For purposes of teaching great works of literature, and for the sake of teaching oneself—perhaps to regain what once seemed within one’s grasp but has now proven elusive, misunderstood—it is sometimes necessary to resort to themes and topics that are out of fashion not only with students but also the greater part of recent literary scholarship, even out of fashion with oneself. Asking about the relation of love and honor in Shakespeare’s plays, and in particular the bearing of love and honor on the dynamics of the plays’ power to move us, risks the appearance of naiveté, even complacency. But when formerly widespread assumptions about love and honor fall into disuse and obliquity, a good deal of reconstructive energy needs to be devoted to rehabilitate them so that the plays can be read and experienced as fully as possible. Sometimes only then can students and jaded scholarly imaginations absorb and judge scenes, characters, and whole plots.
To the sophisticated eye, such an approach is vulnerable to the charge of oversimplification. The topical pairing of love and honor, evoking an array of questions about the relation between eros and thumos, or the nature of emotion and virtue, tends to come across these days as willfully traditional, old hat, esoteric, conducive to habits of self-indulgent literary appreciation. It seems insufficiently heuristic or theoretical, and not clearly useful for making the world a better place. If it cannot meet such criticisms, a traditional or neo-traditional criticism that invokes love and honor will not only fail to meet theorists’ skepticism; it will not confront many students’ certainty that their own experience or ignorance of love and honor is authoritative, or their complementary conviction that there is nothing sure but live-andlet-live relativism. What is to keep interpretation of any play of Shakespeare from these extremes, including the academic disposition to look for agendas, symptoms, or historical forces in place of complex trajectories of character, passions, and ideas? A modern psychology of instincts and biases, for whatever help it offers, is not clearly superior to older ways of grasping psychological depth and moral / political complexities that are generated by the tension and complementarity of thumos and eros in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.
The pairing of love and honor as framing ideas for a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s plays also evokes a way of understanding characters’ motivations and aspirations in terms of political life as well as psychology. Love and honor are not only opposites in a sense; they are by their nature (though in what precise ways it is our task to inquire) accountable to one another. As love draws toward marriage, it engages political understandings, sanctions, and incentives regarding a particular polity’s conception of marriage. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the alliance of families is of course a crucial political strategy. The Prince’s cousin Paris (we assume with the Prince’s permission and perhaps encouragement) proposes marriage to Juliet under circumstances that might help defuse the Montague / Capulet feud with the bond of a ruler’s blood. The Friar dares to attempt a direct alliance of the warring parties, which he says he must at first conceal until political circumstances are favorable to revealing it. Unfortunately, each strategy undermines the other for reasons related to the tension between love and honor in Verona. If we do not take seriously the implications and political importance of such marital alliances, we miss many of the rich potentialities of Shakespeare’s Verona. Missing the power of love to challenge, explode, or secure those alliances, we risk losing even more.
To ask directly about love and honor in Shakespeare increases the chances of rediscovering important things: the play’s revelations of personality, the springs of action in the play’s plot, and the consequent trajectories of Shakespearean character that have proven so enduringly moving to generations of audiences. When critical approaches go along with critical fashion by looking immediately for hidden motives and mechanisms, or by so problematizing character that each dramatic person in the play is a crisscrossing of social influences and psychological forces, instead of (not in addition to) a dynamic of thought, choice, action, and circumstance, they miss or downgrade the plays’ persistently edifying and curative popularity. In ignoring the nature and dynamic of honor and love in those dramas, they are unlikely to consider that dynamic as a wellspring of character and political life. The interplay of irascible, yet honor-loving thumos and sexual, yet high-aspiring eros forms and tests character and polity in play after play: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance.
Some things are so large, or so taken for granted in these dramas, that sophisticated modern criticism is frequently tempted to ignore them, or to dismiss them as discredited conventions. Today, anger is stigmatized as a clinical condition. It is “OK” to be mad, but anger that is not approvable moral anger is now likely to be considered a form of psychosis or criminal rage. The Aristotelian idea that anger is driven by a sense of justice, and hence a sense of honor in defending justice—whether or not thumotic passion is well- or ill-directed—is alien to modern sensibilities. Ancient imaginations knew the type of the wrathful madman perhaps better than moderns do, for they knew Achilles. By contrast, the modern tendency (in peacetime, at least) to reject the traditional possibility of the legitimacy of war for honor’s sake militates against seeing war when it plays a non-baleful role in Shakespeare’s plays. Not just war but the ubiquity of war in Shakespeare’s works easily goes unnoticed, along with the framing power of war to color character and action. The comedies are as likely as the tragedies to share in this pattern: not only in response to the presence of war but as dramatic motions influenced by the potentialities of anger and honor-driven conflict. Without an acknowledgement of the deep psychological grounding of warlike, honor-loving qualities in a variety of characters and polities in circumstances that challenge and form them, our reception of Shakespearean action risks becoming incoherent.
War is not the only thing. As Mars courts Venus, or rivals her, love is its problematic complement in pre-modern understandings of human possibilities. The destructive power of love can invade almost any plot—not only in the tragedies (for example in Cleopatra’s ruination of a willing Antony and Lady Macbeth’s seduction of her husband’s honorable inhibitions), but in the comedies and tragicomedies (as in Prospero’s old self-undoing love for his brother Antonio, another Antonio’s love-thwarting love for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, and the near-murderous passions of multiple pairs of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
War is arguably the more commonly unacknowledged, lurking reality that frames almost all the comedies as well as the tragedies. Indeed it is often a formative cause—not merely a color—of the plays’ comedic power. Think how much All’s Well that Ends Well would change without the scourging drama of the frivolous yet challenging Italian wars. Consider Measure for Measure without the lingering effects of war, followed by a long abusive peace and the prospect of a resumption of hostilities. Questions of honor, precedence, and competitive prerogatives not only provoke jousting, duels, and incipient warfare between groups as soon as the action begins. They inhere in, exercise, elevate, and deform characters and plots. Though in recent films and stage productions the seriousness of the war-frame is often ignored, reduced to innocuous parody, or hyped as gratuitous violence, the implicit martial frame—even if it exists only in the rumor, memory, or imagination—draws upon, and draws out, greater and baser possibilities of character and action.
When love and war mix seemingly unrestrainedly in Shakespearean drama, the disastrous result is evident: deformation and tragedy (Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Lear), or the self-undoing satire of Troilus and Cressida, though even in these cases the persistent frame of war adds significance to, even makes significant, plots ostensibly driven by erotic energies. When war is a looming possibility yet strangely alienated from the action, as in Measure for Measure, Hamlet and Timon of Athens, it is the almost un-admitted, missing element—the factor kept in the background yet a contributor to the conflict and the resolution.
Shakespearean comedy is often rightfully characterized as festive, conciliatory, conducive to the ceremonies of courtship and marriage. War is by no means welcome, and is kept more or less at a distance, for it threatens to shift comedy’s foundations. But the prospect of war also engenders, as well as lurks behind, Shakespeare’s comic weddings, the byplay of lovers, and the rivalry of suitors. It is not only risked in the dangerous passages of courtship; it is calmed and bridled by reconciliation and comity between rival families and within the souls of the lovers. Often it threatens, as in the last scenes of Twelfth Night, to wreck everything at the moment of resolution. Or it enforces a sense of urgency in the proceedings: In Act V of As You Like It, we see that Rosalind’s plots of courtly testing and reconciliation have been racing against the threat of invasion and civil war. But war also lends a vital ardor to love. The last minute eruption of Duke Orsino’s jealousy toward Viola, which issues threateningly from a wounded sense of honor, is also a manifestation of ardent love. The near-miraculous appearance of Olivia’s look-alike brother turns that mixture of passions away from violence and self-damage toward a profession of love, which would not come to be, or be itself, without this incorporation of Orsino’s expressed capacity for jealousy and retribution.
For Shakespeare, one of the most striking mythic memories of war amidst the offices of peace would have been the famous battle between the human guests and the centaurs at the wedding of King Pirithous, as preserved in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Shakespeare of course was schooled in that text. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom proposes that the mechanicals play that battle before the Duke of Athens and his Queen on their wedding night.1 The ludicrous suggestion is tellingly indecorous. The Duke turns him down: a little play about the famous violent desecration of a king’s nuptials (complete with mass rape and slaughter) would be a silly outrage.2 And yet in another sense it would resonate with the wedding of the moment: Theseus has recently defeated the distinctively warlike Amazon Queen—now his Queen—in a battle of one kingdom against another. She is not quite subdued as the action of the play begins. There must be a wedding, and a consequent discipline of delay that would be incongruous were Hippolyta a mere war-captive. Is the ceremonious pause then merely a conqueror’s vanity? Hippolyta and Theseus continue their rivalry—much as Oberon and Titania and the lovers in the forest do, with some danger of cataclysm in nature, or lovers’ violence. The royals are partners in the peacetime equivalent of war: the hunt. Their banter over the calls of one another’s hunting dogs is a conciliatory, competitive engagement with each other’s martial resources. The treaty of their matrimony will be sealed, or lost to disorder, partly through their rivalrous, mutual love of the hunt.
The centaurs of Thessaly, whom Bottom and his friends promise to play for the Duke, did not attack—in Ovid’s tale—the wedding from without. They were honored guests and therefore part of the proceedings. Their natures mixed, at least at first, with those of their hosts.3 As partly uncivilized relatives of the Queen, the centaurs were however unused to drink, and became inebriated. They wrecked the proceedings, their lusts intent upon carrying off the women as their own at all costs. Their centaurish natures, which were graphic reminders of their hosts’ dual natures of base and higher elements, mixed with the wedding drink of reconciliation so as to destroy the ceremony’s delightful, risky work. The ceremony’s magnanimity and erotic sublimation, well-suited to the reconciliation of disparate families, deteriorated into rage and sexual license joined as mutually debasing allies.
The centaurs’ outrage not only burst the confines of ceremony; it threatened the foundation of the kingdom. Killed or exiled from Thessaly, the defeated manhorses lived on in poetical allusion to their war and defeat. Modern tourists can see how they persisted in the ancient imagination when they visit the restored Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, where their battle with the king’s relatives adorns the base of the throne of Athena. The armed goddess, if we believe the scholars who reconstructed her, presided serenely over the scene of carnage, as though acknowledging, embodying, and resolving humanity’s divergent potentialities for marriage and mayhem, alliance and misalliance.
Elsewhere in Shakespeare, the intertwinings of love and honor compose a variety of moving plots, as well as forms of character that live on in repetitions of reading and attending. If they are alive to those interactions, audiences are more likely to return to the plays, seeking to shake and temper memories of Shakespearean trauma and relief.
Recall Lear’s resolve in the first scene to hold to his kingly word of honor, in the face of his love for Cordelia. In that decaying lordliness, he defies the love that most moves him. The magnitude of his vehement insistence upon honoring his own command is hardly comprehensible without an audience’s awareness of his love for Cordelia and the high stakes of honor that accompany his division of his kingdom. His political ambition to neutralize France and frustrate civil war by favoring Cordelia with the largest, most powerfully allied portion of Britain becomes a perverted, desperate love—a poisonous cordial he pours into his own ear. The force of the play has much to do with these two things together: on the one hand, Lear’s idea of honor (as in the king’s words, which, once declared, cannot be taken back) and its potentially ennobling, then twisted power over his love for Cordelia; on the other, the power of that love to ruin his rule. Like Lear we cannot take in the one without the other, though unlike Lear we have the mixed privilege of a feeling witness who is yet distanced enough from the wreck to reflect upon its paradoxes, and the faint though immediately fading possibility that he might have peacefully succeeded.
Think now of the play of love and honor in Measure for Measure, in which Isabella, in the process of disciplining herself to be devoted to the Church by taking on the habit of a nun, fiercely defends her honor against Angelo but then submits in silence to the Duke’s proposal of marriage at the end of Act V. Whether that silence is self-conscious, honorable consent, or virginal resistance is of course an important question. Is her resistance the re-expression of her preliminary vows as a novice in God’s service, or should it be taken as a defense of her maiden honor, which paradoxically might be consistent with the married love that the Duke offers her? Her tentative entry into the convent, with all its rites of purification, involves the gradual taking on of a habit of honorable devotion in preparation for marriage to Christ. When the Duke doffs his disguise as a friar and proposes to her, he is appealing to her awareness, consistent with that process, that her worldly and religious senses of honor have been humbled by new claims of love and what might be the higher honor of becoming espoused to her Lord—whether it be to Christ or to the sometimes designedly Christ-like Duke of Vienna. This is one of the deep problems of that problem play that intrigues and baffles us, that draws us in and warns us off. We are offered the chance to undergo longing and uncertainty about the nature of marriage when marriage is presented as a sacrament of compelling and flawed erotic, political, ethical, and religious aspirations.
In Much Ado About Nothing, what better variation on this theme of paradoxical relations between love and honor than Beatrice’s love-test for Benedict: “Kill Claudio,” she declares, in that moment bringing about one of the most striking, disturbing, humorous turns in the play. Benedict will presumably show his love by acting honorably. But what does this mean? He is being asked to destroy Claudio as a result of Claudio’s claim of honor against Hero, whom Claudio loves. Hero’s apparent loss of honor has spurred Claudio to take revenge upon her precisely because he loves her and sees the honor of their love threatened. If he had succeeded, Benedict would have of course won Beatrice’s love—and confirmed her love for her friend—yet only by destroying Hero’s chance of recovering her own honor, and her Claudio.
What recovers the situation in Much Ado for comedy is not just the Friar’s stratagem of fabricating Hero’s death. It is the emergence of a deeper interplay of love and honor. The play turns upon Claudio’s self-consciously honorable, ritualized display of grief for the sake of his lost love, and his publicly resolved submission to marriage so honorable he does not see or wish to see the face of his bride—all the while entering into what he thinks is not possible: the recovery of his lost love in the honorable—though because it is honorable, the most erotically promising—wedding to her look-alike sister, who turns out to be Hero herself transformed by these honorable, erotic acts of grief and the loving Friar’s canny stratagem to save Hero’s honor. We do not need to disentangle these things to notice their mutually reinforcing appeal to our sympathies amidst the rich, fraught fabric of conflicts they generate. We never completely forget the potentially lethal combinations of love and honor exhibited in many sinister turns earlier in the play. But the comedy mitigates those turns by exercising them almost on the verge of war, not only between lovers but also between characters fresh from real armed conflict, allies in war who, as we have seen, are capable of falling into cruel hatreds.
In all these works of Shakespeare, and in many more if we had time to think of them, the relation of love and honor cannot be adequately felt or described as a mere coincidence, an arbitrary interplay of differences, or a direct conflict of opposites. More importantly, it is often an interaction that contributes mightily to each play’s tragicomic structure and impact—its cathartic power as a working out of the dynamics of characters caught and propelled by their choices in plots of comic and tragic possibilities.
In Romeo and Juliet, we have one of Shakespeare’s most fraught, and most moving instances of this phenomenon. In its first scene we see combative wits not sure whether they want to fight or fornicate with their rival clan—insistent upon their martial honors and power over the opposite sex yet not sure whether their martial and sexual fantasies are separate, or even whether they bode murderous or conciliatory impulses. Their witty outbursts manifest a giddy sense of limitlessness mixed with foreboding. It seems as though the liberation of spirit and contemptus mundi that mix within the Christian dispensation have somehow heightened the thumotic and erotic impulses of even minor characters in Shakespeare’s Verona. They are full of life while courting death. The dangerous conflicts and concordances of love and honor in such an environment, arising within young men of extraordinary ardor and high spirits, infect not only Juliet but also the Friar, and even her aged father. We rarely witness such a sustained, ubiquitous power of doing and undoing elsewhere in Shakespearean drama.
In two other, crucial scenes outside the explicit love plot, the pattern reaches heights of development and cathartic power that tell us something important about the action of the play as a whole, and why it maintains its hold on us. The first is the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt, which ends with Romeo’s selfless, defective intervention, the death of his friend, and consequently, Romeo’s fatal confrontation with Tybalt. The scene would devolve into melodrama were it not for Mercutio’s expansive superiority to his surroundings: the force of his presence, which momentarily joins the company of Falstaff and Hamlet.
It is the ingenious range and rage of that presence that is most memorable, deriving as it does from Mercutio’s free and intuitively probing friendship with Romeo—a friendship of great promise not only because Mercutio is the Prince’s kinsman but because his affection seems to grow the more he wittily swaggers in the Verona street. Witnessing that interaction within and between Mercutio and Romeo, one wonders whether Mercutio’s enlarging, insistent idea of friendship (which Romeo understands better than others)—might nobly rival or save the overall action of the play rather than help doom it. As a cousin of the Prince rather than the warring families, one who freely mixes thumotic rivalry, bawdy affection, and high-minded friendship, he is also a powerful mitigating agent whose character and action work temporarily to moderate the forces of love and honor threatening the lovers and Verona itself.4 When that spirited love falls victim to Tybalt’s underhanded sword, inadvertently aided by Romeo’s lovingly incompetent intervention, it is Juliet who takes on Mercutio’s mantle so that it can be fashioned for the sake of a love even more radical in its combination of spirited valor and eros. Juliet incorporates and purifies, with mortal speed, his mercurial devotion.
The complementary example of loving hate is Romeo’s confrontation with Paris just outside Juliet’s tomb. It is another interaction of love and honor that holds us suspended between reconciliation and death. Both men act to protect Juliet from desecration. Romeo accosts Paris with a magnanimous lover’s plea to let him enter the tomb without fighting. Paris, who we have seen nobly wooing Juliet and who, we know, has no grudge but a desire to honor and protect, dies as prelude to Romeo’s end.
Romeo at first avoids the duel; but his counterpart insists, as Romeo himself would in Paris’s position. Romeo’s rash act of honorable defense sharpens and accelerates his erotic yearning to join Juliet. There Juliet will herself die in the noble Roman way for the sake of her erotic calling. Thus the aspirations of love and honor complement and undermine one another. The lovers’ ability to feel and project these cooperative contradictions—combined with their articulate grasp of their condition of being in the throes of those contradictions—makes for a catharsis of fear and pity that we too undergo, at a distance, the more we take in the rich ordeal in them, as well as its nearly successful, then lethal resolution. Insofar as their deaths bring peace between the warring families and within audiences touched by the lovers’ passions, the ensuing armistice is an acknowledgement of complicity in a noble waste. Freedom from the play’s erotic, thumotic entanglements has entailed a loss.
But this is not enough. We need an account of Friar Lawrence’s contribution to the conflict of love and honor leading to the end just described, an analysis of how his work weaves itself into the characterizing relations of love and honor that form of the play. What is to be said, in particular, of the Friar’s Christianity and its working conception of honor and love? To what extent do these things underlay and complete the play’s mythos, its animating plot?
The Friar is of course Shakespeare’s individualized representative of Love’s party on Earth: of the Christian dispensation bringing love to a supposedly deed-centered, honor-driven, warlike, highly political world of Judaic piety and Roman virtue. The Friar is no Old Testament Judge or king. He has no official standing in the Veronese Prince’s court. In fact we never see him outside his cell until the disastrous last scene, when his panic at being exposed as a political agent in the city’s affairs is so great it causes him to abandon Juliet in the tomb.
In one sense, then, the Friar’s vocation profoundly disempowers him, removing him physically and philosophically from the Prince and from the work of governing Verona. On the other, however, his active representation of the Christian legacy empowers him to act from above, for the over-arching good of Love. We see him unhesitatingly involved in all the play’s intimate affairs of the heart, which no one else but the lovers themselves can enter: Romeo’s agony over Rosalind, then over Juliet; the lovers’ private resolve to end their lives; their secret joining—in their swift marriage and even (as directed) on the wedding night; as well as Paris’s charged diplomatic negotiation with Juliet. On a mission that transcends the usual inhibitions, the Friar has the power—and uses it in the knowledge that he has it—to influence the course of Verona’s politics through counsel, secret ceremonies, plots, and a potion. The counsel includes, of course, directions to Juliet about how to lie (see IV.i.89–90), even though it is Juliet whom Shakespeare presents as capable of preserving her honesty even when she is interrogated by her parents.
That these machinations of spiritual and Machiavellian intervention help bring on—indeed effectuate—disaster should not prevent us from noticing how the Friar’s ideas of love and honor comment upon and explain a good deal about his actions. His discourse about plants and human nature indicates that he intends to bring peace to Verona by joining and tempering both love and honor, not by suppressing one, or exiling either from the another. Most notably, the Friar does not purpose to eliminate from Romeo or from Verona the thumotic desire for distinction that can foster conflict, for he several times chides Romeo for abandoning it, and bases the substance and timing of his secret plot on the families’ and the Prince’s continuing desire to defend honorable marriage. By seeking to balance thumos with love in an honorable marriage, he plots for an honorable political as well as erotic union so revolutionary in its joining of opposites, so irreversibly blessed and consummated, and so well-timed in its disclosure, that Verona’s warring families and the Prince must certify it and so end their broils.
In the Friar’s well-worn but still suggestive commentary on herbs and Romeo’s condition, we learn that nothing is so vile it does not possess “some special good,” nothing so good that if “strain’d from that fair use,” it “[r]evolts from true birth” (II.iii.1–22). If “[v]irtue itself turns vice, being misapplied/ And vice sometime by action” is “dignified” (21–22), both love and honor are shriven and implicated in human virtue and folly, depending upon how they are applied and used. “Opposed kings”—“grace and rude will”—encamp in man, and the “worser” must be suppressed. But that “worser”—rude will—is found in love and honor both. (21–22, 29). Each has a will that must be tempered. Thus the Friar condemns Romeo’s disabling infatuation with Rosalind as a dotage, the product of his willful imagination and appetitive will. He arranges the secret wedding of Romeo and Juliet without any proof—or any attempt to secure proof—that Romeo’s love for Juliet is anything different. When he thinks of his plan, it is the wedding itself and its political impact that will discipline that will and the vices of Verona. Together, love and honor will temper each action of the will to make something good.
This joining of erotic and honor-seeking aspirations is apparently what the Friar has in mind when he commands Romeo to “love moderately” (II. vi.14). It is the result of acting well as an honor-loving man and loving husband, even though the rigors of exile have thrown Romeo’s fiery love into cold despair on the brink of suicide. Where Romeo would kill himself rather than suffer the torments of indefinite separation—and (as we sense in his vehemence) rather die than undergo the profound indignity of that separation given the absolute claims of his love—the Friar would have him act like a man by combining his tempered will as a lover with the moderation of his willful fury. He must do both:
Hold thy desperate hand!
Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art;
Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts [denote]
The unreasonable fury of a beast.
Unseemly woman in a seemly man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both. (III.iii.108–11)
In the end, of course, the Friar fails. His counsel to the lovers as well as his plan for their reunion miscarry. Love and honor destroy rather than temper one another. He is undeniably instrumental in the lovers’ deaths. Taking the path of honor in his disgrace after his cowardly flight from Juliet’s side, he speaks truly and thoroughly within the limits of the scene about his contributions to events, and condemns himself as the “greatest” among those the Prince has called “parties of suspicion” (V.iii.222–23). More, he says he is willing to be executed if he is found instrumental for “aught in this.” Whatever lesser sanction might be due an accessory, he says he will accept death if he is found to be implicated. Rather than claim his end was Love and his means forgivable, he submits to the judgment of his worldly ruler. The political imperatives of the Prince’s rule, including the need to preserve his honor as the preserver of Verona’s peace, reassert themselves.
And yet rather than focusing on the Prince’s judgment, which we never hear, the conclusion of the play reintroduces the tension and interaction of love and honor by explicitly combining worldly and poetic justice. With measured, conditional clemency, the Prince reassures the Friar by remembering his past services in a persistent, present-perfect tense: “We still have known thee for a holy man.” There is no guarantee of immunity from punishment—“Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished” (V.iii.308)—and yet honor and love together strangely reassert themselves in the grander, perhaps ultimately unconvincing, scheme of poetic justice. In this larger sense, poetic justice has punished both Veronese houses for their faction-mongering. They have lost their heirs and stand condemned by evidence of a loving bond which, despite or because of its disastrous end, now seems greater than their rivalry. The Prince too has suffered, with a loss of kinsmen that punishes him for his failure to end the fighting: “All are punished” (V.iii.292–95).
Before the Prince speaks, closure has already been effected by fortune and, paradoxically, the Friar’s plot, which has accidentally (and, if we are uncharitable, recklessly) led to the lovers’ deaths. The Friar’s goal of making Love prevail over warring claims of honor has been achieved, though at a cost that would make monstrous any man’s plan to achieve it in the way it has unfolded. The patriarch’s reconciliation in the last scene is a ceremony of grief. Is this then a triumph of love?
In the end the play frames the judgment of the Prince and of the play overall as though it were an elusive balance—of love and honor within each character and the intricacies of plot, of political justice weighed against political clemency, and of worldly justice and clemency weighed against some kind of heavenly judgment and forgiveness. I have argued elsewhere5 that this balance, affected by the way the play molds its sources, is especially arduous and strangely pleasing. It is a cathartic drama whose tenor and impact would not be possible without its rendering of the lovers’ climb toward death and the belated, hearbreaking reconciliation that ensues. The play is a tragedy after all, though we have to wonder, taking a cue from Samuel Johnson’s Preface, whether Shakespeare in fact turned even this play, as he did many others, into a tragicomedy. As a tragedy it raises deep philosophical and political questions about the strengths and weaknesses of Verona’s regime, and of the cross-purposed characters of Shakespeare’s Veronese. In this light, the validity of a tragicomic triumph of Love over the tomb is barely conceivable. And yet without Shakespeare’s working out of the plots and personalities that are stimulated and tested by these influences—especially in their sensitivity to the mutual claims of love and honor—these philosophical questions would pale. In that working out of these things—largely through Shakespeare’s augmentation and departure from his sources—love reappears where honor prevails, and honor where love controls.
This distinguishing play of love and honor, once it is incorporated into teaching and interpretation, appeals to students’ and older audiences’ experience as well as to the intuition that there must be something more. It removes disabling inhibitions about the play’s remoteness, and activates a sense of wonder at what is inspiring because it is somehow deeply familiar and yet beyond us. For the older set, perhaps jaded by dozens of performances and reinterpretations, a recognition of the claims of love and honor in Romeo and Juliet increases the likelihood that the play will call out to be seen and read again and again.
1. “‘The Battle with the Centaurs,’ to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp” (V.i.44–45).
2. Theseus also tells him that he has told Hippolyta the story already, to draw attention to his ancestor Hercules, the victor over the raging beasts: “That have I told my love, / In glory of my kinsman Hercules” (46–47).
3. In Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, a touchstone of chivalrous conduct, or Sidney’s Arcadia, from which Shakespeare probably drew his references to centaurs, the idea of courtly perfection is embodied in a man’s seemingly effortless chivalry, his masterful blending with his horse.
4. His appropriately named companion, Valentine, is mentioned in the action but does not appear. Mercutio’s actual partner in this action is Benvolio, whose prominent intervention in the street brawl of Act I is the complementary work of a good-willed, moderately warlike man working to temper angry claims of honor. Together, Benvolio and Mercutio are catalysts of a peaceful, spirited resolution of Verona’s inner and outer conflicts.
5. John C. Briggs, “Romeo and Juliet and the Cure of Souls,” Ben Jonson Journal 16 (May 2009) 281–303.