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 despisèd life, closed in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death. (1.4.106–11)
Again, there is a reference to the inauspicious stars we heard about in the Prologue (“star-crossed lovers”). The difficulty with Romeo’s speech is that it has no relation to anything in the immediate context. Mercutio’s dream of Queen Mab is positive and lyrical and has no forebodings in it. What fatal consequence hangs in the stars for Romeo? The play is clearly a tragedy, but it can’t get to be a tragedy simply through tragic declarations.
There is another declaration of portents in Romeo and Juliet’s wedding night, celebrated “aloft” (on the upper stage) in act 3, scene 5. Juliet is trying to persuade Romeo not to leave but Romeo insists he must speedily begin his banishment in Mantua. Juliet suddenly foresees evil:
O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
Either my eyesight fails, or thou lookest pale. (3.5.54–57)
Romeo concurs in this bleak vision: “And trust me, love, in my eye so do you. / Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu!” (3.5.58–59). Romeo exits with a polished couplet. But what is the nature of Juliet’s sense of doom? It has no relation to its immediately joyful context of the wedding night, but it looks forward, proleptically, to the way the play will actually end in the Capulet monument. Like Romeo’s earlier portent, it’s as if Juliet is speaking for the play rather than for herself. Shakespeare seems to be exaggerating the need to reiterate that this is a “star-crossed” tragedy.
The role of Friar Lawrence in the play is ambiguous. When Romeo comes to visit him in his cell and asks to marry Juliet, the Friar’s counsel is to go slow, and there is a sense in his advice that he is already predicting the tragic end of the lovers:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately: long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. (2.6.9–15)
The idea that Romeo and Juliet should “love moderately” goes against whatever we can gather about the nature of love, especially in Shakespeare’s early comedies. The love-at-first-sight convention assumes that the lovers will be fully in love immediately. They don’t start moderately and see their love grow, but they are at the climax presumably at first sight. That is why the Friar’s idea seems so oddly out of place.
Friar Lawrence’s scheme is to have Juliet drink a sleeping potion that will make her seem dead for forty-two hours, then awake in the Capulet burial vault and meet Romeo, who will take her to Mantua for their happy ending. The plan is so elaborate and melodramatic that it seems unlikely to succeed in all of its particulars. Before Juliet drinks the potion, she has grave doubts about the Friar’s motives. Her long soliloquy in act 4, scene 3 is important for our understanding of the Friar’s role in this play. Juliet in her troubles has been more or less abandoned both by her mother and her Nurse. She knows that “My dismal scene I needs must act alone” (4.3.19). She fears that the potion will not work and provides a dagger with which to kill herself if need be. But, more importantly, she suspects the Friar of foul play:
What if it be a poison which the friar
Subtly hath minist’red to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonored
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is; and yet methinks it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man. (4.3.24–29)
Juliet is full of fears, but she takes the potion and is ready to try her fate. There is a maturity in Juliet that we haven’t seen before.
One of the weakest touches in the plot is that Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo in Mantua cannot be delivered because of a fear of infection. Friar John returns the letter, but Friar Lawrence is merely dismayed by the turn of events:
Unhappy fortune! By my brotherhood,
The letter was not nice [trivial], but full of charge,
Of dear import; and the neglecting it
May do much danger. (5.2.17–20)
Friar Lawrence doesn’t have any Plan B ready for emergencies, but he proceeds to obtain an iron crowbar to go to the Capulet burial vault. His exclamation, “Unhappy fortune,” fits only too well with the fatalism announced in the Prologue.
From the previous scene (5.1), we know that Romeo has heard of Juliet’s death and burial. He resolves to buy poison from an impoverished apothecary and commit suicide by Juliet’s side. The Apothecary, whom Romeo has lately seen “Culling of simples” (5.1.40), strangely resembles Friar Lawrence, whom we first see gathering “baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers” (2.3.8). Romeo, determined to take his own life, exclaims against astrological determinism: “Then I defy you, stars!” (5.1.24). This defiance is repeated in the final scene of the play (5.3) when Romeo drinks the poison:
O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. (5.3.109–12)
But it turns out that whatever the “star-crossed” lovers do only enacts their preordained destinies.
Romeo and Juliet ends tragically as the Prologue predicted it would, but, at the end, there is still a sense that Romeo and Juliet are not tragic protagonists at all. As Capulet says to Montague, they are “Poor sacrifices of our enmity!” (5.3.305). Their deaths end the feud, but, when we consider the way the play moves, Romeo and Juliet remain innocents who, through no fault of their own, meet their doom. They can’t be “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” and tragic at the same time. Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are always much more implicated in their destinies. They act, sometimes vigorously, on their own behalf. They are not just the sacrificial victims of fate.
Chapter 8
Audience Response to Richard
in Richard II
There is a significant reversal in the audience response to Richard during the course of the play. We begin with a frivolous Richard stopping the combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, dunning the English public for his Irish wars, insulting the dying Gaunt, and disinheriting Gaunt’s son, Bolingbroke. When Richard returns from the Irish wars, Bolingbroke has already invaded England. Although he invokes the divine right of kings, Richard is despondent and already prepares for his defeat and abdication. By the time of his murder in Pomfret Castle, he has become Christ-like in his sufferings and has fully won back the sympathies of the audience.
The opening conflict between Bolingbroke and Mowbray is puzzling, but it clearly has to do with the murder of Woodstock, Gaunt’s brother and Richard’s uncle. It is implied that Richard is involved in this murder, but it is never explicitly stated. Bolingbroke and Mowbray are ready for combat in act 1, scene 3, but Richard throws his warder, or truncheon, down and stops the fight. Why does the king allow the challenges in the first scene and the meeting of Mowbray and Bolingbroke in armor in act 1, scene 3 to proceed at such length? Is he so inordinately in love with pageantry for its own sake to allow events to go so far when he intends to break off the combat and sentence both Mowbray and Bolingbroke to exile?
By act 1, scene 4, Richard falls even further in the audience’s esteem when we see him with his sycophantic minions, Bagot and Green, preparing for war in Ireland. Richard envies Bolingbroke’s “courtship to the common people” (1.4.24) as if anticipating his ascent to the crown. Bolingbroke acts “As were our England in reversion his, / And he our subjects’ next degree in hope” (1.4.35–36). Richard now do
es everything to alienate himself from the English commons by cruel exactions to pay for the Irish wars:
And for our coffers with too great a court
And liberal largess are grown somewhat light,
We are enforced to farm [lease out] our royal realm,
The revenue whereof shall furnish us
For our affairs in hand. (1.4.43–47)
The “liberal largess” of Richard’s court refers to the lavish expenditures that have almost bankrupted his “coffers.” The “farming” of the realm was a much-hated practice by which, for ready cash, the king would sell to his favorites the right to collect royal taxes. Even worse, if the farming of the realm is insufficient:
Our substitutes at home shall have blank charters;
Whereto, when they shall know what men are rich,
They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold,
And send them after to supply our wants. (1.4.48–51)
“Blank charters” were deliberately left blank so that the king or his representatives could write in whatever sums they chose. The king’s actions are not designed to win favor with either the commons or the wealthy.
At the end of this scene, when Richard hears of old Gaunt’s grievous illness, he continues his reprehensible grasping for money to pay for his Irish wars:
Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars. (1.4.59–62)
This anticipates the next scene in which Richard visits the dying Gaunt and not only insults him but also claims the estate that rightfully belongs to Gaunt’s son, Bolingbroke.
In act 2, scene 1, the dying Gaunt delivers a blistering commentary on King Richard and the evils of his reign: “His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last” (2.1.33). England “ Is now leased out—I die pronouncing it— / Like to a tenement [land leased to tenant] or pelting [paltry] farm” (2.1.59–60). Here again is that unsavory word “farm” from the previous scene—and the “blank charters.” England “is now bound in with shame, / With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds” (2.1.63–64). It is at this point that the king enters.
York continues with his denunciation of Richard, pursued by flatterers and wasting the substance of once-glorious England: “Landlord of England art thou now, not king” (2.1.113). Richard cuts him off scornfully and calls him “A lunatic, lean-witted fool, / Presuming on an ague’s privilege” (2.1.115–16). He spares his life because he is “brother to great Edward’s son” (2.1.121), but he wishes fervently for his death. When Gaunt exits, Richard takes unlawful possession of his estate:
And for these great affairs [the Irish war] do ask some charge,
Towards our assistance we do seize to us
The plate, coin, revenues, and movables
Whereof our uncle Gaunt did stand possessed. (2.1.159–62)
This is exactly what Richard planned to do at the end of act 1, scene 4. York is scandalized because Gaunt’s estate is the rightful property of his son, Bolingbroke, but Richard is determined to enrich himself to pay for his Irish wars: “Think what you will, we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands” (2.1.209–10). This is the lowest point in the play that Richard comes to in the audience’s esteem. At the end of act 2, scene 4, Salisbury already predicts his downfall: “Ah, Richard! With the eyes of heavy mind / I see thy glory like a shooting star / Fall to the base earth from the firmament” (2.4.18–20).
When Richard returns from Ireland to face the army of Bolingbroke in act 3, scene 2, he is radically different. He now pursues an intensely lyrical melancholy that indicates that all is lost. His saluting the earth of England is a poetic and sentimental moment that marks the change in Richard:
I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs.
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favors with my royal hands. (3.2.4–11)
Richard is fully aware that his personified invocation of Earth might seem foolish and misguided to his military followers: “Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords” (3.2.23), but he persists in his hopeless sense of the divine right of kings, that god will favor his cause:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord. (3.2.54–57)
At this point the audience cannot help sympathizing with Richard in his adversity. They are aided in their feeling by Richard’s glorious poetizing.
Richard seems determined that he can make no effort to oppose Bolingbroke. He wallows in his despair: “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (3.2.155–56). Interestingly, he now seems to abandon the pomp and extravagance of kingship and to think of himself as a desperately needy man:
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king? (3.2.174–77)
This anticipates the shattering grief of King Lear on the heath.
Audience sympathy for Richard is promoted by the sorrow of other characters for the king, especially his queen. In the choral scene of act 3, scene 4, the queen expresses how forlorn she is made by Richard’s fall:
For if of joy, being altogether wanting,
It doth remember me the more of sorrow;
Or if of grief, being altogether had,
It adds more sorrow to my want of joy. (3.4.13–16)
The gardener’s report of Richard’s plight is altogether desperate to the queen, who thinks in biblical imagery: “What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee / To make a second fall of cursèd man?” (3.4.75–76). We are beginning to think of Richard’s fall in religious terms.
The queen’s grief is more fully developed when she meets Richard as prisoner on his way to the Tower:
But soft, but see, or rather do not see
My fair rose wither; yet look up, behold,
That you in pity may dissolve to dew,
And wash him fresh again with truelove tears. (5.1.7–10)
Richard is stoic in accepting his destiny, but he is unstinting in his poetic expression of sorrow. He tells his tearful queen:
In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire
With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales
Of woeful ages long ago betid;
And ere thou bid good night, to quite their griefs
Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds. (5.1.40–45)
Tears are the only recourse “For the deposing of a rightful king” (5.1.50). In their parting kiss, they are like the fated lovers in Romeo and Juliet. Richard says: “One kiss shall stop our mouths, and dumbly part: / Thus give I mine, and thus take I thy heart” (5.1.95–96). The tone is very different from the ranting Richard wishing Gaunt dead in act 2, scene 1.
Richard’s final scene as a prisoner in Pomfret Castle shows us a transformed character. In his opening soliloquy, Richard is philosophical, comparing, with many biblical allusions, “This prison where I live unto the world” (5.5.2). He sees himself playing many different roles, ending with his death (“being nothing”) (5.5.41). There is an important use of music in this scene (as there is in the statue scene [5.3] of The Winter’s Tale). Richard’s discourse on Time is also a confession of his misconduct, ending with a moving declaration:
This music mads me: let it sound no more.
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me,
For ‘tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world. (5.5.61–66)
Love as a “strange brooch” is an odd metaphor, probably referring to the jewel worn in one’s hat.
It is at this point, as though enacting an act of love, that a loyal groom of Richard’s stable enters to declare his devotion to the king, a groom who “dressed” (5.5.80), or cared for, his “roan Barbary” (5.5.78) on which Bolingbroke later rode in triumph. Richard cannot resist a poetic comparison of himself and his faithless horse: “I was not made a horse, / And yet I bear a burden like an ass, / Spurred, galled, and tired by jauncing Bolingbroke” (5.5.92–94). Exton and the murderers soon enter and Richard is killed—after, however, he kills two of the murderers. It is interesting how thoroughly Richard is transformed in the audience’s eyes from a frivolous, grasping, thoughtless person into a warm, suffering, Christ-like martyr.
Chapter 9
The Fairy World of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
It is important to remember that the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are spirits and not mortals. This is also true of Ariel in The Tempest. The fairies are creatures of nature and are not restrained by the moral prohibitions of Christian society. Titania, for example, falls in love with Bottom disguised as an ass. As a spirit and not a mortal, she is uninhibited (as we see in many modern productions). The wood outside of Athens to which the lovers flee is symbolically a dark place, a place of night like Freud’s Id, which the fairies rule. Magic is familiar in this world, and we should not be surprised that aphrodisiacs are so effective. The love juice is remarkably potent not only on Lysander but also on Titania, who can be made to fall in love with the next thing that she sees. In the world of the forest, love can be chemically induced.
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