Lecture on Romeo and Juliet
By Bill Harlan
The following lecture is based on the material covered in the taped
lecture on Romeo and Juliet by Bill Harlan. It is not a transcription of that lecture but
does contain the same information. All
references are to the Signet paperback edition of the text. You should have that work available to
consult as you cover each passage indicated by the act, scene and line numbers
in boldface. I am indebted to Ann Uawithya for her
assistance in preparing this text.
Romeo and Juliet is fairly early in Shakespeare’s
career; it was probably written and performed in the year 1595. That means that Shakespeare may have been an
active playwright in the
In 1595 Shakespeare was performing with his own company. They were organized under the title “Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” meaning the Lord Chamberlain, Queen Elizabeth's chief-of-staff and the most powerful man in the kingdom, had granted permission for his name and protection to be given this company. Almost all of the principal actors were in place that would perform with Shakespeare throughout his career.
Previously Shakespeare had had considerable success with
some light comedies like Love’s Labor Lost and Two Gentlemen of
Verona. The story of Romeo and
Juliet was well known. The basic story
of two ill-fated lovers who committed suicide through mutual misunderstanding
dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
In the centuries before Shakespeare wrote the play, the story had come
to be associated with
The other thing this story line does is play on the tension of individual desire versus parental control. The idea of marriage was too important to be left up to the romantic inclinations of a couple of teenagers. Shakespeare shows us the overwhelming power of the sexual attraction, regardless of how young the participants are. Despite the long-standing social forces which allowed fathers to select whom their children would marry, the idea of young people pining away to consummate their own happiness despite parental objections has always been an attractive storyline.
To the basic story Shakespeare added new and colorful characters, such as the Nurse, who brought different perspectives on the theme of love. If Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate play about love, it is important to remember that there are many different views of love in the play and that this complexity is Shakespeare's primary addition to the story he inherited.
The immediate source for the play is a poem by Arthur Brooke. Reading Brooke’s poem reveals the genius of Shakespeare. Although Brooke provided a convenience source for the basic story line, Shakespeare turned the story into something really impressive. What Brooke wrote in his poem was a plodding moral story, a warning to parents about what would happen if they did not watch their children more closely. Shakespeare added more characters for complications -- the Nurse, Juliet’s father, Friar Lawrence all reflect different perspectives on love. Here is a passage from the Preface of Brooke's poem, showing the moralistic perspective he took toward the story. It's found in the Introduction to the Signet edition to the play:
To this end, good reader, is this tragically matter written to describe unto
thee a couple of unfortunate lovers thralling [enslaving] themselves to
dishonest desire, neglecting the authoritarian advice of parents and friends, conferring their principal counsels on drunken gypsies and superstitious
friars (that natural instrument of inchasity) attempting all adventures of
peril for that taking of their own wished lust using oricular confession [that
which can be heard] to keep and hold them in treason for further purpose. Abusing the honorable name of lawful marriage, the cloak, the shame of
stolen contracts, finding by all means the dishonest in life, hastening to a
most unhappy death.
There are all kinds of moral condemnations in this passage. These are bad kids. They did wrong things. They're not really worthy of any kind of sympathy. What a difference from Shakespeare's view of the characters! An important thing to look for in the play is what causes the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.
Two kids fall in love, get in over their heads, violence ensues, the law gets involved, they end up misunderstanding. Romeo kills himself; Juliet discovers his body and kills herself. One cause for this tragedy is provided by Brooke. Some wild, irresponsible, unsupervised adolescents in a moment of sheer stupidity do something that is irreversible. We read about this all the time in the newspapers. What causes the tragedy? The immaturity of both Romeo and Juliet.
The second cause for Shakespeare's audience, emphasized in the original performance of Romeo and Juliet, would be, “What do you expect from a bunch of Italians?” The English looked at the Italians with a mixture of envy and disgust. To the English, the Italians were more prone to violence and engaged in all kinds of disgusting behavior. A film released about ten years ago, A Room With A View, was set around 1900 and shows a young English woman venturing out into an Italian city to discover first hand the violence of that society. The English in Shakespeare's time had a very simple explanation for certain behavior. Because the Italians lived in the south, the hotter climate had a direct effect on the personalities and behavior patterns of Italians. The cause for the tragedy is that Romeo and Juliet couldn’t help it because of where they grew up.
A third explanation for the tragedy is right at the beginning of the play, references to star- crossed lovers. Romeo and Juliet throughout the play right up to the very end talk about fate and fortune, some kind of supernatural power which led them to their deaths. There isn’t any reason for it; it's just the accident of fate. They are cosmic victims; they could never escape what happened to them. This explanation is mentioned frequently in the text of the play.
However, there is another explanation, the fourth, closer to what Shakespeare has in mind in the structure of the play. Romeo and Juliet are victims of an irrational family feud, violence fostered by the older generation in that society which forces them into a series of fatal actions. In this view the tragedy is caused by the parents who unknowingly bring about the death and destruction of their own kids. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet help to bring about an end to the feud. It is the sacrifice of the children that leads the parents to the peace table.
The fifth possible cause – the one I find most interesting -- is that what makes Romeo and Juliet most admirable, their capacity to love and to give to one another and to experience the ultimate passion of love -- all these good qualities ultimately lead to their deaths. The idea is sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, a possibility that in Shakespeare's plays could lead to destruction. Shakespeare explores this idea in other of his great tragedies, an idea that I think links Romeo and Juliet to other tragedies, besides the fact that there are a lot of dead people around on the stage at the end of the play. What makes Romeo and Juliet unique is what leads to their destruction. It's an intriguing idea.
This has been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays in performance. In the 20th century, especially in film, there have been three notable versions of the movies. In the 1930’s the great matinee idols, Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, starred in the first film version of Romeo and Juliet. In 1968 the Italian director, Franco Zeffirelli did a version of Romeo and Juliet, first for the stage where it was highly successful and then on film. This is a justly famous version, with Olivia Hussey and Michael Whiting as the leads and a young Michael York as Tybalt. This is the version most people have seen.
Then just a few years
ago, Leonardo Di Caprio in his pre-Titanic phase and Claire Danes
starred in the modern version of Romeo & Juliet, which many people
refer to as the "MTV Romeo & Juliet." It's a different
take on the original version of the story, but is still close to the text. In addition, Romeo and Juliet has been
adapted in many forms, most notably
When the play has been performed over the centuries, people
have tended to see Romeo and Juliet as separated by ethnic, religious, or
political forces. Consequently, wherever
in the world conflict exists, Romeo and Juliet is likely to be placed in
that context. There is probably a
production of Romeo and Juliet being performed right now somewhere in greater
Act I, Prologue
The play opens with a prologue: a narrator comes in, does a
short speech, and this narrator links segments of the play together in the
first couple of acts. Shakespeare used
this device in several of his plays. The
narrator tells us that Capulet and Montague are alike in dignity. They are both Italians, from the same social
background, same religion. In Shakespeare's view what most important about the
feud is not the differences between the Montagues and the Capulets; there are
no differences! What's important is that
there is no rational reason for the feud.
Only we in modern times emphasize the differences. In the original vision of the play, if the
servants did not wear different uniforms, no one would know who was who. This seems to be an important point for
Shakespeare to make. The feud dominates
the story, but we never learn where the feud came from and what it is all
about; it's just a given in the world of
The thing we learn about how the play was originally performed is that it apparently took only two hours on stage. This is extraordinary to those of us familiar with modern theater on which it takes at least three hours to perform a shortened version of the play. So apparently, they really moved the play along when Shakespeare performed it. Another interesting aspect of Shakespeare's theater is found in the last two lines of the prologue, where the narrator comes out and apologizes ahead of time for what the audience will see. In effect, he says, if you'll just listen carefully to what we present, we will try not to screw up too badly. Shakespeare does kind of apologizing in several plays, almost a special pleading: please do not expect too much; we apologize ahead of time, because we might disappoint you. It seems disingenuous, a little bit of play-acting. I am sure in some very basic way Shakespeare understood how good he was. He knew how much people enjoyed his plays. Notice also that we get the reference to the "star-crossed lovers," the idea that fate (associated with the stars in Shakespeare's day) causes the tragedy.
Act I, Scene 1
We now get in an introduction to various people in
In the first 34 lines, these two guys are talking about the
feud and what they are going to do. How
do they feel about the feud? What is their attitude toward the Montagues? Why
do they act the way they do? Despite the fact that this is set in
The important thing about Samson and Gregory is that they
are servants and talk like servants.
They have the speech of their class.
Much of the humor is rough. It is
what Shakespeare calls “bawdy,” language
filled with sexual innuendoes and puns. Shakespeare's audience loved dirty
jokes, so there are lots of them. I
apologize ahead of time; when you study Shakespeare, it is hard to avoid
obscenity. The second thing that might
be difficult for modern audience to understand are the puns; they are found
throughout the play. Not just simple one-time puns, sometimes they are quite
elaborate. There are reports in
Shakespeare's times, when an actor delivered a particularly complex pun, the
audience would applaud and stop the action.
Find some of the puns in the scene. [Lines
1 -- 34]
You can see right at the beginning an elaborate pun on coals. "We'll not carry coals" at line 1 means "we'll not accept insults." If they did, they would be called "colliers," or coal miners. That leads to a play on the word “choler” which meant "anger." Finally, if you have too much choler, you will wear a "collar" with a reference to a noose. You've got four interlocking puns in the first four lines.
Sexual references are found frequently, such as line 27: "the heads of maids" or the maidenheads. Some of the references might pass you by. In a play like this, the characters are sexually explicit. Shakespeare frequently refers to something which resembles a male erection, what we call a phallic reference. Shakespeare's audience was on the lookout for all such references. For example at line 30, Samson says, “Me they [the maids] are able to feel while I am able to stand." At line 33 when Gregory says “Here comes the two of the house of Montague, draw thy tool,” he's talking about drawing a sword but also pulling out his penis.
Fundamentally, as we listen to these two guys talk, they
talk a good fight, especially Samson,
who is ready to go right now. Point him into the right direction, he will take
on the Montagues single handedly. But that is all it remains, just talk. They do not seem consumed by hatred. It turns into dirty jokes. Gregory keeps putting Samson down, “If thou
are to move, thou runneth away,” in effect calling him a coward. At line 15 Gregory refers to Samson as a weak
slave. He questions his sexual ability, his ability to stand. Samson says that "I am a pretty piece of
flesh," and Gregory says, "It is a good thing you are not a fish [as
opposed to flesh]; otherwise you would have been a poor John." This was
dried fish, thin and feeble looking. You
would not want to be referred to as a "poor John." Finally, the reference at line 15 that
"the weakest goes to the wall" gives us an insight into the condition
of the Elizabethan streets. The streets were very narrow; there was no sewage
system. Everything that you did was thrown out the window and ran down the
middle of the street. Potential conflicts arose between people who met on the
street. Gentlemen protected ladies by
letting them walk nearest to the wall.
To Samson and Gregory, this becomes one more opportunity for sexual
contact: push the maids to the wall.
Kind of interesting little view there.
These guys are big talkers, but no action. Except now they are going to get their
chance. {Lines 35 -- 65]
Now, two servants of the Montagues, Abram and Balthazar, enter. As the four guys circle each other, they seem like four dogs sniffing each other and uttering growls every now and then to see who's the toughest. Do any of these servants seem to you ready to fight? They look for all kinds of excuses and reasons not to fight, although they do all kinds of provocative things. Notice that Gregory and Samson are constantly concerned about keeping on the right side of the law [line 50]. Then we get to the thumb-biting incident at line 45; thumb biting in Shakespeare is the same as flipping off someone on the freeway is for us. The first thing that Samson says is, "If I say 'I am biting my thumb at you sir,' are we on the right side of the law? Will I get in trouble?" Samson is careful with the thumb biting not to direct it to any specific Montague. It is just a kind of general insult to the world. You see that the attitude toward the feud from the servants seems at best ambivalent. They know what they are supposed to do, but they are not too eager about it.
Now what sets off the fight? Your text has Gregory say in effect at line 60, "Insult them directly. Say, 'We serve a better man than you do.' Here comes one of my master's kinsman.” This is why it is so important to see plays as they are performed. The way the text makes it look, Samson and Gregory of the Capulets are in a standoff with Abram and Balthazar of the Montagues, when in comes Benvolio who is the kinsman of the Montagues. But it is the Capulet servants who say, “Quick, here comes one of my master's kinsmen.” That does not refer to Benvolio, but the Capulet honcho, Tybalt, who does not show up in the text until five lines later. This is the result of the Shakespearean stage, that had two doors for actors to make their entrances. You envision Benvolio coming through the door where the servants are sniffing at each other, while on the far side, about the same time, Tybalt comes through the other door. Samson and Gregory see Tybalt and know they are in big trouble if they don’t start fighting immediately.
The language that is spoken up to this point is all prose. [Consult the class web page on the differences between prose and verse.] Why do the servants speak only in prose? Notice that when Benvolio and Tybalt enter, they speak verse. Why the change from prose to verse? The key to this part of the scene is the character of Tybalt. Benvolio's name suggests "benevolence" as the peacemaker, as a guy who tries to maintain the public order. Tybalt is referred to as "fiery." What motivates Tybalt? Why does he provoke violence? Notice in the reading and the text how quickly other people join in the fight.
Capulet and Montague will come out accompanied by their
wives. What do the wives think of their
husbands doing battle? Finally, we are
going to rely on the appearance of the prince to stop the fight, and he
pronounces his sentence. What is the
prince’s overriding concern in this particular scene? [Line
66 -- 106]
Tybalt is the firebrand in this whole feud business. His concern when Benvolio is trying to stop the fight is to continue the violence. At line 68 Tybalt says, “What, art thou drawn amongst these heartless hinds.” "Hinds" refers to the lower-class servants. For someone like Tybalt, using a sword against a servant is inappropriate. Only gentlemen should be engaged in sword fights. This is an older, medieval view of the world, when only gentlemen were allowed to use swords. That is why gentlemen have "coats of arms," as a license to bear arms or carry a sword.
Everything that Tybalt says here is filled with the rhetoric of violence: "Turn thou Benvolio, look upon thy death," [line 71]. "What drawn, and talk of peace. I hate the word as I hate hell, all Montagues and thee" [line 72].
On one hand we have Tybalt’s wholehearted engagement in the feud; on the other we have the reaction of Lady Capulet and Lady Montague when their husbands want to get into the fight. Their wives mock them. Lady Capulet says in effect, "What do you need a sword for; you need a crutch, old man." Wives can deflate the male ego in so many ways.
The wives do not take their husbands' threats of violence seriously, just as the servants were reluctant to fight, undercutting the seriousness of this supposed feud. If it were not for the presence for Tybalt, these people could continue to circle and sniff each other until they got tired of it. There is no stated reason for the feud nor any history of the conflict. You might ask yourself why Shakespeare leaves out what started the feud that is so important to the action of the play.
The prince’s anger is immediate and powerful. At line 86, he refers to the combatants as "beasts" and the feud as “pernicious rage.” His primary concern is the threat the feud poses to the community. It has disturbed the peace of the community, at line 94, three other times. Other people’s lives have been endangered. The prince's doom or fatal warning starts at line 91: in effect whoever is involved in the next fight will be punished by death. This attempt to reestablish the peace and order in the city will propel the rest of the story; it will make death and punishment inevitable.
Once everyone leaves, the immediate private concerns of the
characters come into focus. Montague and
his wife are exceedingly concerned about the problem with their son who is
acting strangely. They ask Benvolio, his cousin, to help them determine what is
wrong with Romeo. As you listen to
Benvolio talk about what set this battle off, listen to his description to
Tybalt’s attack. Ask yourself what way
this might undercut the seriousness of the feud. Secondly, as you listen to Benvolio and
Montague describing Romeo's behavior, what do these symptoms suggest to you?
Locking himself in his room, shutting his door and windows? [Lines
107 -- 163]
In a couple of ways, you can see that the seriousness of the feud is once again undercut. Montague is very angry at line 107: "Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach?" This is not something that a man obsessed with a feud would normally say. More to the point, Benvolio describes Tybalt’s attack at line 114, how he swung his sword and made the air hiss. The sword cut the winds but harmed no one, so the air hissed at him. Hissing someone meant the same thing in those times as it does in ours: when you hiss somebody, you are putting him or her down. From Benvolio’s point of view, Tybalt is a lot of hot air.
Lady Montague is not involved in the feud. Her line “Where is Romeo?” introduces a motif, or pattern of repeated phrases, that will run throughout the play. People over and over again in one way or the other, ask this question, “Where is Romeo?” Most famously Juliet asks this question in "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" Look for this “Where is Romeo” pattern right up to the final scene.
The Montagues are very concerned about their son and want to protect him, just as the Capulets are about Juliet. The Montagues describe his odd behavior of wanting to be alone, walking in early morning, before the sun is up, shutting himself in his room. All he lacks now to be a love-sick adolescent of the 21st Century is a CD turned up to maximum volume. Clearly, the kid has the symptom of an unhappy love affair.
Notice the reference at line 139, "the shady curtains
from
Apparently Romeo is only active at night, and throughout the play he is associated with the nighttime. It is at night that all the romantic things happened; the two teenagers come alive when the sun goes down.
In the next sequence, Benvolio will question what is going
on with his cousin. "Cousin"
is a generic term used in those times referring to any kinship other than being
direct brothers. Cousins, nephews,
in-laws three or four times removed are referred to "cousins." Romeo
is reluctant to tell Benvolio all the details of his condition. Ask yourself why? He present himself as overwhelmingly
depressed, and lets Benvolio know that he is involved in an unhappy love
affair, although he does not reveal who he is in love with. Why the reluctance to name the object of his
passion? Do you see any place where
unrequited passion is undercut, where Romeo is exhibiting concerns other than
being in the company of his loved one?
Romeo talks an awful lot about love, about 63 lines. What has he done in a practical way to win
the love of this girl? You will be
surprised by the approaches that he has used to win his love. [Line
163 -- 241]
What Shakespeare shows us in this exchange between Romeo and Benvolio really is a young man suffering the extremes of love. At first when Benvolio questions him, Romeo answers in riddles as at line 166, "What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?" The response, "Not having that which having makes them short," is a non-answer. He dances around, never mentioning Rosaline’s name, his supposed girlfriend. Despite that initial reluctance, soon Romeo is in the full flush of his suffering. At line 172, love is so gentle in his view [appearance], he is Cupid looking like a young child. Despite that exterior appearance, he is "rough in proof" [trial]. Romeo complains that Cupid, who is always shown as blindfolded or muffled, can still see the way to his love ["will"] without his eyes. In effect, "Cupid can get whoever he wants, but I, fully grown and capable of independent action, can’t.”
Romeo emphasizes the suffering he had done for love, but on closer examination his attitude is ambivalent: it makes him feel awful, but it makes him feel wonderful. This conflicted attitude comes as no surprise when he talks about love and its connection with hate, at line 178. He starts talking about the feud, “Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,” using self-contradictory phrases. Now the technical terms for this apparent paradox is "oxymoron.” We are surrounded by oxymorons: "jumbo shrimp," "bittersweet" and "military intelligence." Any two things that are brought together that seem to contradict one another are oxymorons. That’s how Romeo feels about love, but because he’s a teenager, if one oxymoron is good, two oxymorons are even better. In this particular passage from line 178 to 185, he uses 11 separate oxymorons to show us how good/how bad love makes him feel. By the deliberate overuse of oxymorons, Shakespeare demonstrates Romeo's youth and enthusiasm.
Actually all of this elaborate, self contradictory celebration of love goes back to an Italian poet, Petrarch, who wrote at the beginning of the Renaissance. He had lived about 300 years before this play was written and much of what Shakespeare and his time thought about love, or the way they talked about love, came directly from Petrarch. He was famous for having seen a woman, whom he named Laura, just once, passing in the street. He fell completely in love with her and spent the rest of his life, despite several marriages, writing about this fabulous creature, Laura whom he never saw again. The fashionable young men of Shakespeare time were skilled in all the language, posturing and emotional reactions that had come from Petrarch. An excellent example of Romeo mirroring Petrarch is in his attitude toward love found in lines 193 -- 197:
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;
Being purged [or cleaned up], a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.
What else is it? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
The thing to notice about these oxymorons or descriptions of love in these scenes is that they seldom are attached to any human being. Once again here, you can see the influence of Petrarch who spent 50 years writing about the woman he saw only once, so there was a kind of disassociation with the actual physical woman involved. Romeo’s unhappiness/happiness in love dominates the scene.
Every now and then, you can see the touches that remind us that this is after all a kid who is about 16. At line 176, after talking about the frustration of being in love, he suddenly asks, “Where shall we dine?" A teenager cannot get that far from his stomach. At line 186, he asks, “Dost thou not laugh” In effect he is wondering, "Haven’t I gone too far?"
Romeo has tried all of the traditional ways to impress this girl, to get her to go out with him, and he lists them at line 215: "She will not stay the siege of loving terms" or sweet talk. He tried "the encounter of assailing eyes," making eye contact with her from across the room. Apparently, that did not work either. She was perhaps near-sighted. When neither of those traditional ways worked, he asked, “How much would it take for you to go out with me?” at line 217. He has tried all the different approaches and he really becomes upset because she has turned him down. He even mentions the ultimate killer line to get women to be friendly. Her not loving him makes "huge waste” at line 223; her beauty "starved with her severity,/ Cuts beauty off from all posterity." What he's saying is “You are so beautiful you owe it to the gene pool, to get pregnant immediately, and even though it is a dirty job, I volunteer to help in the process.”
One final explanation about the masks that women wear at
line 233. In Shakespeare's time, women of the upper classes had all kinds of
ways to assert their social superiority.
Obviously where they lived, the way they spoke, what they wore were all
signs of superiority. One of the most
interesting from our point of view was that noble women would be careful not to
get tan or sunburned at all. This was a way of distinguishing yourself
socially. If a woman was of the working
class, she often had to work outside and got tan, like a
While women could experience this rarefied passion of love, they did not go in for the same kind of verbal excess. Part of what it meant to be gentleman in Shakespeare time, especially someone of Romeo’s age, is the ability to talk a good love affair. It is similar to the servants talking a good fight at the beginning of the scene. This is deliberately overdone. Shakespeare parodies the verbal excesses of the guys who have read all of Petrarch’s works and follow his tradition. You will see Romeo throughout the play follow this kind of tradition of overkill using language. It sounds as if the words signify nothing, because we do not even know toward whom all this passion is directed. You get the feeling that the presence of the girl is of secondary importance. The most important thing is to talk a good love affair.
Act I, Scene 2
In a patriarchal society, women were treated as property. Commentators of Shakespeare time mention in the records that women are treated in ways that rob them of any independent action. In marriage, especially among the upper classes, women were used as property. So it is against this background that Juliet’s father, Capulet, behaves relatively humanely and decently. He is genuinely concerned about his daughter’s health, well-being and happiness. [Act I, scene 2]
[Lines 1 -- 45] At
the beginning of the scene, a young man, county or Count Paris, comes to talk
to Capulet about marrying his daughter Juliet. This would be a very big coup
for the Capulet family because of the suitor’s title. Despite the significance of this marriage,
Capulet puts
These issues will come back in a few scenes when Capulet
changes his mind about Juliet marrying.
At line 29, in a description of what the party is going to be like,
Capulet says, "Even such delights/
Among fresh funnel buds shall you [have] this night." Big social functions
were held in rooms where rushes and herbs like fennel were strewn upon the
floor as a way to deodorize the house.
Other editions of the play have changed "fennel" to
"female," emphasizing that
As the conversation with Capulet and
In the next sequence of this scene, try to guess why Capulet would assume that his servant could read the list of those invited to the party. This was an age where the majority of people were illiterate. Capulet somehow assumes that his servant would magically know how to read and could go out and find the people written on the invitation list. Why would he do this? [Lines 46 -- 104]
In the second half of this scene we see Benvolio trying to give therapeutic help to his friend Romeo, about getting over this disastrous love affair. What course of action does Benvolio recommend to Romeo? Once again, we see Romeo in what should have been a serious situation being less than serious several times. Why?
Finally, we are introduced to a technique that Shakespeare used throughout his plays -- the conceit – an elaborate, detailed comparison between two very different things, things that we would not think of as having any similarity at all. This comparison will be very detailed with several parallels between two different situations or objects. See if you can find an example of a conceit. They can be two to three lines long or more.
Once again, the question arises why Capulet would assume
that his servant could read. People
lived in very close proximity in Shakespeare's time. It would have been unlikely for Capulet not to
know if he had a literate servant. One
of the explanations is that he is trying to impress
In this passage, the servant speaks prose as befits someone from the lower classes. When Benvolio and Romeo come in speaking amongst themselves about Romeo’s problems, they speak verse. Romeo begins to joke around with the servant about whether he can read at line 58. When he does, he switches to prose. The choice of verse or prose also depends on to whom you are speaking. The servant enjoys the banter with Romeo, as does Romeo. Underneath the façade of unrequited love, Romeo is essentially an average teenager. A revealing exchange is at line 56, when Romeo greets the servant: “God-den, good fellow.” The servant responds, “God give ye good-den, I pray sir.” That "good den" is an old-fashioned greeting used among common people that Romeo adopts here and the servant responds in kind.
Benvolio gives Romeo advice on how to overcome his lovesickness. At line 45, his advice takes the form of a conceit:
One fire burns out another's burning.
One pain is lessen by another’s anguish. [He switches to another conceit.] Turn giddy, or dizzy and be holp [helped] by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with another’s anguish. [Another conceit here.] Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old shall die.
In Shakespeare's day love was often referred to as an infection. But in the last two lines he makes it sound as if love were some kind of a poison.
Romeo’s response to some of these comments is dismissive when Benvolio recommends he find another girl. He says, in effect, "The advice you are giving me is useful only for simple physical injuries, like a broken shin, but not for when our souls are injured." When the servant asks him if he could read, he responds “Ay, if I know the letters and the language” [line 62]. The servant says in effect, "I know what you are saying, you do not know the language." Romeo is mouthing off and undercuts the seriousness that he is trying to project of a man consumed with unrequited passion for his lover.
Benvolio proposes crashing Capulet’s party, since that would allow Romeo to compare Rosaline to other girls. This leads to one of the most elaborate conceits in all of Shakespeare's plays. Benvolio suggests, "Go and look, I will show you some other women and then you can decide if Rosaline is good-looking and truly worthy of your love." At line 90, Romeo responds in this conceit:
When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires; [When my eyes see another woman I think is as beautiful as Rosaline, an obvious falsehood]
And these [my eyeballs] transparent heretics, be burnt for liars. [Religious heretics were burned at the stake.]
And these [my eyes] who, often drowned [by tears] could never die, [My eyes will now become transparent heretic and will be burned because they accepted the religious heresy that there's another woman more beautiful than Rosaline.]
One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her match [equal] since first the world begun.
This is probably one of the very few times in all literature when eyeballs were compared to religious heretics. This is a conceit, an extended comparison of very different things, at its most extreme.
Benvolio answers by comparing the eyes and the reflection of Rosaline in them to two crystal scales. The image of Rosaline is balanced with herself since she is the only object reflected in both his eyes. Benvolio says in effect, "Let me show you some other girls, with Rosaline on one side of the scale and another girl on the other, and then we can weigh and compare their beauty." So the idea is set in motion of crashing Capulet’s party to check out the chicks.
Now Shakespeare supposedly had little knowledge of the
Italian language. Yet in the letter that Romeo reads, there are a number of
Italian names. Where does Shakespeare
get these names? Shakespeare was a
widely read man in all kinds of things; we are not sure about the extent of his
library. We find passages from many
books, odd pieces of information from here or there, and suddenly, with modern
Shakespeare studies, a source for a name like "Signior Martino" will
suddenly appear. Often times, a name was
selected because it fit into a rhythmic pattern because Shakespeare was writing
in blank verse as he so often did.
Sometimes, he just made things up.
For example, with a phrase like
"Signior Placentio and his lovely nieces," you get an image of a
family. All the key players are
mentioned here, even the "lively
Act I, scene 3
As we move on to Act 1 Scene 3, we are introduced to one of
the most vivid character in all Shakespeare plays: Juliet's nurse. The nurse is
very maternal, very chatty. She has a
fully developed history that she shares with us. So, as you read this next
sequence, what do you learn about the Nurse?
Her family and her previous life?
Secondly, make some judgment about how Juliet’s relationship with the
nurse differs from the one with her mother. Now that you have been tuned into
sexual innuendoes in Shakespeare plays, one of the best sources of such sexual
references or "bawdy" is the nurse, so look for some of the sexual
references that the nurse made. A little
hint here: a "stone" can refer to a testicle. [Act I, scene 3]
The nurse is an exceptionally well-written character, so it is no exaggeration to say she really does dominate the scene. If we are lucky, we have had relatives like the nurse, a person who turns a simple question into a long story. Lady Capulet simply asks how old Juliet is, and that sets the nurse off, and we find out all kinds of things: the nurse had a child of her own, Susan, who was born about the same time as Juliet. In fact that is how the nurse got her job, as a wet nurse, to feed young Juliet, because it was considered undignified for the women of the nobility to physically nurse their own children. We find out that she had a husband whose sense of humor she thinks was wonderful. We learn that she continued to live and work for the Capulets as the companion for the young Juliet after her infancy. I have had aunts who could remember some story with very embarrassing details that they would tell over and over again, like the nurse. In one form or the other, four different times. The nurse is a fascinating character; she lives life very close to the here and now.
When she is asked how old Juliet is, she associates Juliet’s
birth date with an annual religious ceremony: Lammastide. She talks about dates in the past by
associating them with specific events, like an earthquake. (Earthquakes were
unusual in
The nurse has a number of sexual innuendos beginning with “Now by my maidenhead
at twelve year old!” That must have gotten a real good laugh in Shakespeare's audience> Usually girls from this social class no longer had their maidenheads at 12 years old. A little more obscure is when she calls for Juliet at line 4: "What, lamb! What, lady bird!" "Ladybird" was a slang term used to address a prostitute. This may be why she immediately says, “Oh God forbid.” Excuse me for saying that. Another bawdy reference is where Juliet falls forward and gets a big lump on her head, as the nurse says, "A bump as big as a young cock'rel's stone" [line 53]. I am never interested enough to examine the lower part of a young rooster to see what its testicles look like. Apparently the nurse knows these body parts very well. The nurse uses this comparison because Juliet has fallen on her face. The nurse's late husband had a famous retort at line 55: “fall'st upon thy face?/ Thou wilt fall backwards when thou comest to age!" When you're older and more sexual experienced, you'll know what position to assume. The precocious little three-year-old Juliet unwittingly agrees, much to the delight of the nurse. Actually this incident foreshadows Juliet’s first sexual experience which is about to take place within the next twenty-four hours.
The nurse is very impressed by the idea of a husband for
Juliet. When Lady Capulet has a long
speech beginning at line 80 describing
Young Juliet does not get a chance to talk very much; most
of the time she is embarrassed by the nurse.
After her mom drops this bombshell on her that the Capulets think that
With such strong female characters in this play, how would a male actor have played a role like Juliet? To play Juliet, you needed to be a highly specialized actor, one whose voice had not yet changed, to play a young girl. These actors were few and far between; they were heavily sought after. At that time there were over 300 people who were writing plays on a regular basis. There was a great deal of competition for the boy actors. It is interesting that when Shakespeare retired from his company in 1613, he was replaced in the partnership by a young male actor who had started out playing the girls' roles. In Shakespeare time, boy actors made the transitions into mature roles more easily than they do now. People like poor McCauley Caulkin, married at 17 and on the front page of the Enquirer. Almost without exception, young female characters that Shakespeare wrote are very assertive, very much women in their own rights. This must have been a real challenge for the young boy actors. Poor Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Ophelia in Hamlet were conventional women and weak characters. The older actors probably played the parts like the Nurse. As an older woman, she has all of these extreme characteristics and needed a strong actor. Characters like Juliet’s mother perhaps needed to be a little less strong because she really does not have that much to do in the play. She seems to be dominated by her husband and does not really figure into the action, except in one place.
Act I, Scene 4
We are going to be introduced to another key character. We have already met Benvolio, a benevolent, peace-loving man, supportive of his cousin, Romeo, a very empathetic friend. On the other hand, Mercutio, Romeo's other friend, is hardly empathetic at all. He is a wild, manic comedian. The closest comparison I have heard is that he is Shakespeare's version of Robin Williams. Like Williams he engages in massive verbal overkill, and when his humor is at its best, he jumps from one idea to another, free associating, picking up ideas or words and just running with them. His friends enjoy being around him; he is a bit of a loose cannon. We will listen to the exchange between Mercutio, Benvolio and Romeo as they and others approach Capulet's house. You will hear about masks and prologues. I will talk some more about these things after you've reviewed the scene. [Act I, Scene 4]
[Line 1 -- 53] You see in this exchange how Mercutio really dominates and seeks to control Romeo’s behavior. Romeo is obviously a wet blanket; everybody is going to have a great time at the party, except Romeo, who is going to sit around and mope and feel sorry for himself. Mercutio tries to rouse him out of his depression. You can see how Mercutio plays on words over and over again. There are lots of elaborate puns as in the first scenes of the play. Mercutio puts down the idea of love, debilitating love, and wants to rescue Romeo from this depression.
Here are a couple of things about the social customs at the time that might be mysterious. Even though the guys will crash the party, they don’t do this in some crass or underhanded way. They are planning to have someone come in at their arrival and announce who they are in a welcoming speech. This speech is often delivered by some young boy employed as a page just for this occasion. This is what Mercutio means at line 4, “We'll have no Cupid hoodwinked with a scarf.” The kid would dress up as Cupid and come in to announce their arrival. The other thing that you may be surprised about is all the references to masks. In this time, the custom was for young gentlemen when they went out to a party to wear masks to increase the social tension with a sense of playfulness. This was also a way to protect their identity. If you went to a party and really got wild and out of hand, part of the social fiction was that people wouldn’t know who misbehaved: “Gee, who was it that tore the door off the bathroom, and threw up in the drive way? We do not have the slightest idea because of his mask." It was a convenient dodge that allowed you to be openly flirtatious when you were wearing a mask. This kind of identity protection was very important for young gentlemen who had to guard their honors at all other times.
At about line 12, Romeo, talking about his feelings, uses a serious pun: "I am not for this ambling./Being but heavy, I will bear the light." It was dark in the streets so when you went anywhere, you always had to have torches with you. The Elizabethan version of the designated driver was the guy who carried the torch. That was what Romeo is offering to do here. When he is questioned by his friends, he talks of his depression about being in love at line 22: “Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.” That sets Mercutio off who takes the phrase in openly physical terms: in effect, "If you sink too much in love, you will oppress such a tender thing." Romeo then talks about love not being soft and yielding, but being tough, sticky and pricking in line 26. That gives Mercutio a chance to do a bawdy pun on "pricking" and "pricks." It means exactly what you think it means as Mercutio talks about male erections. He takes delight in this kind of sexual joking. Like the nurse, Mercutio is openly sexual, but the nurse’s sexuality is simple and good-hearted. Often she said things like "ladybird" that are unintentional. Nothing that Mercutio says is unintentional.
This is a guy who is really sharp and delights in these kinds of elaborate puns. Jumping to line 40, Romeo, who is not in the mood for this word play, says he is done and Mercutio gets off a triple-level pun on the word “done” - about a horse stuck in mud and a brown color and collecting on unpaid bills!
Another interesting point is at line 31; Mercutio decides to put his mask in a case. He will go in his own face. He does not care "What curious eye doth quote deformities." He does not care about what people think about his real appearance. At line 36 where Romeo talks about letting other people dance, he says, those who are light of heart "Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels." As your notes probably tell you, rushes were spread on the floor at these big parties. Wall-to-wall carpeting was not frequently found. It was a way to protect the floor. At the end of the party, you just swept up the rushes and you had a reasonably clean room again.
[Line 54 -- 114]
We end this sequence with Romeo and Mercutio getting into another argument over
the significance of dreams. This is
going to serve as the intellectual springboard for Mercutio to give one of the
most famous speeches in the whole play.
It is about Queen Mab, a mythological folklore figure that Shakespeare
probably heard about while growing up in
Back to the remarkable Queen Mab speech. I hope you saw what I was talking about how it is divided into two parts. He obviously enjoys talking about the ridiculously smallest aspects of Queen Mab, like spider webs and grasshopper wings and things like that. In the second part, he talks about the social types in Shakespeare day: the lover, the lawyer, the courtier who spends time around court begging for royal favors. I bet you never knew where fever blisters came from. Apparently, Queen Mab comes if a woman dreams about kisses too much. The angry Mab will blister her lips because her breath is tainted with the smell of sweetmeats or candy [line 75]. We get the parson who is more interested in the amount of money he is going to make than in saving soul. We get the soldier getting a post- traumatic, combat flashback dreaming about cutting throats. Anyway, Mab is responsible for many things, based on her interpretations of what human beings are dreaming about, the dreams that she makes them dream. When you take this in its entirety, the speech does go on for a long time, and Romeo finally interrupts Mercutio to say he has gone too far and is talking about nothing.
Often in modern productions, Mercutio is played as someone who really is out of control, off balance for whatever reason. When you see the film version of this play, you see this suggested in different ways for different reasons. Mercutio behaves this way in an excessive manner. Clearly, he is the dominant force among this group of young men, intellectually very sharp and possessed of this wild imagination. We see Romeo gets very serious about "some consequences hanging in the stars," something that is going to have its beginning tonight at Capulet’s party.
In this scene Romeo is easily led and looks for approval from people like Mercutio and Benvolio. In this next scene, Romeo will discover his authentic self and does so through love. When Romeo falls genuinely in love with Juliet, it really changes him. He becomes much more independent in making his own decisions, although Juliet does push him around and tell him what to do quite a bit.
Act I, scene 5
Let’s move to scene 5, the party at Capulet’s house. [Act I, scene 5, lines 1 -- 55] In the first 15 lines, we get a small picture of what it must have been like to throw a big party. The servers are clearing the dinner dishes; Benvolio had said that the supper was done. The serving men are cleaning, getting the tables and chairs up so people can dance. "Oh, yes," says one servant -- "be sure to save me a piece of the marzipan [dessert], so I can give it to the girl next door." You will see as the scene unfolds, it has many levels of awareness. Different people know about different things that are going on. The servants in the first 15 lines constitute the lowest level of awareness about what is happening at this party. Capulet knows more, but Romeo and Juliet have the highest level awareness, because they know about their love. And Tybalt knows Romeo crashed the party and he plans on killing him, an important fact Romeo is unaware of.
At line 18 we see Capulet welcoming everybody and joking
with the ladies and growing nostalgic about how long it has been since he’s
threw a dinner dance party at his house. We see how excited this party makes
Capulet. One of the reasons for the
party is that
Look at what happens when Romeo sees Juliet -- a kind of instant transformation, falling in love at first sight. Remember that he sees her first; she does not realize who he is until he makes his approach to her. So let us look at the text from line 18 to about line 55.
When Romeo sees Juliet, at about line 46, the way he describes her is straight out of Petrarch, the poet I talked about earlier. He compares her to "a snowy dove among crows." He compares her with the sun or the moon. Look at the comparison to "a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear" at line 48. For the Elizabethans a dark complexion is a negative thing, and the contrast between the dark skin and bright jewel highlights Juliet's pale complexion.
What Romeo proposes to do at line 53 is that when the dance ends, he will watch where she stands and go over and figure out a way to touch her hand. He even uses a favorite Petrarchian image: he proposes to make his "rude" or uncivilized hand "blessed." The idea here is that love becomes like a religious experience. Rosaline is quickly forgotten. He has never seen true beauty until this night, at line 55.
Shakespeare seldom gives his audience a single emotion all by itself. Romeo has just seen Juliet. He is desperately in love. An ordinary playwright might let Romeo wrestle with this emotion and talk some more with us. Not Shakespeare! Immediately Tybalt – the hot-headed Capulet -- hears or recognizes Romeo and jumps to the conclusion that Romeo has crashed the party in order to mock and cause trouble. In rage, he decides to start a fight right now. "Get me my sword!" Romeo, of course, does not hear any of this. Has no idea he has been recognized and is in danger of being killed. So we get this conflict of emotion as members of the audience: Romeo and his love interest, Romeo under danger of attack.
In the resulting scene Shakespeare gives us a mix of emotions. On the page we don’t realize how skilled this mixture is: Capulet still trying to be the genial party host, asking people to dance, telling them to have more wine, don’t go home yet. At the same time he is carrying on this angry and bitter argument with Tybalt from 62 -- 94. One of the things you see here, which is important to Capulet’s character later on, is that Capulet can be very warm, genial, concerned about his daughter. But once he is crossed, once somebody does something he does not want done, he is quickly enraged. Capulet has a very quick temper, as you will see here. Especially when he thinks that Tybalt is challenging his authority. He refers to Tybalt in all kinds of insulting ways, such as "boy" and "princecox." Tybalt flies into an irrational rage, and Capulet explodes about being challenged by Tybalt. The behaviors of both characters prepare us for the dramatic events later in the play.
In talking about Romeo crashing the party, Capulet excuses it and praises Romeo. One of the things in a Shakespearean play is that if your enemy emphasizes your positive qualities, the audience is assured of what a good person you are. When Romeo finally gets across the room through the dancers and approaches Juliet, the language that they exchange is very different from what has been uttered before. Listen as it is done here. See if you can figure why this scene sounds so different from the language they use elsewhere in the play.
Ask yourself what is it that Romeo wants here? What is his objective in approaching
Juliet? What exactly is it that Juliet
does in response to this guy who starts coming on to her? As soon as they exchange their first words,
had their first kiss, the party unfortunately breaks up and people start
leaving. As they leave, both Romeo and
Juliet discover who this strange, attractive person is that they have been
talking to. Look for that oxymoron, that
self-contradictory phrase that Romeo was so prone to use earlier during the
play. See if you can find it in the last
sequence of the play. [Line 56 -- 147]
There is certainly a lot going on in this scene. At one level of awareness, we have Romeo who has discovered his love for Juliet and then Juliet who very quickly discovers that someone has fallen in love with her. In the midst of all this activity, all the dancing going on, with Romeo's friends and Tybalt and Capulet nearby – only Romeo and Juliet know the every special thing that is happening between them. What they do not know, what we are left with, is Tybalt's rage when he discovers Romeo's presence. Tybalt is a time bomb that is waiting to go off. We will see it in action the very next day.
We also see Capulet's rage set off by the idea that anyone would dare to challenge him. We can see how the behavior of Tybalt and Capulet prepares us for actions that will follow in the play. What was different about the way Romeo and Juliet spoke to each other? Did you notice that the lines of verse that they spoke were rhymed? Their first dialogue together takes the form of a sonnet. In Shakespeare time, formal poems often took the form of a sonnet, a 14 line verse, which had a regular rhyme pattern to it. The sonnet was considered especially appropriate to talk about love and so to heighten the impact of this first meeting between Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare used the form of a sonnet. There are some other things unusual about it: the religious imagery, for example, and the fact the whole poem is a conceit, that elaborate comparison. It makes falling in love a religious experience.
It gets to be very specific and rather odd in some regards. Remember that Romeo is intent in crossing the
room just to touch her hand. His opening
line, his come-on, indicates just that.
“If I profane with my unworthiest hand/ This holy shrine.” So Juliet’s hand is like a religious shrine,
like the church in
Romeo persists, “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?” Juliet says that they are supposed to use their lips in prayers. Romeo then says, "let lips do what hands do!/ They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.” It's up to Juliet to save Romeo's soul! The power of this religious conceit is not unique to Shakespeare. It goes clear back to Petrarch and even before him. That is the idea that the love object, the woman, is all that stands between salvation and despair for the man who is looking for a favor – for the return of his affection. At this point, Juliet simply says at line 107, “saints do not move." They don’t become actively involved in granting prayers. They just stand still – they do nothing. Romeo takes that as a cue that she is not going to try and resist him. So he takes that opportunity to kiss her “Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.” And having kissed her once, he continues this witty argument, and says that if I have somehow dishonored you, I will take my sin back by kissing you again. Juliet smiles and says, "You kiss by the book." In other words, "You are really pushing your advantages here, sucker."
So this wonderful little scene takes place. Immediately they are interrupted; the party breaks up. Juliet is called away by her mother. Notice at line 115, when Romeo asks the nurse, who that wonderful girl is, she revels in her indirect connection to Juliet, telling Romeo that she nursed the young woman he just asked about. She cannot help herself; she kind of advertises Juliet to heighten male interest, at line 118: “I tell you, he who can lay hold of her," who can marry her, "shall have the chinks.” "Chinks" here meaning the chink of golden coins, lots of money.
That's how Romeo realizes that Juliet is a Capulet. She asks about the identity of that young man. It is interesting when she asks "Who is that?" at about line 130, it is as if she does not point out Romeo until the third time. The nurse goes to see and comes back to say that is Romeo Montague. "The only son of your great enemy." I hope you saw that the next line, Juliet’s line at 140 is the oxymoron: “My only love sprung from my only hate.” The oxymoron is all about the self-contradictory emotions. Back in Act I, Scene 1, when Romeo was trying to tell us how powerfully he is affected by love, he just did an overkill of oxymoron, none of which had any particularly power because the whole idea of love seemed to be so abstract. Remember at that time we did not even know who it was he was in love with. Kind of like, oh my God, how awful I feel. The focus was entirely upon Romeo and his emotional state. Notice in a few short scenes how this particular rhetorical device had taken on a new and powerful meaning when Juliet says, "My only love sprung from my only hate." We can relate to this idea at a very immediate emotional level because we have seen the effect his declaration of love had upon her. We have seen her reaction. When she uses the oxymoron, it is more than just a clever play on words. There is a real power there in the bringing together of love and hate in a single image. Therefore, Juliet at this point wants to hide from the nurse, to retreat into her own world and wrestle with this complex and conflicting emotions, as does Romeo. What will they do?
Act II, Scene 1
[Act II, scene 1] In the next scene we return to the Prologue. His speech tells us what we already know. It adds a new feature. What is the difference between Romeo's love for Rosaline, which suddenly disappeared, and Romeo’s love for Juliet? The answer is his love for Juliet is returned. It may seem a statement of the obvious. When Juliet responds to his offer of affection, unlike Rosaline, this is all the encouragement that Romeo needs. Now he is totally and completely in love.
Act II, scene 1 Romeo leaves that party but tells us that he must go back: "Can I go forward when my heart is here?/ Turn back, dull earth, and find thy center out." This is a very powerful image -- as if Romeo were a little world, a planet, and the center or core of that world, what really holds it together, is Juliet. So he is physically and cosmically incapable of moving beyond the pull of gravity and has to come back.
In the scene that follows here, he hides in the shadows while Benvolio and Mercutio search for him. Benvolio and Mercutio sense almost immediately that Romeo is hiding in the shadows. They saw him come this way. They call to him, knowing that he can hear them. Mercutio, not content to call just for his friend Romeo, conjures his friend at line 6, which has a special meaning: you conjured a spirit. You evoked a demonic presence and sorcerers conjured up evil forces. So Mercutio in a comic way conjures Romeo. What do you need to conjure someone like Romeo? Maybe black magic or verses, the stuff of love. The conjuring you hear is increasing sexual and gets into Mercutio's favorite game, which is making obscure sexual references. Mercutio is verbally brilliant so that he can take an idea and play with it. Think of the conjuration as something like Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist, trying to call the satanic forces together with the magic phrase "Humors! Madman! Passion! Lover!" -- all of the things that you could say about Romeo in his previous life when he was obsessed with Rosaline. Mercutio asks that the spirit just pronounce a couple of love rhymes at line 8, "and I am satisfied." Maybe a reference to Venus and her son, Cupid, the little god of physical lust at line 11 --13? All of this is intended to be insulting because both Benvolio and Mercutio know full well that Romeo is within earshot and can hear this stuff.
When Mercutio conjures Romeo by referring to Rosaline, you can see what I am talking about at line 17 as his sexual references become more obvious:
I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie.
The last line is wonderful. "Demesnes that there adjacent lie" comes right out of property descriptions. It was probably in a deed of property that Shakespeare heard it used. In the midst of sexually evoking Rosaline, body part by body part, you get this business phrase thrown in about the "property" adjacent to the thigh.
Benvolio warns, "You had better be careful; you will anger him." Mercutio quickly says at line 23 that wouldn't not anger him. "T'would anger him/ To raise a spirit in his mistress’s circle/ Of some strange nature, letting it there stand/ Till she had laid it and conjured it down." Remember I talked about all the references to male erections that are found throughout Shakespeare's plays? Here is one more. Letting the spirit stand till she had laid it and conjured it down? Rosaline knows how to handle an erect spirit. "Now that would make him angry if I were to say that," says Mercutio, saying that. He adds at line 29 "I conjure only to raise up him." So having once made his joke about the male erection, Mercutio will not let it go.
In the rest of the scene there are references equally intriguing, talking about Romeo and Rosaline in sexual terms as if they were two different kinds of pears: the medlar pear and the pop'rin pear. For some obscure reason the medlar, eaten when it was overripe, was associated with female genitalia; the pop'rin pear suggests what Romeo should do -- "pop her in." Nothing seems to be sacred or protected from Mercutio's imagination. Even fruit has an erotic aspect.
Act II, Scene 2
This is justifiably one of the most famous scenes in all of
Shakespeare works, Romeo and Juliet on the balcony. In this scene Romeo
continues to act and to speak like a traditional courtly or Petrarchian
lover. In the first speech, lines 1 --
24, where he sees Juliet at the window, you hear a lot of the same images and
conceits that we got earlier. She is
like a heavenly body; she is like the sun.
There is a play on the sun and moon that runs throughout the play. Romeo and Juliet and their love are
associated with the night. Daytime is
when hatred and killing occur. [Act II,
scene 2, lines 1 -- 61]
Here, Romeo calls Juliet the sun and urges her not to be influenced by the moon. After all, the moon was identified with Diana, goddess of chastity. "Just saying no" is not what Romeo wants Juliet to do now. In his response to her presence, there is no mention of the feud. It is remarkable how quickly the feud drops out of the picture for both Romeo and Juliet. Remember there is no origin or explanation of the feud, what it is all about. We never know what's behind the hatred that is going to end up costing so many lives, destroying so much that is good. This absence of any motive seems to be deliberate on Shakespeare's part. People are engaged in a bloodthirsty conflict that has no particular beginning or reason. It just is. Shakespeare emphasizes irrationality like the feud. Now when Romeo sees Juliet up above at the window of her bedroom, she comes out on the balcony. There are two important physical things on stage that Shakespeare establishes. Number one, Juliet does not see Romeo; she has no idea that he is there. He has a moral dilemma when she starts talking aloud to herself: should he say something to let her know that he is present or should he wait and hear what she has to say. We can see how Romeo handles his moral dilemma. The other thing is that there is a physical separation. The balcony is at a considerable height above the garden floor where Romeo is. Check out the details in the section on Shakespeare's theater on the web site. This is the perfect example of how Shakespeare would use the upper stage to establish distance.
In Shakespeare's theater, this separation is absolutely essential. Romeo and Juliet were both played by young male actors. Shakespeare had to be very careful about physical contact between those two males on stage. You might get into legal problems and condemnation by the church authorities. Not to mention making some members of his audience uncomfortable. This is one of the reasons why Shakespeare is very cagey about showing physical affection on stage. He came up with subtle ways to maintain some kind of physical or emotional distance in order to impede the full physical expression of love in his plays. Instead he had to show affection verbally. This scene is famous, to put it bluntly, because these two kids cannot get at each other. They have to talk about their passion, at some distance because they cannot reach the other. This has not stopped modern film directors from overcoming the physical distance between the upper and lower stage. Our sensibilities in the 21th century require some kind of physical contact between Romeo and Juliet. But Shakespeare kept them separate. This is one of the major things that motivate this particular scene.
In the first 60 lines, notice how Juliet has been transformed by the brief experience with Romeo. She is completely energized and focused. This is a girl who only a short time before said to her mother, "I am only going to do what you give me permission to do." That girl is long gone. This is a new person. All she can focus on are the difficulties. Romeo enters with his tongue hanging out and parading all of his language of love; all he wants to do is get close to her. She focuses on all the practical difficulties. She is the one who takes charge. She says that if we are going to be together, this is what we have to deal with. How did she propose to get around the central issue of their identities, Romeo the Montague and Juliet the Capulet?
When we look more closely at the opening speech, we see many of the conceits that I have been talking about: the sun and moon and the stars, all of them designed really to make Juliet’s beauty something that transcends the human, like Petrarch's girlfriend Laura. This glorification is found throughout, in little phrases like "bright angel," or where he says that her eyes are like stars. Romeo carries it one step further and imagines her eyes substituting for stars and turning night into day. These are all very elaborate kinds of things that had the audience applauding, well done. Side by side with these verbal excesses, Shakespeare shows Romeo's fundamental character. You get very simple expressions of the longing a real 16 year-old boy in love for the very first time might feel. Phrases like line 10: "It is my lady! O it is my love." I think even more moving is line 23, when he says that he wishes to be a glove upon her hand – that he might touch her cheek. That is nothing out of Petrach, that is the kid himself coming from Romeo's heart.
One of the most famous lines in the whole speech is Juliet’s: “Oh Romeo, wherefore art thou?” Which does not mean where is Romeo, but why are you Romeo? "Wherefore" means "Why are you Romeo? Why is that your name?" That is what Juliet focuses on -- the practical solution to the problem of the feud. At least make a separation between Romeo and his name. Separate the reality of the human being from the name. She believes that this is how you can get around the feud. This feud is something that exists at the level of the word "Montague," not the physical reality of Romeo.
Throughout their speech there is a really emphasis upon treating words as objects. As Juliet says at line 43, what is in a name? That is the basis for the study of semantics. Romeo offers to be newly baptized. Here again we get the religious aspects; he can change his name if that pleases her. "My name is hateful to myself," he says at line55, "since it causes you discomfort." The word becomes a literal object that he can attack: "Had I it written, I would tear the word." Finally, at line 61, he will no longer be a Montague if that bothers Juliet.
The other thing I talked about was Romeo listening to Juliet pour her heart out. And his moral quandary, at line 37, when he wonders, "Shall I hear more or shall I speak at this?" Sleazy kid, he lets her pour her heart out for another 12 lines before he finally manages to startle her by speaking “I take thee at thy word.” One of the dynamics of this scene is the simple device of Juliet speaking, telling us her true feelings before she knows Romeo is there. Why is this so important? From line 61 -- 124 we will see how this changes the dynamics, the normal anticipated course of courtship between the two young people.
What we saw back at the dance when Romeo, spouting a sonnet, took her hand and kissed her, that was the way you are supposed to do it. That is how you played the game. Man pursues, man urges, man comes up with eloquent language, and woman acts demure, coy and puts him off only to enflame his passion. This gets changed profoundly and fundamentally in the course of this scene. When Juliet says, “Oh God I love him” she changes the rules.
[Act II, scene 2, lines 62 -- 141] In the next sequence, we start off with Juliet expressing real concern for Romeo's safety. She is worried about what it going to happen to him. Look at Romeo's reaction to the idea of danger; he is trespassing in the middle of the night in the garden of his mortal enemy. He does not acknowledge a threat, only that his love is true. He uses a rhetorical exaggeration, emphasizing his emotional state rather than the reality of possible death.
You can certainly see the difference in the reaction between Romeo and Juliet. Romeo is still playing the traditional courtly lover with his Petrarchian images and exaggerated sense of his own immortality. Remember when you listen to Romeo and Juliet, that these kids are within about three days of their deaths. So when Romeo says in a grand gesture at line 78, "My life were better ended by their hate [the Capulets]/ Than death prorogued [delayed] wanting [lacking] of thy love." This is a beautiful sentiment but dramatic overkill, considering that he is going be dead very shortly. Shakespeare intends to show these kids imbued with the traditional adolescent fantasy that they will live forever.
Juliet’s natural concern is why he is there. Romeo responds like the courtly lover, saying at 71 "There is more peril in thy eyes than anything else." The idea here is that he will live and or die based entirely upon Juliet’s reaction to the declaration of his love.
Romeo is very moving and powerful when he talks about how love helped him climb the wall and get into the garden. We also have a curious image in line 82 where he says, " I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far/ As that vast shore washed by the farthest sea,/ I should adventure for such merchandise." This is a reference to the kind of voyages and explorations that were common in Shakespeare's time, people like Francis Drake sailing around the world appealing to the imagination of Shakespeare's audience. We used to say, “Fly me to the moon.” Now we probably should say, “Fly me out of the galaxy.” What Romeo says is more earthbound for us, but fitting within the limitations of distance his audience comprehended. He would travel around the world to get her merchandise.
Look at Juliet’s response at line 85. What is it that has changed to make this so profoundly different from traditional love affairs? Juliet has upset the convention and expectation. She has violated the rules of the game. It is too late to go back. She says at line 88, "Fain would I dwell on form." She would really like to go back and do it the way it was supposed to be done. That is what she means by "form." "Farewell compliment" at line 89 refers to the role playing that we saw at the dance where she is supposed to behave one way and he another. By cutting through all of that game playing, Juliet has upset the normal course. From the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, game playing was essential. There were countless books about the rules of love. How it was supposed to be done, what men were supposed to do and how women were supposed to act. What happened here is that Juliet skipped over the first 17 chapters of the Book of Love; she is up to the chapter on "Making the Final Commitment" and getting registered at Nordstrom's… Romeo is still back on chapter 1, impressing the girl with courtly images, swearing that you will love her eternally. They have to get on the same page if the relationship is going to progress. She assures him that although she has spoken out of turn, she will be true. She challenges him at line 93, "O gentle Romeo,/ If thou does love, pronounce faithfully." In effect, "If you're bothered by my breaking the rules, I will go back and play the game although we both know at this point that it is simply a game."
Romeo had a problem with Rosaline; he did not know whether she was playing the game or really didn't like him. With Juliet he does not have that problem. By the way, when she refers to him as “O gentle Romeo” the word "gentle" is undoubtedly a social reference, a way of praising him by asserting his rank. Her actions assure him that her behavior is not light. She is not promiscuous. She is not giving into him because she has no morals. Trust me, she says, " I will prove more true than those who have more cunning to be strange." In other words act the role that they do not really feel. She ends up asking for his pardon, “Do not impute this yielding to light love.” She is ready to go to the next level. Unfortunately, Romeo has to catch up and that means he has to get through all the chapters of the book of love, all the intermediate steps, such as swearing your love. We certainly see Romeo's determination to pursue the chapter on swearing your love. Everything that he offers to swear by, she says, "Oh don't do that." At line 116, she says, "Do not swear at all." She has that premonition as Romeo had at the party: "It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;/ Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be/ Ere one can say it lightens" [line 118 -- 120]. This last image is nice, instantaneous illumination. What Juliet is getting at indirectly in this sudden chill relates to that question I raised earlier, what is the source of the tragedy of this play? Juliet sees that sometimes a good thing can be too much. It sweeps people up in too sudden a passion.
At line 125, Romeo is still not the same place where she is. She says they have to go now, to separate for the time being." His great line is “Will you leave me so unsatisfied?” (This is where the young Mick Jagger got his idea for the song, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”) That is what you were supposed to say to your new girlfriend on the first date: why do you leave me so unsatisfied? Juliet says, "Hey sucker, I am up here 10 feet away. You are down there, and we are in the middle of the enemy camp. What is it exactly that you want me to do?" All Romeo can come up with is the exchange for their vows of love. She’s already done that, dummy.
She wishes she could take it back and give it to him again. Here once again, we get one of those oxymoron at line 133. She says, "My bounty is as boundless as the sea,/ My love as deep; the more I give to thee,/ The more I have." You can understand this oxymoron and the idea of the more I give, the more I have because we have seen it in action. We have seen this love grow; we know the source of the love and the honest, emotional authenticity that lies behind it. This has much more force that those empty oxymorons that Romeo was throwing off in act 1 scene 1.
Suddenly we are aware of the nurse; we hear her off stage, calling to Juliet. This creates a tremendous tension. This thing between Romeo and Juliet is so intense because it is private. Given the circumstances, they must protect their love from the outside world. Just the fact that the nurse is offstage somewhere and might hear what is going on creates tremendous tension. You can hear this in Juliet’s voice. She is torn between staying there and talking to Romeo and covering up what has taken place.
The nurse in this scene really stands for the entire outside world. In a simplistic way, the conflict in the play is that the outside world discovers Romeo and Juliet’s love. As they do, the troubles begin. In the last line, when Romeo speaks, he refers to the blessed night, once again establishing that good things happen at night only. "I fear that all this but a dream." We get an echo here of the Queen Mab speech. The cynical Mercutio might say, "You are about to get you nose rubbed in it for daring to dream the impossible dream." Or is this the real thing? Shakespeare is playing with dream and reality.
We are going to go on for the next sequence. Things will move rapidly. She has moved on several chapters already in the book of love. She is already talking marriage. Juliet is the most unconventional young woman; she is the one that proposes marriage. In those times marriages were handled by family members, negotiated ahead of time by the parents of the young couple. Here, however, Juliet does the negotiating. She does not share the proposal with any adult, not even the nurse. She is behaving here really independently for the first time in her life.
How might Capulet react to the fact his daughter proposes
marrying a Montague? I do not think he
ever contemplated that his daughter would want to marry the son of the
enemy. From a social perspective, the
marriage would be all right; they are both of the same social class. But the wedding would be like a marriage of
two Mafia families. The weapons would
have to be checked at the doors, or you would have a free fire zone in the
middle of the dance floor. The other
thing is that Capulet is so fixated with the possibility of the marriage to
Her father will say later on in the play that she is the only hope he has left. In his life, there were other children, but he had lost them. This is one of the realities in Shakespeare's time -- that almost all families had suffered the death of children. Shakespeare himself was the third of his siblings, but the first one to survive to adulthood. He himself lost his son, Hamnet, when the boy was about 10 years old.
In the next sequence we get some "loving delays" where Juliet keeps being called back, Romeo says, "Should I leave? I do not want to leave." They keep finding and inventing reasons to prolong this wonderful moment of love. Once again, we will get at least one powerful oxymoron in passing. [Act II, scene 2, lines 142 -- 190]
Juliet certainly takes charge here. She pops back in at line 143 and says, "If that thy bent of love be honorable,/ Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow/ ….Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite." Of course, Romeo is still trying to figure out whether she will go out with him on Friday night. I think that this comes as a real surprise to him.
One of the nice things in this sequence is the reminder in the language that both of them use that they are still very young. Romeo is trying to develop a conceit, a comparison about what it is like to leave your lover at line 157. He compares approaching your love to the way schoolboys feel about leaving school, and he compares the way you feel about leaving your lover to how schoolboys feel about coming to school on Monday morning. Juliet has a good one showing her youthfulness at line 177, where she compares keeping Romeo on a kind of string like a child with a bird that lets it hop away only to yank it back. Then that really powerful oxymoron, justly famous from this particular scene, line 197, “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow/ That I shall say good night till it be morrow.” Again, we can feel the force of that oxymoron emotionally because we know what caused it.
Act II, Scene 3
In the last lines of Act II, scene 3 Romeo mentions going to his "ghostly friar's cell" to tell him the news and seek his help. Friar Lawrence becomes the first adult to hear this extraordinary news. How does he react in this scene? [Act II, scene 3]
Romeo's spiritual advisor, Friar Lawrence, is a good man to
turn to in the situation that he faces.
Friar Lawrence is a man of the church, a moralistic character. He has a saying for every situation. He is probably a Franciscan, so he has been through Franciscan training to handle all the human emergencies. When he hears Romeo's reckless account about a new love, he chides Romeo. He has not shared our experience; he puts Romeo down and denies that there is anything of lasting value about this new crush that he apparently has. He did not share the experience of the audience; therefore he does not know the depth of feeling between these two young people.
Notice how he uses this, beating Romeo over the head for having such a foolish, thoughtless passion. The question to ask yourself is, given the way Friar Lawrence feels about this new love, why at the end of the scene, line 90, does he agree to the marriage?
Friar Lawrence brings a different kind of perspective. He is the first person from the outside world that finds out about this intense love affair. Like everybody else in this play: the nurse, Mercutio, Capulet -- they can’t get much further than their own kind of narrow view about what love should be and what Romeo is capable of. The friar is pretty much a moralistic judge, really upset at the idea that Romeo has done something that he should not have done with Rosaline. Then when he finds out that it is somebody different, he beats up Romeo because he is so shallow in his affection. At line 67 he says, “Young man’s love lies/ Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.” It is an important distinction for Friar Lawrence to make, that this love is not heart to heart, but a kind of shallow, temporary passion enflamed through the eyes. That is certainly how Romeo is first attracted to Juliet. But now we are far from that point. We see the use of neat little moral sayings, aphorisms, that Friar Lawrence uses frequently, such as line 80: "Women may fall when there's no strength in men." He has 101 of these tidy statements, suitable to be framed and hung on the bathroom wall, conclusions that can wrap up all the complexity of human existence in a neat package.
Friar Lawrence is similar to many men in Shakespeare's time in seeing a fundamental weakness in women. Yet, in his plays Shakespeare creates these extraordinary women whom he shows us over and over are capable of fidelity and loyalty and really act as moral force. I think that Shakespeare for dramatic reasons presents the possibility for equality and shows his male audience that women are capable of much more than what conventional wisdom held. I believe that Shakespeare did this largely for dramatic purposes. He made a good play, but certainly was conscious of what he was doing with his female characters.
The central issue here is why Friar Lawrence does what he does in furthering the marriage. Assuming that you identified that passage where the friar supports the marriage, it is important to keep in mind that his reason, while admirable, will, in an important respect, make possible all of the tragic events that will follow. Sometimes bad consequences come from good people trying to do things for the best of all reasons. Friar Lawrence should realize this.
Act II, scene 4
Elsewhere in
The scene begins with the echo of what we have heard before, “Where the devil should Romeo be?” In effect, "Where is Romeo?" They discussed his disappearance, both of them totally unaware of what happened to their friend and the change in his feelings.
We learn that Tybalt has sent a challenge to Romeo's house. Mercutio almost immediately begins ridiculing Romeo as a lovesick adolescent. He is unusually witty; about line 16 he refers to Cupid as the "blind bow boy," shooting a blunt shaft and asks if Romeo is the man to encounter Tybalt. And then he really takes off on Tybalt. He is especially insulted by what he sees as Tybalt's affected, phony manner of fighting duels by the book. He calls him the "captain of compliments" [line 20]. "Compliments" here does not mean "saying something nice" but "conscious, cultured behavior." You probably have seen on television people who are very much into the martial arts and all that specialized ritual. Tybalt is very similar to that kung fu master, filled with elaborate formality and arcane vocabulary. This is what Mercutio means by "fighting by the book." Nevertheless, despite his phoniness, Tybalt can be deadly. At one point, says Mercutio, Tybalt keeps time in his sword fighting: one, two, and the third one in your chest.
Mercutio is also affronted by Tybalt’s fondness for new fashion -- Italian rapiers in particular and fencing terms from both the Italians and the French. At one point, line 36, he describes Tybalt talking about his "bones." This is a pun on the French word “bon" for "good." He describes a certain fencing stroke as "the hay," a reference to the Italian term "hai." Even the way Tybalt uses English is exaggerated. He has a very clipped way of describing what's important to him at line 31: "a very good blade! A very tall man! A very good whore!" Mercutio asks if Romeo, this lovesick kid run through the heart with the love sonnet, is the man to meet Tybalt in a duel to the death. He decides that Romeo does not have a chance.
At about line 40, Romeo enters, and Mercutio really gets wound up. He mocks Romeo for being lovesick, using an elaborate pun on the first syllable of Romeo's name and fish eggs -- "roe." At line 41 he even refers to Petrarch the Italian love poet who created the tradition of excessive rhetoric of love, and to his phantom girl friend, Laura. Mercutio lists some of the classic beauties from history and mythology, such as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Thisby, whom we will meet again in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Mercutio's puns become even more elaborate. He uses the words "slip," "pink," "sole" and "goose" in several different ways, linking them together in a complex, on-going play on words. Mercutio had done the same thing the night before on the way to Capulet’s party. Remember that Romeo was like a wet blanket; he really did not want to go and dance. This morning, he is much livelier. He answers to Mercutio pun for pun, giving as good as he gets and finally driving Mercutio to say at line 71: "Come between us, good Benvolio, my wit faints." Mercutio assumes that Romeo is no long in love and that this is what accounts for the change in his friend’s behavior. What a great irony that Romeo is more in love than ever! It's just that now he loves somebody who returns his affection.
Mercutio takes on love one more time from line 92 -- 106. Now not so much in classical terms or elaborate puns, but in terms of a very bawdy, obscene exaggerated description of sexual activity. Mercutio is genuinely pleased that his friend is apparently over his lovesickness, and he says, "Why, is not this better than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo." Ironically the thing that has restored Romeo to health and to his true identity is the fact that he is truly in love. Mercutio cannot resist doing a mini-satire on the nature of love. We get a marvelous description of love, a great natural (a mental defective or idiot), running up and down "to hide his bauble in a hole" [line 96]. You can figure out for yourself what his "bauble" is and what "hole" he hides it in.
Remember that Juliet promised to send someone to see where Romeo intended to marry her, and the nurse has been selected as the go-between. The nurse’s ego is really inflated by this mission. First of all, Juliet has asked her to leave the house and go out through the city to meet some mysterious nobleman. Secondly, she has a direct involvement in bringing about the thing she longs to see: the marriage of Juliet. The fact that it is secret and it will fly in the face of social convention just makes it all the more exciting. In honor of the occasion, the nurse is playing the "grand gentlewoman." She has decked herself out in a fancy dress, carries a fan and probably has a mask. She has even gotten one of her fellow servants to come along and pretend to be her attendant. Peter has to carry the mask in front of the nurse to keep her from getting sunburned. All of these things are, of course, in style of the great ladies of the time.
If Mercutio was bothered by Tybalt's phoniness, he really finds the nurse an irresistible target for pretending to be what she isn't. Mercutio deliberately provokes the nurse and accuses her of being a "bawd" and a "whore." If she is going to dress up in a fancy way, he will accuse her of being a prostitute, someone who pretends for a living. All of this is done indirectly; he does a little song at line 141 about "an old hare hoar," which simply means an old gray rabbit. The nurse does not know that; she just hears the word "whore." She does not have the advantage of looking at the text as you do and reading the footnote. It wouldn't make any difference anyway; she is illiterate and cannot read. All she hears is the word "whore" and knows that this is directed at her and is provoked by Mercutio taking liberties with her. If she were a great lady, he would not talk this way to her.
What is interesting about the next sequence is that we hear her anger directed at Mercutio, once he leaves. She calls him at line 152 a "saucy merchant," full of his own "ropery" or insulting talk. Romeo tries to explain Mercutio's behavior at line 154: "A gentleman, nurse, that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month." In other words, his bark is a lot worse than his bite. But all the nurse probably heard was that phallic reference, "stand to." The nurse is not calmed by this at all. She is going to "take him down" even if he were lustier than he is. If she can't, she can find somebody else to do it. Now nurse probably doesn't mean that she'll have sex with Mercutio; she's far too angry. It's just that in her rage at being treated so badly when she was playing the grand lady, she strikes out at him and says the first thing that comes into her mind, much as she did when she called Juliet "Ladybird" back in Act I, scene 3. The audience is encouraged to laugh at the nurse for something she doesn't even realize she has said.
Then in her anger, she turns on poor Peter, the Capulet’s serving man that she has brought along to play the part as her servant. She says at line 161: "And thou must stand by too, and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure." That has got a double meaning. She means a knave insulted her with Peter doing nothing to stop it. It can also mean a knave had sex with her. So Peter's response, "I saw no man use you at his pleasure. If I had, my weapon should quickly have been out," is also a double entendre: "If I ever saw a man having sex with you, my weapon would quickly have been out." You know from earlier comments that "weapon" can be a phallic reference, especially in comic contexts.
Now the nurse turns to her primary mission, to find out what
Romeo intends to do about his pledge to wed Juliet. Notice here she is not content just to get
information; she wants to make sure that Romeo understands how important this
mission is and what a wonderful catch Juliet is. The nurse would make a good used car
salesman. She is always plugging the
value of her product. In a lot of
respect, this is the
We see here something that is often found in Shakespeare's lower class characters. If a word has more than one syllable in it, they either have difficulty using the word or understanding it. Here, the nurse sees the word "protest" as a positive thing and thinks that Romeo will love Juliet forever. We also see her stumbling with words at about line 210 where she states that Juliet "looks as pale as any clout in the versal world.” "Versal" is the corruption of "universal" world. Again at 215, where she means to say “sentences” it comes out as “sententious.” Language is not the nurse’s real strength. Most of all we see this when she asks Romeo about the letter that starts his name. He says his name starts with “R,” and she denies it, saying “R” is for the dog because that's the sound he makes when he growls. We see here the way people who cannot read often look at the world. The letter becomes, in effect, a replacement for the thing, the letter R must be associated with the dog, and Romeo is too fine a person to have his name start with the same sound as the dog, "grrrr."
I wanted to comment on the language in this particular passage. The initial exchange between the nurse and Romeo is in prose. All of the scene up to this point has been fun and games, involving Mercutio and Romeo putting the nurse on. At line 186, Romeo suddenly shifts into verse. Can you tell me why the shift occurs here? Romeo continues speaking in verse as does the nurse to about line 205. Then everything switches back to prose. Figure out why the change from prose to verse in this particular 19 line section.
At line 190, there is a nice little exchange where Romeo offers the nurse a tip: "Here is for thy pains". She says, “Oh no sir, not a penny." Great ladies would not take money for delivering a message. He insists and so she says all right and takes it. It is always a funny thing when she has to step out of character as a lady in order to take the tip, which she obviously really appreciates.
Act II, Scene 5
We now move to scene 5, with Juliet back at her house,
waiting desperately for the nurse’s return.
We are gong to take a look at the first speech that Juliet has. I want you to notice how she expresses her
impatience in two kinds of way. First is
the language in which she makes all kinds of references to the traditional
symbols of love and second is where she expresses her impatience in very
childlike terms that a thirteen year old girl might use. [Act
II, scene 5, lines 1 -- 18]
Juliet’s impatience is understandable. We have all been that age when we can hardly wait another minute. You can see a number of references to the classical treatment of love and the formal ways of talking about love. Then we get down to things that sound like a teenager would say them, as at line 12 – 13: “Had she affections and warm, youthful blood,/ She would be as swift in motion as a ball.” Her words make it sound like a tennis match. She starts ragging on the nurse because of her age, another sign of being an adolescent.
The nurse comes in, about line 20, but it is not until line
70 that she finally reveals to Juliet the substance of Romeo's message. How do you account for these 50 lines delay
in telling Juliet the news that she is desperate to hear? Let us listen to the rest of this particular
sequence and see what you make of the nurse’s delay. Secondly, once the nurse does tell Juliet
about the arrangements for marriage, notice that she cannot help making some fairly sexually explicit
references on what Juliet has in store for her that night. [Act II, scene 5, lines 19 -- 79]
Why did the nurse take so long to tell Juliet such a simple message? When the nurse comes in, her expression is deliberately glum and unhappy. Her back hurts her. This is part of the teasing that she enjoys doing. She blames it on her physical exhaustion having to walk two or three blocks as a lady and play her role. The nurse's physical expression is important here as you will see in a couple of scenes when once again she comes back to Juliet with another message and the same look on her face.
The nurse is also trying to make herself more important by stretching the information. It's the same thing that we saw when she met with Romeo. She does not want to let go of her role. Once she gives up that information, she is no longer the center of the universe.
There's still another dynamic going on here. The nurse does not want to let Juliet go because taking care of Juliet has been her job. This represents Juliet’s moving into adulthood, becoming a woman. You also see some of those bawdy references where the nurse moves from the rather high plane of talking about honorable love and marriage down to the sexual part of the whole enterprise. The nurse says at line 77, "You shall bear the burden soon at night." That is so characteristic of the nurse. We are told about Juliet blushing, not just at the sexual references but at the mere idea that Romeo is going to marry her. It's unusual when Shakespeare has one character describe the expression on another character’s face. It means he wants everyone in the theater to know how a character looks.
Act II, Scene 6
This scene is the marriage of Romeo and Juliet. We have been
preparing for this ever since Romeo and Juliet saw each other at the
party. What Shakespeare does with it is
interesting; we do not actually see the wedding take place, as we would in any
good soap opera. Why? [Act II, scene 6]
You would think in an event this important to the story we would certainly have an extended wedding ceremony. Shakespeare chooses not to show us anything except Romeo and Juliet arriving and lets the audience use its own imagination to supply the subsequence ceremony.
Romeo enters first, and he is so filled with adolescent fervor that at line 5 he tells Friar Lawrence, "Do thou but close our hands with holy words,/ Then love- devouring death do what he dare./ It is enough I may but call her mine." Romeo is prepared to suffer anything including death just to be married to Juliet. It is important to keep in mind that these two kids are within a few days of their own deaths. So, these kinds of melodramatic statements where they offer to risk their own lives or talk about their own mortality take on an added edge with you realize that pretty soon they will be dead.
Juliet arrives and Romeo asks her how much she loves him. She answers at line 32 in a way that shows her to be slightly more mature than Romeo. “They are but beggars that can count their worth;/ But my true love has grown to such excess/ I cannot sum up sum of half of my wealth.” Romeo is still dealing with love in a level of high abstraction and grand gesture. Juliet’s answer here seems to describe more accurately the excess of emotions and feelings. Friar Lawrence confirms the kids' lack of maturity and restraint as he says in the last two lines, “You shall not stay alone/ Till Holy Church incorporate two in one.”
At line 9, the friar had worried momentarily about this marriage: ‘These violent delights have violent ends/ And in their triumph die like fire and powder [gunpowder],/ Which, as they kiss, consume.” The friar expresses here the condition that I talked about as one of the possible causes of the tragedy -- the idea of excess of some good thing like love that Juliet cannot even sum up.
Act III, Scene 1
The ceremony takes place, Romeo and Juliet separate waiting desperately for that night when they can enjoy each other’s company. In Act 3, scene 1, once again Benvolio and Mercutio are in the streets wandering about. Now Benvolio is concerned about the next day, the mad blood stirring and the possibility of violence. From the beginning, Benvolio has been the peacemaker of the play. Now suddenly, Mercutio turns on Benvolio and projects his own propensity for violence onto Benvolio and asserts Benvolio is liable to erupt in anger. Let us look at the first 56 lines of the scene going through some of Mercutio's wilder accusations of Benvolio. [Act III, scene 1, lines 1 -- 34]
You can see what I mean about Mercutio projecting onto Benvolio. Benvolio gives no evidence anywhere of anything like what Mercutio describes. Mercutio is the man who is like Tybalt, the one with the propensity for violence. Many of these accusations are very funny. The first at line 5 is
Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a
tavern, claps me his sword upon the table and says, “God send me no
need of thee!”
As a general rule, if you are sitting in a bar quietly and somebody comes in and puts a .38 revolver on the bar and says, “I sure as hell hope I don’t have to use this,” generally, it is a good idea to leave quietly. At line 26 Mercutio accuses Benvolio of starting a fight with a man who coughs in the street because it awakened his dog that was lying asleep in the street. One of the reasons for this emphasis upon violence is that young gentlemen at this time were highly attuned and sensitive about any question involving honor. Tybalt is about to challenge Romeo to a life and death fight, because Romeo's showing up at the Capulet’s party the previous night was a terrible stain upon Tybalt’s honor. Tybalt cannot live as a gentleman with his honor stained by Romeo's actions.
Shakespeare plays are often filled with comments and
observations about dueling. Dueling was
a very serious problem during this time and was against the law. Shakespeare plays are filled with references
to gentleman who have to satisfy their honor by taking the fight out of the
city limits in order not to be arrested.
Mercutio's comic view of the world is about to be tested once Tybalt
comes in. In the rest of this scene
notice how Mercutio deliberately provokes Tybalt in lots of different ways
before the fight begins. [Act III, scene
35 -- 91]
You see Mercutio's provocations throughout this sequence. For example at line 39 Tybalt asks for a word with one of them. Mercutio responds, "And but one word with one of us? Couple it with something; make it a word and a blow." The reference to "consort" at line 47 turns into an insulting pun, as your notes explain. At line 49, the musical theme continues, as Mercutio pulls out his sword and says, "Here's my fiddlestick. Here is that shall make you dance. Zounds, consort!" Mercutio turns Tybalt's innocent use of the word "consort" into a threat. "Zounds" is a shortened form of "God’s wounds." This sacrilegious curse, one of the taboo words in Elizabethan speech, shows us how upset Mercutio is at this point.
The language between Mercutio and Tybalt is all in prose at this point. When Benvolio speaks at line 51, he speaks in verse about the importance of maintaining order and not airing grievances in public. It reminds us that it was illegal to duel within the city. And the change to verse emphasizes the importance of Benvolio's warning. We will see this reference to dueling again at line 59. Tybalt has said, "Here comes my man," referring to Romeo. Mercutio takes it in a different sense and asks "Do you think Romeo is your servant?" Mercutio adds, “Go before the field [out of town, outside the jurisdiction of the authorities], he'll be your follower"[right behind you].
Tybalt turns from Mercutio and challenges Romeo at line 61,
saying, "The love I bear thee can afford/ No better term than this: Thou
art a villain.” Think about the characters you've met in this play. Certainly Mercutio, Romeo, Benvolio all have
powerful vocabularies and poetic imaginations.
Look at all of the creative ways that Mercutio has been insulting Tybalt
up to this moment. When it comes to
Tybalt’s big moment, finally he has center stage. He is going to pour out all the anger and
insult that he has seething inside. But
all he is capable of saying is, “Thou art a villain.” Boy, talk about an
anticlimax, about falling flat in a world full of people capable of verbal
pyrotechnics. Tybalt is about as
exciting as an accountant. No reflection
intended upon accountants. Anyway, Tybalt's insult falls flat. It's also a hint about how this character
might be played. He's a little slow, not
as quick as the other young men of
In the fight where Mercutio is hurt, why does he jump in and take on this fight with Tybalt, when it is something between Tybalt and Romeo? We understand why Romeo is so meek, so willing to overlook the insults. This whole sequence is a wonderful illustration of how Shakespeare uses different levels of awareness. We know it is not a good idea to kill your wife’s cousin on the wedding day, especially before the honeymoon. Romeo does apparently back down, saying at line 65, “Villain am I none./ Therefore farewell. I see thou knowest me not.” So why does Mercutio jump in and make this his fight?
Technically, Mercutio is not a member of the Montague family. He is just a friend to Romeo. Nevertheless he is outraged that Romeo has given this apparently dishonorable vile submission. More than that, it represents a victory for Tybalt, whom Mercutio resents greatly. At line 75 he cries, “Alla stoccata carries it away. Tybalt, you rat catcher, will you walk?" "Alla stoccata" is an Italian fencing term, the kind of affected jargon that really enraged Mercutio. He calls Tybalt a "rat catcher," recalling the apparent origin of Tybalt's name which goes back to an animal fable, where Tybalt was the name of the king of cats. Mercutio adds that he just wants one of Tybalt's nine lives. Mercutio fights with Tybalt because he cannot stand the idea that Tybalt would win anything.
Mercutio insists that Tybalt fight with him. Romeo tries to part them, and he asks
Benvolio to help part them. He warns
them of the consequences of the law and that the prince has forbidden this
"bandying" in
In the next sequence, lines 92 – 122, we see the consequence of Mercutio's fatal wound. Notice in particular the sudden change in tone here from the comic to the tragic. This is the dividing line in the play. Up to the point, this could have been a romantic comedy: boy meets girl, boy cannot get girl, and boy has big confrontation with girls’ big angry first cousin, but boy ends up getting the girl anyway. I can see Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger playing the leads. But with Mercutio's death this is the tragic moment where the play changes. Romeo does not at first understand the seriousness of Mercutio's wound. Part of this has to do with Mercutio's reaction to his own injury. He seems to know right from the beginning that it is fatal, that he will die. You can hear from the way he talks about it. At the same time, he talks about it as it if is a joke. No wonder the people around do not understand the significance. [Act III, scene 1, lines 92 -- 122]
Mercutio has brought his death on himself. He cannot really blame the houses of Capulet and Montague when he was the one who provoked the fight. But he does blame them; it's an all-too common reaction. Mercutio does not want to believe that he got hurt by Tybalt for whom he has such disdain. In moments of crisis is disbelief. When authorities recover the black boxes from the airline crashes, what they most often hear from the doomed pilots are words of exasperation, upset and anger that something has happened to provoke this. This might also be Mercutio's natural reaction as well. The reason for that reaction can be found in his descriptions here. At line 102 he cries out, "Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch man to death!" He had been insulting Tybalt before as a rat catcher; he is no more than a small, domestic animal. The use of the taboo word "zounds" lets us know how angry he really is. He alludes to the phony quality that he so disliked about Tybalt at line 103: "A villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic " [by formal rules].
Romeo is particularly shaken by Mercutio's accusation at line 104: "Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm." Romeo's rather pathetic answer is “I thought all for the best.” Mercutio is helped from the stage to die, and Romeo thinks, "Oh my God, this is awful. Not only is my best friend dead, my reputation is stained. All of this happened because of sweet Juliet." For a moment there, at line 115, he blames Juliet. "Your beauty has made me effeminate." In the same way, when Juliet hears about Romeo killing Tybalt, she is going to blame Romeo, but just for a moment. Benvolio comes back to tell us that Mercutio is dead. Romeo, as a reminder to us of the premonition he had before entering Capulet’s party, wails at line 121, "This day's black fate on moe days doth depend;/ This but begins the woe others must end."
Tybalt comes back, but the sense of dark looming fate does
not stop Romeo from challenging Tybalt and continuing the fight. In the next sequence, from line 123 to line
138 where Romeo kills Tybalt, think about how you would stage the fight if you
were directing this. [Act III, scene 1,
lines 123 -- 138]
In the text it is a very shot fight -- swish, swish, swish, and Tybalt is dead. But here the director and actor once again have plenty of room to be creative and help shape the way you feel about the characters and the issues raised by the play. Sometime it is staged with Romeo jumping into this fight and then realizing very quickly that Tybalt is the superior swordsman. After almost being killed, Romeo just barely wins by a fluke when he falls and manages to put his sword up and Tybalt impales himself on it. The fight becomes mostly self-defense. In other versions when Tybalt comes back in, Romeo really forces the fight. As he says at line 125, "fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!" He overwhelms Tybalt and slaughters him without mercy. This way of staging the fight emphasizes Romeo's rage and bloodlust. For his part, Tybalt shows once again that he is verbally not equal to Romeo. While Romeo in the text has a number of ferocious challenges, all Tybalt can say is “Thou wretched boy.”
Once Tybalt is dead, all Romeo can say is "O, I am fortune's fool!" Romeo and Juliet see what happens to them as some malevolent force in the universe. At the same time, we have the advantage of seeing what brings Romeo to this stage where he kills the one man that he should not, certainly not on his wedding day. I think the answer is that Romeo is not entirely the victim here. He helps to bring about this fate upon himself.
Let's take a look at the rest of this scene. [Act III, scene 1, line 139 -- 199]
The citizens come in, Romeo runs away. The prince comes in, turns to Benvolio for an account of the fight. Benvolio seems trustworthy. He gives an evenhanded account, except he downplays Mercutio's role in forcing the fight originally. You might ask why Benvolio would do this. He seems pretty fair throughout the statement. It might be that since Mercutio is closely related to the prince, Benvolio see it safer to show Tybalt as the real villain. Tybalt prompted the fight and Mercutio was brave and stood up for his friend and took on the fiery Tybalt.
The Capulets are there as well. It's not the old man who is prone to anger
and violence; it's his wife. Lady
Capulet proves herself to be as bloodthirsty as her nephew. It turns out that Tybalt was a special
favorite of hers. She is adamant about what happened although she was not
there. Often in cases like this, when a
crime take place, people who were not even there are sure that the other guys
did it first. It is like listening to
the news from
Act III, scene 2
This scene is a dramatic example of how Shakespeare uses
different levels of awareness. We are
still reeling from the shock of Mercutio and Tybalt's deaths. And the knowledge that Romeo has been
banished and that his hopes and plans have been bashed. Meanwhile, in scene 2, Juliet waits for
Romeo. How are they going to get together for their honeymoon night with all
that's happened? [Act III, scene 2]
So, Juliet's speech eagerly awaiting Romeo's arrival is poignant to us because we know what she does not. Dramatically, Shakespeare makes us anticipate how Juliet is going to react when she learns the news. How will she find out about Romeo's banishment? What is she going to do about it? What previous scene does this one remind you of?
Once again Shakespeare will not let us have a single emotional experience. We feel the young girl's longing for Romeo and for the wonderful night that lies ahead of them. That vicarious experience makes the pain all the more powerful and increases the suspense about when the shoe will drop. In the speech, Shakespeare uses references to figures of mythology, like Phoebus and Phaeton. This is Shakespeare parading his classical knowledge for his audience. We get down to some typically Shakespearean images where Juliet talks about love and night, which she calls at line 11 "Thou sober-suited matron all in black." At the next line we see an interesting oxymoron: "learn me how to lose a winning match/ Played for a pair of stainless maidenheads." "Lose a winning match" is a self-contradictory phrase, an insightful description from a young girl about to lose her virginity. Notice she assumes he is a virgin as well. Juliet evokes the spirit of the night at line 17, "Come, night, come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;/ For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night/ Whiter than new snow upon a raven's back". We get the echoes of the earlier balcony scene where Romeo refers to Juliet as the day in night. And we get one of those Petrarchian images in the "new snow upon the raven’s back." The most powerful image in this richly detailed speech is line 21:
Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
This idea of Romeo's special luminescence being used as a star and putting the day to shame is an echo from the balcony scene where he said the same thing of her. What's most important here is the adolescent bravado, the idea that both of them feel they are immortal. If Juliet knew how close to death she and Romeo actually are, she might not be so melodramatic in her statement.
The image at line 26 is interesting: "Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love,/ But not possessed it." If you have ever waited for escrow, as Shakespeare undoubtedly did with all his property purchases, you can certainly appreciate Juliet's impatience. Then at line 28 you can hear the 13 year-old girl speaking:
So tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.
Doesn't that sound like the agony of waiting for an adolescent?
The nurse comes in to deliver to message that turns out to be eerily like Act II, scene 5 where Juliet was waiting for the nurse to return with the message about marrying Romeo. Just as before the nurse enters frowning, but now she is deadly serious, no more teasing. What Shakespeare has done is to draw these two scenes with a lot of close parallels as ironic comments. For example, she lets Juliet know right away that Tybalt is dead, but it is not until you get down to line 70, that she finally tells Juliet that Romeo has been banished and he has killed Tybalt. Why that delay?
What effect does the delay have on Juliet? As you read lines 35 to 70, ask yourself, you know what the nurse is referring to, but what does Juliet know? What do you think Juliet hears as the nurse gives the information piece by piece? It may be part of the nurse’s fumbling personality that she knows what happened, and it does not occur to her to tell Juliet. She does not even think about Juliet reacting to all of this. You can see what a terrible wrenching experience it is for Juliet. In the first 20 lines at least she believes that Romeo has somehow been killed. Line 70 the nurse finally straightens out her misunderstanding. Romeo is banished and Tybalt is killed. This is a scene of overwhelming grief, but in the middle of it at line 45, "Say thou but "Aye,"/ And that bare vowel "I" shall poison more/ Than the death-darting eye of the cockatrice." (Check your notes for the meaning of "cockatrice.") What we have here is Juliet doing one of the most elaborate puns in the play, as plays on "Ay," " I," and "eye" for another three lines. What she's saying basically is that I lose my identity if you say Romeo is dead. It's one more example of the serious puns that Shakespeare used so frequently.
Shakespeare has a distraught young girl who has enough presence of mind to play on these words in seven or eight different ways. It was a reminder that for Shakespeare's audience there were these parallels in reality, and how words can reflect the interconnectedness of the overall experience. We see the same kind of elaborate word play in the poems of the great poet of that age, John Donne.
When Juliet finds out that Romeo has slain Tybalt, her immediate reaction at line 72 is to blame him. She does so in a series of oxymorons, such as "Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical." These, of course, echo Romeo's oxymorons in the beginning of the play. Once again, the difference is the conflict of emotions that Juliet feels which helps us understand the origins of these particular oxymorons. They are, nevertheless, really overdone for modern tastes. Where one or two would be enough, she uses 13!
Now Juliet denies Romeo, condemns him, and the nurse at line 85 jumps in and agrees. She says that men are all the same; they are all trouble-makers and liars. She ends wishing that shame would come to Romeo. Several other older women in Shakespeare plays are very quick to jump to total condemnation of the male gender once they see an example of something they do not like. Juliet immediately changes her mind and says, "Wait a minute, Romeo was not at fault, and he was not born to shame." She does a very sudden 180 degree turn, saying that the circumstances under which he had done what he did were more complex than she realized at first.
Then about line 110 she remembers what the nurse had said about Romeo being banished, and she feels despair. If these adolescents are convinced of their own immortality, when that is challenged they are equally quick to go to the opposite extreme. "If I cannot have him, I am going to kill myself. I am going to die." Juliet gives way to despair and threatens to kill herself at line 136: "I'll to my wedding bed,/ And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead." Teenage suicide is not a new phenomenon. It was as old and tragic and mysterious in its own way back then as it is in ours. So the good-hearted nurse goes out to find Romeo and bring him back to provide emotional comfort. Juliet gives the nurse a ring for Romeo as she says, "Give this to my true knight,/ And bid him come to take his last farewell" [lines 142 --143].
Act III, Scene 3
If Juliet gives in to despair so easily, you can imagine
what Romeo does. [Act III, scene 3]
Romeo's despair over his banishment is total and complete. Banishment is another form of death. It is a form of death that is especially cruel, cutting your head off with a golden ax. As you listen to him give vent to his emotional upset, notice how Friar Lawrence gives a rational response. I think of Friar Lawrence as a Franciscan; he has taken a number of seminars in how to work with teenagers and their problems. .
Romeo is upset here. If all you see is an unreasonable
teenager throwing a fit, then you missed one of the points that Shakespeare is
making. He presents an argument that he
dealt with in a number of plays where characters react to others' emotional
responses. Shakespeare shows us that
people have a right to their emotions. Friar Lawrence tries to prove to Romeo
that he should be happy he has been banished.
Ultimately his efforts here are doomed.
As Romeo eloquently says at line 63: “Thou canst not speak of that thou
doth not feel.” If Friar Lawrence were
in the same situation, with Tybalt and Mercutio having been murdered, followed
by the Prince's doom, Friar Lawrence would have reacted the same way. At line 37, when
Heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives; and every dog and cat
And every little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her;
But Romeo may not.
Romeo echoes the names of animals that Mercutio had used in
his anger at dying. Romeo emphasizes his
grief that these animals can look on Juliet while he cannot. He even gets down to flies having more
privilege than he does because they can stay in
At line 41, Romeo uses a pun in serious circumstances: "Flies may do this but I from this must fly." It's very similar to the serious pun Juliet made on "I" and "aye" in the preceding scene. Just a reminder that word play in Shakespeare doesn't have to be comic. It's just one more way of drawing connections. Even as he is committing a pun, Romeo throws himself upon the ground and sobs out his despair. The nurse comes in and asks "Where is Romeo?" (We've heard that before!) Line 86 – 87 she urges Romeo to stand up, "If you be a man, for Juliet sake, rise and stand." Here in a very serious situation, the nurse makes a bawdy, phallic reference, but I don’t think she is aware of it. (Of course, if Romeo goes to comfort Juliet as the nurse urges him to do, he will need to "rise and stand" in every sense of the words.) Rather than the nurse’s appearance soothing Romeo, he attempts to kill himself at line 105. He asks the friar, "In what vile part of this anatomy/ Doth my name lodge?" and offers to cut it out with his knife. Shakespeare takes us back here to that attempt in Act II, scene 2 when Juliet tried to separate the feud from their love by blaming their names. The friar disarms him.
At line 108 Friar Lawrence has had it, and he turns loose the full power of his professional training to convince Romeo not to feel this way in an impressive 50-line speech. Here are some of the high points. At line 110 he challenges Romeo's manhood: "Thy tears are womanish." He appeals to Romeo's pride: "I thought thy discretion better tempered," at line 115. He reminds him of the effect of his suicide on Juliet at line 116: "Wilt thy slay thyself?/ And slay thy lady that in thy life lives?" Down at line 120, the friar mocks Romeo's cursing of fate, pointing out that he possesses in abundance the "birth, heaven and earth" that he blames for his plight. This idea is part of a larger plea to Romeo not to lose his soul. Suicide would destroy Romeo's nobility (126) and his valor (127) and turn his love to perjury (128). What happens to your love if you kill yourself?
At line 134, the friar says in effect, "You are self destructive and you are giving way to despair." At line 135 he begins to list all the good things about Romeo's situation that he is overlooking. It is almost as if you could hear some therapist saying, "All right, you’re on the ledge, ready to jump – before you do, here’s a notepad. Write down five things you really like about yourself and your life." Juliet is alive, Tybalt, who would have killed you, is dead, and the prince, who could have executed you, lets you off with banishment. "A pack of blessings light upon your back," [line 141]. It is right out of the counselor's textbook. The friar ends up offering Romeo hope. Go spend the night with Juliet and then go into exile and let your friends beg for pardon from the prince.
The nurse has heard all of this, and it knocked her socks off. She finds intelligent older man like this really irresistible. At line 159 she declares, "O Lord, I could have stayed here all the night/ To hear the good counsel." But Romeo never even acknowledges any of Friar Lawrence's efforts. It is not until the nurse says, "Here is a ring that Juliet sent for you" that he responds. At line 165 he declares, "How well my comfort is revived by this." All the learned rhetoric and philosophy of Friar Lawrence are as nothing compared to the fact that Juliet sent a ring, signaling that she still loves him. We are set up for the night of passion and love.
Act III, Scene 4
Shakespeare could not show Romeo and Juliet's wedding night
on the stage. Modern productions do not
let that stop them, providing numerous shots of butts and flanks in simulated
passion. Fortunately for us, Shakespeare had to substitute words for the
passion. So, rather than our watching
what is going on upstairs in Juliet's bedroom, we get a scene downstairs in the
living room where Juliet father is talking to Paris. [Act III, scene 4] Both
Capulet and his wife are terrible concerned about Juliet. Her grief seems
excessive. Tybalt has been dead for
about six hours, but she is still crying and not getting on with her life. If I sound facetious, it is because I want
you to see how Shakespeare speeds up the clock for his characters. He compresses time and makes things happen
extra fast, so there is a psychological speeding up as well. The parents end up justifying the forced
marriage of Juliet with
At line 12 Capulet says to
Once again, much as we got in the balcony scene, the outside
world comes in upon Romeo and Juliet's declaration of love, threatening their
intimacy. In this case with unexpectedly
terrible news. I want to emphasize that
Capulet’s actions are not unreasonable.
He is mostly motivated by concern for his daughter, much as in the
initial conversation with
Act III, Scene 5
[Act III, scene 5,
lines 1 -- 64] It is the morning after the night of love. Juliet wants Romeo to stay; he knows he has
to leave. In modern parlance it’s the sleepover. This is the day that he has to be out of
He climbs down from the balcony, and Romeo and Juliet bid farewell. At line 51 Juliet wonders if they will ever see each other again, and Romeo responds with some optimistic lines he probably doesn't believe. But at line 54 Juliet has a very morbid premonition about the future: "O God, I have an ill-divining soul," and she thinks she sees Romeo on the ground as if he were dead in a tomb. (And, of course, that's exactly how she will next see him.) Where earlier in the play did we hear a similar kind of premonition?
>
Here in the first part of this scene we have an innocent attempt at deception with Juliet acting out of love. Later in the scene, where Juliet has to lie to her parents, the deception is much more serious. It's interesting to see how Juliet's love for Romeo and having to hide that love affects her relationship with her parents. Juliet has certainly matured quickly when you think about the stage time of this play. Only two days before, she was a 13 year-old girl who never thought about going out, and now she has to deal with awful issues and consequences of separation.
Even more than that, Juliet has matured in the sense that she has to deal with large issues of life and death that we do not normally expect very young people to think abut. We see this in her final speech at line 60 where she cries out, "O, Fortune, Fortune! All men call thee fickle" and wonders how fortune can deal with someone so renowned for faithfulness like Romeo. Just as Romeo felt a sudden chill of fate before he entered the Capulet's party, so Juliet has perhaps for the first time felt her own mortality.
[Act III, Scene 5, line 65 -- 244] Lady Capulet enters and gets on Juliet for her excessive grief over her cousin: "Some grief shows much of love./ But much of grief shows still some want of wit" [line 74-- 75]. I have already commented on how Shakespeare speeds up the emotional changes in this play. By compressing time Shakespeare found he could heighten the dramatic suspense and actually make the characters' actions more believable. They do not have a chance to sit back, reflect, and weigh their options. Such a rush of emotional changes prepares us for the suicides that end the play. All of this is implicit in Lady Capulet chiding her daughter for apparently grieving for her cousin who's been dead for less than a day.
As Juliet responds to her mother’s attacks, her responses are filled with dramatic irony, a kind of double understanding. We know the truth about Juliet's situation, so we know what she means when she says she wants to get her hands on Romeo at line 86. Her mother hears one thing; we hear something else. We see similar examples of dramatic irony at lines 95, 98 and 101. All these help to strengthen our identification with Romeo and Juliet. Of course, the whole play is constructed to strengthen the audience's identification with the kids because we share so much of their secret life together.
The other important thing we learn from Lady Capulet is a
very real threat to Romeo's life. At
line 90 she describes her plans to send someone to find Romeo in
Lady Capulet gives Juliet the "good news" that her
father, concerned about her health, has given
Capulet at first is solicitous for his daughter's
well-being. From line 131 -- 138 he
compares her tears to a tempest at sea, her body a ship tossed by the waves of
emotion. But when he learns from his wife that she has refused to marry
A second aspect of Capulet's rage is his tendency to pick up on specific words which rouse his anger. At the party back in Act I, scene 5 when Tybalt said he had to fight Romeo because he could not "endure" his presence, the irate Capulet used the word repeatedly and finally declared "He shall be endured" [I, 5, line 78]. In the present scene when Juliet tries to explain that her refusal is not based on her being "proud," she says at line 148, "Proud can I never be of what I hate,/ But thankful even for hate that is meant love." Capulet throws the words back in her face with sarcastic power, beginning at line 150:
How, how, how, how, chopped-logic [word game]? What is this?
"Proud!" -- and "I thank you" -- and "I thank you not" --
And yet "not proud"? Mistress minion you,
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds!
The third aspect of
Capulet's rage is that he holds the upper hand in the situation. Juliet lives in a society where the only
protection she has is what is afforded by her extended family. There were no social services that were going
to rescue a 13 year-old girl. So when
her father takes about throwing her out of the house, that has a real threat to
it. We might think, well, all right, at
least if you have to leave
Capulet takes Juliet's refusal very personally in his speech
beginning at line 177. One of the ways
Shakespeare signals that Capulet's anger is real is the opening phrase of that
speech, "God's bread." It's one of those sacrilegious phrases, taboo
words, that characters are really caught up in powerful emotion, like
"'sblood" [God's blood] or "zounds" [God's wounds]. Most phrases in the plays that evoke the name
of god like this are Elizabethan swear or taboo words. We also see the typical assertion at line 193
that Juliet, as a daughter, is his property that he may dispose of as he
chooses: "I'll give you to my friend." Juliet seeks for a sympathetic ear, but her
mother rather brusquely cuts her off at line 205: "Do what thou wilt, for I
have done with thee." The nurse's
advice that Juliet simply shut up and accept the second marriage is the
practical course of action, what most of us would recommend under the
circumstances. Of course, the nurse
embellishes
Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!
Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn,
Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue
Which she had praised him with above compare
So many thousand times.
In other words the nurse is guilty both of disloyalty to Juliet's husband and of hypocrisy by now condemning him. Youth can be very unforgiving of the failures of adults. Notice that in the last line of this scene we have still one more threat of suicide.
Act IV, Scene 1
[Act IV, scene 1,
lines 1 -- 43] The sense of Juliet's desperation fills this scene, but
before she can seek help from Friar Lawrence, she has to deal with Paris, who
is consulting with the friar about the upcoming marriage. He tells
Juliet: To answer that, I should confess to you.
Juliet: I confess to you that I love him.
Juliet: If I do so, it will be of more price,
Being spoken behind your back, than to your face.
[Act IV, scene 1,
lines 44 -- 126] Once alone with the friar Juliet makes clear to him that
she will kill herself rather than marry Paris in her long speech at line
50. From that threat
Or hide me nightly in a charnel house,
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud --
Things that to hear them told have made me tremble.
Juliet is terrified of death and everything associated with it. We know this because while she rattled off the other scary things she was willing to do, with this last fear she takes six lines to list in gruesome detail what most frightens her.
Friar Lawrence says, in effect, "Funny you should
mention being hidden with dead men…."
That's exactly what he wants her to do.
He explains the working of the potion that will make her appear
dead.
Act IV, Scene 2
[Act IV, scene 2] This short scene begins with a little comic routine, what in the Shakespeare business is called "comic relief." We have just had a very heavy scene where Juliet has agreed to fake her own death. The following scene will be the one where her family will discover her body. So Shakespeare gives his audience a chance to recharge their emotional batteries. He has a little joke in lines 1 -- 10. Apparently plans for the wedding are proceeding, even without the bride's agreement. Capulet sends a serving man out to hire 20 really good or "cunning" cooks, and the servant promises to bring home the best, using his special test. He will have all the applicants lick their fingers because, as he says at line 6, "'tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers." It's a little off tangent in our study, but I have always liked that line.
Juliet returns home, apologizes to her father and appears to
acquiesce in the marriage. This so delights Capulet he decides the move the
marriage up a day earlier than planned.
Back in Act III, scene 4 Capulet had taken over preparations for the
marriage and had declared that it would take place on Thursday. Now, Tuesday afternoon, Juliet finally sees
the light and becomes an obedient child.
With the same kind of rashness we saw in his anger, Capulet, now in his
joy, sends word to
Notice at line 26
Juliet mentions that she saw
Act IV, Scene 3
[Act IV, scene 3] While
her father is busy hiring the caterers and getting a band for the wedding
reception, Juliet prepares her clothes for the wedding and sends the nurse and
her mother downstairs to help with the preparations. Once she has dismissed them for the last
time, this 13 year-old girl, not surprisingly, has second thoughts about what
she must do. At line 17 she starts to
call them back to comfort her but realizes at line 19, "My dismal scene I
needs must act alone." Then at line 21 she worries that the potion may not
work; rather than marrying
Act IV, scenes 4 and 5
Shakespeare has set up a situation in these two closely
related scenes where the audience looks forward with dread to the discovery of
Juliet's body. We try to imagine what
the emotional impact will be on the parents, the nurse and even Paris, the
expectant bridegroom. Shakespeare shows
the wedding preparations by the Capulets and the nurse in a light-hearted way,
which heightens our sense of dramatic irony because we know what they will soon
discover. [Act IV, scene 4]
As Capulet "plays the housewife," we learn at line
5 for the only time in the play the name of the nurse, Angelica. Given the nurse's love of bawdy humor, it's
ironic that her name is based on the word "angelic." She enjoys bantering with him and at line 6
calls him a "cotquean," a man who does women's work. When she worries he will be sick for the
wedding if he doesn't go to bed, he brags at line 9 that he has stayed up all
night before. If wife counters at line
11 that he has indeed stayed up all night when he was "mouse hunting"
or chasing women but that now she keeps her eye on him. He accuses her of being overly jealous. All
of these exchanges are done in a light-headed way, along with comic teasing
with the servants. At the end of the
scene they hear the approach of
You can see how the next scene is simply a continuation of
the previous one as the nurse goes into Juliet's chamber to get her up. We know what she will find and cringe at the
shock she will experience. How will
Shakespeare handle this obvious trauma? [Act IV, scene 5]
The nurse bustles around the room trying to wake the bride. In her customary bawdy manner she warns
Juliet that she won't be getting much sleep the next night when
Here's Shakespeare's dilemma. He doesn't want the audience to get too emotionally invested in the Capulet clan's grief. We know she's not really dead. Besides, Shakespeare wants us to save our emotional batteries for the real death coming in a few scenes. So what he does is show us the family going through the motions of grieving. The language becomes suddenly very formal and like a ritual, called in rhetoric a lamentation, so that we see the sorrow without feeling it, as if we were removed from its emotional power. We can hear this change most obviously in the nurse's speech at line 49, since we know her unique manner of speaking earlier in the play:
O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!
Most lamentable day! Most woeful day
That ever ever I did yet behold!
O day, O day, O day! O hateful day!
Never was seen so black a day as this.
O woeful day! O woeful day!
This is not the real voice of the passionate, earthy woman we have enjoyed listening to throughout the play. This woman who loved Juliet more than anything else is reduced to expressing her grief by repeating words like "woeful" and "day." All the other characters sound like this as well. Shakespeare will use the same device of formal lamentation in Macbeth seriously and in A Midsummer Night's Dream comically. We recognize they are sad but we aren't allowed to feel their grief. Friar Lawrence comes in and goes through the motions of comforting the family and at line 94 warns them, "The heavens do low'r [frown] upon you for some ill," and recommends immediate burial, since he just happens to have the service of the dead with him.
The last fifty lines of the scene are a comic relief with the musicians suddenly changing the musical selections to fit the changed circumstances. There are a number of obscure puns on musical terms and cheap jokes. In modern productions this scene is always cut. In his later tragedies Shakespeare would handle comic relief in a less clumsy way.
Act V, Scene 1
In the first part of this scene Romeo learns of Juliet's death. What's unusual about the way he reacts? [Act V, scene 1, line 1 -- 33] As the scene opens in Mantua, all that Romeo can think about is Juliet. He recounts to us a dream that he has had. Remember how often in this play people have talked about dreams and looked for their significance, all the way back to Queen Mab and her effect on dreamers. In his dream Juliet finds him dead and restores him to life; Romeo points out that it was an unusual dream in that the dreamer imagined himself dead. He does find it appropriate that Juliet was the instrument to restore him to life. He feels that something good is about to happen because of this dream. Why does Shakespeare set the scene up as he does with Romeo having this unusual dream and then his servant arriving with the news that Juliet has died? The dream does prepare us for Romeo's death. It is also a reversal of what happens when he finds Juliet in the tomb and kisses her, indulging in the fantasy that he could revive her. It is also still one more example of dramatic irony as we watch while Romeo learns what we already know. Of course, if he knew as much as we do of the circumstances, this would be a different play. Romeo's servant, Balthazar, gives him the bad news in a rather indirect manner, saying that Juliet is well since she sleeps in the tomb.
Look at line 24, Romeo's reaction to the death of his wife, what has given his whole life meaning. All he says is, “Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars.” Think back to when we first met Romeo in Act 1, scene 1. This was a guy who couldn't stop talking about love and how being in love made him feel. Who took 63 lines to express the fullness of his feeling. And that was for a girl who wouldn't even go out with him! Just in sheer quantity of words, we have come a long way. Here he reacts to all that loss in a single line, "Is it even so?" He simply acknowledges that the unthinkable has happened. And then he adds, "I defy you, stars." We go back to the idea of fortune or fate, something in his stars that has lead him to this place. Romeo sees Juliet's death and his suffering as the impersonal punishment of fate, something destined to happen by the stars. He will defy that fate and carry out what is left of his life by his own choices.
[Act V, scene 1, lines 34 -- 86] After checking about any letters from Friar Lawrence, Romeo decides without any further consideration to kill himself. He must sleep with Juliet. Again, we see this theme of adolescent suicide that has gone throughout the play. He becomes completely energized at the idea of returning to Juliet. He thinks in terms of how he is going to accomplish this, thinks poison, the preferred method of murder at that time. He immediately seeks an apothecary, a druggist, to sell him poison. The sale of poison in Shakespeare's time was a capital offense. If people were found to be selling poison, it could mean their deaths.
Romeo finds the apothecary and convinces this guy to sell him some poison. Notice how Romeo counters the argument against the sale. The apothecary says I can’t sell this to you. Romeo argues that yes, he can, and here are all the reasons society is treating you unjustly. Ask yourself, does this sound like a 15 year-old kid, the young, callow Romeo that we heard earlier in the play?
Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness
And fearest to die? Famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back:
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it and take this. [lines 68 -- 74]
When the apothecary finally agrees to accept gold for poison, he says at line 75, "My poverty but not my will consents," to which Romeo responds, "I pay thy poverty and not thy will." Later, at line 80, he adds, "There is thy gold -- worse poison to men's souls,/ Doing more murder in this loathsome world,/ Than these poor compounds thou mayest not sell."
Suddenly, it seems like a very different kind of Romeo here. Throughout the play, this young man was completely concerned with love and the state of his own soul. Here at the worst time in his life, we see him opening up his vision, seeing the world in a larger sense, helping to change this apothecary’s values. "Why are you obeying the law when you are starving to death?" he asks. What Shakespeare is doing in this passage is something that he does with all the heroes in his tragedies. At the point of death, they are given the wisdom and the ability to see the world more clearly than ever before. This 15 year-old kid gives a very compelling argument. It is intriguing how the tragic heroes are changed after they have gone through awful suffering. You see some new kind of person emerge. There is always this forlorn hope that Romeo could survive long enough so we could see more of this new, mature human being.
Act V, Scene 2
[Act V, scene 2] This short scene shows us what happened to delay the friar's message. It reminds us that in Shakespeare day, the fear of infection by disease did lead to very strict orders about quarantine, especially outbreaks of the deadly bubonic plague. In a sense Romeo and Juliet's fate was determined by an accident. Friar Lawrence rides off to the rescue at the Capulet tomb.
Act V, Scene 3
[Act V, scene 3, lines 1 -- 48] The scene opens with the arrival of Paris at the Capulets' tomb. He gives direction to his servant to leave him alone, but to warn him if anyone approaches. If a courtly lover's girlfriend died, he was required to redouble his efforts to prove his love and devotion. Paris is here to deliver a poem about how much he will miss Juliet. Paris starts in conventional terms, talking about Juliet and his love for her, calling her "sweet flower" and playing upon the idea that he will bring flowers for her grave nightly. He will also bring "sweet water" or perfume to cover the smell of death, and when he runs out of perfume, he will use his tears. It's a perfectly rhymed, socially acceptable expression of grief. Petrarch would have been proud. It's the kind of sentiment you would put on a Hallmark greeting card: "Sorry you lost your bride on your wedding day. Hope tomorrow is better."
Then Romeo comes in. His speech could not be more different from Paris'. He is energized and focused. Throughout his speech to his servant Balthazar he is giving directions and issuing dire warnings of violence if anyone tries to stop him [line 22 -- 39]. Paris was concerned with sentiments and feelings, like Romeo was at the beginning of the play; Romeo in this speech is all action. He describes his behavior at line 37: "The time and my intents are savage-wild." Even the harsh sounds of the words he uses communicate a very different attitude toward his love: "Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron" [line 22]. Romeo tells Balthazar that he is entering Juliet's tomb to retrieve a ring he gave her, but he threatens him with extreme violence at line 33:
[I]f thou, jealous [curious], dost return to pry
In what I farther shall intend to do,
By heaven, I shall tear thee joint by joint
And strew this hungry graveyard with thy limbs.
One of the subtle ways we can measure how far Romeo and Juliet have come is in the contrast between the way Paris and Romeo speak in these opening lines. Paris has no clue that this desperate, violent language is actually a much more authentic statement of love than his sweet little poem. Romeo opens the tomb by brute force.
[Act V, scene 3, lines 49 -- 87] Naturally, because of the history of the feud, when Paris sees who is breaking into the tomb, he puts the worst possible construction on it: "to do some villainous shame/ To the dead bodies" [line 52]. Paris, defending the honor of his beloved, tries to arrest Romeo. Romeo warns him and says, "Listen, do not get in my way, I am desperate." Romeo, indirectly, tells Paris that he has come to kill himself: "By heaven, I love thee better than myself,/ For I come hither armed against myself" [line 64 -- 65]. But it is a matter of honor for Paris, so he persists, they fight, and poor clueless Paris gets his brains knocked out.
This scene is often cut from production. Why would a director decide not to show Romeo killing Paris at the mouth of Juliet tomb?
Honoring Paris' dying request, Romeo brings his body into Juliet's tomb. He acknowledges the kinship he feels now with Paris as he shakes his hand at line 81: "O, give me thy hand,/ One writ with me in sour misfortune's book!" Romeo looks around and realizes that the tomb is not what he expected:
I'll bury thee in a triumphant grave.
A grave? O, no, a lanthorn [lantern], slaught'red youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light. [lines 83 -- 86]
Listen now to Romeo's final speech and tell me what you
think is unusual in it, what you would not have expected from a teenaged boy
viewing the body of his first love. [Act
V, scene 3, lines 88 -- 120]
This is one of the most powerful speeches in all of Shakespeare plays because we have vicariously shared the emotion behind it. In it Romeo focuses on six different topics as he prepares to take his own life. In the first sequence, lines 88 -- 91, Romeo experiences a sense of relief: "How oft, when men are at the point of death/ Have they been merry! Which their keepers call/ A lightening before death" [lines 88 -- 90]. He has struggled so hard to get to this point where he can see the end. Now he feels a sense of acceptance. In the second part, lines 91 -- 96, he notices Juliet's beauty, untouched by the decay of the grave. In an interesting metaphor he envisions a battle with death over possession of Juliet: "Beauty's ensign [banner] yet/ Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,/ And death's pale flag is not advanced there" [lines 94 -- 96]. Unfortunately Romeo does not pursue the question of why Juliet still looks so lifelike. In the third section (lines 97 -- 101) Romeo acknowledges the presence of Tybalt's body, whom he calls cousin, and offers atonement for having killed him by now taking his own life. In the fourth part of the speech (lines 101 -- 105), Romeo returns to an examination of Juliet's beauty and, in an unusual conceit, offers an explanation for her appearance at line 102:
Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
Romeo turns death into a rival for Juliet's love. He explains in the fifth sequence (lines 106 -- 112) that to protect the honor of his wife, he will never leave "this pallet [bed] of dim night" [line 107]. At line 109 he explains how he will defy his fate, as he had sworn he would when he learned of Juliet's death two scenes before:
O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.
Teenagers can be melodramatic about their suffering, but we can emphasize with Romeo's feeling of being too tired to continue to live because Shakespeare has made us a part of the experience leading up to the decision. (Sometimes Romeo's poetic imagination gets the better of his sense of good taste; his reference at line 109 to the worms which will be Juliet's chambermaids is probably more than we wanted to know.) In the final section of the speech (lines 112 -- 120) he expresses his love to Juliet's body and takes his farewell in physical terms:
Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your final embrace! And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Two interesting points about this passage: Notice how in the last two lines Shakespeare uses a subtle reference to a business deal with a kiss what seals a "bargain" to "engrossing" or, as your notes tell you, "all-buying" death. There is a parody of these lines in the final speech of Thisby in A Midsummer Night's Dream which Shakespeare wrote soon after Romeo and Juliet.
The Renaissance believed that the breath that we share in a kiss was an embracing of two souls. The kiss here is more than an erotic gesture; it has a religious significance as well. Romeo takes the poison, calling it "unsavory guide" at line 116 and referring to himself as a "desperate pilot" at line 117. When he first met Juliet back in the balcony scene, he said to her at Act II, scene 2, lines 82 --84, "I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far/ As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea,/ I should adventure for such merchandise." Romeo has come full circle and now, in dying, he runs on the "dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark" [line 118]. The drugs work quickly and he dies with a kiss.
[Act V, scene 3, lines 121 -- 310] Friar Lawrence shows up at this point, a moment too late, and we are back in the external world of adults. The friar is frantic, as his suspicions prove true. He stays to comfort the waking Juliet. His only recourse is to offer her sanctuary in a nunnery at line 156. In Shakespeare's plays becoming a nun is sometimes an escape hatch from the world of men. If all else fails in your life, you can become a nun. We will see this again in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The friar tries to comfort Juliet and help her deal with the unthinkable, even as she is asking for the final time in the play, at line 150, "Where is my Romeo?" However at this critical moment, the friar fails Juliet and runs away to save himself at line 159. Even the best of the adults -- the nurse, Lady Capulet, and Friar Lawrence -- are going to fail in this story about young love.
Juliet's death speech is not nearly as elaborate as her husband's, but like Romeo, she is focused fiercely on action. The outside world is breaking into the tomb just as she is about to kill herself. Throughout the play, Romeo and Juliet often talked about killing themselves and about dying. Here she is faced with the reality. Just like Romeo, she is very decisive. She first tries to drink the rest of Romeo's poison, but he has taken it all, and in her frustration she calls her husband "churl" at line 163. This is a very unusual word choice since "churl" is the word that you used as an insult or put down of a social inferior. Once again, as with Romeo's "lightning of spirit" back at line 88, we have the unexpected language making this experience of death all the more real. Contrast in your minds this treatment of death and grieving with that shown by Juliet's family back in Act IV, scene 3: "O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!" This is the kind of real reaction, what real people would say in a situation like this as opposed to the flowery formal expressions of grief of Paris at the beginning of the scene. These two teenagers are far beyond the simpleminded patterns of love language that they used at the beginning of the play. They can talk to each other in ways like this.
Without poison in the cup, Juliet tries kissing his lips, looking for remaining poison. When that does not work, she uses the dagger which she has been threatening herself with in the last two acts of the play. Just as Romeo saw his death as a chance to rest from life's turmoil, so Juliet sees comfort at line 170: "This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die."
Psychologically, this is the end of the play. Most modern productions end here. The hero and heroine are both dead. But for Shakespeare what is important is not just the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and the text goes on for another 140 lines. All the loose ends are resolved. The prince comes in very quickly. Friar Lawrence is picked up by the watchmen and brought in. He was responsible for helping bring about the tragedy. The prince has both Capulet and Montague brought in and shown that their hatred has led to this awful moment. Montague at line 211 tells us that his wife has died of grief over son’s exile. Shakespeare wants us to see that the suffering is not confined to just Romeo and Juliet. That is why it is important for us to see the death of Paris. Romeo and Juliet's love has greater consequence. Finally, the prince points out the obvious moral lesson that the hatred between the families has lead to the deaths of the children.
In the last 25 lines of the play, there is one final oxymoronic phrase, one self-contradiction. See if you can find it; it is a little subtle.
