And Juliet
TheConnell GuidetoShakespeare’sRomeoandJulietbySimon Palfrey
ContentsIntroduction4What’s in a name?69A summary of the plot8How does Juliet speak her love?75What is the play about?10How does Shakespeare handle time inRomeo and Juliet?8091How does Romeo and Juliet differ fromShakespeare’s comedies?12Why is Juliet so young?Why is Romeo introduced to usindirectly?24How does Shakespeare show Juliet’s“erotic longing”?100What do we make of Romeo’s firstappearance?28Is there a moral in this play?106How is Juliet introduced?31Why is Mercutio so important?37How does Mercutio prepare us forJuliet?47Why is Romeo’s first glimpse of Juliet soimportant?51What is it that makes the balcony sceneso memorable?55N OT ESThe charactersHow Shakespeare changed his sourceBenvolioThe critics on RomeoSix key quotes from the playThe balcony sceneTen facts about Romeo and JulietCuts, censorings and performance versionsThe FriarFour ways critics have seen the tragedyHow exceptional are the lovers?A short chronologyBibliography7172622535864728698108116120
Introduction: the world’sgreatest love story?Romeo and Juliet is routinely called “the world’sgreatest love story”, as though it is all aboutromance. The play features some of the mostlyrical passages in all of drama, and the loversare young, beautiful, and ardent. But when welook at the play, rather than rest in its reputation,the lyricism and the romance are not reallywhat drive things along. It is true that Romeo,especially early on in the play, acts like a youngman determined to take his place in an immortaltale of love. Everything he says is romantic – butrather like an anniversary card is romantic. Hiswords propel nothing, or nothing but sarcasticadmonitions from his friends to forget about loveand to treat women as they should be treated, withcareless physical appetite. The world we haveentered is rapacious more than romantic.Everyone knows something of this, from thefilm versions of the story if nothing else. Romeoand Juliet must fight for their love inside a cultureof stupid hatreds. But it is not a simple case of loveversus war, or the city against the couple. If it were,it would nicely reinforce clichés about true love,fighting against the odds. I want to suggest that theplay Shakespeare actually wrote is more troublingthan this. Its lovers oppose the world they are born4into: but the nature of their love is also bornprofoundly from it.In the first acts of the play, much of the energyand vitality comes from Romeo’s friend, Mercutio.He is the most vehemently anti-romantic figureimaginable. He takes the city’s over-heatedculture of violence, sex and one-upmanship,and accelerates it all into pathological, friendtiring jokes.Now we might think it the purpose of Romeo,and the play, to fly beyond Mercutio’s sexualrevulsion, his verbal fantasies, and to findsomething whole and true like love. And certainlythis is partly what happens. But it doesn’t happenin the way we might think it should – by Romeomeeting Juliet, and everything else sliding awayinto irrelevance. For what happens is that Romeomeets Juliet, and everything is transformed by her:but it is also transferred into her. Not only Romeo’sardour, but the demonic energies of the city andMercutio, are crystallised and somehowalchemised in Juliet. She turns the lead to gold– bright, hot, the standard of all exchange. But sheis also too precious to be safely seen, and fatal toanyone who truly does see her.Once Romeo properly meets her – in thebalcony scene – Juliet takes over the play almostcompletely (a possession cued by the passing ofMercutio in Act Three, Scene One). Hers isthe energy and desire that pushes things to5
completion. And this appetite is absolutely a thingof violence. Juliet takes her place as acharacteristic Shakespearean hero, one who feels apassion or sees a possibility and drives through toits satisfaction, whatever the cost. Her passion –for all her youth, for all its truth – is at the verycusp of murderousness.There is one moment in the play whichexemplifies this passionate pitilessness. It is whenJuliet has agreed to take the sleeping potion. Shegoes to her nurse, and her mother, and her father,and solemnly swears that she now agrees withtheir wishes for her, that she will confess her sins(of disobedience) and marry Paris as they have bidher. She gets her parents’ thanks and blessing, andleaves to her bedchamber. She does so knowingthey will never see her again.The heart thrills and freezes at the thought.Could there be an act colder in its heat, moreopen-eyed in its annihilation of everything thatuntil this day has most mattered?The Prince, at the end of the play, blames thefamilies for the deaths of the young lovers (“Seewhat a scourge is laid upon your hate”). But thisstrikes me as false, almost as a kind of bad faith. Ofcourse the things that the families do force thelovers’ hands. But as much as such plot-devices areat work, they are used to trigger events – Romeo’sexile, Juliet’s sleeping potion, and so on – ratherthan define their substance. The truly substantial6thing is whatever moves, or moves in, its heroine.For Juliet represents the devastating coming-true,for better and worse, of everything in this world.She is its scourge, in the sense that she will whipand punish and haunt it; she is also its triumph, inthe sense of its best and truest thing. The deaths itall leads to are in no way avoidable, and in no wayaccidental. They are her inheritance, the thing shewas born to. Of course she takes Romeo with her.But it is at heart her play.THE CHARACTERSJULIETCAPULET, her fatherLADY CAPULET, Capulet’s wifeTYBALT, her nephewESCALUS, prince of VeronaCOUNT PARISMERCUTIOMONTAGUELADY MONTAGUEROMEOBENVOLIO, Montague’s nephewTHE NURSEFRIAR LAURENCEPETER, SAMPSON, serving men of the CapuletsGregory, Friar John, an Apothecary, Abraham, Balthasar, aChorus7
A summary of the plotAct OneA brawl breaks out in Verona’s streets. Once againit is the men of the feuding noble families of Capuletand Montague. Prince Escalus intervenes, declaringthat further fighting will be punishable by death.Paris, a kinsman of the Prince, talks to LordCapulet about marrying Juliet, Capulet’s 13-yearold daughter. Her father invites him to a ball. Julietis unconvinced.Romeo, son to Montague, missed the brawl. Hisfamily and friends wonder where he is. He tells ofhis unrequited love for Rosaline, and is persuadedto attend the Capulet ball, disguised by a mask, inthe hope of meeting Rosaline. Instead he meetsand falls in love with Juliet.Act TwoAfter the feast, Romeo overhears Juliet on herbalcony confessing her love for him. They agree tomarry in spite of their families’ hatred. With the helpof Friar Laurence, they are secretly married thenext day. No one else knows except Juliet’s Nurse.Act ThreeTybalt, Juliet’s cousin, challenges Romeo to aduel. Romeo refuses to fight. Romeo’s friendMercutio fights instead, and is fatally woundedwhen Romeo attempts to break up the duel. In8a rage, Romeo kills Tybalt.The Prince exiles Romeo on pain of death.Romeo secretly spends the night in Juliet’schamber. The next morning the lovers part.Capulet, believing Juliet’s grief to be caused byTybalt’s death, insists that she marry Parisimmediately. The Nurse recommends bigamy, andJuliet feels betrayed. Now she is on her own.Act FourIn despair, Juliet consults Friar Laurence. He bidsher to pretend to consent to the match with Paris,but on the night before the wedding to drink apotion that will make her comatose for “two andforty hours”. His plan is for Romeo to rescue herfrom the family crypt and carry her to Mantua.The next morning the Nurse discovers herapparently dead. Her family wail and mourn. She isentombed according to plan. But Friar Laurence’smessage to Romeo doesn’t arrive in time.Act FiveRomeo is told that Juliet is dead. He buys poisonand returns to the Capulet crypt. There he meetsParis, who has also come to mourn Juliet. Romeokills Paris. Still believing Juliet to be dead, hekisses her and drinks the poison. Juliet awakesand, finding Romeo dead, stabs herself with hisdagger. Faced with this sorry sight, the fathersagree to end their violent feud.9
What is the play about?If Romeo and Juliet is a play about passion, it isimplicitly one of rebellion. This is the key to itsextraordinary magnetism. Not a rebellion ofpeople against the state, or not in any simple way.Rather, it is a play about the rebellion of the heart,our basic vitality, a thing equally of spirit and body,against all forms of false, complacent, begrudging,insensible constriction. It is a play that taps intothe desire, cherished by all of us, for a life lessafraid, less timid and obedient, less, in a very basicway, predicted.Shakespeare’s play knows what an awful thing itis to know everything that must follow from thefact of our birth here, now, among these people andthose institutions. How deadening to think that wehave, in truth, no choice in what follows at all –that even our thoughts and emotions are likewisealready scripted, waiting for us to rehearse andperform them. Thought is free? Not here it isn’t –not in Shakespeare’s Verona! We even know whowe are to hate, and who we can share our hatredswith. Who would not rebel against such a world?Who would not rebel to love’s side! *Romeo and Juliet strikes upon that little flint inus all, what the philosophers sometimes call our‘conatus’. We might call it the soul’s appetite – the*As Marx said, “The tradition of the dead generations weighs like anightmare on the minds of the living.”10sense that life is abundant, or should be; that weare born to strive, and that our identity, our being,is a purposive force, searching always for someopportunity or other to strike us into flamingcompletion; that what might or should or may bereally could be. William Hazlitt calls Shakespearethe poet of what would be, of what if – and this iswhat Juliet and Romeo live. They turn cannot intowould. They make the impossible possible.Romeo and Juliet, then, is a play about theinadequacy of what is habitually given andaccepted as our daily lot; about the consequentneed, if life and language are to be authentic, forrebellion or internal exile. The Shakespeare criticKiernan Ryan puts it like this:Romeo and Juliet lays siege to the legitimacy of aworld which deprives men and women of boundlesslove as surely as it deprives the poor of their sharein the worlds’ wealth, seeing the lovers as bornbefore their time, citizens of an anticipated age.marooned in a hostile, alien reality, which hasalready contaminated their hearts and minds, andeventually crushes them completely.The play is equally about the inevitability offailure, because the institutions of their world, ascurrently constituted, are immovable. It is aboutthe humiliation of mere survival, and thetransformative promise given to us, the witnesses,11
who through feeling so passionately for thecondemned lovers forswear any timid, paltry,obedient kind of survival. In its place, weimaginatively allow only the kind of survival that iswilling to endure death as the price of truth andpassion – to witness it and live somehow in it.How does Romeo and Julietdiffer from Shakespeare’scomedies?The premise of the Oscar-winning Shakespeare inLove was that Romeo and Juliet began its life as acomedy. The same idea has regularly occurred tocritics of the play, who identify a basically comicworld until the moment when Mercutio is slainand everything is suddenly doomed. Before that,the argument goes, the action comes straight fromcomi-romantic cliché: the hero and heroine,paragons of youth and hope and health, falling inlove in defiance of foolishly censoring authority.This view is well articulated by Susan Snyder’s TheComic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1979):Comedy is organised like a game. Romeo andJuliet, young and in love and defiant of obstacles,are attuned to the basic movement of the comicgame toward marriage and social regeneration. But12they do not win: the game turns into a sacrifice, andthe favoured lovers become victims of time and law.But is this to say that Romeo and Juliet isessentially about escapist desire, only with thecatch that, as Snyder has it, “comic adaptabilityconfronts tragic integrity”, meaning that only theelders survive into the future whereas, in comedy,it is the young and marriageable?Most of Shakespeare’s comedies turn on similarquestions of obedience to the law of the elders. Theheroine is confronted by patriarchal obstinacy – alaw, a will of one kind or another, an obtuse failureon the part of the parent truly to see what is beforethem: typical examples are Portia hemmed in bythe “will” of her dead father’s caskets in TheMerchant of Venice, or the escape into the forestaway from forbidding patriarchy in A MidsummerNight’s Dream and As You Like It. The woman’sresistance or exile is ours. This resistance speaksfor everything that is intelligent, sensitive tofeeling, in touch with necessary futures. Of coursethe heroines of comedy are not perfect. They canbe foolish or ungenerous or too quick to judge. In anumber of plays Shakespeare introduces heroineswho seem already suspicious of male appetite, andneurotically or violently defended against it. Wesee this with Katherina in The Taming of theShrew, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing,Isabella in Measure for Measure. But in these cases13
just as much as the others, the stories revolvearound freedom of choice and overcoming falserepression, whether internal or external. Wherethere is a resolution, it hinges upon the heroinediscovering, however surprisingly or accidentally,her free choice in love. The infamously difficultending of Measure for Measure – when the Dukemugs the silent Isabella with a sudden marriageproposal – is unsettling partly because we cannotknow what degree of choice Isabella has in thematter, but also because we have had no choice init either. The story has not established the Dukeand Isabella as potential lovers; there is no buildup of desire or expectation which the ending canfinally satisfy. For all comedy’s sometimes carnivalexuberance, its satisfactions depend upon tight logic,publicly verified unions, and the agreed granting ofpermission by both characters and audience.So how do these examples differ from Romeoand Juliet? Is it simply that conventional comediesallow a reconciliation of desire and authority, andRomeo and Juliet does not? That the comediesshow authorities learning from their mistakes and– unlike Romeo and Juliet – the lovers surviving toenjoy the benefit? Or that, again unlike Romeo andJuliet, the betrothal that celebrates desire is publicrather than secret, and therefore capable of growth?These things are true, but they do not explainanything. The answer does lie, I think, in howRomeo and Juliet’s ending differs from the endings14of the comedies – but more profoundly than theabove descriptive summaries allow. For the crucialpoint is that in the comedies we always know theending before we begin. We know it the wholeway through; the ending is immanent in everymoment. Now, there may be interesting questionsabout exactly what the ending of a comedy is:betrothal or marriage, yes, but on what or whoseterms, and with what kind of promise, is oftenopen to doubt. Do we return to the beginning, witheverything in due patriarchal order, as though theexciting experiments of the plot never were? Ordo we perhaps nod along with the tidy ending,whilst identifying the real promise in the newpossibilities that the heroines discovered beforethis formal return to the fold?Either way, the ending in a comedy –togetherness and survival, a survival premisedupon a workable, fertile union between young menand women – is present and at work in everymoment of the play, implicitly directing ourresponses as we cheer on or laugh with or fear forthe parties. This means that desire, inShakespearean comedy, is always directed towardthe social world, something shareable andsurviving. This does not preclude stark carnality,any more than it does deceit. But such things arecounters in a plot, characterising this character orthat moment. The main thing is that life goes onfor all of us, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in15
health. The closing betrothal is really a way ofsaying just this.As Samuel Johnson said back in the 18thcentury, Shakespeare’s natural bent was probablyfor comedy. But he knew, always, that comedy isevasive. He knew that there is something just alittle, if not depressing, then de-adrenalising aboutthe conventional comic ending. It is satisfying, nodoubt, to see the warring lovers united, or mistakesrectified. But that is also the limitation. It seems tosatisfy; we have received what we came for. Comicclosure is a stopper upon the bottle of thought –and, perhaps, of desire. The typical comedy showsthe genie of restlessness roaming around, gettingaway with what is usually accounted trouble – butthe end of the play has the genie back inside thebottle. Shakespeare’s comedies, however, arefamous for not being entirely resolved; there isalways somebody that cannot or will not enter themagic, conflict-dissolving circle. I have mentionedIsabella in Measure for Measure, but even thehappier endings have their refusers: Malvolio inTwelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado AboutNothing, Shylock, of course, in The Merchant ofVenice. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream endswith one of the lovers, Demetrius, still deceived bythe love-potion into loving a besotted woman hehas always loathed.All of this points to something conditionalabout the satisfaction that these comedies deliver.16At a glance: how Shakespearechanged his sourceARTHUR BROOKE’ST R A G I CA L L H I S T O RY ESHAKESPEARE’SOF ROMEUS ANDROMEO AND JULIETJULIETMercutio.hardly figures Mercutio one of Shakespeare’sAll we are told about him is thatmost extraordinary creationshe has “cold hands”Romeo walks by Juliet’s house for“a week or two in vain” before hespeaks to her.This is concentrated into onesoliloquy, with Juliet alreadypresent.After their exchange of marriagevows, Romeo and Juliet go straightto Juliet’s room and sleep together.He hates the idea of leavinghis wife behindBetween exchanging marriagevows and sleeping together is astreet fight, in which Mercutioand Tybalt are murdered; sex isshadowed by death.Their love affair is two monthslong. Brooke writes at lengthabout their time together: “thevirgin fort hath warlike Romeogot”The Friar gives exceedingly longlectures, some of them 160 linesor more.The Nurse calls Juliet a “wylywench” moved by “lust”Their love affair only really lastsfor a nightThe Friar is not quite so longwindedJuliet is never called suchthings by anyone, and we arenot asked to judge her for it17
Shakespeare never lets the possessors (of grace,love etc.) simply get away with it. He knows that theresolution is partly a lie. He knows that marriagecan neither contain nor harness the energies thathave propelled the action of the play. Marriagesettles the desire, as a lagoon or reservoir mightgather the overflowing turbulence of sea. But it isalso only marriage, and will not bear too muchscrutiny. If Shakespeare had wanted to exploremarriage he would have entered a different genreentirely, the cuckold comedy beloved of manyof his contemporaries. But the daily business ofmarriage was always something the great manpreferred to keep at a distance.The satisfactions of comedy-desire areessentially prudential. They speak of prudentnegotiation, artful turning away, a willingness notto insist upon too much. If we look for a futurethese endings dissolve before our eyes. For what infact are we celebrating at the end of a comedy? Notthe serendipity of meeting, or a workable union, orthe promise of a decent life, or future children, orthe good stock and generous community fromwhich the couples arise, or even hope – the thingswe might, on a generous construction, identify asthe theme of a wedding. Instead, in a comedy wereach
Romeo is told that Juliet is dead. He buys poison and returns to the Capulet crypt. There he meets Paris, who has also come to mourn Juliet. Romeo kills Paris. Still believing Juliet to be dead, he kisses her and drinks the poison. Juliet awakes and, finding Romeo dead, stabs herself with his dagger. Faced with this sorry sight, the fathers
The death of Romeo and Juliet:The death of Romeo and Juliet: Inside the tomb, Romeo drinks the poison and dies next to Juliet. Soon after, Juliet wakes up and sees Romeo dead next to her. Friar Lawrence comes into the tomb and tells Juliet what happened. Juliet takes Romeo's dagger and kills herself. 7 A lesson learned:
Act 4 Tue Night Juliet takes the fake potion Act 4 Wed Morn The Nurse discovers the "dead" Juliet. The Capulet family learn that their daughter Juliet is dead. The wedding preparations are changed to those of a funeral. Act 5 Wed Romeo learns of Juliet's death – devastated, he plans to return to Verona to see the dead body of Juliet - he plans
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Act Two Forced to meet in secret, Romeo and Juliet declare their love to each other and decide to get married. Romeo visits Friar Laurence, a priest, and asks him to perform the wedding. Aided by Juliet’s nurse, Romeo and Juliet meet and marry in secret. Act Three During a street fight, Juliet’s cous
6 P r e s t w i c k Ho u s e, in c. Multiple Critical Perspectives Romeo and Juliet General Introduction to the Work Introduction to Romeo and Juliet R o m e o and Juliet is a play, or, more specifically, a tragedy, yet, in some ways, it complicates the defi- nition of Shakespearean tragedy. A Shakespearean tragedy generally involves a tragic hero (Romeo and Juliet contains
The letter doesn’t reach Romeo and he hears news that Juliet is dead. Romeo returns to Verona and, believing Juliet to be dead, visits the Capulet tomb where her body has been laid. Thinking Juliet is dead, Romeo poisons himself and dies. Juliet wakes and finds Romeo dead. She kills herself rather than live without him.
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