Romeo and Juliet (34 page)

The Nurse and the Friar show that one way comedy can operate in a tragedy is by its irrelevance. Tragedy is tuned to the extraordinary.
Romeo and Juliet
locates this extraordinariness not so much in the two youthful lovers as in the love itself, its intensity and integrity. As the play moves forward, our sense of this intensity and integrity is strengthened by the cumulative effect of the lovers’ lyric encounters and the increasing urgency of events, but also by the growing irrelevance of the comic characters.

De Quincey saw in the knocking at the gate in
Macbeth
the resumption of normality after nightmare, “the reestablishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, [which] first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.”
²⁵
I would say, rather, that the normal atmosphere of
Macbeth
has been and goes on being nightmarish, and that it is the knocking episode that turns out to be the contrasting parenthesis, but the notion of sharpened sensibility is important. As the presence of other paths makes us more conscious of the road we are in fact traveling, so the Nurse and the Friar make us more “profoundly sensible” of the love of Romeo and Juliet and its tragic direction.

The play offers another sort of experiment in mingled genres that is less successful, I think. It starts well, in 4.4, with a striking juxtaposition of Capulet preparations for the wedding with Juliet’s potion scene. On the one hand is the household group in a bustle over clothes, food, logs for the fire—the everyday necessaries and small change of life. On the other is Juliet’s tense monologue of fear, madness, and death. It is fine dramatic counterpoint, and its effect is stronger in stage production, as Granville-Barker observed, when the curtained bed of Juliet is visible upstage during the cheerful domestic goings-on.
²⁶
The counterpoint, of course, depends on the Capulets’ ignorance of what is behind those curtains. It comes to an end when in scene 5 Nurse and the others find Juliet’s body. But Shakespeare keeps the comic strain alive through the rest of the scene. The high-pitched, repetitive mourning of the Nurse, Paris, and the Capulets sounds more like Pyramus over the body of Thisbe than a serious tragic scene. Finally Peter has his comic turn with the musicians. What Shakespeare is attempting here is not counterpoint but the
fusion
of tragic and comic. It doesn’t quite work. S. L. Bethell suggests that the mourners’ rhetorical excesses direct the audience to remain detached and thus to reserve their tears for the real death scene that will shortly follow.
²⁷
This makes good theatrical sense. It is also possible that the musicians’ dialogue, modulating as it does from shock to professional shop to dinner, was meant to set off the tragic action by projecting a sense of the ongoing, normal life that is denied to Romeo and Juliet. Still, the scene tends to leave spectators uneasy—if, in fact, they get to see it at all: often the mourning passages are cut and the musicians’ business dropped altogether.
²⁸
Shakespeare’s hand is uncertain in this early essay at fusing tragic and comic. Mastery was yet to come, first in the gravediggers’ scene in
Hamlet
and then more fully in
King Lear
.

The structural use of comic conventions does work. The result, however, is a particular kind of tragedy. Critics have often remarked, neutrally or with disapproval, that external fate rather than character is the principal determiner of the tragic ends of the young lovers. For the mature Shakespeare, tragedy involves both character and circumstances, a fatal interaction between man and moment. But in
Romeo and Juliet
, although the central characters have their weaknesses, their destruction does not really stem from those weaknesses. We may agree with Friar Laurence that Romeo is rash, but it is not rashness that propels him into the tragic chain of events. Just the opposite, it would seem. In the crucial duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, Romeo is trying to keep the combatants apart, to make peace. Ironically, this very intervention leads to Mercutio’s death.

If Shakespeare had wanted to implicate Romeo’s rash, overemotional nature in his fate, he handled this scene with an ineptness difficult to credit. Judging from the resultant effect, what he wanted was something quite different: an ironic dissociation of character from the direction of events.

Perhaps this same purpose lies behind the elaborate development of comic elements in the early acts before the characters are pushed into the opposed conditions of tragedy. To stress milieu in this way is necessarily to downgrade the importance of individual temperament and motivation. At the crucial moment Romeo displays untypical prudence with the most upright of intentions—and brings disaster on himself and Juliet. In this unusual Shakespearean tragedy, it is not what you are that counts, but the world you live in.

Violence, Love, and Gender in
Romeo and Juliet

In three of Shakespeare’s plays, female and male characters share the title. These plays all deviate from the male-actor-female-audience pattern that dominates in
Hamlet
,
Lear
,
Macbeth
, and
Othello
and resemble the comedies in other ways as well. In
Romeo and Juliet
and
Troilus and Cressida
, as in
Antony and Cleopatra
, the lovers begin as admiring audiences to each other. Juliet learns to pretend to protect her love of Romeo, and while her pretense fails, Romeo never distrusts her as the other heroes distrust women. Cressida pretends from the very beginning, and in the climactic scene Troilus is an audience to her infidelity with Diomedes. One hero lacks distrust of women, the other seems to learn it by painful experience (though we can find imagery suggestive of such distrust in his language earlier); unlike Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, or Desdemona, but more like the women of comedy, the women maintain or increase their ability to act throughout the play.

In these plays, then, suspicion of women’s acting cannot be the cause of the disaster. But issues of gender politics are still important.

Unlike the romantic comedies, these plays all include war or blood and that calls on men to define their masculinity by violence. In their private world, the lovers may achieve a mutuality in which both are active and genders are not polarized. But in the external world, masculinity is
identified with violence and femininity with weakness. Romeo and Juliet establish a role-transcending private world of mutuality in love. But this world is destroyed, partly by Romeo’s entanglement in the feud, partly by Juliet’s continued life in her parents’ house concealing her marriage.

The minor characters in
Romeo and Juliet
establish a background of common beliefs current in both plays: “women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall” (1.1.17-18) while men glory in their “naked weapon” (35). In the Nurse’s view, there are compensations—“women grow by men” (1.3.95)—but she assents to her husband’s equation of female sexuality with falling backward.

Two different conventional images of this society link sex and violence. First, sexual intercourse is seen as the success of male attacks. For example, Benvolio consoles Romeo in his lovesickness for Rosaline by saying, “A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit” (1.1.210). Romeo describes the futility of his courtship of her thus, “She will not stay the siege of loving terms / Nor bide th’encounter of assailing eyes” (215-16). Romeo has assayed this siege because he has already been hit with a different kind of violence—from “Cupid’s arrow” (212). As Mercutio will later put it, he is “stabbed with a white wench’s black eye: run through the ear with a love song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft” (2.4.14-16). Rosaline does not feel the same way, and thus “from Love’s weak childish bow she lives unharmed” (1.1.209). Romeo’s imagery conflates his sexual desire for Rosaline and his consequent desire that she fall in love with him—imagery of his attacking her and of love’s attacking her.

When Romeo meets Juliet, he gives up using such violent imagery about sexual intercourse: when he uses it about falling in love, summing up to Friar Laurence in riddles, his emphasis is on the reciprocity of their feelings:

Alternatively, he follows the image with a conceit that makes Juliet, if accepting, his protection:

In general, with Juliet he gives up images of himself as violent aggressor. He speaks more of wanting to touch her than to conquer her, even if this means wishing away his own identity. “O that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek . . . I would I were thy bird” (24-25, 182). Romeo is the only Shakespearean tragic hero who could offer to give up his name, who could say, “Had I it written, I would tear the word” (57). The strange nineteenth-century stage tradition of casting women as Romeo as well as Juliet may have been in part a response to his lack of violent imagery—except toward his own name—in their love scenes.

Nevertheless, lack of violence in the imagery does not mean a lack of sexual energy and attraction, and Shakespeare’s dialogue sensitively suggests the power of their developing relationship. The openness and directness of Romeo and Juliet stand out against the background of the romantic comedies, which celebrate the gradual triumph of love over the inhibitions and defenses of the lovers. Only in
The Merchant of Venice
do two lovers (Portia and Bassanio) talk readily and without disguise at their first meeting. While the lovers in the comedies echo each other’s language and imagery as their affinity grows behind their disguises, Romeo and Juliet at once match their shared imagery with more emotional openness.

Throughout this first meeting, Romeo takes the initiative; but at the same time, his language puts aggression at a distance. He speaks humbly about his “unworthiest hand” (1.5.95); if his touch is sin, it is “gentle” (96); if it is too rough, he would prefer “a tender kiss” (98). Thus his initiative is that of a pilgrim to a saint and claims to imply the dominance of the woman, not the man. But his saint does not simply stand motionless on her pedestal; she talks back, picking up his imagery and quatrain form, and accepts his hand as showing “mannerly devotion” (100). Even when she claims that “Saints do not move” (107), she is still showing her willingness for the kiss that climaxes the sonnet their interchange has become:

After the kiss, Juliet gives up the imagery of sainthood: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took” (110). She insists on her sharing of his humanity.

The next time they meet, they share the initiative as well. In the balcony scene, Shakespeare uses the soliloquy convention to show each of them in fantasy speaking to the other first, but breaks that convention by showing Romeo as the audience who responds to become actor along with Juliet. Each speech sets the beloved outside the social framework: Romeo compares Juliet to the sun, her eyes to the stars; Juliet more consciously imagines removing him from society: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” (2.2.34). It is when she makes a direct offer to her fantasy Romeo that the real one breaks in, and proposes a love that will create a private world between the two of them:

Like a dreamer startled to find a dream materialize, Juliet is taken aback at Romeo’s response. She breaks the fantasy of renaming—“What man art thou . . . ? . . . Art thou not Romeo?” (52, 60)—and momentarily appears to withdraw in fear. Thus the emphasis shifts from shared feeling to male persuasion, as Romeo speaks of the power and value of love, until Juliet responds and acknowledges to the real Romeo what she has said to the fantasy one—“Farewell compliment!” (89). When the interplay of caution and persuasion begins again, Juliet’s anxiety oddly focuses on Romeo’s oaths, as if his faith could be guaranteed by his
not
swearing. The unreality of her expressions of distrust adds to the charm of this exchange: there are no hints that she finds men untrustworthy, or that Romeo finds women untrustworthy, or even that the family feud leads either of them to doubts about the other (as distinguished from awareness of the practical difficulties). It is as if the only force working against their trust at this point is the feeling that their love is too good to be true. Romeo suggests this as he momentarily, in Juliet’s absence, takes over the verbal caution:

By this time Juliet has given up her hesitation; her avowal evokes the self-renewing power of their mutuality but at the same time grounds it in her own autonomy:

And as she has been more concerned with the external world in pointing out dangers, she takes the initiative in turning their love from shared fantasy and passion to social institution: “If that thy bent of love be honorable, / Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow” (143-44).