This is probably the best thread I’ve ever seen in Cafe Society. A very simple question. A very complex situation to analyze. I lack the expertise to contribute anything of substance, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the read.
La Vita Nuova by Dante. Petrarch’s sonnets. Wyatt and Surrey. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Pretty much every Elizabethan sonnet cycle ever written (and there are a hell of a lot of Elizabethan sonnet cycles). All about love. Most of 'em about love at first sight. There are a few exceptions; Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil specifies that he didn’t fall in love with Stella at first sight – but the fact that he has to say so reveals a lot about how ingrained a literary convention it was.
Plenty of English Renaissance poetry can be found here; even a few minutes of browsing reveals that romantic love was not by any means an “unused” theme.
I can’t remember for sure, but I think it was Heinlein, who said the following about R&J.
“The real tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is not that they died so young but that the ‘boy meets girl’ instinct can be so strong as to overcome all common sense.”
Well, it depends. Did they have someone lined up for him? (It doesn’t say in the play whether or not he’s betrothed or intended for someone-- men were expected to persue ladies, so his behavior isn’t an indication.) Whether he was or not, they would have wanted a bride for him with a dowry-- a noble family often counted on the money that a new bride would bring.
Secondly, they would be embarassed that their son had been an accomplice to a girl who defied her family. Some of that shame would rub off on them.
My classical-text teacher* taught it this way. In addition to the mercurial qualities displayed by the title characters, he spent a lot of time on the scene where Juliet’s family discovers her “corpse” the morning after she drinks the potion. In contrast to most Shakespearean scenes where characters raise themselves to new heights of poetic grace to express their grief, these people basically fall all over each other saying “O, O, O, O” over and over again. You can argue about why this would be the case; his preferred take (which he suggests to the actors when he’s directing the play) is that the characters are deliberately trying to outdo one another with ostentatious displays of mourning.
In other words, the scene is basically dark comedy, which makes rather a lot of sense if you think about it narratively. We know Juliet isn’t dead, so the parents’ grief is pretty empty. They have to grieve, because they think their daughter is dead, but it’s just a plot point. Shakespeare is normally much too good a dramatist to waste time on obligatory scenes without providing some other emotional context to make those scenes matter. In other words, if they’re just grieving, you sit there and maybe feel kind of bad for them, but otherwise wait for the scene to be over; but if they are, in fact, putting on a show for one another, the scene takes on a wicked new energy and adds something significant to the play.
(My take is that the nurse’s grief is legitimate, but that the parents don’t want to be outdone, and artificially inflate their feelings for display.)
If you buy this, then the theme of hyper-romanticism, or more generally emotional overreaction — by adults who are concerned about what other people think about them, and by teenagers who have those adults as role models and are given to hysteria anyway — begins to fit quite well into the show as a whole.
*I have an acting degree. Woot! to me.
The notion of a ‘teenage crush’ is overworked. I’ve seen nothing to persuade me full adults experience anything of a different quality.
‘In love’ is not a testable quantity. Add to this that the figures are fictional and the question cannot be finally resolved. I say this though, Shakespeare wasn’t one to pitch at rendering an emotional condition defined by someone else’s artifice. And ‘in love is trite.’ Very much his own man, his better plays aim for big movements, strongly made. R and J are the fulcrum of this play. Make what they have to be insubstantial and the play has no movement.
R and J may be imprudent, Shakepeare may have disapproved of the attitude, in one of his odd conservative moments, but Shakespeare was never so cynical as to plant a folly at his play’s heart without someone commenting on it.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
A really beautiful and romantic line, IMO (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiment). And Shakespeare even quoted it in one of his early plays (As You Like It, I think it was), so he seems to have liked it as well.
(bolding mine)
I’d argue this is not one of Shakey’s better plays, first off. Next, what they have is not insubstantial (I know you aren’t saying it is), but rather, ill-advised. I agree that the point here is the folly of romanticism. Just because they might happen to not be truly in love doesn’t mean that the play has no movement. There’s that whole family drama, feuds and killings that don’t rely on their love but rather the desire they have for each other.
I don’t think I’m explaining this well, though, so apologies. I went to the dentist & am hopped up on vicodin. I just think modern scholarship has convinced us of things about Shakespeare which are incorrect. I often read him as highly cynical of authority, love, marriage, and religion—others don’t have to—so saying “Shakespeare was never so cynical…” ignores valid points of view, namely my own. (insert smiley emoticon). Again, sorry this is so jumbled.
If the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets was in full swing, then yes, he was.
Or was it considered worse for a young woman to defy her parents than it would be for a young man to defy his? Asimov points out, in his discussion of Merchant of Venice, that there’s a frequent dramatic convention of a young girl from the “evil” side falling for a young man from the “good” side. He says that most people would find it horrible if the genders were reversed.
In some societies, that shame might rub off on other members of the family, who would also find themselves shunned socially. I don’t know to what degree that was true in Elizabethan England.
Today, it’s pretty much accepted by most of our society that a man or woman can and should marry who they like, regardless of what their parents want, so we tend to sympathize with Romeo and Juliet. Would that have been the case for Elizabethan audiences, or would they have sympathized more with Juliet’s parents?
I’m with the interpreters who think the play is about the folly of acting too quickly/being motivated by romanticism rather than reason.
Do you mean someone in the play? If so, (a) I disagree and (b) even so, I think Escalus, Friar Lawrence, and Benvolio do a fair job as the “hey, stop being idiots!” faction.
On top of that, the play may be named for them, but I think Romeo and Juliet aren’t meant to be taken as the sole protagonists. I see them as a parallel to Mercutio and Tybalt, in that they’re both pairs of people acting quickly because of internal desire, with fatal consequences.
The last few times I’ve read the play, the heat and blood motifs have always jumped out at me. Benvolio’s line in III.i, “For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring”, is the thematic crux of the play to me. silenus’ description of a “15-minute play” is quite apt. 
An expansion of the line I mentioned:
Emphasis mine, and although I didn’t hit Mercutio’s triple repetition of “mood”/“moody”, it’s along the same lines: Nearly everyone in Verona is sizzling.
Also note that Benvolio starts out in cool, structured blank verse, which Mercutio immediately (and heatedly ;)) breaks out of.
No, the good Friar thought this one was different, because he saw in it the opportunity to hopefully bring peace to the two feuding houses.
One point to keep in mind is the audience for whom Shakespeare was writing. In particular, the well-connected portion of the audience which kept him in funds. Owing to Elizabeth’s famous virginity (or lack of a husband, which for a lady of her station was assumed to be the same thing), it was rather in vogue to downplay the significance of romantic love. Consider also, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Oberon is describing the flower to Puck: Cupid took aim at a virgin enthroned in the West (gee, I wonder who that might be), and missed, instead hitting the flower. So while everyone else is running around crazy with love, regal Elizabeth is able to maintain her wits about her. Likewise here: The underlying message is that love (or at least, what we think is love, no matter whether it actually is) makes fools of us all.
Of course premodern people experienced love. Love wasn’t invented in 1960. But it is true that attitudes towards love changel. Nowadays every movie ever shown pushes the idea that if you love someone you should throw away everything else for the sake of that love, that your feelings are the most important thing in the universe. In premodern times it was known that people would fall in love…but that this love could lead to tragedy, because the two lovers could never fulfil their love with each other without betraying someone or something else.
Actually, if I remember correctly, Juliet had a line early on (same night she met Romeo) where she comments that all her family’s fortune would belong to the man whom she married. Mind, I’m not sure the rationale behind this (a hell of a dowry?), but I seem to remember this being her interpretation of the flow of wealth (and she may very well have been wrong). I’ll try and find the exact line when I get home.
Yes and no. There was less parental control in Elizabethan society than most modern readers imagine. Among middle- and lower-class families, it was expected that people would marry a partner who was roughly of their own social rank, and that both the prospective marriage partners and their families would be in agreement about the whole deal – but while the consent of parents and friends was desirable, it wasn’t obligatory, and it was rarely withheld in practice. On the other hand, it was common among the aristocracy and the landed gentry for parents to arrange marriages and initiate courtship, but the children were still expected to agree to the marriage*.
In terms of popular culture – well, there’s an entire play entitled The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, and the sad consequences when people were forced to marry against their will was a common theme in popular ballads, poetry, and even sermons. The conflict between the suitor favored by the parents and the one favored by the girl was a stock dramatic situation – Shakespeare uses it again in The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there are plenty of other comedies that exploit the same dramatic situation, such as Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In all cases, the audience is supposed to sympathize with the young lovers (and the parents are eventually won over).
That said, as Lemur866 points out, one does tend to read the lovers’ behavior differently when it’s a tragedy – R&J are certainly being irresponsible and unruly by the standards of Elizabethan culture, and the audience probably is meant to read them as making a mistake. But I’d argue that it’s a mistake born of impatience and impulsiveness, not self-delusion. Their love is real; the fact that they can’t bide their time and wait to act on it is disastrous.
Whew. Now, please don’t anybody ask me to say anything about The Duchess of Malfi
*Cite: Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680, pp. 70-79.
Bird Monster We’ll have to disagree. I think it is one of the better Shakespeares. Certainly not one to be relegated even to the bottom half of the 33 odd.
E.g: Most Friar Lawrence. Most of Juliet. Lots of Mercutio esp. Queen Mab. The Feast.
Secondly R + J themselves create the drama. Without them all the play’s direction is one way; an alternately cooling and heating antagonism between the 2 houses. That’s why what they are must be real.
Fourthly and lastly (
), I’ve no doubt Shakepeare played the odd cynical note, but not to the degree and in the way suggested if R & J were no more than a passing fancy. The drama of Othello turns on a misunderstanding, but it is overt. I just don’t see either textual evidence, or Shakepeare being so sour as to have something similar at the heart of this play.
Tracy Lord, I see the characters you mention as urging caution, without convincingly arguing against the reality and substance of R & J’s condition. I agree with the Mercutio & Tybalt comparisons. Yet those 2 have their own flawed ways and the Director’s challenge must be to ensure the charm of Mercutio does not outshine the Romeo, who is altogether more delicate and aware than he.
I’ve long been a fan of the blood and heat motif in this play: As per this post
I think it’s more about an eventual inheritance, and I don’t think Romeo would have gotten it under the circumstances.
um, guys? if other sources are to be believed, this isn’t an original story by Shakespeare. his is just the (then) current interpretation of a long-running evolving theme.
based on that, i think i’d tend to read the whole play simply as his artistic interpretation of the historical story. sort of like Dante’s interpretations of the punishments in Hell assigned to real, historical figures from back in his day that he put in The Inferno.
FWIW.
If she was an only child, she (her husband, actually) would be the heir to her parents’ fortune when they died. But, if they disinherited her because of her elopment, that wouldn’t happen.
YMMV, of course – this is Shakespeare, and he put so much into everything he wrote that people are STILL arguing about his meanings, as this thread illustrates…
My college Shakespeare teacher only went over R&J briefly – she didn’t much like it. “Best play in Shakespeare: all the teenagers die.” Her take on the tragedy? Because it’s called one and listed as one in the title… not a romance, as others of his plays were. It’s not a tragedy because the two twit kids kill themselves, it’s a tragedy because the entire city tears itself apart because these two twit kids didn’t take it into their heads to think rationally for thirty seconds at a time.
The families end their feud when they see what it’s done, but a legitimate marriage between the two wouldn’t have been impossible. But instead of working within their society they turned a grumbling feud into out and out warfare, getting their cousins and friends killed just because they loved one another.
All but one or two of Shakespeare’s plays had source material. You can still argue about how Shakespeare meant people to understand his play because the characterization could be very different. He wrote his own dialogue, and he invented some of the characters. An author can take a theme like that and still add a lot to it. [I see Wikipedia says the same thing, and I probably should’ve just linked instead of saying it myself. :smack:]