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Romeo and Juliet have set the tone for many a romantic relationship around the world, for more than four centuries now. How many times has a young person, caught up in the emotional rush of first love, looked at their significant other and thought, “She’s my Juliet,” or, “He’s the Romeo I had hoped for”? When William Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, I’m sure he knew it was a good play. Yet I don’t think he intended to define the West’s notions of romantic love for the next four centuries and more; and I’m not sure he would have wanted audiences, either in his time or now, to take the play that way.
The scenario, of course, is a long-standing quarrel between two eminent Veronese families, the Montagues and the Capulets - “Two households, both alike in dignity/In fair Verona”. The quarrel, as we all know, will lead to tragedy for “a pair of star-crossed lovers”, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet; and the phrase “star-crossed” seems crucial here. The stars, it was believed in Shakespeare’s time, influenced one’s fate; and Romeo and Juliet is very much a tragedy of fate. In the later tragedies of Shakespeare’s artistic maturity - Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello - the main character makes choices that move the character toward a tragic end. Romeo and Juliet, by contrast, is a play in which cruel fate intervenes more than once, setting the title characters on a predestined path.
Romeo and Juliet meet at a Capulet party and fall in love at first sight. The words that accompany the young lovers’ first kiss – with Romeo saying, “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!/Give me my sin again”, and Juliet sardonically replying, “You kiss by the book” – are part of our culture, like the entire dialogue from the unforgettable balcony scene. Meanwhile, the reader or play-goer meets an intriguing array of characters. On the Montague side, there is Mercutio, Romeo’s wild and flamboyant friend. When he is fatally stabbed, Mercutio realizes that his death is a direct result of the Capulet-Montague feud, and declares, “They have made worms’ meat of me….A plague on both your houses!” Mercutio’s death scene is one of the most powerful in all of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.
On the Capulet side, there is Tybalt, the nephew of Capulet’s wife. In 1960’s Great Britain, Tybalt would have fit right in among the Mods or the Rockers -- a true “king mixer,” who loves fighting for fighting’s sake. When Benvolio asks Tybalt to help him break up a quarrel among the Capulets’ and Montagues’ servants, Tybalt’s response – “Peace? Peace? I hate the word/As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee” – is characteristic. One senses that this violence-loving character will come to a violent end; but on a first reading or viewing of Romeo and Juliet, it is surprising to see at whose hand that violent end comes.
Juliet’s Nurse loves and is loyal to her lady, but at one crucial moment in the play shows herself only too willing to bend to situational ethics. And it is scarring to see the cruelty that Juliet’s parents display toward their daughter when, because she has been secretly married to Romeo, she refuses her father’s choice of the young Count Paris as a husband for her; Juliet’s mother, in a moment of foreshadowing, declares, “I would the fool were married to her grave!” Old man Capulet meanwhile lets Juliet know that he is perfectly willing to disown her, cast her out, if she refuses to follow his marital plans for her: “An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;/An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets!”
The play’s focus on destiny becomes crystallized in the character of Friar Lawrence, a good and kind man of God who hopes to find a way to bring the two lovers together and reconcile the two warring families. Through a cruel twist of fate, he achieves the second goal but not the first. Yet Friar Lawrence also serves as a choral figure, speaking to Romeo crucial words that may represent Shakespeare’s true attitude toward Romeo and Juliet and their young love: “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”.
Friar Lawrence’s words evoke the classical ideal of μηδὲν ἄγαν, mêden agan, nothing in excess. In crucial ways, Romeo’s behavior in particular is excessive; we sympathize with him as a young man in love, but by the play’s end he has killed two people. (One of those killings almost always gets left out of the film adaptations, including both Franco Zeffirelli’s classically inflected 1968 film and Baz Luhrmann’s Blade Runner-style, post-modern 1996 film.) Even young love, Shakespeare seems to be saying, can be taken too far.
It is not that the play provides a direct critique of two teenagers in love; they are teenagers, and everyone knows how difficult the teenage years are. It is not reasonable to expect teenagers to behave with the rationality that adults are supposed to display. The problem, rather, is that Romeo and Juliet are surrounded by immoderate adults who, even though they should know better, willingly give free rein to their own emotional excesses. Considering the behavior that Romeo and Juliet have been witnessing all their lives, how should we expect them to behave?
But the love of Romeo and Juliet is compelling, and the tragedy of their shared destiny breaks the heart; all logic and all Aristotelian appeals to reason fly forth, blown away as if by an Adriatic breeze. The closing words of Escalus, Prince of Verona – “Capulet, Montague,/See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,/That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!/And I, for winking at your discords too,/Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished” – provide a compelling summation of the play’s themes. Writing on this Saint Valentine’s Day, I cannot help concluding that – whether we are reading the play as Shakespeare intended, or not – the canonical status of Romeo and Juliet as the greatest love story in the English language seems to be safe for the foreseeable future.
The scenario, of course, is a long-standing quarrel between two eminent Veronese families, the Montagues and the Capulets - “Two households, both alike in dignity/In fair Verona”. The quarrel, as we all know, will lead to tragedy for “a pair of star-crossed lovers”, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet; and the phrase “star-crossed” seems crucial here. The stars, it was believed in Shakespeare’s time, influenced one’s fate; and Romeo and Juliet is very much a tragedy of fate. In the later tragedies of Shakespeare’s artistic maturity - Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello - the main character makes choices that move the character toward a tragic end. Romeo and Juliet, by contrast, is a play in which cruel fate intervenes more than once, setting the title characters on a predestined path.
Romeo and Juliet meet at a Capulet party and fall in love at first sight. The words that accompany the young lovers’ first kiss – with Romeo saying, “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!/Give me my sin again”, and Juliet sardonically replying, “You kiss by the book” – are part of our culture, like the entire dialogue from the unforgettable balcony scene. Meanwhile, the reader or play-goer meets an intriguing array of characters. On the Montague side, there is Mercutio, Romeo’s wild and flamboyant friend. When he is fatally stabbed, Mercutio realizes that his death is a direct result of the Capulet-Montague feud, and declares, “They have made worms’ meat of me….A plague on both your houses!” Mercutio’s death scene is one of the most powerful in all of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.
On the Capulet side, there is Tybalt, the nephew of Capulet’s wife. In 1960’s Great Britain, Tybalt would have fit right in among the Mods or the Rockers -- a true “king mixer,” who loves fighting for fighting’s sake. When Benvolio asks Tybalt to help him break up a quarrel among the Capulets’ and Montagues’ servants, Tybalt’s response – “Peace? Peace? I hate the word/As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee” – is characteristic. One senses that this violence-loving character will come to a violent end; but on a first reading or viewing of Romeo and Juliet, it is surprising to see at whose hand that violent end comes.
Juliet’s Nurse loves and is loyal to her lady, but at one crucial moment in the play shows herself only too willing to bend to situational ethics. And it is scarring to see the cruelty that Juliet’s parents display toward their daughter when, because she has been secretly married to Romeo, she refuses her father’s choice of the young Count Paris as a husband for her; Juliet’s mother, in a moment of foreshadowing, declares, “I would the fool were married to her grave!” Old man Capulet meanwhile lets Juliet know that he is perfectly willing to disown her, cast her out, if she refuses to follow his marital plans for her: “An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;/An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets!”
The play’s focus on destiny becomes crystallized in the character of Friar Lawrence, a good and kind man of God who hopes to find a way to bring the two lovers together and reconcile the two warring families. Through a cruel twist of fate, he achieves the second goal but not the first. Yet Friar Lawrence also serves as a choral figure, speaking to Romeo crucial words that may represent Shakespeare’s true attitude toward Romeo and Juliet and their young love: “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”.
Friar Lawrence’s words evoke the classical ideal of μηδὲν ἄγαν, mêden agan, nothing in excess. In crucial ways, Romeo’s behavior in particular is excessive; we sympathize with him as a young man in love, but by the play’s end he has killed two people. (One of those killings almost always gets left out of the film adaptations, including both Franco Zeffirelli’s classically inflected 1968 film and Baz Luhrmann’s Blade Runner-style, post-modern 1996 film.) Even young love, Shakespeare seems to be saying, can be taken too far.
It is not that the play provides a direct critique of two teenagers in love; they are teenagers, and everyone knows how difficult the teenage years are. It is not reasonable to expect teenagers to behave with the rationality that adults are supposed to display. The problem, rather, is that Romeo and Juliet are surrounded by immoderate adults who, even though they should know better, willingly give free rein to their own emotional excesses. Considering the behavior that Romeo and Juliet have been witnessing all their lives, how should we expect them to behave?
But the love of Romeo and Juliet is compelling, and the tragedy of their shared destiny breaks the heart; all logic and all Aristotelian appeals to reason fly forth, blown away as if by an Adriatic breeze. The closing words of Escalus, Prince of Verona – “Capulet, Montague,/See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,/That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!/And I, for winking at your discords too,/Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished” – provide a compelling summation of the play’s themes. Writing on this Saint Valentine’s Day, I cannot help concluding that – whether we are reading the play as Shakespeare intended, or not – the canonical status of Romeo and Juliet as the greatest love story in the English language seems to be safe for the foreseeable future.
