Unlikely. From the wikipedia article on Juliet’s age:
Narrow hips would increase the risk regardless of age.
What does that have to do with the point that narrow hips are going to be much more common for 13 year olds than 16 year olds, which is probably part of the reason why the latter is at the low end for marriage ages?
Im not so sure about noblewomen but your average female Elizabethan married roughly in her mid to late twenties, I believe. Anne Hathaway was 26 when she married Shakespeare. It’s often thought 26 was on the old side for the period but apparently it was not.
Also, Juliet’s age. Shakespeare made Juliet a year younger in his version than she had been in the original, or in the translated version. Make of that what you will.
I think it was R. A. Heinlein who said something like “The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is not that they died so young, but that the boy meets girl instinct should be so overpowering as to overcome all common sense.”
This is correct, although it’s class-related – most Elizabethans married in their early to mid-twenties because most of them had to be able to support themselves financially before they married. This meant, usually, waiting until they had finished their apprenticeship years and were established in a trade (for men) or spending several years working as domestic servants and saving up enough money for a marriage portion (for women). The upper classes were more likely to marry in their teens, although, as several characters point out in the play, fourteen is certainly at the low end of marriageable age even for them.
None of this, however, changes the fact that the play treats Juliet as an adult, though a young one, capable of consenting to marriage and knowing her own mind.
No? Let’s look at a couple of samples.
This is generalized – it’s about love, not Rosaline. It’s also cliched, even by 1590s standards; mention sighs and tears, toss in a few oxymorons, and bam, instant Petrarch. It’s also essentially static – the metaphors and paradoxes are heaped on top of one another rather than progressing, and there is, of course, no interaction with Rosaline, since she’s both absent and unattainable. It’s tidy, moreover – note that all of the lines are end-stopped, and they divide neatly into two sets of three parallels each. This is not language that reaches for or risks anything.
From later in the play:
In addition to the obvious difference that this is addressed to Juliet, and contains an invitation for her to speak about her feelings in return, this is freer, more dynamic. The lines are enjambed – you can feel the urgency and breathlessness – and while it’s still a consciously poetic speech with some metaphors and images that would be familiar to an audience steeped in Petrarchan love poetry, their expression is fresher and more natural. Moreover, the emphasis is on what Juliet does and what both lovers feel, rather than on what love is. It’s about mutuality, “the imagined happiness that both / Receive in either.”
Just to be clear, I was focusing on the idea that the death rate was high because so many 13-year-old girls were getting married. Such marriages were very rare, and so did not contribute significantly to the statistics.
The cationary bit was not about their love story. It was about poisoning whole generations of families – the sins of the fathers becoming their children’s burdens.
No, that’s not why the mortality rate was so high, because it was actually pretty unusual for a 13 year old to give birth in the Elizabethan era. This was much younger than the average marriage age and was known to be dangerously young for childbearing – if the girl was even capable of becoming pregnant.
The average age for the onset of menstruation in the modern US is 12.5 and in the UK it’s 12.9 (Wikipedia), but this is younger than what was typical historically. I couldn’t immediately turn up numbers for Elizabethan England, but this chart shows how the average age for menarche in Norway dropped from about 15.5 in the late 19th century to about 13.5 in 1980.
Were the average ages of marriage roughly the same for Elizabethan-era Italy, where Romeo and Juliet was actually set, as for England, where the statistics cited throughout this thread are mainly from?
I don’t know, but I don’t think it really matters, as it seems unlikely that Shakespeare or many members of his audience would have known what the average marriage age was in Italy either. The Wikipedia article on Juliet notes that the character was 17-going-on-18 in Italian writer Matteo Bandello’s earlier version of the story, and 15-going-on-16 in English poet Arthur Brooke’s adaptation.
If I may add to Baker’s comment, Henlein’s alter ego Jubal Harshaw remarks, “He [Romeo] was a blithering young idiot.”
IMHO, Friar Lawrence is definitely the worst character of the play. He marries R&J to each other in secret, hoping that will end their families’ feud?
It’s a love story. It ends in tragedy just like in real life.
Margaret Beaufort had such a hard time in childbirth that she never had another child–despite a couple more marriages. Even when dynastic marriages took place very young, consummation was often delayed. For very good reasons.
I don’t think Shakespeare sat down & pondered “what moral lesson shall I teach with this play?” He needed plays to fill the theater & decided to rework a familiar story. He had depth–so we can feel sad for the young lovers forced into a hopeless situation by an idiotic family feud. Which had been killing fine young men for years–the death of a lovely girl finally ended it.
I’m pretty sure that he intended to publicize it immediately afterwards, but events moved too quickly to give him a chance. He couldn’t publicize it before, because if he did, the members of the two houses would move to stop him.
Unless you’re objecting that it wouldn’t have worked, because it pretty much did.
This. I mean, there may be other things going on in Shakespeare’s play (he’s pretty good like that), but there is a clear lesson right there in the text. Just look at the prologue: it mentions the star-crossed lovers once, and their parents and the parents’ feud three times. The lovers’ death is only mentioned as something that finally brought the parents to their senses.
So the tragic part – the part the play is on its face warning us about – isn’t that the kids were in love, it’s that the kids families’ feud caused the death of four of their children, when more sensible families would instead have been celebrating a happy marriage.
I wonder, though this is pretty speculative, if the point of Juliet being 14 is that it helps show how dysfunctional the feud made things. Juliet had another suitor, but since he was not from an unacceptable family, he was able to discuss it with Juliet’s father, who wisely counseled waiting a couple years and seeing how things were then. But since Romeo can’t talk it over with her, or his, family, he had to reply on the wisdom of only himself and the fourteen year old. Which doesn’t work out so well in the end.
As the popular saying these days goes:
It is, however, a primo example of the “star-crossed” lovers archetypal story - the love that burns but is not meant to be and results in tragedy. Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, etc.
The actual story is an infuriatingly lame one about two drama queens.
But since my personal introduction to it was via Zefferelli’s flawless film, i loved it. Saw it roughly 50 times. Still think no actress who has ever lived could ever be a more perfect Juliet than Olivia Hussey was.
But yeah, two stupid kids and their stupid families all acting atupidly.
That is true, but the birth of Henry damaged her and in her 2 subsequent marriages she never conceived another child. And when her granddaughter Margaret went off to marry the King of Scotland- at about the same age (14) she was anxious that the marriage not be consummated right away- no doubt she didn’t want the same thing to happen to her granddaughter. (As it turned out, the younger Margaret didn’t conceive for over 3 years, so it’s likely this is what happened).