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Romeo and Juliet contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful poetry, including such well-loved lines as 'a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet' and 'But, soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.' It also contains some of his most raucous bawdy. Seconds before Romeo identifies Juliet with the rising sun, Mercutio makes a baser comparison: 'O, that she were / An open arse and thou a pop'rin pear!' The image depends on the resemblance of the fruit known as a medlar to the female genitals and the Poperinghe species of pear to the male. Mercutio's ribbing of Romeo also puns on 'to meddle' and 'pop it in', both meaning to have sex, and on 'O' as a sign of the vagina. The juxtaposition of such matter to Romeo's glorious aria on the transformative effect of love at first sight is typical of Shakespeare's unsentimental robustness. Youthful as the lovers are, Juliet especially, this is a very grown-up play, which recognizes that love and sex are inseparable.
Shakespeare often thought in pairs. Give him an idea and he is equally interested in its opposite. Sometimes he will handle similar material in successive works, trying it out as comedy in one case and tragedy in the other. A Midsummer Night's Dream turns on comedy's ancient plot of young people finding true love in the face of parental opposition. In the final act, the opposite ending of the same story is invoked: Bottom and his friends perform the Roman poet Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe, a pair of lovers from rival households who lose their lives in a tragedy of bad timing and misapprehension. Though played in the style of parody, the 'very tragical mirth' of Pyramus and Thisbe is a reminder that in the matter of love all does not necessarily end well. Romeo and Juliet is the companion-piece. As Dream is a comedy darkened by something of the night, so Romeo is a tragedy that keeps surprising us with flashes of comedy. The shock of Juliet's apparent death is heightened by proximity to the cheerful bustle of the wedding preparations and the comic dialogue of clown and musicians. Equally, Shakespeare takes character types from the comic tradition – the tyrannical father, the bawdy servant, the meddling friar, the witty and cynical friend – and transforms them into such complex, many-layered beings as Old Capulet, the Nurse and Mercutio.
The spirit of the play is fundamentally Ovidian, although the story is closely based on a different source, an Italian Renaissance novella that was mediated to Shakespeare via a drearily written poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet . As in Ovid's Metamorphoses , 'violent delights have violent ends': intense passions lead to dramatic transformations, the bright flame of young love is swiftly and cruelly snuffed out, but something of constancy endures at the close. Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe meet by an ancient tomb outside the city. They fall to earth in death, but their love is symbolically remembered in the ripening of the blood-dark mulberry. A couplet of Friar Laurence's neatly sums up the structure of feeling that underlies this and so many other of Ovid's transformations: 'The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb: / What is her burying grave, that is her womb.' Taken as a whole, the friar's soliloquy cuts to the quick of Shakespeare's double vision. It is structured around the rhetorical figure of oxymoron, the paradox whereby opposites are held together. Not only womb and tomb, but also day and night, herbs and flowers that are simultaneously poisonous and medicinal, virtue and vice, God's grace and our own desires: 'such opposèd kings encamp them still / In man as well as herbs.'
In Peter Quince's staging of Pyramus and Thisbe, Snout memorably plays the part of the Wall that divides the households of the two lovers. Romeo and Juliet begins with Samson, a servant of the house of Capulet, bragging of how he will thrust the Montague maids up against a wall. That is to say, having beaten up the rival men, he will have their women: sex is a matter of taking not giving. Samson boasts the biblical name of a man capable of bringing walls tumbling down, but what actually happens is that Romeo lightly o'erleaps the orchard wall – like Ovid's Hercules entering the fabulous gardens of the Hesperides – and moves the action into a new key. The lovers give themselves to each other and, though they are then taken in death, the wall of division crumbles away. The memory of Romeo and Juliet binds together the houses of Montague and Capulet, bringing their ancient grudge to an end.
Romeo himself has some rapid growing up to do along the way. At the beginning of the play, he is in love with Rosaline. Or rather, he is in love with the idea of being in love. We never actually see Rosaline: she exists solely as the idealized love-object of Romeo. She is nothing more than a literary type, the beautiful but unavailable mistress of the sonnet tradition that goes back to the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch. The Petrarchan lover thrives on artifice and paradox. The fire in Romeo's heart is dependent on his lady's icy maidenhood – 'Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, / Still-waking sleep that is not what it is!' As the Friar recognizes, this is mere 'doting', not true loving. And so long as Mercutio is around, the bubble of poetic language keeps on being pricked – is it not just a matter of rhyming 'love' with 'dove'?
Romeo still poeticizes on seeing Juliet, though he speaks in richly textured imagery instead of the banal oxymorons inspired by Rosaline: 'It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear.' When the lovers meet at the Capulet ball, they weave a verbal dance that answers to the motions of their bodies and hands: their initial dialogue is wrapped into the form of a sonnet. But over the next few scenes their language evolves into something more fluid and more natural. You can hear Shakespeare growing as a poet even as you see the love between Juliet and Romeo growing from infatuation at first sight to the conviction that each has found the other's soul-mate. Love is a chemistry that begins from a physiological transformation – Romeo is 'bewitched by the charm of looks' – but it becomes a discovery of the very core of human being: 'Can I go forward when my heart is here? / Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out.'
The great Romantic critic and essayist William Hazlitt read Shakespeare as profoundly as he meditated upon love. 'Romeo is Hamlet in love', he said. For Hazlitt, falling in love is like coming home to your dreams. But what also haunts the lover – remember the teasing paradoxes of A Midsummer Night's Dream – is the suspicion that it might all be a dream. Mercutio spins a tale of how love is but the mischief of Queen Mab, midwife of illusion. Romeo blesses the night, but then acknowledges his fear that 'Being in night, all this is but a dream, / Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.'
Juliet has to deal with another fear. For a girl in Shakespeare's time, chastity was a priceless commodity. To lose her virtue without the prospect of marriage would be to lose herself. In the speech that begins 'Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face', Juliet reveals quite remarkable self-understanding. She is acutely aware that in love the stakes for a woman are far higher than they are for a man. Here Shakespeare's poetic language becomes the vehicle of both argument and emotion. The artifice of rhyme is replaced by blank verse that moves with the suppleness of thought itself.
In the original production, the lines would have been spoken by a young male actor of perhaps around the same thirteen years as the character of Juliet. By highlighting extreme youthfulness (in the source, Juliet is sixteen), Shakespeare makes a bold implicit claim for his poetic drama. Both actor and character are speaking with maturity far beyond their years: such, the dramatist implies, is the metamorphic potency of the mingled fire and powder of love and art. Though younger than Romeo, Juliet is more knowing. She senses the danger in his talk of idolatry. In the soaring love-duet that is their final scene together before Romeo's exile, she wills the song to be that of the nightingale rather than the lark because she knows that the break of day will mean the end of their night of love and the dawn of a harsh reality in which she will be reduced to the status of a bargaining chip in the negotiations between Verona's powerful families.
According to the social code of the time, it is the duty of the young to obey the old. Marriage is a matter not of love, but of the consolidation and perpetuation of wealth and status. Arthur Brooke, author of the Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet which Shakespeare had before him as he wrote, told his readers that the moral of the story was that young lovers who submit to erotic desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and listening instead to drunken gossips and superstitious friars, will come to a deservedly sticky end. Shakespeare's play, by contrast, glories in the energy of youth. It does not seek to advance a moral or to condemn what Juliet calls the 'disobedient opposition' of child to parent. The drama offers instead the tragic paradox that the heat in the blood that animates the star-crossed lovers is the same ardour that leads young men to scrap in the street and to kill out of loyalty to their friends. The kinship of love and revenge, the perpetual war between the generations: Shakespeare will return to this territory in later plays such as Hamlet and King Lear .
It is sometimes said that Romeo and Juliet is a lesser work than these 'mature' tragedies because its catastrophe is provoked by fate rather than the actions of the characters themselves. Shakespeare does impose an artistic shape upon the plot through the device of the Chorus, with its emphasis on events being written in the stars. But the misadventure that provokes the disastrous ending is not merely a piece of bad luck: the reason Romeo does not get Friar Laurence's crucial letter is that Friar John is detained for fear that he might have been infected with plague. Plague was an everyday reality in Shakespeare's London. Puritan preachers may have proclaimed it as a judgement sent by an angry God, but that is not how it would have seemed to Shakespeare's original audience. Everybody in the theatre would have known families whose future had been blighted by plague.
Parents are supposed to die before their children, the old before the young. With plague, it is not always like that. The tragic irony of Romeo and Juliet is that the houses of both Capulet and Montague escape the plague, yet still the children die first. The final scene takes place in an ancestral tomb, but those who lie dead are the flower of a city's youth – Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Juliet and her Romeo.
PLOT: A long-standing feud between the Montagues and the Capulets flares up in a brawl on the streets of Verona, halted only by the arrival of Prince Escalus. Romeo, only son of the Montagues, is hopelessly in love with the unattainable Rosaline. Attempting to shake him out of his melancholy, his friends Mercutio and Benvolio persuade him to go to a party at the Capulets' house. There he meets and falls instantly in love with Juliet, the Capulets' only daughter, and she with him. With the help of Juliet's Nurse, they are secretly married the next day by Friar Laurence. Juliet's cousin Tybalt quarrels with Romeo and in the fight which ensues Mercutio is killed. Romeo avenges his friend's death and kills Tybalt, for which he is banished from Verona on pain of death. After spending a single night with his bride, he escapesto Mantua. Juliet learns that her parents plan to marry her to Count Paris. Distraught, she turns to Friar Laurence, who devises a plan. He gives her a drug which will make her appear to be dead. The intention is that her parents will place her in the family tomb and when she awakes from her drugged sleep, Romeo will be waiting to escape with her to Mantua. When Romeo returns to Verona, he believes her really to be dead and kills himself. Waking to find Romeo dead beside her, Juliet kills herself. The two families, united in grief, vow to end their feud.
MAJOR PARTS: ( with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage ) Romeo (20%/163/14), Juliet (18%/118/11), Friar Laurence (11%/55/7), Nurse (9%/90/11), Capulet (9%/51/9), Mercutio (8%/62/4), Benvolio (5%/64/7), Lady Capulet (4%/45/10), Escalus (3%/16/3), Paris (2%/23/5), Montague (1%/10/3).
LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 90% verse, 10% prose.
DATE: 1595–96. Includes part for Will Kemp, who joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594; published 1597, with assignment to 'Lord Hunsdon's Men' (the name of Shakespeare's company from July 1596 to April 1597); astrological allusions and earthquake reference may suggest composition in 1595–96; close links with A Midsummer Night's Dream .
SOURCES: Based on Arthur Brooke's long narrative poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which was itself based on an Italian novella by Matteo Bandello (1554, possibly known to Shakespeare via William Painter's English translation in his 1567 Palace of Pleasure ). Shakespeare's alterations to Brooke include considerable expansion of the roles of the Nurse and Mercutio.
TEXT: The First Quarto (1597) is poorly printed, so has traditionally been assumed to be an orally reconstructed or 'reported' text, though this assumption was challenged in the late twentieth century; it seems to have had a playhouse origin. The Second Quarto (1599) is longer and better printed, justifying its title-page claim 'Newly corrected, augmented, and amended'; it is generally thought to have been derived from Shakespeare's manuscript. A Third Quarto (1609) reprinted the Second, and a fourth (1622) reprinted the Third, but with intelligent corrections, some of them deriving from consultation of the First Quarto. The 1623 First Folio text was printed from the Third Quarto, though introducing its own intelligent corrections and additional stage directions, but also many new errors as a result of its being printed almost entirely by 'Compositor E', by far the least competent of the workmen who set the Folio into print. Modern editions are traditionally based on the Second Quarto, but we respect the intentions of the Folio, seeking to retain the innovations of its original editor while eliminating what we judge to be its compositorial errors by means of emendation from the Second Quarto (and occasionally the other Quartos). The Folio lacks the Prologue, an omission we highlight by enclosing the lines within asterisks. Folio follows the Second Quarto in including a number of repeated lines (e.g. the description of dawn at the end of Act 2 scene 1 and the beginning of Act 2 scene 2); the likeliest explanation on each of the three occasions when this occurs is that the first of the duplicated passages represents authorial 'first thoughts' intended for deletion: these lines are retained in our text but are indicated by enclosure within double solidi (// //). zynEzuYDEJWxDf0eNYJrNOTmwyb93PffMwHEmcgQpNki0VP8exjrr+lDWfyvbhdy