Romeo and Juliet

by Shakespeare, William

  It remains for me to speak of the hero and heroine, of Romeo and Juliet themselves; and I shall do so with unaffected diffidence, not merely on account of the delicacy, but of the great importance of the subject. I feel that it is impossible to defend Shakespeare from the most cruel of all charges—that he is an immoral writer—without entering fully into his mode of portraying female characters, and of displaying the passion of love. It seems to me that he has done both with greater perfection than any other writer of the known world, perhaps with the single exception of Milton in his delineation of Eve. . . .

  Shakespeare has described this passion in various states and stages, beginning, as was most natural, with love in the young. Does he open his play by making Romeo and Juliet in love at first sight—at the first glimpse, as any ordinary thinker would do? Certainly not: he knew what he was about, and how he was to accomplish what he was about: he was to develop the whole passion, and he commences with the first elements—that sense of imperfection, that yearning to combine itself with something lovely. Romeo became enamored of the idea he had formed in his own mind, and then, as it were, christened the first real being of the contrary sex as endowed with the perfections he desired. He appears to be in love with Rosaline; but, in truth, he is in love only with his own idea. He felt that necessity of being beloved which no noble mind can be without. Then our poet, or poet who so well knew human nature, introduces Romeo to Juliet, and makes it not only a violent, but a permanent love—a point for which Shakespeare has been ridiculed by the ignorant and unthinking. Romeo is first represented in a state most susceptible of love, and then, seeing Juliet, he took and retained the infection.

  This brings me to observe upon a characteristic of Shakespeare, which belongs to a man of profound thought and high genius. It has been too much the custom, when anything that happened in his dramas could not easily be explained by the few words the poet has employed, to pass it idly over, and to say that it is beyond our reach, and beyond the power of philosophy—a sort of terra incognita for discoverers—a great ocean to be hereafter explored. Others have treated such passages as hints and glimpses of something now nonexistent, as the sacred fragments of an ancient and ruined temple, all the portions of which are beautiful, although their particular relation to each other is unknown. Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place: if we do not understand him, it is our own fault or the fault of copyists and typographers; but study, and the possession of some small stock of the knowledge by which he worked, will enable us often to detect and explain his meaning. He never wrote at random, or hit upon points of character and conduct by chance; and the smallest fragment of his mind not unfrequently gives a clue to a most perfect, regular, and consistent whole.

  As I may not have another opportunity, the introduction of Friar Lawrence into this tragedy enables me to remark upon the different manner in which Shakespeare has treated the priestly character, as compared with other writers. In Beaumont and Fletcher priests are represented as a vulgar mockery; and, as in others of their dramatic personages, the errors of a few are mistaken for the demeanor of the many: but in Shakespeare they always carry with them our love and respect. He made no injurious abstracts: he took no copies from the worst parts of our nature; and, like the rest, his characters of priests are truly drawn from the general body.

  H. B. CHARLTON

  From Shakespearian Tragedy

  In their general structure and idea, the three tragedies so far reviewed were in the current dramatic tradition of their day. But Romeo and Juliet is a departure, a comprehensive experiment. It links the English stage to the Renaissance tragedy which by precept and by practice Cinthio2 in the middle of the sixteenth century had established in Italy.

  Cinthio’s principles were in the main an adaptation of Seneca’s, or rather of what he took to be Seneca’s purposes, to the immediate needs of Cinthio’s contemporary theatre. His own object he declared to be “servire l’età, a gli spettatori.” Tragedy must grip its audience. It must therefore reflect a range of experience and base itself on a system of values which are felt by its audience to be real. Many of his proposals are the direct outcome of this general principle, and one or two of them are especially pertinent to our argument. For instance, tragedy must no longer rely mainly for its material on ancient mythology nor on accredited history; for these depict a world which may have lost urgent contact with a modern audience’s sense of life. The best plots for modern tragedy will be found in modern fiction. For modern fiction is the mythology of today. It is the corpus of story through which the world appears as it seems to be to living men;From Shakespearian Tragedy by H. B. Charlton. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1948. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

  it mirrors accepted codes of conduct, displays the particular manner of contemporary consciousness, and adopts the current assumptions of human values. Let the dramatist, therefore, draw his plots from the novelists. An inevitable consequence followed from this. There is nothing in which the outlook on life adopted by the modern world is more different from that of the ancient classical world than in its apprehension of the human and spiritual significance of the love of man for woman. Love has become for the modern world its most engrossing interest and often its supreme experience. Modern fiction turns almost exclusively on love. So when dramatists took their tales from the novelists, they took love over as the main theme of their plays. Seven of Cinthio’s nine plays borrow their plots from novels (most of them from his own series, the Hecatommithi); the other two are “classical,” but are two of the great classical love stories, Dido and Cleopatra. Jason de Nores, a much more conservatively Aristotelian expositor than his contemporary Cinthio, to exemplify the form which the most perfect tragedy could take, constructs the plot for it from one of Boccaccio’s tales.

  Whether by direct influence or by mere force of circumstance, Cinthio’s practice prevailed. Sixteenth-century tragedy found rich material in the novels. But the traditionalists were perpetually reminding the innovators that tragedy always had had and always must have an historical hero. “In tragoedia reges, principes, ex urbibus, arcibus, castris,” Scaliger, the Parnassian legislator, announced. No one would accept a hero as great unless his memory were preserved in the historian’s pages. “C’est l’histoire qui persuade avec empire,” as Corneille put it. Shakespeare, an eager and humble apprentice, naturally followed traditional custom. Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and Richard II belong in the main to the conventional pattern. They deal with historical material. Their heroes are of high rank and potent in determining the destiny of nations. The plot is never mainly a lovers’ story, though a love intrigue intrudes sporadically here and there within the major theme. But somehow the prescriptions had not produced the expected result. There was something unsatisfying in these plays as divinations of man’s tragic lot. And so the conventions were jettisoned in Romeo and Juliet.

  Shakespeare was casting in fresh directions to find the universality, the momentousness, and above all the inevitability of all-compelling tragedy. In particular, he was experimenting with a new propelling force, a new final sanction as the determinant energy, the ultima ratio of tragedy’s inner world; and though Romeo and Juliet is set in a modern Christian country, with church and priest and full ecclesiastical institution, the whole universe of God’s justice, vengeance, and providence is discarded and rejected from the directing forces of the play’s dramatic movement. In its place, there is a theatrical resuscitation of the half-barbarian, half-Roman deities of Fate and Fortune.

  The plot of Romeo and Juliet is pure fiction. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke’s poem, The Tragicall Historie of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Shakespeare knew from Broke’s title page that the tale was taken from an Italian novelist, “written first in Italian by Bandell.” He knew, too, what sort of novels Bandello wrote, for Painter had retold them in his Palace of Pleasure (1567).
They were clear fictions. Moreover the hero and the heroine, Romeo and Juliet, had none of the pomp of historic circumstance about them; they were socially of the minor aristocracy who were to stock Shakespeare’s comedies, and their only political significance was an adventitious role in the civic disturbance of a small city-state. Romeo and Juliet were in effect just a boy and a girl in a novel; and as such they had no claim to the world’s attention except through their passion and their fate.

  To choose such folk as these for tragic heroes was aesthetically well-nigh an anarchist’s gesture; and the dramatist provided a sort of program-prologue to prompt the audience to see the play from the right point of view. In this playbill the dramatist draws special attention to two features of his story. First, Verona was being torn by a terrible, bloodthirsty feud which no human endeavor had been able to settle; this was the direct cause of the death of the lovers, and but for those deaths it never would have been healed. Second, the course of the young lovers’ lives is from the outset governed by a malignant destiny; fatal, star-crossed, death-marked, they are doomed to piteous destruction.

  The intent of this emphasis is clear. The tale will end with the death of two ravishingly attractive young folk; and the dramatist must exonerate himself from all complicity in their murder, lest he be found guilty of pandering to a liking for a human shambles. He disowns responsibility and throws it on Destiny, Fate. The device is well warranted in the tragic tradition, and especially in its Senecan models. But whether, in fact, it succeeds is a matter for further consideration. The invocation of Fate is strengthened by the second feature scored heavily in the prologue, the feud. The feud is, so to speak, the means by which Fate acts. The feud is to provide the sense of immediate, and Fate that of ultimate, inevitability. For it may happen that, however the dramatist deploys his imaginative suggestions, he may fail to summon up a Fate sufficiently compelling to force itself upon the audience as unquestioned shaper of the tragic end. In such circumstance Romeo’s and Juliet’s death would be by mere chance, a gratuitous intervention by a dramatist exercising his homicidal proclivities for the joy of his audience. Hence the feud has a further function. It will be the dramatist’s last plea for exculpation or for mercy; and it will allow his audience to absolve him or to forgive him without loss of its own “philanthropy”; for through death came the healing of the feud, and with it, the removal of the threat to so many other lives.

  It becomes, therefore, of critical importance to watch Shakespeare’s handling of these two motives, Fate and Feud, to see how he fits them to fulfill their function, and to ask how far in fact they are adequate to the role they must perforce play. Both Fate and Feud, although absent as motives from the earliest European form of the Romeo and Juliet story, had grown variously in the successive tellings of the tale before it came to Broke.3 The general trend had been to magnify the virulence of the feud, and, even more notably, to swell the sententious apostrophizing of Fate’s malignity. Broke, for instance, misses no opportunity for such sententiousness. Longer or shorter, there are at least fifteen passages in his poem where the malignity of Fate is his conventionally poetic theme. “Froward fortune,” “fortune’s cruel will,” “wavering fortune,” “tickel fortune,” “when fortune list to strike,” “false fortune cast for her, poore wretch, a myschiefe newe to brewe,” “dame fortune did assent,” “with piteous plaint, fierce fortune doth he blame,” “till Attropos shall cut my fatall thread of lyfe,” “though cruel fortune be so much my dedly foe,” “the blyndfyld goddesse that with frowning face doth fraye, and from theyr seate the mighty kinges throwes downe with hedlong sway,” “He cryed out, with open mouth, against the starres above, The fatall sisters three, he said, had done him wrong”—so, again and again, does Broke bring inThe diversenes, and eke the accidents so straunge,

  Of frayle unconstant Fortune, that delyteth still in chaunge.4

  Romeo cries aloudAgainst the restles starres, in rolling skyes that raunge,

  Against the fatall sisters three, and Fortune full of

  chaunge.5

  There are more elaborate set speeches on the same theme: For Fortune chaungeth more, than fickel fantasie;

  In nothing Fortune constant is, save in unconstancie.

  Her hasty ronning wheele, is of a restles coorse,

  That turnes the clymers hedlong downe, from better to the

  woorse,

  and those that are beneth, she heaveth up agayne.6

  So when Shakespeare took up the story, Broke had already sought to drench it in fatality. But since Shakespeare was a dramatist, he could not handle Fate and Feud as could a narrative poet. His feud will enter, not descriptively, but as action; and for fate he must depend on the sentiments of his characters and on an atmosphere generated by the sweep of the action. The feud may be deferred for a moment to watch Shakespeare’s handling of Fate.

  His most frequent device is to adapt what Broke’s practice had been; instead of letting his persons declaim formally, as Broke’s do, against the inconstancy of Fortune, he endows them with dramatic premonitions. Setting out for Capulet’s ball, Romeo is suddenly sad: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!

  (1.4.106-13)

  As the lovers first declare their passion, Juliet begs Romeo not to swear, as if an oath might be an evil omen:I have no joy of this contract tonight:

  It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;

  Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

  Ere one can say “It lightens.”

  (2.2.117-20)

  Romeo, involved in the fatal fight, cries “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (3.1.138). Looking down from her window at Romeo as he goes into exile, Juliet murmurs

  O God, I have an ill-divining soul!

  Methinks I see thee, now thou art below,

  As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.

  (3.5.54-56)

  With dramatic irony Juliet implores her parents to defer her marriage with Paris:Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed

  In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.

  (202-03)

  Besides these promptings of impending doom there are premonitions of a less direct kind. The friar fears the violence of the lover’s passion:These violent delights have violent ends

  And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

  Which as they kiss consume.

  (2.6.9-11)

  Another source of omen in the play is the presaging of dreams; for from the beginning of time, “the world of sleep, the realm of wild reality” has brought dreams which look like heralds of eternity and speak like Sybils of the future. There is much dreaming in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio may mock at dreams as children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy. But when Romeo says he “dream’d a dream tonight,” Mercutio’s famous flight of fancy recalls the universal belief in dreams as foreshadowings of the future. Again Romeo dreams; this time, “I dreamt my lady came and found me dead” (5.1.6). As his man Balthasar waits outside Juliet’s tomb, he dreams that his master and another are fighting and the audience knows how accurately the dream mirrors the true facts.

  But Shakespeare not only hangs omens thickly round his play. He gives to the action itself a quality apt to conjure the sense of relentless doom. It springs mainly from his compression of the time over which the story stretches. In all earlier versions there is a much longer lapse. Romeo’s wooing is prolonged over weeks before the secret wedding; then, after the wedding, there is an interval of three or four months before the slaying of Tybalt; and Romeo’s exile lasts from Easter until a short time before mid-September when the marriage with Paris was at first planned to take place. But in Shakespe
are all this is pressed into three or four days. The world seems for a moment to be caught up in the fierce play of furies reveling in some mad supernatural game.

  But before asking whether the sense of an all-controlling Fate is made strong enough to fulfill its tragic purpose let us turn to the feud. Here Shakespeare’s difficulties are even greater. Italian novelists of the quattro- or cinquecento, throwing their story back through two or three generations, might expect their readers easily to accept a fierce vendetta. But the Verona which Shakespeare depicts is a highly civilized world, with an intellectual and artistic culture and an implied social attainment altogether alien from the sort of society in which a feud is a more or less natural manifestation of enmity. The border country of civilization is the home of feuds, a region where social organization is still of the clan, where the head of the family-clan is a strong despot, and where law has not progressed beyond the sort of wild justice of which one instrument is the feud.

  For ere I cross the border fells,

  The tane of us shall die

  It was well-nigh impossible for Shakespeare to fit the blood lust of a border feud into the social setting of his Verona. The heads of the rival houses are not at all the fierce chieftains who rule with ruthless despotism. When old Capulet, in fireside gown, bustles to the scene of the fray and calls for his sword, his wife tells him bluntly that it is a crutch which an old man such as he should want, and not a weapon. Montague, too, spits a little verbal fire, but his wife plucks him by the arm and tells him to calm down: “thou shalt not stir one foot to seek a foe.” Indeed, these old men are almost comic figures, and especially Capulet. His querulous fussiness, his casual bonhomie, his almost senile humor, and his childish irascibility hardly make him the pattern of a clan chieftain. Even his domestics put him in his place:Go, you cotquean, go,