Romeo and Juliet (29 page)

This brings me to observe upon a characteristic of Shakespeare, which belongs to a man of profound thought and high genius. It has been too much the custom, when anything that happened in his dramas could not easily be explained by the few words the poet has employed, to pass it idly over, and to say that it is beyond our reach, and beyond the power of philosophy—a sort of terra incognita for discoverers—a great ocean to be hereafter explored. Others have treated such passages as hints and glimpses of something now nonexistent, as the sacred fragments of an ancient and ruined temple, all the portions of which are beautiful, although their particular relation to each other is unknown. Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place: if we do not understand him, it is our own fault or the fault of copyists and typographers; but study, and the possession of some small stock of the knowledge by which he worked, will enable us often to detect and explain his meaning. He never wrote at random, or hit upon points of character and conduct by chance; and the smallest fragment of his mind not unfrequently gives a clue to a most perfect, regular, and consistent whole.

As I may not have another opportunity, the introduction of Friar Lawrence into this tragedy enables me to remark upon the different manner in which Shakespeare has treated the priestly character, as compared with other writers. In Beaumont and Fletcher priests are represented as a vulgar mockery; and, as in others of their dramatic personages, the errors of a few are mistaken for the demeanor of the many: but in Shakespeare they always carry with them our love and respect. He made no injurious abstracts: he took no copies from the worst parts of our nature; and, like the rest, his characters of priests are truly drawn from the general body.

From
Shakespearian Tragedy

In their general structure and idea, the three tragedies so far reviewed were in the current dramatic tradition of their day. But
Romeo and Juliet
is a departure, a comprehensive experiment. It links the English stage to the Renaissance tragedy which by precept and by practice Cinthio
²
in the middle of the sixteenth century had established in Italy.

Cinthio’s principles were in the main an adaptation of Seneca’s, or rather of what he took to be Seneca’s purposes, to the immediate needs of Cinthio’s contemporary theatre. His own object he declared to be
“servire l’età, a gli spettatori.”
Tragedy must grip its audience. It must therefore reflect a range of experience and base itself on a system of values which are felt by its audience to be real. Many of his proposals are the direct outcome of this general principle, and one or two of them are especially pertinent to our argument. For instance, tragedy must no longer rely mainly for its material on ancient mythology nor on accredited history; for these depict a world which may have lost urgent contact with a modern audience’s sense of life. The best plots for modern tragedy will be found in modern fiction. For modern fiction is the mythology of today. It is the corpus of story through which the world appears as it seems to be to living men;
it mirrors accepted codes of conduct, displays the particular manner of contemporary consciousness, and adopts the current assumptions of human values. Let the dramatist, therefore, draw his plots from the novelists. An inevitable consequence followed from this. There is nothing in which the outlook on life adopted by the modern world is more different from that of the ancient classical world than in its apprehension of the human and spiritual significance of the love of man for woman. Love has become for the modern world its most engrossing interest and often its supreme experience. Modern fiction turns almost exclusively on love. So when dramatists took their tales from the novelists, they took love over as the main theme of their plays. Seven of Cinthio’s nine plays borrow their plots from novels (most of them from his own series, the
Hecatommithi
); the other two are “classical,” but are two of the great classical love stories,
Dido
and
Cleopatra
. Jason de Nores, a much more conservatively Aristotelian expositor than his contemporary Cinthio, to exemplify the form which the most perfect tragedy could take, constructs the plot for it from one of Boccaccio’s tales.

Whether by direct influence or by mere force of circumstance, Cinthio’s practice prevailed. Sixteenth-century tragedy found rich material in the novels. But the traditionalists were perpetually reminding the innovators that tragedy always had had and always must have an historical hero.
“In tragoedia reges, principes, ex urbibus, arcibus, castris,”
Scaliger, the Parnassian legislator, announced. No one would accept a hero as great unless his memory were preserved in the historian’s pages.
“C’est l’histoire qui persuade avec empire,”
as Corneille put it. Shakespeare, an eager and humble apprentice, naturally followed traditional custom.
Titus Andronicus
,
Richard III
, and
Richard II
belong in the main to the conventional pattern. They deal with historical material. Their heroes are of high rank and potent in determining the destiny of nations. The plot is never mainly a lovers’ story, though a love intrigue intrudes sporadically here and there within the major theme. But somehow the prescriptions had not produced the expected result. There was something unsatisfying in these plays as divinations of man’s tragic lot. And so the conventions were jettisoned in
Romeo and Juliet
.

Shakespeare was casting in fresh directions to find the universality, the momentousness, and above all the inevitability of all-compelling tragedy. In particular, he was experimenting with a new propelling force, a new final sanction as the determinant energy, the
ultima ratio
of tragedy’s inner world; and though
Romeo and Juliet
is set in a modern Christian country, with church and priest and full ecclesiastical institution, the whole universe of God’s justice, vengeance, and providence is discarded and rejected from the directing forces of the play’s dramatic movement. In its place, there is a theatrical resuscitation of the half-barbarian, half-Roman deities of Fate and Fortune.

The plot of
Romeo and Juliet
is pure fiction. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke’s poem,
The Tragicall Historie of Romeus and Juliet
(1562). Shakespeare knew from Broke’s title page that the tale was taken from an Italian novelist, “written first in Italian by Bandell.” He knew, too, what sort of novels Bandello wrote, for Painter had retold them in his
Palace of Pleasure
(1567). They were clear fictions. Moreover the hero and the heroine, Romeo and Juliet, had none of the pomp of historic circumstance about them; they were socially of the minor aristocracy who were to stock Shakespeare’s comedies, and their only political significance was an adventitious role in the civic disturbance of a small city-state. Romeo and Juliet were in effect just a boy and a girl in a novel; and as such they had no claim to the world’s attention except through their passion and their fate.

To choose such folk as these for tragic heroes was aesthetically well-nigh an anarchist’s gesture; and the dramatist provided a sort of program-prologue to prompt the audience to see the play from the right point of view. In this playbill the dramatist draws special attention to two features of his story. First, Verona was being torn by a terrible, bloodthirsty feud which no human endeavor had been able to settle; this was the direct cause of the death of the lovers, and but for those deaths it never would have been healed. Second, the course of the young lovers’ lives is from the outset governed by a malignant destiny; fatal, star-crossed, death-marked, they are doomed to piteous destruction.

The intent of this emphasis is clear. The tale will end with the death of two ravishingly attractive young folk; and the dramatist must exonerate himself from all complicity in their murder, lest he be found guilty of pandering to a liking for a human shambles. He disowns responsibility and throws it on Destiny, Fate. The device is well warranted in the tragic tradition, and especially in its Senecan models. But whether, in fact, it succeeds is a matter for further consideration. The invocation of Fate is strengthened by the second feature scored heavily in the prologue, the feud. The feud is, so to speak, the means by which Fate acts. The feud is to provide the sense of immediate, and Fate that of ultimate, inevitability. For it may happen that, however the dramatist deploys his imaginative suggestions, he may fail to summon up a Fate sufficiently compelling to force itself upon the audience as unquestioned shaper of the tragic end. In such circumstance Romeo’s and Juliet’s death would be by mere chance, a gratuitous intervention by a dramatist exercising his homicidal proclivities for the joy of his audience. Hence the feud has a further function. It will be the dramatist’s last plea for exculpation or for mercy; and it will allow his audience to absolve him or to forgive him without loss of its own “philanthropy”; for through death came the healing of the feud, and with it, the removal of the threat to so many other lives.

It becomes, therefore, of critical importance to watch Shakespeare’s handling of these two motives, Fate and Feud, to see how he fits them to fulfill their function, and to ask how far in fact they are adequate to the role they must perforce play. Both Fate and Feud, although absent as motives from the earliest European form of the Romeo and Juliet story, had grown variously in the successive tellings of the tale before it came to Broke.
³
The general trend had been to magnify the virulence of the feud, and, even more notably, to swell the sententious apostrophizing of Fate’s malignity. Broke, for instance, misses no opportunity for such sententiousness. Longer or shorter, there are at least fifteen passages in his poem where the malignity of Fate is his conventionally poetic theme. “Froward fortune,” “fortune’s cruel will,” “wavering fortune,” “tickel fortune,” “when fortune list to strike,” “false fortune cast for her, poore wretch, a myschiefe newe to brewe,” “dame fortune did assent,” “with piteous plaint, fierce fortune doth he blame,” “till Attropos shall cut my fatall thread of lyfe,” “though cruel fortune be so much my dedly foe,” “the blyndfyld goddesse that with frowning face doth fraye, and from theyr seate the mighty kinges throwes downe with hedlong sway,” “He cryed out, with open mouth, against the starres above, The fatall sisters three, he said, had done him wrong”—so, again and again, does Broke bring in

Romeo cries aloud

There are more elaborate set speeches on the same theme:

So when Shakespeare took up the story, Broke had already sought to drench it in fatality. But since Shakespeare was a dramatist, he could not handle Fate and Feud as could a narrative poet. His feud will enter, not descriptively, but as action; and for fate he must depend on the sentiments of his characters and on an atmosphere generated by the sweep of the action. The feud may be deferred for a moment to watch Shakespeare’s handling of Fate.

His most frequent device is to adapt what Broke’s practice had been; instead of letting his persons declaim formally, as Broke’s do, against the inconstancy of Fortune, he endows them with dramatic premonitions. Setting out for Capulet’s ball, Romeo is suddenly sad:

As the lovers first declare their passion, Juliet begs Romeo not to swear, as if an oath might be an evil omen:

Romeo, involved in the fatal fight, cries “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (3.1.138). Looking down from her window at Romeo as he goes into exile, Juliet murmurs

With dramatic irony Juliet implores her parents to defer her marriage with Paris:

Besides these promptings of impending doom there are premonitions of a less direct kind. The friar fears the violence of the lover’s passion:

Another source of omen in the play is the presaging of dreams; for from the beginning of time, “the world of sleep, the realm of wild reality” has brought dreams which look like heralds of eternity and speak like Sybils of the future. There is much dreaming in
Romeo and Juliet
. Mercutio may mock at dreams as children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy. But when Romeo says he “dream’d a dream tonight,” Mercutio’s famous flight of fancy recalls the universal belief in dreams as foreshadowings of the future. Again Romeo dreams; this time, “I dreamt my lady came and found me dead” (5.1.6). As his man Balthasar waits outside Juliet’s tomb, he dreams that his master and another are fighting and the audience knows how accurately the dream mirrors the true facts.