Romeo & Juliet: Violent Passions

1. Shakespeare wasn’t what most teenagers imagine: Shakespeare dodged taxes, hoarded grain, and rubbed shoulders with some extremely unsavoury characters such as the co-writer of Pericles and part-time pimp George Wilkins. Plausible stories about him include the famous Richard III anecdote where he sleeps with an admirer of Burbage, or that he died after going out on the lash with Ben Jonson. He was also a radical writer who dared to stage a deposition scene in Richard II; when Essex rebelled against the Queen, he paid Shakespeare’s company to stage the play, with the actors later hauled in front of the authorities.

Actors, by the way, were traditionally seen as little more than vagabonds, while theatres were disreputable places next to bear-pits and brothels, with drunk clientele staggering indiscriminately from one to the other. Shakespeare’s generation came close to changing this, with Shakespeare’s wildly popular (and racy) poems Lucrece and Venus & Adonis turning him into a sort of literary pin-up. In a play written by Cambridge students in 1598, a student gushes, ‘O sweet Mr. Shakspeare! I’ll have his picture in my study at the court’.

2. Romeo and Juliet was ground-breaking because it was the first ever romantic tragedy on the English stage. Romance was the stuff of comedy, and if you compare it to a play like Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in the same year, both plays begin in classic romcom style (much like other Shakespearean comedies like As You Like It): powerful people with irrational rules forbid young people from loving each other. We know what happens next, right?

Except that Mercutio, the crude and over-confident best mate straight out of every romcom ever, gets killed partway through the play. That would have had roughly the same effect on the audience as if Hugh Grant fell off a cliff halfway through Four Weddings. The panto fighting from the beginning, the banter on the balcony, all become terribly real. Tragedy is defined by an excess, and we begin to realise that there’s something excessive about their love.

3. Romeo and Juliet was the 1595 equivalent of punk rock. Shakespeare took his source material from Arthur Brooke, who kicks his poem off with a warning about those who ‘yielded their liberty thrall to foul desires’. Shakespeare doesn’t do that. Juliet is the smartest character in the play, and Mercutio is the most brilliant; the older generation are absolute dunderheads. Romeo and Juliet’s idealistic love is contrasted with the language of the Montagues, who talk about Juliet as a commodity: Romeo calls gold ‘poison to men’s souls’. At the end, Juliet’s father decides to build a statue to her in gold, showing he’s spectacularly missed the point of the play. Don’t even get me started on how many times the friar drops the ball – for all his talk about ‘violent passions’, if he didn’t give terrible advice they’d both be honeymooning at the end (n.b.: this being Italy, he’s obviously Catholic, so not just a man of faith: in the Brooke poem he’s called a ‘superstitious’ friar, the common epithet for Catholics).

The Romantics used R&J as a foundation-stone for their movement, and we still see the play through their lens – nevertheless, the Romantics were the first really shocking, youth-driven movement, and you can draw a direct line between their impact and the anti-establishment tendencies of modern music. No R&J → no Sorrows of Young Werther → no Bonnie & Clyde → no Anarchy in the UK. Instead of rehashing the poem’s ‘if only they’d listened’ moral, the play takes young lovers and gives them tragic dignity, while depicting their elders and betters as foolish and morally vacuous. This was revolutionary for the stage. Although…

4. Romeo is just the worst. The whole ‘making Juliet 13 thing’? Not really normal in the 16^th century either, when the average age of marriage was 24. Romeo is almost certainly older than in the poem, and he’s in love with someone who has a nurse. He first appears interrupting his laboured talk about love to ask ‘Where shall we dine?’. His hackneyed Petrarchan oxymorons describing love in 1.1 (‘fire...sea…gall...sweet’) add up to nothing, something Benvolio sees through all too clearly: ‘thou canst not teach me to forget’, says Romeo, to which Benvolio replies, ‘I’ll pay that doctrine, or die in debt’. The first scene runs through the different lovers – the soldier in love (‘siege of loving terms’), the rich man with his ‘saint-seducing gold’, and the melancholic lover beneath the sycamore (sick-amour) tree – everything, in short, but authentic love. After he switches to Juliet, the chorus tell us that ‘That fair for which love groaned for and would die… is now not fair’.

The balcony scene isn’t much better: Romeo drops clangers like ‘there lies more peril in thine eye, / Than twenty of their swords’, a cliché Shakespeare later makes fun of in AYLI (‘show the wound mine eye hath made in thee’). Juliet is made nervous by his excess, responding to his words with ‘to be frank… My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep: the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite’. Her simplicity is far more powerful. But it’s worth mentioning that Romeo or Juliet never see each other’s faces clearly until their marriage off-stage (Early Modern laws forbade marriage scenes). Is Romeo a ‘Hamlet in love’, as Hazlitt put it? You can certainly argue that Romeo’s love for Juliet is more genuine than his love for Rosaline. But it’s worth noting that no-one ever called Hamlet an idiot, as Friar Laurence does continually in a 51-line speech in 3.3, by my count the longest in the play(!). Tragedy often features a tension between human hubris and fate (e.g. ‘star-cross’d lovers’). One could claim that Romeo represents the pathos of hubris, and the more innocent Juliet represents the pathos of fate: there is a constant theme of her being marked for death as her bridegroom, (‘my grave is like to be my wedding-bed’, ‘death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead’, ‘make the bridal bed in that dim monument’, ‘death lain with thy wife’, ‘unsubstantial death is amorous’, all replete with dramatic irony). On that note...

5. Romeo and Juliet is possibly Shakespeare’s most ironic play. Shakespeare’s famous doubleness means that moments before ‘But soft, what light’ we have Mercutio’s ‘O, that she were / An open arse’; news of Juliet’s fake death leaves the wedding-musicians awkwardly packing away at the end; the play’s purest character is paired with her filthy-mouthed nurse (‘you shall bear the burden soon at night’). The sonnet, which features several times throughout the play, was by 1595 becoming a bit of a joke, and the play’s Prologue could be viewed as parodic, with an ironic reference to ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’. MND’s Pyramus and Thisbe scene satirises R&J, also beginning with an attempt at a sonnet and featuring one lover finding another dead: a sample of the language runs, ‘O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black! / O night, which ever art when day is not! /O night, O night! alack, alack, alack’.

The fact that we are told in the prologue that they end up dead means that every successive scene drips with dramatic irony, none more so than Romeo’s speech at the beginning of the fifth act: ‘If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep, / My dreams presage some joyful news at hand’. Rather than wait to see what happens, we see the inevitable unfold. Juliet consummates her marriage with death (‘O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath’), and as the lovers lie dead onstage, the foolish friar recaps at length what we have already seen, reminding us what we miss: the ‘violent passions’ that he of all people could never understand. The play ends with the ironic detachment that threatens love’s authenticity throughout – ‘Some shall be pardoned, and some punished’, declares the Duke – but as the families go off to build their golden statues, we are sure that the dead lovers carry the day: it is the triumph of the internal, a bounty that cannot be counted out in gold, but is as boundless as the sea.