Romeo And Juliet – William Shakespeare, 1591-95 ★★★★½

Love and Other Bad Ideas

Clicking through random web pages the other day, I came across a quote by the noted French author André Maurois that immediately set me to thinking about this play:

"We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder."

I don't know if M. Maurois was referencing Romeo & Juliet in the above quote, but why not? It's the play for many when it comes to romance, featuring "archetypal young lovers" as Wikipedia's entry for the play puts it. Yet actually reading it reveals one of the most subversive depictions of the folly of love in Western literature.

I don't know about you, but when someone tells me of how their marriage began "like something out of Romeo & Juliet," I have to suppress the urge to ask: "How can that be? I'm talking to you, aren't I?"

It is a time of civil unrest in the Italian city of Verona. Two families, "both alike in dignity," are for some reason engaged in a running feud that erupts into a street battle in the opening scene. Meanwhile, the young progeny of one of these families, Romeo, pines over a woman named Rosaline who apparently prefers holy orders to his affections. Dejected, he is pressed by friends to go to a party. There he spies Juliet and is instantly smitten. So, in turn, is she.

But since he's a Montague and she's a Capulet, not to mention 13 and practically betrothed to another, the deck is pretty well stacked against them. Will true love conquer all?

Um, no.

Because Shakespeare wrote beautiful sonnets and waxed lyrical about human beauty both male and female, there is a tendency to view him as a romantic. That would be wrong. This is the guy, after all, who cut his wife out of his will with the lone exception of his second-best bed, and wrote a sonnet where he mocks comparing an unattractive lover to a summer's day, ticking off her many defects in iambic pentameter. No, Shakespeare was a law-and-order guy, wary of love as a disruptive, distending challenge to keeping peace in the neighborhood. When two youngsters get it in their heads to buck the system, the Bard is there to bring down the hammer, hard.

Love is not to be trusted, Shakespeare makes clear early. "Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,/Too rude, too boist'rous, and it pricks like a thorn," observes Romeo in the first act [Act I, scene iv, lines 25-26].

Romeo is speaking at the time of his infatuation for Rosaline, a case of bad love indeed. His pining over her inaccessibility accomplishes nothing and renders him dead-weight to his friends. Much is made of Cupid the blind sniper making misery all around. One of Romeo's friends, Benvolio, urges Romeo to make an effort to fall in love with someone else, not for the sake of love, but to bleach his frail mind of the mark of Rosaline. In the process, Benvolio compares love to both fire and poison.

Tut, man, one fire burns out another's burning,
One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with another's languish:
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die. [I.ii.47-52]

Of course, this qualifies as spectacular bad advice given how the play shakes out. The only thing which proves worse in this play than the wanton desires of the protagonists is the sage advice of their friends.

When Romeo and Juliet do come together, it's with all of the subtlety of a bus collision. Once they are introduced to each other, it's off to the races, a clear case of hormones on the boil. A case can be made that they are doing this for all the wrong reasons. He's got a lot of pent-up desire for Rosaline that needs to be let out; she's got her status-conscious parents trying to set her up with their richest friend, a doting nobleman named Paris with a taste for jailbait and, we soon learn, not a lot of patience when it comes to getting what he wants.

Juliet openly distrusts love, famously comparing it to the "inconstant" moon when Romeo spends too long flouncing up his love talk for her imagined benefit. For one so young, she shows a quiet wisdom that sets her apart from the headstrong dullard Romeo, as when she cautions him about swearing to love her a bit too much:

Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say 'It lightens.' [II.ii.23-27] 

She knows what lies ahead is more foul than fair, that as a character in another Shakespeare play put it, the course of love never did run smooth. It certainly won't here.

Want a representative image for Romeo And Juliet? Okay, it's about a guy suspended in mid-air and clinging for life while simultaneously dragging his beloved to join him in an early grave. And they're smiling, the idiots. From the 1968 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli, which was the version that got screened at my school. [Image from www.cinemagia.ro] 

In case you can't already tell, I love this play. It's got everything you want from Shakespeare: soaring poetry, ripping adventure, passion to die for, and some of the bawdiest humor he ever put down. He even sneaks the words "tit" and "ass" in, albeit in slightly altered form, which helps in reaching the young of any generation. It's a gripping story, not one he came up with himself, but rather one he crafted carefully into a vital whole, well-balanced with pathos, wit, psychodrama, and a riveting conclusion set in a tomb that contains some of Shakespeare's most powerful language centering on the much-commented-upon relationship between love and death which informs this play.

Take for example Juliet's plea to Friar Lawrence to deliver her from the clutches of an unwanted marriage so she can stay pure for her Romeo:

O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower;
Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud;
Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble;
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love. [IV.i.78-90]

It's like something out of Robert E. Howard! It works, though, because Shakespeare is so in his element and clearly delighting as he pushes every button. I think it also works because of the way he has set up our expectations so we are already fully immersed in the equation that love equals doom.

It's also tightly written, more so than most Shakespeare plays I've read. I wondered for a while about some of what might be termed "plot conveniences," for example, when Romeo is exiled, Juliet tries an elaborate ruse to be reunited with him, with fatal consequences. Why didn't she just leave Verona, especially considering her father just kicked her out of his house? But then I read a passage where it is noted the watch of Verona are out and on the lookout for people coming and going. A young girl alone wouldn't stand a chance, and probably couldn't count on anyone helping her make such a trip.

The play does wrap things up a bit too neatly for my tastes; I can't abide how that awful father of Juliet's gets to pontificate with the penultimate line. Yet it's hard to squawk at a play which sets down so brilliantly a love story for the ages while simultaneously putting paid to the notion that love does conquer all, when it can't even conquer a slow-footed friar.