Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: A Tragedy of Sonnet-Lovers

Does Romeo and Juliet even need an introduction?  Well, this time on the poddie, we'll look at the play's tragic lovers through the lens of the Renaissance sonnet, how that poem style's postures shapes the action, making character fate.

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• 16:43 (Cont.) Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: A Tragedy of Sonnet-Lovers

Transcript

Hi there, litterbugs, welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  Today’s foray into the fertile imagination of William Shakespeare concerns those crazy kids Romeo and Juliet, another play that everybody thinks they know.

But before we get swept up in the riptide of Veronese romance and violence, I would like you to know that my email is classicenglishliterature@gmail.com.  Drop a line to suggest show topics or to offer suggestions or just to say hello.  It gets lonely out here in the interweb cloud.  You can also find me on Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and X (nee Twitter).

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Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a play that occupies a major piece of real estate in the popular imagination.  The lead characters have become a byword for young love, consuming passion.  Everyone in the English-speaking world can probably quote “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo,” even if there is still some confusion as to what it means.  The play is a favorite among middle- and early high-school English teachers who assume (very, very wrongly, in my opinion) that a tale of teenagers in love will be accessible and enjoyable to hormonally-charged adolescents, and it’s in that arena – the pubescent language arts classroom – that most people get their somewhat distorted ideas about Shakespeare’s work.

Let’s flesh out the plot for those of you who may have left school more than a few months ago:

Romeo and Juliet begins with the Chorus introducing two leading families of Verona: the Capulets and the Montagues. These families are embroiled in a feud that has erupted into violence on three occasions, but the reasons for the antagonism remain vague.  A fourth outbreak of violence occurs in the play’s first scene, when the Prince of Verona intercedes and threatens to banish the participants. Later, Don Capulet plans a feast, hoping to affiance his daughter Juliet to Count Paris. 

Word of the party spreads, and Montague's son Romeo and his friends Benvolio and Mercutio decide to go in disguise, Romeo hoping that Rosaline, whom he loves – really, he totally, totally does, no question – will attend. But instead he meets Juliet and falls instantly in love with her. Rosaline who? Juliet's cousin Tybalt recognizes the Montague intruders and hustles them out, breaking off the new lovers’ introductions. 

Romeo skulks about the Capulet orchard, hoping to see Juliet in her window, which is not at all creepy. They decide to marry the next day, with the help of Juliet's Nurse, when Juliet goes for confession to Friar Laurence. Comes off without a hitch.

Hot-headed Tybalt challenges Romeo, who refuses to fight.  He’s a lover now, you see, not a fighter.  Mercutio, Romeo’s friend, thinks Romeo’s a wuss, and fights with Tybalt himself.   Romeo tries to stop the fight, but Mercutio is slain. Enraged, Romeo chases Tybalt down and kills him.  Still a bit of the fighter in him after all.  The Prince banishes the murderer.

Juliet waits anxiously for Romeo, then learns of the fight, Tybalt's death, and Romeo's banishment. Friar Laurence looks after the exile, figuring a way to have Romeo spend the night with Juliet before leaving for Mantua. While all this is afoot, the Capulets mourn Tybalt, then Lord Capulet declares that Juliet will wed Paris tomorrow.  Juliet would rather not, thank you very much, and Juliet’s parents are quite miffed at Juliet’s obstinacy.  

Here’s the genius part of the plan.  Friar Laurence provides a potion that simulates death, and so the wedding party thinks when they come to collect her. The Friar sends word to Romeo of Juliet's plan and tells him to come rescue his wife.

But alas!  The vital message does not reach Romeo because an outbreak of plague has cut off travel.  The desolate husband hears that his bride is dead, purchases poison from a Mantuan apothecary, returns to Verona, arrives at the tomb, kills Paris, drinks his poison and dies. Juliet awakens from her stupor, and Friar Laurence fills her in on the latest events.  She refuses to leave the tomb and stabs herself to death. The Capulets and the Montagues agree to a peace and raise a monument to their dead children.

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In his history plays (and in some of the tragedies to come), Shakespeare consulted a number of sources, particularly Plutarch’s Lives and Holinshed’s Chronicles.  For the comedies, he looked to Italian playwrights for inspiration or to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, actually, is one of the few plays for which we cannot identify a source and so it may be one of the Bard’s original plots (though Ovid does have an influence).  Anyway, for Romeo and Juliet, we have a really prominent source: a 1562 poem by one Arthur Brooke entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet.  It’s the first telling of the Romeo and Juliet legend in English, and Brooke himself stirred together a number of continental tellings going back to the 1530s.  Original Italian versions like the one by Luigi da Porta present pretty much the tale as we have it on stage: Romeo and Giuletta are members of the feuding families of Montecchi and Capelletti, who secretly fall in love and marry.  They include the accomodating Nurse, Romeo's exile, the Friar's sleeping draught, the failed message, and the suicides in the tomb.  A 1559 French version by Boaistuau changes the suicide timing a bit, so Romeo has died before Juliet recovers, and it’s the French versions that Brooke draws from, and which he heavily moralizes, turning it into a cautionary tale, and that Shakespeare imbibes in turn.

But of course our Bill can’t leave well enough alone.  He needs to put his own flavor on it, and its moral bluntness is the first to go, ditch the crude preachiness against the perils of young passion. 

As I said at the beginning of this episode, Romeo and Juliet is a play nearly everyone knows something about.  In addition to the boatload of famous lines, we’re familiar with themes of the obsessive power of love, the violence that it can engender.  We know the play, as a tragedy, dwells on ideas of fate and character.  One can see the play as a meditation on social management: where does authority lie?  What is the proper balance of justice between the individual and society?  Between the sexes?  I think all of this is, in one way or another, rather commonplace for most of us.

But reading it through this time, one of the things I noticed Shakespeare doing is interrogating the ways by which the conventions of literature, of storytelling, contribute to the tragic action the play portrays.  Generally, he is very interested in the ways by which language frames our experiences, how it, in a sense, constructs our lived reality.  In a way, I guess, Romeo and Juliet is kind of meta, a play about playing roles.

Hence the other changes he makes from the sources. In them, the story takes place at a rather leisurely pace, over the course of some months. Shakespeare contracts that time-frame to a mere four days – which wildly intensifies the passions and leads to questions about the depth and maturity of the characters’ emotions.  And speaking of maturity, Shakespeare dramatically reduces Juliet’s age.  In the sources, Juliet first appears at around 20 years old.  A later version makes her 16, but Shakespeare explicitly puts her age at just 13.  Capulet tells Paris that

My child is yet a stranger in the world;

She hath not seen the change of fourteen years.

Let two more summers wither in their pride,

Ere  we may think her ripe to be a bride.

Dad wants her to be 16 before any marriages take place, well aware, it seems, of his daughter’s juvenescence and fervent emotional nature.  Interestingly, Paris accepts the premise, but argues, “Younger than she are happy mothers made.”  But Capulet replies, “And too soon marred  are those so early made.”  Note the repetition as rhyme here to conclude the point, as well as the heavy stress on the word “marred” as a physically, and linguistically, diminished version of “married,” all those alliterative m’s tying the conversation up (though Capulet, as we know, cannot keep his position).  

And since we’ve mentioned young Paris, and many of us , I suppose, are wont to think of him as the rom-com interloper, the “other guy” that our heroine nearly settles for, it’s worth noting that Shakespeare has Paris actually come to the Juliet’s tomb – this does not occur in the sources, and so I think that maybe we are a little harsh on Mr. Paris.  I read his visit as a gesture of genuine feeling for Juliet, a real sign of mourning.  She is his dying thought:

O, I am slain! If thou be merciful,

Open the tomb; lay me with Juliet.

Anyway, I’m in danger of drifting again.  I was talking of Juliet’s rather startling youth.  It is often explained away in junior high classrooms as, “Well, that’s just the way it was in those days.”  And I suppose a well-informed language arts teacher might remember that Chaucer’s Wife of Bath declaring, “For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age, /  Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,/ Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve.”  Married at twelve.  But Chaucer and Shakespeare feel the need to mention their ages, not because it was common, but because it was extraordinary.  These are excessively young girls, certainly not without historical precedent, but not in the usual way of doing things.  Juliet’s youth is emphasized because it is a problem.

While canon law fixed a girl’s betrothal age at 12 and a boy’s at 14, overwhelmingly in the Middle Ages and early modern period the average age of brides was 18 to 22.  Yes, noble families might contract and execute marriages earlier for sundry political or monetary reasons, but we should not take Juliet’s youth as unsurprising.

Well, then, how old is Romeo?  Curiously, Shakespeare leaves that rather vague.  We get the impression that he is some years older than Juliet, but we are not sure how many.  Generally, he is portrayed as being perhaps 16, but as we have already noted, he could be in his early twenties.  There’s no reason to not to imagine a perhaps 8 year age gap between a child and a young man.  Whatever his actual age, we see early that he is not mature.

The play opens with the famous prologue, and while it provides necessary exposition and a deterministic cast to events which follow, the literary form the speech takes will echo throughout Romeo’s characterization.  You remember it, yeah : 

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

da da da da da.  But that prologue is a sonnet.  Remember them?  14 lines of iambic pentameter, quatrains and couplets or octaves and sestets?  Rather fashionable among swank gentlemen of the time?   Shakespeare opens this play with the au courant love poem style.  And the sonnet occurs a couple more times in the play, the last being a prologue to act 2.

But the first time the lovers kiss, their dialogue is a sonnet.  Here it is.  Romeo takes the first quatrain:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet the second:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

They share the third:

Romeo

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?                  

Juliet

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

And the final couplet alternates:

Juliet

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo

Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

This is rather unusual.  We are used to Renaissance sonnet cycles, like those by Sidney and Spenser, as inspired by Petrarch, in which the woman is an unattainable ideal – Sidney’s Stella means star, bright, shiny, above and beyond.  And the woman is silent.  Hardly ever is she given voice.  But here, the sonnet is dialogical – there is statement and response.  Couple of things to draw from this:

1. Romeo is the card and calendar of the Petrarchan sonnet-lover.  He mopes about melancholically, mooning over his love.  He prefers solitude.  His language is often paradoxical.  He presents himself as an erotic, courtly-love style suitor, trying to dazzle with witty metaphors, but in Romeo’s case, they come off as quite conventional, almost moribund.  She is a shrine, he (or his lips) are pilgrims, yawn.  By the by, looked at this way, his famous “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” from the balcony scene comes off as completely derivative and dull.  It feels like a cliche even 425 years ago.  She should have ghosted him there.

Yeah, and speaking of ghosting,whatever happened to Rosaline?  She seemed a perfectly nice person.  Not a party girl, but . . . Romeo says, “She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow / Do I live dead that live to tell it now.”  She doesn’t return his passion, and even if she did, she has chosen to remain chaste.  She’s hardly a suitable subject for an aspiring young cavalier.  What’s a young, red-blooded Veronese to do . . . ?  Hey, who’s that pretty kid?

That pretty kid, though, is a bit more sharp – she plays the worldly-wise woman a bit (like the beloved in Spenser’s Amoretti who challenges his vanity) by reminding Romeo of the actual holiness implied by his clumsy pilgrimage metaphor.  Of course, this is the weakest “hard to get” ploy ever.  She ain’t straining herself.  But she is calling out, albeit delicately, Romeo’s callowness.  He is playing a role – he’s a young man with a head addled by all that poetry – and he acts the part of the poetic lover.  She up on that famous balcony and he down in the orchard (a rather well-worn trope for sexual delight in medieval courtly love poetry) is a brilliant instantiation of the world of Romeo’s youthful fantasy.  If you’ve not noticed, I am not a member of the Romeo Fan Club.

1. The dialogic sonnet allows for Juliet’s agency and a foregrounding of female desire.  When you think about it, the beloveds of sonnet sequences are kind of sexless.  They inspire some kind of intellectual or spiritual passion in the speaker, but actual desire feels almost absent, or at least quite buried in the poetic performance.  And since the women addressed by those cycles are generally mute, we’ve no reckoning with female sexuality at all.  But Shakespeare centers Juliet’s sexual desire at the same time as, disturbingly, centering her youth.  It’s no mistake that he alters her age to coincide with the dawning sexual awareness of adolescence.  

Anticipating her wedding night, Juliet longs for Romeo: 

Come, gentle night, come, loving black-browed night,

Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars!

Early editors thought they must have gotten a bad text, because it seems more sensible that Romeo should be dead if he is to be cut out in little stars, right?  Until you realize that “die” was also a slang term for “orgasm,” then the line reads more clearly and is far more erotically charged.  The imperative “come” needs no real explanation for its sexual subtext, and “night” does similar double-duty as a homonym for the dark hours and a chivalrous lover.  And, of course, we should note that Juliet sees herself as the active party here.  She doesn’t say, “Take me, my love” as one might more conventionally expect.  She says, “Give me” – she will do the taking herself.  Rather a precocious young lady.

But one still hopelessly green.  Clever she is, educated.  Savvy to the ways of her rather constricted world.  But still very innocent and, in her way, as romantically addled as Romeo.  

That’s the tragedy, I think.  Not what happens to the lovers, but why it happens.  Their thrusting youth and emotional rebellion are energized by a fantasy, a game of “what if”?  That’s what the “wherefore art thou, Romeo” speech is about, that business about “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  They live in a world entirely circumscribed by the name – Montague or Capulet.  And remember that these are paternal names, traced through the male line.  This was what identity was in the early modern period – a matter of lineage and social position.  Not yet did we have our modern notion of identity as a matter of autonomous consciousness and individuality.  Juliet is similarly precocious in her anticipating a post-Romanticist conception of the self, an authentic and unique agent unhindered and uncircumscribed by politics, society, biology, or any other external force. The opening prologue emphasizes the ideas of the “household” and “dignity” and such defining social and masculine forces cannot be overwrought by a sonnetty dream, at least not yet.

But, conversely, to dismiss the tragedy as merely patriarchal tyranny is to miss a point.  Certainly, the kind of paternalism under which the play operates comes under some intense scrutiny – the feuding families, the rioting young men (and rioting as a means of male bonding), the misogynistic threatening language (Samson, one of Capulet’s men, says he will “thrust Montague’s maids to the wall”), the clear subordination of women’s agency – all this is presented for our critique.  Sadly, the sonneteer is, as personified by Romeo, not a hero defying a dangerous cultural order, but a reification of that very system’s more seductive faces.

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It’s something of a critical commonplace to note that Romeo and Juliet is a comedy until people start dying.  But there’s some truth to it.  It’s Shakespeare’s first real foray into tragedy, and he draws on many comedic formulae.  Many scholars go so far as to say that Romeo and Juliet is A Midsummer Night’s Dream in through a funhouse mirror.  The two plays do share so much.  The father-enforced marriage: Lysander and Romeo are a pair just as Hermia and Juliet are.  Much of the verse shares similar characteristics: rhyme-swapping and repetition, parallel speeches, etc.  The Dream’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” play within a play may well be a parody of Romeo and Juliet.  Now, we don’t know which one Will wrote first, though reasonable dates of 1595 or 6 work.  How one play inflected the other chronologically is thus a mystery, but that thing I talked about last episode, that in the Dream Shakespeare rather ambiguously restores order even as he preserves the tensions (masculine/feminine, reason/magic, male/female, love/power) that upset it – I think Romeo and Juliet wants to do a similar thing, but then Mercutio dies (this is what clever-clogs call peripeteia – the turning point in a tragedy when the horrifying end becomes all but inevitable).

Let’s look at the prologue-sonnet again.  Here’s another pair of wicked famous lines telling us of how the feud between the two noble households alike in dignity will be resolved by the sacrifice of their children:

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life.

Maybe so famous we don’t really notice them anymore.  The “star-crossed lovers” bit especially.  Now, yes, this line, taken in isolation, means something like betrayed by the stars or ill-fated – it’s an astrology thing.  But the play keeps the tragedy squarely centered in human folly or venality.  Emotional rashness.  The “star” bit reminds me of the unattainable female of the sonnet cycles, in which case the play’s destruction comes not from disembodied destiny, but from a romantic misprision.

The first of these two lines, dominated by the “f” alliteration, plays with the dual meanings of “fatal”: deadly and destined.  The loins of the two foes literally means the line of family descendancy, generations of Montagues and Capulets, but if you are prone to playing with words, as I am, you could also make an argument that it is the two foes who have copulated and produced the tragedy to come.  And, of course, “take their life” is cruelly equivocal: it can mean “receive their life,” as in be given birth to, or end their own lives, which, of course, they do.

Masculine honor and its fragility sets in motion a chain of events that Romeo is too emotionally shallow to control or even effectively respond to, events which cost not only his life, but the life of Juliet.  Let’s look at Romeo’s last lines:

Eyes, look your last!

Arms, take your last embrace!  and, lips, O you

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on

The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!

Here’s to my love!  

O true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick.  Thus with a kiss I die.

He’s still the Petrarchan lover.  There’s almost a meta moment here, in which their deaths are just part of a script that Romeo acts out.  His final speech says nothing about Juliet or about his recognition (what the tragic scholars call anagnorisis) of his own responsibility for the tragic action.  It’s all about him – an apostrophe to his own body parts and his fate.  Righteous kiss, my eye.  And here’s to my love?  Surely, his love means Juliet, his beloved, his darling.  Yeah, maybe.  But I doubt it. He’s not Paris. I think he’s talking about his love, his emotional intensity.  Juliet happens to be a hook upon which to hang that hat.