A friend who’s working on Shakespeare these days asked me about a little piece I wrote on “Romeo & Juliet” a long time ago, when I was a grad student at Northern Illinois University, which got published in a fledgling journal called Marxist Perspectives. I offered her my tattered copy of # 7, Fall 1979, but she, being adept at such things, dug up a PDF online via a Google search. Here it is, along with the back story from my old blog.
I lead with the story because I always do, even though I’m not Southern by birth—or, like the editor of MP, the now infamous Gene Genovese, by infatuation with a past that is not even past. It’s a digressive, even dilatory habit, this tarrying with the narrative, but I don’t think it’s merely a professional deformation born of academic socialization (except that academia still shows the elbow-patched signs of male supremacy). Never ask a male professor what he’s working on, my friend tells me, unless you want to be detained for at least 45 minutes. I try to keep it under 15.
.You could read this essay as a meditation on the loneliness induced and enforced by the individualism modernity brings in the form of bourgeois society; or, what is the same thing, a skeptical study of romantic love and sexuality. These ideas or conditions were of immediate importance to me as I wrote, so the result still carries a certain sense of urgency, maybe even panic. I tell the back story, which involves Gene Genovese, to explain how Shakespeare mattered to me, just then, and why this play addresses conditions that still prevail, even now.
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Here is the back story: https://politicsandletters.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/eugene-d-genovese-rip/
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Reflections On ‘Romeo & Juliet [Marxist Perpectives 7 (1979): 50-61]
“The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral.”
—D. H. Lawrence
There are two obstacles to thinking historically about Shakespeare's plays, and in particular about his most compelling early tragedy, “Romeo and Juliet.” First, historical criticism of literature, for all its advances during the last ten to fifteen years, is still seen as a rather vulgar sort of enterprise that inevitably degenerates into simple-minded equations of ideas and current events. Second, and more important, most twentieth century audiences romanticize the dramatic isolation of Shakespeare's tragic heroes and heroines, and identify with the lonely struggles of a Hamlet or a Lear. Romeo and Juliet provide particularly forceful illustration. Identifying with two star-crossed lovers who use all their resources to evade the dictates of an outmoded world view (or moral code) is almost impossible in an age in which the instrumental logic of modern sexuality is, once again, being challenged.
But unless we make some attempt to understand the world Shakespeare lived in and wrote for and about, we cannot avoid becoming hopelessly anachronistic—and more often, downright silly—in interpreting his plays. I do not mean we must somehow pinpoint every “influence” on the dramatist, any more than we must respond to his plays as if we were Elizabethan subjects. Nor do I mean we should treat the plays as a set of documents that have no living value or universal significance as literature. Rather, to understand how Shakespeare's dramatic genius actually does transcend both his times and our own, we have to begin by understanding him as part of his.
If, as Wilbur Sanders has remarked, the great artist “must stand at the heart of change,” then Shakespeare' s greatness owes much to the times in which he lived. l His was an epoch filled with the contradictions and possibilities created by the momentary coexistence and interpenetration of a disintegrating past and an as yet unformed future: Shakespeare stood at the heart of that momentous change we know as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England. The intellectual sources and cultural traditions he could creatively assimilate were thus extraordinarily diverse. More specifically, Shakespeare was part of, and responded to, a historical moment in which medieval and modern—feudal and bourgeois—notions about truth, reason, nature, and human nature were equally vital, equally available for scrutiny and appraisal.
But what of “Romeo and Juliet”? Do we not commit ourselves to the career of the two lovers because their cause is so manifestly just—because we are shown that the essentially feudal notion of dynastic or familial obligation imposed on Romeo and Juliet by their parents is simply inhuman?
This is undoubtedly the response of virtually every modern critic, director, and audience. Yet Shakespeare's scenario is much more ambivalent. In “Romeo and Juliet” he tentatively mapped out what was to become, in “King Lear,” a terrifying exploration of the inadequacies peculiar to both the feudal and bourgeois world views.
Shakespeare establishes the tone of “Romeo and Juliet” immediately, in the opening exchange between two Capulet swordsmen:
Sampson: “I will show myself a tyrant; when I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids, and cut off their heads.”
Gregory: “The heads of the maids?”
Sampson: “Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads; take it in what sense thou wilt.”
Gregory: “They must take it in sense that feel it.”
Sampson: “Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and 'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.”
Gregory: “'Tis well thou art not a fish; if thou hadst, thou hadst been poor John. Draw thy tool; here comes two of the house of Montagues.”
Sampson: “My naked weapon is out . . . .”
This is probably Shakespeare's bawdiest play: Its structure and poetry force us to experience not what one critic calls the "finest part of pure love" 2—whatever that may be—but the explosive power of pure sexual desire. For example, Mercutio's earthy paean to that diminutive figure of lust, Queen Mab (I. iv), and Juliet's impassioned plea for the onset of "love-performing night" (Ill. iii) are united by their nearly identical erotic imagery. The latter scene parallels the scene in Friar Laurence's cell (IV. i), in which Juliet vows to enjoy the sensual horrors of the charnel house if that will reunite her with Romeo: “Give me, give me! O, tell me not of fear!”
The hint of possible sexual fulfillment enforces the parallel between the balcony scene (Il. ii) and the tomb scene (V. iii). In the balcony scene a candid Juliet names a man's parts, joins the unnamed part she obviously fancies to a rose, and finally exclaims, "Romeo, doff thy name . . . Take all myself." When Romeo asks Juliet if she will leave him "so unsatisfied," she has something besides an innocent exchange of vows in mind when she replies with her own blunt question: "What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?" In the tomb scene, however, it is Romeo's language that is starkly erotic:
“O my love! my wife! Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,/Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty; /Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet/ Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks . .
“Ah, dear Juliet, Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe/That unsubstantial death is amorous, /And that the lean abhorr'd monster keeps /Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
“For fear of that, I will stay with thee . . . . “ (V. iii. 91-95, 101-106)
Juliet's use of Romeo's "naked weapon" to consummate their union—"O happy dagger!/This is thy sheath”—echoes the sexual imagery of the play's opening scene.
The poetry of “Romeo and Juliet” is focused throughout on the meaning of passion. As Nicholas Brooke points out, Shakespeare' s language continually evokes “that point where love and lust are identical.” 3 Juliet, for instance, is practically panting as she paces her room, waiting for Romeo:
“Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, /That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo/Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen . . . .
“Come, civil night,/Thou sober suited matron, all in black,/And learn me how to lose a winning match,/Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods;
“Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,/With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
“Think true love acted simple modesty . . . /Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,/ Give me my Romeo . . . . (III. ii. 5-7, 10-16, 20-21)
The intensity of the lovers' sexual appetites, the bent of their "affections and warm youthful blood," are perfectly obvious to those who arrange the secret marriage. When Juliet's nurse returns home with Romeo's message, she immediately recognizes the course of her charge's impatience:
“O God's lady dear!/Are you so hot? . . .
“Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks.” (II. v. 64-65, 72)
And Friar Laurence agrees to marry the two lovers in the hope that "this alliance may so happy prove/To turn their households’ rancour to pure love,” but he fears that their sexual appetite—their "violent delights”—will produce "violent ends." In fact, the poor old man hurries to marry them to prevent a sinful consummation of their surging desire:
“Come, come with me, and we will make short work; /For, by your leaves, you shall not stay alone/Till holy church incorporate two in one.” (II. vi. 35-38)
Even this brief an exposition may seem unnecessary, since modern critics do not disagree about the centrality of passion or sexual appetite in “Romeo and Juliet.” Differences arise only when they interpret the meaning or dramatic function of the lovers' sexuality. But most authorities on Shakespeare would probably agree with F. T. Prince's admonition: “If we press too hard for judgements, in the pursuit of some moral design, we distort the spirit of the play. Everything exists to discriminate the love-passion from what surrounds it, to make real the reality of passion, to show it in action; but we are not asked to judge it.” 4
This stance toward the play can no doubt be explained by critics'—perhaps unconscious—allegiance to romantic notions of love, for they do, after all, judge the reality of the lovers' passion. Donald Stauffer, for example, who demonstrates that "No less than in the hatred of brawling houses, . . . 'unreasonable fury' may be shown in love," concludes that the "ethical energy of the drama resides in its realization of the purity and intensity of ideal love." 5
To be sure, Romeo and Juliet's passion does shield them from those two enemies of beauty and purity, time and the mundane requirements of social existence: Their death in love means that neither age nor the pressure of public obligations can ever destroy their commitment to each other. But Shakespeare was probably not as modern in these matters as most of his interpreters are. He was one of many Elizabethan poets and playwrights who attempted to define the nature of love and human sexuality at a time when human nature itself was being redefined by the emergence of capitalism. 6 “Romeo and Juliet” was part of that painful effort.
The doctrine of human nature to which Romeo and Juliet are loyal, and which they seek consistently to express, is a species of a new doctrine of nature as such. The medieval [doctrine of ] nature, from which it differed radically , viewed the universe as a divinely ordained unity that provided a normative pattern for political and social behavior. "Reason" was that human faculty which allowed individuals to know the providential pattern God had devised for the heavens and earth—to understand and realize their nature. “Unreasonable” behavior was no less than sinful or immoral since it was a deviation from rules of conduct derived from God and, closer to hand, evidenced in nature. Custom sanctioned and enforced such rules, or, alternatively, such restraints on individuals' pride, ambition, and appetite as were consistent with their nature. 7
When Shakespeare wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” in the mid-1590s, Elizabethan poets and playwrights had already begun to juxtapose to this older doctrine another, newer set of interrelated notions about the meaning of nature. Was nature, they asked, merely a collection of amoral forces and not, after all, a divinely ordered, benevolent universe that connected God and man? Was human nature, then, just an agenda of appetites, simply a part of brutish nature so conceived? And if so, how could natural impulse—for example, sexual appetite or the will to dominate others—be questioned?
Shakespeare himself worked in the same laboratory as Marlowe, Jonson, and Donne. All the history plays, for example, deal in some way with the Machiavellian dilemma—with the political implications of the new concept(s) of nature. I am not suggesting that these plays were so many intellectual exercises, or that in the 1590s Shakespeare was undertaking nothing more than "the dramatic presentation of philosophic ideas."8 Rather, I am suggesting that he did not shrink from depicting imaginatively, realistically, and as fully as his growing creative powers would allow, the human significance of what had become, by the last decade of the sixteenth century, a conflict between two world views.
The older, traditional doctrine of nature—a legacy from the disintegrating feudal past—confronted the new doctrine, in which no connections in the universe were admitted save those of material cause and effect; in which reason was not an ethical norm but a calculator of the means to satisfy the appetites with which we are born; and in which custom stood in the way of the energies, passions, and appetites that defined human nature. Thus, this new doctrine of nature expressed the "scientific" outlook of the new bourgeois universe as it was emerging from and breaking up a society still based on feudal order.
Romeo and Juliet belong to this universe. Juliet announces her citizenship as soon as the masked ball is over and urges her new love to do the same:
“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
“Deny thy father and refuse thy name; /Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, /And I'll no longer be a Capulet.” (II. ii. 33-35)
The distance she has traveled since meeting Romeo may be gauged by comparing these lines with her reply to the question Lady Capulet asks before the mask ("Speak briefly, can you like of Paris' love?"):
“I'll look to like, if looking liking move./But no more deep will I endart my eye
“Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.” (I. iii. 97-99)
The traditional bond of childhood—what Lear would call “effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude”—which Juliet expresses so gracefully, so naturally in Act I becomes, in Act Il, an external restraint, an obstacle to the expression of natural impulse. The inversion is complete—and completely stunning.
The itinerary Juliet wistfully designs in the balcony scene is, in fact, an outline of the lovers' career. Hence Capulet's utter amazement at his daughter's refusal to marry Paris reveals not villainy or stupidity but the predictable response of a man who believed, with good reason, that it was unnatural for children to disobey their parents, particularly in matters of marriage. His position, sanctioned as it was by both long-established custom and received doctrine, was no more or less extreme than Juliet' s willingness to die rather than forsake her personal "god of idolatry." By this point in the tragedy, however, Capulet no longer shares a common vocabulary with his daughter: They are literally worlds apart, for he behaves as if the world of customary obligation remains intact, and she as if it does not exist.
Friar Laurence proves as ineffectual as Capulet in coping with the forces loosed by the lovers' single-minded pursuit of their passion—and for the same reason. His commitment to the older doctrine of nature is made clear upon his entrance (with a basket):
“The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb; What is her burying grave that is her womb; /O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies/In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
“For nought so vile that on the earth doth live/But to the earth some special good doth give . . .
“Within the infant rind of this small flower/Poison hath residence and medicine power:/For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part; Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
“Two such opposed kings encamp them still/In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will.” (II. iii. 9-10, 15-18, 23-28)
Here is a providential, benevolent nature, an ordered unity wherein everything has an appointed place and function, and through which God and Man are connected. Human nature, as part of this larger pattern, is neither eternally given nor simply brutish; it cannot be conceived as mere appetite. If reduced to that (“where the worser is predominant”), death, not regeneration from nature's "burying grave that is her womb," must follow: "Soon the canker death eats up that plant. "
The Friar's fears about marrying the two lovers derive from this doctrine of nature:
“These violent delights have violent ends/And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
“Which as they kiss consume.” (II. vi. 9-11)
He would prefer that Romeo and Juliet "love moderately," in accordance with what he understands is their human nature. But it is rather late for this sort of preaching. Yet we cannot dismiss as idle prattling his identification of the lovers' sexual appetite with death, for the same association recurs throughout the play. Indeed, the complete absence of any connotation of fertility or regeneration in Romeo and Juliet's sexual nature is remarkable. Thus the terms of the identity between love and lust are cemented by the constant association of both with death.
That Shakespeare' s association of Romeo and Juliet' s sexuality with death was not accidental is emphasized by his liberal use in the play of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the grotesque tradition in medieval folk culture. 9 Mercutio, Juliet's nurse, and to a lesser extent old Capulet all share a stance toward life that, because it never fetishizes sexuality by separating it from a wider range of natural bodily functions and sensual experience, is alien to the spirit of Romeo and Juliet's passion. For example, when Lady Capulet begins to preach about marriage—”So shall you share all that he doth possess/By having him, making yourself no less”—the nurse brings us immediately back to earth: "No less! nay, bigger; women grow by men." (I. iii. 93-95) And when "the wanton blood" rises in Juliet's cheeks after receiving Romeo's message, the nurse again does not mince words:
“I am the drudge and toil in your delight,/But you shall bear the burden soon at night.” (II. vi. 77-78)
Her language always debases: It always focuses on what Bakhtin refers to as the "lower stratum of the body's topography”—the genitals and the bowels. Yet, at the same time, it catches natural rhythms by conjuring images of birth, renewal, and immortality. The meaning of these lines is wonderfully ambiguous: The burden Juliet will bear is, immediately , Romeo' s weight and the loss of her virginity and, eventually, the pain of childbirth. The trajectory defined by the nurse's language is always outward, absorbing the individual in the reproduction of society and in the contours of the larger natural universe, for the source of her grotesque imagery is the perceived connection between nature's cycles and the human body's functions. Mercutio's speech is also suffused with this kind of imagery; it too is the language of folk culture , of the profane laughter that thrived in the medieval marketplace and carnival.
Queen Mab, he muses, “is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,/That presses them and learns them first to bear,/Making them women of good carriage.” (I. iv. 92-94)
Thus, the grotesque tradition that the nurse and Mercutio bring to life in “Romeo and Juliet” is nothing less than the popular, festive form of the doctrine of nature which Friar Laurence enunciates and which Capulet assumes to be valid. Compared to this vision of the nature of human sexuality, Romeo and Juliet's passion is so deadly serious that it is deadly:
“Come, gentle night, come loving, black-brow'd night,/Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,/Take him and cut him out in little stars.” (III. ii. 20-22)
The " gentle night" for which Juliet prays is not only orgasmic oblivion, but also literal death—consummation in every sense. Ultimately, the lovers' deaths become inevitable because the satisfaction of their sexual appetites implies their isolation as individual bodies and assumes a radical break with the continuum of nature as understood and articulated by the other characters: Romeo and Juliet cannot live because a permanent foundation for love (or mutuality of any kind) cannot be constructed on the basis of a violent assertion of individuality and appetite.
This reading of Shakespeare' s most compelling early tragedy at least might allow us to escape the dualities modern criticism seems anxious to impose on it. “Romeo and Juliet” does not have to be interpreted as either a tragedy of fate or a tragedy of character. It is no use pretending that "character is not destiny" in the play on the grounds that the "same Juliet might have awakened earlier.” Such an interpretation begs the question of what kind of character would, in single-minded pursuit of her passion, shut herself “in a charnel-house, O'er cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones, With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.” (IV. i. 81-83)
But it is equally obtuse to read fortune or providence out of the play. Shakespeare was still too much "of an age" that found providence in nature—and too concerned, as an artist, to give expression to the virtues in contemporary culture that were not yet outlived—simply to cast off or ignore its beliefs. Indeed, it may be that his faith in nature as providence allowed him to explore the nature of the emergent bourgeois universe in such intimate detail as we find in “Romeo and Juliet .” 11
Certainly, Shakespeare's dramatic juxtaposition of world views lets each criticize the other. He intends Romeo and Juliet's altogether admirable energy, resourcefulness, and spirit to stand as indictments of the constraints on individualism enforced, in part, by acceptance of the orthodox medieval doctrine of nature. The play would not succeed on any level if this were not the case.
Yet the sense of the wholeness of human life that animates the other characters is appealing, especially when set beside the deadly zeal of the two lovers. Shakespeare genuinely cared for the moral and social implications of the new human nature Romeo and Juliet exemplify. He understood that the price of the individual's liberation from customary modes of obligation and restraint was the loss of that integration of the human personality which the traditional doctrine of nature expressed and celebrated. Surely, that integration exacted its own fearful price by enclosing personality as such within the parochial and hierarchical confines of feudal order. But it was nonetheless real and could be used—provisionally at least, as Shakespeare used it in “Romeo and Juliet”—as an ethical standard by which to judge the human significance of the new bourgeois universe.
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l. Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1968), 324.
2. Donald Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949), 57. I am using Hardin Craig's edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Glenview, Ill., 1961).
3. Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London, 1968), 101. My discussion of Romeo and Juliet owes much to Brooke's brilliant analysis: See 80-106.
4. A. Prince, "A Note onRomeo and Juliet," in C.J. Sisson, et. al. , Shakespeare: The Writer and his Work (London, 1954), 329-333, here 332. See also, R.M. Smith, "Three Interpretations of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ " Shakespeare Association Bulletin, XXIII (1948), 60-77; M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957), 56-72; P.N. Siegel, "Christianity and the Religion of Love in Romeo and Juliet'” Shakespeare Quarterly , XII ( 1961), 371-392; Harriet Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama (Oxford, 1972), 139-144; Roger Stilling, Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy (Baton Rouge, 1976) , 67-81 , 98-99, and passim.
5. Stauffer, World of Images, 57-58.
6. See H.B. Parkes, "Nature's Diverse Laws: The Double Vision of the Elizabethans," Sewanee Review, LVIII (1950), 402-418, esp. 405-410; L.C. Knights, Some ShakespeareanThemes (London, 1959), 84-91; R.C. Bald, " 'Thou, Nature, art my Goddess' : Edmund and Renaissance Free-Thought, " in J.G. McManaway, G.E. Dawson, and E.E. Willoughby , eds. , J.Q. Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, 1948). 337-349.
7. See John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature of Man (New York, 1943), chs. 1-2.
8. L.C. Knights worries over this sort of interpretation in "Historical Scholarship and the Interpretation of Shakespeare," in Further Explorations (Stanford, 1965), 142.
9. See Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, 1968), esp. 29-45, 101-128, 148-150, 320-322.
10. Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth, 142.
l l . Cf. Sanders, Dramatist and the Received Idea, esp. 70-71, 115-120, 324-338.