Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Introduction
William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor
born in 23 April, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean
ages of British theatre. During his time in London, Shakespeare’s first
printed works were published. They were two long poems, 'Venus and Adonis'
(1593) and 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594). He also became a founding member
of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors. He remained with
the company for the rest of his career, during which time it evolved into The
King’s Men under the patronage of King James I (from 1603). During his
time in the company Shakespeare wrote many of his most famous tragedies, such
as King Lear and Macbeth, as well as great romances, like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.
Shakespeare wrote 36 plays, 2 narrative poem and 154 sonnets. He
continued to be one of the most important literary figures of the English language.
Shakespeare in
Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. He is buried
in the sanctuary of the parish church, Holy Trinity.
The Forcefulness of Love
Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story
in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and
most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense
passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. . In the
course of the play, the young lovers are driven to defy their entire social
world: families (“Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” Juliet asks, “Or if
thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”);
friends (Romeo abandons Mercutio and Benvolio after the feast in order to go to
Juliet’s garden); and ruler (Romeo returns to Verona for Juliet’s sake after
being exiled by the Prince on pain .
Love is the overriding theme of the play, but a reader
should always remember that Shakespeare is uninterested in portraying a
prettied-up, dainty version of the emotion, the kind that bad poets write
about, and whose bad poetry Romeo reads while pining for Rosaline. Love
in Romeo and Juliet is
a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against
their world, and, at times, against themselves. The powerful nature of love can
be seen in the way it is described, or, more accurately, the way descriptions
of it so consistently fail to capture its entirety. At times love is described
in the terms of religion, as in the fourteen lines when Romeo and Juliet first
meet. At others, it is described as a sort of magic: “Alike bewitchèd by the
charm of looks” . Juliet, perhaps, most perfectly describes her love for Romeo
by refusing to describe it: “But my true love is grown to such excess / I
cannot sum up some of half my wealth” . Love, in other words, resists any
single metaphor because it is too powerful to be so easily contained or
understood. Romeo and Juliet does
not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between love and
society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of
being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family
in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion.
Love as a Cause of Violence
The
themes of death and violence permeate Romeo and Juliet, and they are always connected to passion,
whether that passion is love or hate. The connection between hate, violence,
and death seems obvious. But the connection between love and violence requires
further investigation. Love, in Romeo
and Juliet, is a grand passion, and as such, it is blinding; it can
overwhelm a person as powerfully and completely as hate can. The passionate
love between Romeo and Juliet is linked from the moment of its inception with
death: Tybalt notices that Romeo has crashed the feast and determines to kill
him just as Romeo catches sight of Juliet and falls instantly in love with her.
From
that point on, love seems to push the lovers closer to love and violence, not
farther from it. Romeo and Juliet are plagued with thoughts of suicide, and a
willingness to experience it: in Act 3, scene 3, Romeo brandishes a knife in
Friar Lawrence’s cell and threatens to kill himself after he has been banished
from Verona and his love. Juliet also pulls a knife in order to take her own
life in Friar Lawrence’s presence just three scenes later. After Capulet
decides that Juliet will marry Paris, Juliet says, “If all else fail, myself
have power to die” . Finally, each imagines that the other looks dead the
morning after their first, and only, sexual experience.
This
theme continues until its inevitable conclusion: double suicide. This tragic
choice is the highest, most potent expression of love that Romeo and Juliet can
make. It is only through death that they can preserve their love, and their
love is so profound that they are willing to end their lives in its defense.
The Individual versus Society
Much of Romeo
and Juliet involve the lovers’ struggles against public and
social institutions that either explicitly or implicitly oppose the existence
of their love. Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract:
families and the placement of familial power in the father; law and the desire
for public order; religion; and the social importance placed on masculine
honor. These institutions often come into conflict with each other. The
importance of honor, for example, time and again results in brawls that disturb
the public peace. Though they do not always work in concert, each of these
societal institutions in some way present obstacles for Romeo and Juliet. The
enmity between their families, coupled with the emphasis placed on loyalty and
honor to kin, combine to create a profound conflict for Romeo and Juliet, who
must rebel against their heritages.
Further,
the patriarchal power structure inherent in Renaissance families, wherein the
father controls the action of all other family members, particularly women,
places Juliet in an extremely vulnerable position. Her heart, in her family’s
mind, is not hers to give. The law and the emphasis on social civility demand
terms of conduct with which the blind passion of love cannot comply. Religion
similarly demands priorities that Romeo and Juliet cannot abide by because of
the intensity of their love. Though in most situations the lovers uphold the
traditions of Christianity (they wait to marry before consummating their love),
their love is so powerful that they begin to think of each other in blasphemous
terms. For example, Juliet calls Romeo “the god of my idolatry,” elevating
Romeo to level of God . The couple’s final act of suicide is likewise
un-Christian. The maintenance of masculine honor forces Romeo to commit actions
he would prefer to avoid. But the social emphasis placed on masculine honor is
so profound that Romeo cannot simply ignore them.
It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a
battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions
and those demanded by the private desires of the individual. Romeo and Juliet’s
appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and the renunciation of
their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context
of individuals who wish to escape the public world. But the lovers cannot stop
the night from becoming day. And Romeo cannot cease being a Montague simply
because he wants to; the rest of the world will not let him. The lovers’
suicides can be understood as the ultimate night, the ultimate privacy.
The Inevitability of Fate
In
its first address to the audience, the Chorus states that Romeo and Juliet are
“star-crossed”—that is to say that fate (a power often vested in the movements
of the stars) controls them (Prologue.6). This sense of fate permeates the
play, and not just for the audience. The characters also are quite aware of it:
Romeo and Juliet constantly see omens. When Romeo believes that Juliet is dead,
he cries out, “Then I defy you, stars,” completing the idea that the love between
Romeo and Juliet is in opposition to the decrees of destiny . Of course,
Romeo’s defiance itself plays into the hands of fate, and his determination to
spend eternity with Juliet results in their deaths.
The
mechanism of fate works in all of the events surrounding the lovers: the feud
between their families (it is worth noting that this hatred is never explained;
rather, the reader must accept it as an undeniable aspect of the world of the
play); the horrible series of accidents that ruin Friar Lawrence’s seemingly
well-intentioned plans at the end of the play; and the tragic timing of Romeo’s
suicide and Juliet’s awakening. These events are not mere coincidences, but
rather manifestations of fate that help bring about the unavoidable outcome of
the young lovers’ deaths.
The
concept of fate described above is the most commonly accepted interpretation.
There are other possible readings of fate in the play: as a force determined by
the powerful social institutions that influence Romeo and Juliet’s choices, as well
as fate as a force that emerges from Romeo and Juliet’s very personalities.
Love
Given that Romeo
and Juliet represents one of the world’s most famous and
enduring love stories, it seems obvious that the play should spotlight the
theme of love. However, the play tends to focus more on the barriers that
obstruct love than it does on love itself. Obviously, the Capulet and Montague
families represent the lovers’ largest obstacle. But the lovers are also their
own obstacles, in the sense that they have divergent understandings of love.
Romeo, for instance, begins the play speaking of love in worn clichés that make
his friends cringe. Although the language he uses with Juliet showcases a more
mature and original verse, he retains a fundamentally abstract conception of
love. Juliet, by contrast, tends to remain more firmly grounded in the
practical matters related to love, such as marriage and sex. This contrast
between the lovers appears clearly in the famous balcony scene. Whereas Romeo
speaks of Juliet poetically, using an extended metaphor that likens her to the
sun, Juliet laments the social constraints that prevent their marriage: “O
Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name” .
Another obstacle in Romeo and Juliet is time—or, more precisely, timing.
Everything related to love in this play moves too quickly. The theme of
accelerated love first appears early in the play, regarding the question of
whether Juliet is old enough for marriage. Whereas Lady Capulet contends that
Juliet is of a “pretty age” and hence eligible for marriage, Lord Capulet
maintains that it’s too soon for her to marry. When Lord Capulet changes his
mind later in the play, he accelerates the timeline for Juliet’s marriage to
Paris. Forced to act quickly in response, Juliet fakes her own death.
Everything about Romeo and Juliet’s relationship is sped up as well. Not only
do they fall in love at first sight, but they also get married the next day.
The lovers’ haste may raise
questions about the legitimacy of their affection for one another. Do they
truly love each other, or have they doomed themselves out of mere sexual
desire? The theme of accelerated love returns at the play’s end, when Romeo
arrives at Juliet’s tomb, believing himself to be too late. In fact, he arrives
too early, just before Juliet wakes up. His bad timing results in both their
deaths.
Sex
The themes of love and sex are closely linked in Romeo and Juliet, though the precise
nature of their relationship remains in dispute throughout. For instance, in
Act I Romeo talks about his frustrated love for Rosaline in poetic terms, as if
love were primarily an abstraction.
Mercutio
picks this thread back up in Act II, when he insists that Romeo has confused
his love for Juliet with mere sexual desire: “this driveling love is like a
great natural that runs / lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole” .
Mercutio’s words suggest a comparison between Romeo and either a court jester
looking for a place to hide his staff or a mentally impaired person seeking to hide a trinket. Yet Mercutio’s use
of the phrases “lolling up and down” and “hide his bauble in a hole” also
strongly imply sexual imagery (“bauble” and “hole” are slang for penis and
vagina, respectively). Hence Mercutio’s words suggest a third comparison
between Romeo and an idiot clumsily groping for a woman to have sex with.
Whereas Mercutio cynically conflates love and sex, Juliet takes a more earnest
and pious position. In Mercutio’s view, there is ultimately no such thing as love,
since love is ultimately reducible to sexual desire.
Juliet,
by contrast, implies that the concepts are distinct and that they exist in a
hierarchical relationship, with love standing above sex. This view accords with
Catholic doctrine, which privileges the spiritual union of marriage, but also
indicates that this union must be legally consummated through sexual
intercourse. The speech Juliet delivers in Act III, scene ii, nicely
demonstrates her view of the proper relationship between love and sex:
Here
the notions of purchase and possession designate love/marriage and sex,
respectively. Through marriage, she has “bought” Romeo’s love (and likewise
“sold” hers to him), but the moment of mutual possession has not yet taken
place. Now that they’re married, however, Juliet clearly longs to “enjoy” the
consummation. “Give me my Romeo,” she says: “And when I shall die, / Take him
and cut him out in little stars” (III.ii.21–22). “Die” was Elizabethan slang
for orgasm, and the image of Romeo “cut . . . out in little stars” subtly
references the sexual ecstasy Juliet anticipates.
Violence
Due to the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues,
violence permeates the world of Romeo and
Juliet. Shakespeare demonstrates how intrinsic violence is
to the play’s environment in the first scene. Sampson and Gregory open the play
by making jokes about perpetrating violent acts against members of the Montague
family. And when Lord Montague’s servant, Abram, appears, their first response
is to prepare for a fight. Gregory instructs Sampson, “Draw thy tool!” , and
Sampson does so immediately.
Tempers among the young men of
Verona are clearly short, as further demonstrated when Tybalt spots Romeo at
the Capulet ball and spoils for a fight. Lord Capulet succeeds in temporarily
calming Tybalt, but the latter’s fury continues to smolder until the top of Act
III, when he tries to provoke a duel with Romeo, fatally wounds Mercutio, and
ends up slain by Romeo’s hand. Though tragic, this turn of events also seems
inevitable. Given how the feud between the two families continuously fans the
flames of hatred and thereby maintains a low-burning rage, such flaring outbursts
of violence appear inescapable.
Violence
in the play has a particularly significant relationship with sex. This is true
in a general sense, in the way the feud casts a shadow of violence over Romeo
and Juliet’s romance. But it also comes up in more localized examples. Sampson
sets the stage for this link in the play’s opening scene, when he proclaims his
desire to attack the Montague men and sexually assault the Montague women: “I
will / push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust / his maids to the wall” .
Sex and violence are also twinned in the events following Romeo and Juliet’s
wedding. These events frame Act III, which opens with the scene in which Romeo
ultimately slays Tybalt, and closes with the scene after Romeo stays the night
with Juliet, possibly consummating their marriage. Even the language of sex in
the play conjures violent imagery. When at the end of Act III Romeo declares,
“Let me be put to death” , he’s referring to the real threat of being put to
death by the Capulets if he’s found in Juliet’s room, but he’s also making a
sexual pun, since “death” is slang for orgasm.
Youth
Romeo
and Juliet are both very young, and Shakespeare uses the two lovers to
spotlight the theme of youth in several ways. Romeo, for instance, is closely
linked to the young men with whom he roves the streets of Verona. These young
men are short-tempered and quick to violence, and their rivalries with opposing
groups of young men indicate a phenomenon not unlike modern gang culture
(though we should remember that Romeo and his friends are also the privileged
elite of the city).
In addition to this association with
gangs of youthful men, Shakespeare also depicts Romeo as somewhat immature.
Romeo’s speech about Rosaline in the play’s first scene is full of clichéd
phrases from love poetry, and Benvolio and Mercutio take turns poking fun at
him for this. They also mock Romeo for being so hung up on one woman. Benvolio
in particular implies that Romeo’s seriousness prevents him from acting his
age. He’s still young, and he should therefore take his time and explore
relations with other women: “Compare [Rosaline’s] face with some that I shall
show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow” .
Whereas
we never learn Romeo’s precise age, we know that Juliet is thirteen. Her age
comes up early in the play, during conversations about whether or not she’s too
young to get married. Juliet’s mother insists that she’s reached “a pretty age”
, but her father describes her as “yet a stranger in the world” and hence not yet ready to marry. Although
Juliet does not want to marry Paris, she certainly believes herself old enough
for marriage. In fact, she yearns for marriage and for sexual experience, and
she often uses explicitly erotic language that indicates a maturity beyond her
actual years.
Yet
in spite of this apparent maturity, Juliet also tacitly acknowledges her own
youthfulness. When she looks forward to her wedding night, for example, she
compares herself to “an impatient child” , reminding the audience that in fact,
this is what she is. Such acknowledgments of the lovers’ youth ultimately serve
to amplify the tragedy of their premature death. Indeed, one of the saddest
aspects of the play is that the lovers die so young, cutting their lives (and
their relationship) so tragically short.
Fate
The theme of ill-fated love frames the story of Romeo
and Juliet from the beginning. During the Prologue, before the play
officially commences, the Chorus makes several allusions to fate, including the
famous reference to Romeo and Juliet as a “pair of star-crossed lovers.”
Shakespeare coined the term “star-crossed,” which means “not favored by the
stars,” or “ill-fated.” Although the term may seem primarily metaphorical
today, the science of astrology occupied a place of privilege in Renaissance
society. Thus, the notion that one’s fate was written in the stars had a more
immediate, literal meaning than it does today. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, then,
their fates are cosmically misaligned.
Later
in the Prologue, the Chorus reiterates the idea of fate in referring to Romeo
and Juliet’s love as “death-marked,” which once again indicates that, from the
very beginning, their desire for one another carries a sign or omen of
inevitable death. Shakespeare’s use of the word “marked” here also suggests a
physical inscription, alluding to the notion that their fate has been
pre-written. It may seem counterintuitive for Shakespeare to open his play by
spoiling its ending, but this choice about how to tell the story allows
Shakespeare to incorporate the theme of predetermined fate into the play’s very
structure. Uniting the theme of fate with the play’s structure in this way
introduces a sense of dramatic irony, such that the audience will have more
insight into the unfolding events than the characters. Watching the characters
struggle against an invisible and unbeatable force such as fate heightens the
sense of tension throughout the play.
This
struggle also amplifies the sense of tragedy at the play’s conclusion. For
instance, when Romeo cries out, “I defy you, stars!” , the audience knows that
his headstrong resistance is no match for fate, and acknowledging this
impotence only makes Romeo’s agony that much more painful. In the end, then,
mentioning Romeo and Juliet’s fate at the beginning of the play doesn’t spoil
the ending. Instead, it locks the audience into a sense of tense anticipation
of inescapable tragedy.
Light/Dark Imagery
One
of the play’s most consistent visual motifs is the contrast between light and
dark, often in terms of night/day imagery. This contrast is not given a
particular metaphoric meaning—light is not always good, and dark is not always
evil. On the contrary, light and dark are generally used to provide a sensory
contrast and to hint at opposed alternatives. One of the more important
instances of this motif is Romeo’s lengthy meditation on the sun and the moon
during the balcony scene, in which Juliet, metaphorically described as the sun,
is seen as banishing the “envious moon” and transforming the night into day
(2.1.46). A similar blurring of night and day occurs in the early morning hours
after the lovers’ only night together. Romeo, forced to leave for exile in the
morning, and Juliet, not wanting him to leave her room, both try to pretend
that it is still night, and that the light is actually darkness: “More light
and light, more dark and dark our woes” .
Opposite Points of View
Shakespeare includes numerous speeches and scenes in Romeo
and Juliet that hint at alternative ways to evaluate the play.
Shakespeare uses two main devices in this regard: Mercutio and servants.
Mercutio consistently skewers the viewpoints of all the other characters in the
play: he sees Romeo’s devotion to love as a sort of blindness that robs Romeo
from himself, and similarly, he sees Tybalt’s devotion to honor as blind and
stupid. Mercutio's punning and the Queen Mab speech can be interpreted as
undercutting virtually every passion evident in the play. Mercutio serves as a
critic of the delusions of righteousness and grandeur held by the characters
around him.
Where
Mercutio is a nobleman who openly criticizes other nobles, the views offered by
servants in the play are less explicit. There is the Nurse who lost her baby
and husband, the servant Peter who cannot read, the musicians who care about
their lost wages and their lunches, and the Apothecary who cannot afford to
make the moral choice, the lower classes present a second tragic world to
counter that of the nobility. The nobles’ world is full of grand tragic
gestures. The servants’ world, in contrast, is characterized by simple needs,
and early deaths brought about by disease and poverty rather than dueling and
grand passions. Where the nobility almost seem to revel in their capacity for
drama, the servants’ lives are such that they cannot afford tragedy of the epic
kind.
Poison
In his first appearance, in Act 2, scene 2, Friar Lawrence remarks that every plant, herb, and stone has its own special properties and that nothing exists in nature that cannot be put to both good and bad uses. Thus, poison is not intrinsically evil, but instead it's a natural substance made lethal by human hands. Friar Lawrence’s words prove true over the course of the play. The sleeping potion he gives Juliet is concocted to cause the appearance of death, not death itself, but through circumstances beyond the Friar’s control, the potion does bring about a fatal result: Romeo’s suicide. As this example shows, human beings tend to cause death even without intending to. Similarly, Romeo suggests that society is to blame for the apothecary’s criminal selling of poison because while there are laws prohibiting the Apothecary from selling poison, there are no laws that would help the apothecary make money. Poison symbolizes human society’s tendency to poison good things and make them fatal, just as the pointless Capulet-Montague feud turns Romeo and Juliet’s love to poison. After all, unlike many of the other tragedies, this play does not have an evil villain, but rather people whose good qualities are turned to poison by the world in which they live.
Conclusion
Love is the overriding theme of the play. In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. In the play, love emerges as an amoral thing, leading as much to destruction as to happiness. But in its extreme passion, the love that Romeo and Juliet experience also appears so exquisitely beautiful that few would want, or be able, to resist its power.
Comments