like walnuts and chestnuts; and a range of salad greens and edible flowers. Wild foods, like blackberries, burdock, dandelions, bilberries, hazelnuts, sloes, nettles, saltwort, sorrel, edible seaweeds and shellfish, were gathered too. Potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, pumpkins, fat orange carrots and many other fruits and vegetables we now take for granted had not yet been brought to England in Shakespeare’s time. The end of winter and the beginning of spring was ‘the hungry gap’, when stored food had been used up and the early harvest hadn’t yet begun. At this time, an onion might be a luxury. In wealthy households, gardeners ‘forced’ asparagus spears or young celery to grow fast in beds of hot manure.
To us today, ‘food’ can mean a wide range of dishes, but for an Elizabethan it meant bread and meat first, pease pudding, and fresh or dried fish. For snacks, they would eat raw nuts, or roasted chestnuts in autumn and winter; oysters, winkles, mussels; apples bought hot and baked from the apple seller; pickled crabapples; radishes by themselves or with butter; or a crust of bread dipped in ale.
Two cooked meals were eaten each day, if you could afford them. Servants and those who did heavy work ate bread, perhaps with butter or cheese or leftover cold meat, when they first woke up. They would also drink ale, which might be heated in winter and have bread sopped in it. Dinner was the main meal, eaten at noon, with a smaller supper at dusk. Nobles and the wealthy ate dinner earlier, at about 11 am (their leftovers would feed their servants), and had supper earlier too. A banquet might begin at midday or mid-afternoon and continue for many hours with various courses, with music or dancing in between some of the later courses until they turned into ‘supper’.
‘Courses’ weren’t a single main dish with vegetables or salad, as we’re used to today. A cour
se might involve many different roasts, sweet dishes, and pies garnished possibly with fruit or vegetables, all on the table at once. Each course offered a different choice — roast venison instead of roast lamb or mutton, for example, or roast pigeon instead of roast duck. The final course at a banquet would often be mostly sweet foods, especially those made by the ladies of the house out of vastly expensive sugar: preserved cherries, stewed quinces, medlar paste, tiny marzipan figures coloured with vegetable juices and decorated with gold leaf. But even this final course might have meat dishes too, sweet ones like chopped spiced chicken with sugar, or fish cooked with honey and apples. At more simple dinners, the last course might be cheese and stewed fruit or a fruit pie, or a dish made of grated cheese sweetened with sugar and spiced with herbs.
Meat, and lots of it, was a sign of both wealth and strength. White bread was a luxury, and came in many shapes and flavours. Pies were common, but only as containers for their filling (only the poor bothered to eat the tough pastry). A ‘humble pie’ was a pie made of ‘humbles’ or deer entrails, well spiced.
The Elizabethans drank an enormous amount of alcohol. Low-alcohol ale was preferred over water as it had the advantage of not giving you the runs or killing you. Much ‘fresh’ water from wells was polluted by sewage, as were rivers or streams. Wine was drunk in wealthy houses, even by children, usually with a lot of water added. In a life filled with pain and hardship, even if you were wealthy, drunkenness was prized.
When you look at many of the stupider events of the last five hundred years of history, it is useful to remember that many or most of the participants were probably drunk. Lord Capulet’s rage when Juliet refuses to marry Paris is more explicable once you realise that during the night spent sitting with Tybalt’s corpse (as duty required) he had probably refreshed himself regularly with brandy. By the time he spoke to his daughter he would have been exhausted and very drunk indeed. The audience would know this and expect it. That was their world.
I Am Juliet Page 13