Romeo and Juliet (35 page)

As the movement of their scenes combines mutuality and male persuasion, the words they use about their love can imply both mutuality and patriarchy. “It is my lady” (10), says Romeo of Juliet at the beginning of the balcony scene, and near the end she promises that if they marry “all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay / And follow thee my lord throughout the world” (147-48). This could reflect either reciprocity of service or a conventional shift from female power in courtship to male power in marriage.

Similarly, when Juliet anticipates her secret wedding night with Romeo, the imagery of female subordination is balanced by imagery of sharing. She speaks of losing her virginity as losing a game, but then it becomes a victory, and her virginity parallel to Romeo’s, as she prays to Night, “learn me how to lose a winning match, / Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods” (3.2.12-13). Here and elsewhere, financial imagery turns Juliet into property more directly than it does Romeo: when she speaks of herself as possessing, the object is less Romeo than love.

Similarly, Romeo calls her “merchandise” for which he would adventure “as far / As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea” (2.2.82-83), while Juliet says “my true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth” (2.6.33-34).

Romeo and Juliet use the image of woman as property in a way that transcends its source in female social subordination; both of them are far from the financial interest that Lady Capulet suggests in her praise of Paris and the Nurse in her observation that Juliet’s husband “shall have the chinks” (1.5.119). Nevertheless, the asymmetry in their use of financial imagery coheres with the asymmetrical demands that the male code of violence will make on Romeo and the female code of docility on Juliet.

Their use of other images is more symmetrical. Both lovers speak in words at once sensuously descriptive of beauty and celestially idealizing. Juliet, says Romeo,

Romeo, according to Juliet, “will lie upon the wings of night / Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back” (3.2.18-19). Romeo has imagined Juliet as the sun and her eyes as stars. Juliet overgoes Romeo’s praise in saying that, transformed into stars,

Unlike some of Shakespeare’s more solipsistic early lovers, such as Berowne and Proteus, Romeo understands the value of reciprocity in love. He wants its ritual—“Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine” (2.2.127)—and explains to Friar Laurence, “Her I love now / Doth grace for grace and love for love allow” (2.3.85-86); he speaks of “the imagined happiness that both / Receive in either by this dear encounter” (2.6.28-29). All this is far from the identification of sex and violence that the imagery of the servants and Mercutio suggests is more usual in Verona.

Why do Romeo and Juliet keep their love secret not only from their parents but also from their peers? Romeo never tells Benvolio or Mercutio of his love for Juliet, though neither one is so committed to the Montagues that they would necessarily be hostile. (Benvolio had no objection to Rosaline as a Capulet; Mercutio belongs to neither house.) This secrecy helps make Mercutio’s fight with Tybalt inevitable. Romeo’s exclusion of Mercutio from his confidence suggests that his love of Juliet is not only a challenge to the feud but also a challenge to associations of masculinity and sexuality with violence. How can Romeo talk of Juliet to someone whose advice is “If love be rough with you, be rough with love, / Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down” (1.4.27-28)?

It is in part because of the difference between their experience of love and Verona’s expected distortion of it that Romeo and Juliet try to keep their relationship private. Yet this secrecy is avoidance of a problem that they cannot ultimately escape. When Romeo tries to act according to his secret love of Juliet instead of according to the feud, Tybalt and Mercutio insist on fighting. And when Romeo’s intervention—to stop the fight—results in Mercutio’s death, it is clear that Verona’s definition of masculinity by violence is partly Romeo’s definition as well. “O sweet Juliet,” he says, “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate” (3.1.115-16), as he prepares for the fight to the death that causes his banishment.

Just before their crucial fight, Tybalt and Mercutio, speaking of Romeo, quibble on the point that “man,” a word so important as an ideal, has from the opening scene the less honorific meaning of “manservant.”

This pun is an analogue of the irony that is precisely in his “manly” vengeance for Mercutio’s death that Romeo most decisively loses control of his own fate and becomes, as he says, “fortune’s fool” (138). In a sense, as Mercutio’s elaboration of his pun suggests without his awareness, a commitment to proving manhood by violence makes one easily manipulated by whoever offers a challenge. “Marry, go before to field, he’ll be your follower! / Your worship in that sense may call him man” (59-60). In the larger sense, the code of violence that promises to make Romeo a man actually makes him its man—its pawn.

If Romeo shares Mercutio’s belief in the manhood of violence, he also shares the Friar’s wish for reconciliation. But the Friar has his own version of gender polarization that also contributes to the disaster. He repeatedly uses “womanish” as a synonym for “weak” when speaking to both Juliet (4.1.119) and Romeo (3.3.110), and, more crucially for the plot, encourages Juliet to pretend obedience and death through his potion rather than helping her escape to Romeo (though she has expressed willingness to leap “From off the battlements of any tower, / Or walk in thievish ways”—4.1.78-79). His image of manhood (desirable as an ideal for both sexes) is emotional control: he chides Romeo for his fury and grief at banishment by calling him “Unseemly woman in a seeming man! / And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!” (3.3.112-13). The Friar distrusts passionate love, and, like much of the conventional imagery of the play, identifies passionate love with violence: “These violent delights have violent ends” (2.6.9). It is consistent that he should not encourage Juliet to elopement but rather hopes to stage their reunion in a context of family reconciliation.

Juliet’s confidante, the Nurse, has a more positive attitude toward sexuality, but she too underestimates the lovers’ intense commitment to each other. Like the Friar, too, she keeps the love secret and encourages Juliet to appear docile to her parents, and finally to marry Paris, since Romeo, she says, “is dead—or ’twere as good he were / As living here and you no use of him” (3.5. 226-27). Thus she is counseling Juliet to a conventional acceptance of the husband chosen by her parents. While Juliet refuses this advice, she follows the counsel of pretense that she receives from nurse and friar. The controlled stichomythia of her dialogue with Paris is a sad contrast to her spontaneous participation in Romeo’s sonnet. Juliet’s acceptance of their advice of pretense and mock death is the point analogous to Romeo’s duel with Tybalt where failure to transcend the gender polarization of their society makes disaster inevitable.

Yet before their deaths, Romeo and Juliet can transcend the aggressions and stereotypes of the outside in their secret world. Fulfilling the promise of the balcony scene, they rename each other “Love” in their aubade scene, and their imagery suggests the creation of a private world with a technique oddly similar to that of the crucial scene in
The Taming of the Shrew
. To keep Romeo with her longer, Juliet transforms the lark into the nightingale and then transforms the sun into “some meteor that the sun exhales / To be to thee this night a torchbearer” (3.5.13-14). Romeo, after initially contradicting her, showing the caution that was primarily hers in the balcony scene, goes along with the game and accepts her transformation, with awareness of the likely cost:

The scene in which Kate joins in Petruchio’s transformation of the sun into the moon and old Vincentio into a young girl is of course quite different in tone. Kate and Petruchio have been engaged in a farcical combat of wills; they are now returning to Kate’s father’s house, accompanied by Petruchio’s friend Hortensio, rather than in a romantic solitude, and they are under no sentence of death or banishment. But both scenes use a verbal transformation of the world—a creation of a private world through words—as a metaphor for a relationship. Such a private world is crucial to
Shrew
’s mediation between ideologies of patriarchy and companionship in marriage, as well as to the attempt that Romeo and Juliet make love to each other tenderly in a world of violence. The secrecy of their love heightens at once its purity and intensity and its vulnerability. When the private world is established it is already threatened. As soon as Romeo accepts the pretense “it is not day” (25), Juliet resumes her caution and returns them to the real world, where Romeo must flee. Nevertheless, they have an absolute trust in each other; on their departure there is no questioning of each other’s truths. . . . Presciently, they imagine death as the only possible obstacle to their reunion.

Shakespeare changed his source to reduce the age of the lovers, and historical evidence suggests that he also made them much younger than the typical age of marriage for Elizabethan aristocrats (twenty for women, twenty-one for men), who married still younger than other classes (median age twenty-four for women, twenty-six for men). However young the members of Shakespeare’s original audiences were—probably a high proportion were in their late teens or early twenties—Romeo and Juliet were still younger than almost all of them. The extreme youth of the lovers emphasizes their innocence and inexperience. Anyone who has lived longer than Romeo and Juliet—anyone who has given up a first love—has made more compromises than they have. It is their extreme purity that gives their love its special tragedy. The play expresses both the appeal and the danger of a love in which two people become the whole world to each other. This little world precariously remedies the defects of the larger one—its coldness, its hierarchies, its violence—but the lovers cannot negotiate recognition by the outer world except by their deaths because of their residual commitment to the outer world and its gender ideals.

Romeo and Juliet
on Stage and Screen

In “To the Memorie of the deceased Author, Master W. Shakespeare,” a commendatory poem published in the first collection of Shakespeare’s works (1623), Leonard Digges wrote,

When Digges published these lines,
Romeo and Juliet
had been on the stage for some twenty-five years. The first printed text of the play, issued in 1597, claims (probably truly) that it “hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely”; the second printed text, issued in 1599, says that
Romeo and Juliet
“hath been sundry times publiquely acted.” And yet, despite allusions to the play, such as Digges’s poem, we have no report of a specific production in England (there are some early references to German productions) until 1662, when William Davenant revived
Romeo and Juliet
.

Despite the absence of early references to productions, we know at least a little about the Elizabethan staging of the play. Because the earliest text, a so-called Bad Quarto (see page 122), probably is based on the memories of actors who had performed in the play, it gives us some idea of what
Romeo and Juliet
was like when it was put on the stage. For instance, certain stage directions in Q1 surely report what the spectators saw. Here are a few of these directions, keyed to the lineation of the present text:

It is possible, too, that some of the omissions in the Bad Quarto (evident when it is compared to the Good Quarto, which was published two years later) may reflect an Elizabethan cut production of the play. True, most of the cuts in the 1597 text must be due to lapses of memory, but some may faithfully represent an abridged performance. For instance, Benvolio’s account (1.1) of the first brawl—ten lines in a later, better text—consists of only two lines in the 1597 version, perhaps because two lines were thought to be enough in production. Similarly, the servants who open 1.5 with talk abut preparing for the banquet are deleted—perhaps because the actors preparing the text did not recall the speech, but possibly because the material was not given in a stage performance. In any case, many later directors have similarly cut these speeches.

One other point should be made about
Romeo and Juliet
on the Elizabethan stage: female parts were played by boys, which mean that Juliet, who is said to be almost fourteen, was in fact played by a performer of approximately that age. Elizabethan child actors were carefully trained, and judging from surviving comments about them, they were remarkably skillful performers. Later centuries have been less successful in their child actors, and attempts to use adolescents in the title roles of the play have usually been unimpressive. Even John Gielgud, when he first played Romeo at nineteen in 1924, was judged inadequate.