Romeo and Juliet (33 page)

This overruling of Tybalt is significant because Tybalt in his inflexibility is a potentially tragic character, indeed the only one in the first part of the play. If we recognize in him an irascible humour type, an alazon, we should also recognize that the tragic hero is an alazon transposed.
¹⁹
Tybalt alone takes the feud really seriously. It is his
inner
law, the propeller of his fiery nature. His natural frame of reference is the heroic one of honor and death:

Tybalt’s single set of absolutes cuts him off from a whole range of speech and action available to the other young men of the play: lyric love, witty fooling, friendly conversation. Ironically, his imperatives come to dominate the play’s world only when he himself departs from it. While he is alive, Tybalt is an alien.

In a similar way, the passing fears of calamity voiced at times by Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Laurence are not allowed to dominate the atmosphere of the early acts. The love of Romeo and Juliet is already imaged as a flash of light swallowed by darkness, an image invoking inexorable natural law; but it is also expressed as a sea venture, which suggests luck and skill set against natural hazards and chance seized joyously as an opportunity for action. “Direct my sail,” says Romeo to his captain Fortune. Soon he feels himself in command:

The spirit is Bassanio’s as he adventures for Portia, a Jason voyaging in quest of the Golden Fleece (
MV
1.1.167-72). Romeo is ready for difficulties with a traditional lovers’ stratagem, one which Shakespeare had used before in
Two Gentlemen
: A rope ladder, “cords made like a tackled stair; / Which to the high top-gallant of my joy / Must be my convoy in the secret night” (2.4.183-85).

But before Romeo can mount his tackled stair, Mercutio’s death intervenes to cut off this world of exhilarating venture. Shakespeare developed this character, who in the source is little more than a name and a cold hand, into the very incarnation of comic atmosphere. Mercutio is the clown of romantic comedy, recast in more elegant mold but equally ready to take off from the plot in verbal play and to challenge idealistic love with his own brand of comic earthiness.

He is the best of game-players, endlessly inventive and full of quick moves and countermoves. Speech for him is a constant exercise in multiple possibilities: puns abound, roles are taken up at whim (that of conjuror, for instance, in the passage just quoted), and his Queen Mab brings dreams not only to lovers like Romeo but to courtiers, lawyers, parsons, soldiers, maids. These have nothing to do with the case at hand, which is Romeo’s premonition of trouble, but Mercutio is not bound by events. They serve him merely as convenient launching pads for his flights of wit. When all this vitality, which has till now ignored all urgencies, is cut off abruptly by Tybalt’s sword, it must come as a shock to a spectator unfamiliar with the play. In Mercutio’s sudden, violent end, Shakespeare makes the birth of tragedy coincide exactly with the symbolic death of comedy. The alternative view, the element of freedom and play, dies with Mercutio. Where many courses were open before, now there seems only one. Romeo sees at once that an irreversible process has begun:

It is the first sign in the play’s dialogue pointing unambiguously to tragic necessity. Romeo’s future is now determined: he
must
kill Tybalt, he
must
run away, he is Fortune’s fool.

This helplessness is the most striking feature of the second, tragic world of
Romeo
. The temper of this new world is largely a function of onrushing events. Under pressure of events, the feud turns from farce to fate; tit for tat becomes blood for blood. Lawless as it seems to Prince Escalus, the feud is dramatically “the law” in
Romeo
. Before, it was external and avoidable. Now it moves inside Romeo to be his personal law. This is why he takes over Tybalt’s rhetoric of honor and death:

Even outside the main chain of vengeance, the world is suddenly full of imperatives. Others besides Romeo feel helpless. Against his will Friar John is detained at the monastery; against his will the Apothecary sells poison to Romeo. Urgency becomes the norm. Nights run into mornings, and the characters seem never to sleep. The new world finds its emblem not in the aborted attack but in the aborted feast. As Tybalt’s violence was out of tune with the Capulet festivities in Act 2, so in the changed world of Acts 3 and 4 the projected wedding of Juliet and Paris is made grotesque when Shakespeare insistently links it with death.
²¹
Preparations for the wedding feast parallel those made for the party in the play’s first part, so as to make more wrenching the contrast when Capulet must order,

The play’s last scene shows how completely the comic movement has been reversed. It is inherent in that movement, as we have seen, that the young get their way at the expense of the old. The final tableau of comedy features young couples joined in love; parents and authority figures are there, if at all, to ratify with more or less good grace what has been accomplished against their wills. But here, the stage is strikingly full of elders—the Friar, the Prince, Capulet, Lady Capulet, Montague. Their power is not passed on. Indeed, there are no young to take over. If Benvolio survives somewhere offstage, we have long since forgotten this adjunct character. Romeo, Juliet, Tybalt, Mercutio, and Paris are all dead. In effect, the entire younger generation has been wiped out.

I have been treating these two worlds as separate, consistent wholes in order to bring out their opposition, but I do not wish to deny dramatic unity to
Romeo and Juliet
. Shakespeare was writing one play, not two; and in spite of the clearly marked turning point we are aware of premonitions of disaster before the death of Mercutio, and hopes for avoiding it continue until near the end of the play. Our full perception of the world-shift that converts Romeo and Juliet from instinctive winners into sacrificial victims thus comes gradually. In this connection the careers of two secondary characters, Friar Laurence and the Nurse, are instructive.

In being and action, these two belong to the comic vision. Friar Laurence is one of the tribe of manipulators, whose job it is to transform or otherwise get round seemingly intractable realities. If his herbs and potions are less spectacular than the paraphernalia of Friar Bacon or John a Kent, he nevertheless belongs to their brotherhood. Such figures abound in romantic comedy, as we have seen, but not in tragedy, where the future is not so manipulable. The Friar’s aims are those implicit in the play’s comic movement: an inviolable union for Romeo and Juliet and an end to the families’ feud.

The Nurse’s goal is less lofty but equally appropriate to comedy. She wants Juliet married—to anyone. Her preoccupation with bedding and breeding reminds us of comedy’s ancient roots in fertility rites, and it is as indiscriminate as the life force itself. But she conveys no sense of urgency in all this. On the contrary, her garrulity assumes the limitless time of comedy. In this sense her circumlocutions and digressions are analogous to Mercutio’s witty games and, for that matter, to Friar Laurence’s counsels of patience. “Wisely and slow,” the Friar cautions Romeo; “they stumble that run fast” (2.3.94). The Nurse is not very wise, but she is slow. The leisurely time assumptions of both Friar and Nurse contrast with the lovers’ impatience, to create first the normal counterpoint of comedy and later a radical split that points us, with the lovers, directly towards tragedy.

Friar Laurence and the Nurse have no place in the new world brought into being by Mercutio’s death, the world of limited time, no effective choice, no escape. They define and sharpen the tragedy by their very failure to find a part in the dramatic progress, by their growing estrangement from the true springs of the action. “Be patient,” is the Friar’s advice to banished Romeo, “for the world is broad and wide” (3.3.16). But the roominess he perceives in both time and space simply does not exist for Romeo.
His
time has been constricted into a chain of days working out a “black fate,” and he sees no world outside the walls of Verona (17).

Comic adaptability again confronts tragic integrity when Juliet is forced to marry Paris—and turns to her Nurse for counsel, as Romeo has turned to Friar Laurence. In the Nurse’s response comedy’s traditional wisdom of accommodation is carried to an extreme. Romeo has been banished, and Paris is after all very presentable. In short, adjust to the new state of things.

She still speaks for the life force, against barrenness and death. Even if Juliet will not accept the dishclout comparison, an inferior husband is better than no husband at all: “Your first is dead, or ’twere as good he were / As living here and you no use of him” (226-27).

But her advice is irrelevant, even shocking, in this new context. There was no sense of jar when Benvolio, a spokesman for comic accommodation like the Nurse and the Friar, earlier advised Romeo to substitute a possible love for an impossible one. True, the Nurse here is urging Juliet to violate her marriage vows; but Romeo also felt himself sworn to Rosaline, and for Juliet the marriage vow is a seal on the integrity of her love for Romeo, not a separable issue. The parallel points up the move into tragedy, for while Benvolio’s advice sounded sensible in Act 1 and was in fact unintentionally carried out by Romeo, the course of action that the Nurse proposes in Act 3 is unthinkable to the audience as well as to Juliet. The memory of the lovers’ passionate dawn parting that began this scene is too strong. Juliet and her nurse no longer speak the same language, and estrangement is inevitable. “Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain,” Juliet vows when the Nurse has left the stage.
²²
Like the slaying of Mercutio, Juliet’s rejection of her old confidante has symbolic overtones. The possibilities of comedy have again been presented only to be discarded.

Both Romeo and Juliet have now cast off their comic companions and the alternative modes of being that they represented. But there is one last hope for comedy. If the lovers will not adjust to the situation, perhaps the situation can be adjusted to the lovers. This is the usual comic way with obstinately faithful pairs, and we have at hand the usual manipulator figure to arrange it.

The Friar’s failure to bring off that solution is the final definition of the tragic world of
Romeo and Juliet
. There is no villain, only chance and bad timing. In comedy chance creates that elastic time that allows last-minute rescues. But here, events at Mantua and at the Capulet tomb will simply happen—by chance—in the wrong sequence. The Friar does his best: he makes more than one plan to avert catastrophe. The first, predictably, is patience and a broader field of action. Romeo must go to Mantua and wait

It is a good enough plan, for life if not for drama, but it depends on “finding a time.” As it turns out, events move too quickly for the Friar. The hasty preparations for Juliet’s marriage to Paris leave no time for cooling tempers and reconciliations.

His second plan is an attempt to
gain
time: he will create the necessary freedom by faking Juliet’s death. This is, of course, a familiar comic formula. Shakespeare’s later uses of it are all in comedies.
²³
Indeed, the contrived “deaths” of Hero in
Much Ado
, Helena in
All’s Well
, Claudio in
Measure for Measure
, and Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale
are more ambitiously intended than Juliet’s, aimed at bringing about a change of heart in other characters.
²⁴
Time may be important, as it is in
Winter’s Tale
, but only as it promotes repentance. Friar Laurence, more desperate than his fellow manipulators, does not hope that Juliet’s death will dissolve the Montague-Capulet feud, but only that it will give Romeo a chance to come and carry her off. Time and chance, which in the other plays cooperate benevolently with the forces of regeneration and renewal, work against Friar Laurence. Romeo’s man is quicker with the bad news of Juliet’s death than poor Friar John with the good news that the death is only a pretense. Romeo himself beats Friar Laurence to the tomb of the Capulets. The onrushing tragic action quite literally outstrips the slower steps of accommodation before our eyes. The Friar arrives too late to prevent one half of the tragic conclusion, and his essential estrangement from the play’s world is only emphasized when he seeks to avert the other half by sending Juliet to a nunnery. This last alternative means little to the audience or to Juliet, who spares only a line to reject the possibility of adjustment and continuing life: “Go, get thee hence, for I will not away” (5.3.160).