We know from experience that love, which seems a perfectly natural and fixed thing, is in fact changeable, depending on our thoughts about it. It is true that what we call “sex” constantly remains part of erotic love, but how large a part, and how is it related to love? That the two are not synonymous is apparent from the words themselves. We used to think that sex was properly the accompaniment of love, and seeking it for its own sake vulgar and immoral. That limitation is no longer popular, and the emancipation of sex—making it a proper object in itself—has, to a considerable extent, been a victory over love, not for it. The assault of contemporary mass media on tradition, and especially on religion, has launched us on an experiment without parallel, portraying untrammeled sex as the very height and center of human bliss. (It’s as if we have at last fulfilled the Declaration of Independence by discovering the happiness on the pursuit of which we can all agree!) But is this truncated view of love sound? Is it good for individuals or societies? What does Shakespeare teach us about the traditional or romantic view of love, particularly in a Christian context, and how well that view comports with life?
Romeo and Juliet is undoubtedly the best known and best loved of the three plays Shakespeare devoted to pairs of lovers. These three plays treat the form love takes in different historical settings, as ways of thought and life change. Love in its Christian setting is the subject of Romeo and Juliet, and the least known of the three, Troilus and Cressida, treats love in its ancient or pagan form. The transition from pagan to Christian love constitutes a major motif in Antony and Cleopatra. The plays about love are far from the only ones in which Shakespeare manifests his interest in the pagan world. Of his ten tragedies, five are set in the greatest centers of antiquity, four in Rome and one in Athens. Even King Lear is set in pre-Christian Britain, so that only the remaining four—Romeo and Juliet and Othello, in Italy, Macbeth and Hamlet in northern Europe—have Christian settings. We may find it surprising that Shakespeare should not only bring the pagan world to life in so many plays but evince a sympathetic understanding and appreciation of it—surprising, only if we assume, as it often is assumed, that he was merely a creature of his own time.
It is hard not to love the lovers in Romeo and Juliet, but it is equally hard to know what to make of the play as a whole, which, after all, ends in stark tragedy. Are we to think well of a love that shortly after its incandescent birth issues in the suicides of the lovers? Is it love or, more aptly, dotage—mere infatuation, based on good looks—that draws them together, so that the play is at the same time a celebration and censure of erotic love? And there are other questions: Why, in fact, are we never told the nature of the dispute that gave birth to the enmity between the Montagues and Capulets, both of whom seem equally high placed in society and unmoved by further ambition? Why the prominence given to Friar Lawrence and his counterpart, the nurse? In addition, and more generally, why so much bawdiness and downright vulgarity (to the extent that Shakespeare will allow this anywhere) in a play featuring the most romantic sentiments of the lovers themselves?
We begin by noting that the Prologue, like others in Shakespeare, does not tell the truth. The interest-arousing phrases there—“fatal loins,” “star-crossed lovers,” “death-marked love”—foretell a doom that, judged by what happens afterwards in the play, was not the necessary outcome of their love, taken by itself (Pro. 5–9).1 Many other factors, many people, many decisions and actions, had to intervene for that doom to be brought about, and the interplay of all of them is the subject of the play.2
It is surprising, even shocking, to move from the Prologue to the first scene. The unnamed lovers of whose fate we had just learned are nowhere to be seen. Instead we have an extended and rather vulgar conversation between two Capulet servingmen spoiling for a fight and adding crude sexual remarks to their simple-minded pugnacity—a pugnacity equaled by that of the men of the house of Montague nearby. To give this popular introduction a serious reading, let us assume it is Shakespeare’s way of telling us that the play will concern itself with the two basic human passions thus displayed in perhaps their crudest form: spiritedness, embodied in anger and warlike contention, or thumos—as the Greeks called it—and sexual passion, or eros.3 These passions have this in common—that they are natural, that they occupy a high place in the pagan world, and that they are regarded by Christianity as requiring the strongest suppression. In the Sermon on the Mount, some of Christ’s most memorable words are directed against both erotic love and the anger connected with hostility and war. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27–28) And also: “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” (Matt. 5:21–22)4 Certainly these injunctions go to the heart of Christianity—to its greatness and its problems too in their application to life generally.
Introduced in a comic way by the coarse exchanges of underlings, it is the interplay of these two great passions—erotic love and spiritedness—that sets the play into motion. A spirited fracas or minor war breaks out between the men of the two families, and at one point Tybalt—the very model of pure undiluted spiritedness—enters the fray. Immediately afterward we learn of the lovesick Romeo’s extreme and unnaturally distracted condition, brought on by the determination of the woman he loves to remain chaste. But at the Capulet’s party that evening, eros redirects his arrows and makes Romeo fall instantly in love with Juliet, daring on the briefest acquaintance, but in mutual physical attraction, to hold her hand and kiss her twice. Spiritedness returns with Tybalt’s attack on Romeo, Mercutio’s equally aggressive defense of Romeo, and Romeo’s own killing of Tybalt, thus setting the stage for the play’s tragic outcome.5
Friar Lawrence’s pivotal role is another sign that the play has much to do with Christianity and its effects. We learn that Friar Lawrence is Romeo’s teacher, the one who told him to “bury love” (II.iii.84)—that is, to suppress it—and it is out of distinctively Christian motives that he helps the lovers take actions that are their ultimate undoing. Friar Lawrence is an expert on herbs, a man who views the world in moral terms and sees the good and evil of which all things are capable, a man of natural moderation and good sense who nevertheless is led into extravagant deeds by certain elements of Christian belief itself. It is his Christianity that makes him think that at all costs the young couple must not sleep together unmarried, and even makes him optimistically anticipate from their union the bringing together of the feuding families. This same optimism, this faith in providence, later keeps him from considering the chance elements that might interfere with his intricate plan involving Juliet’s feigned death. More generally, it is to his Christianity that we must trace his confidence that, in the name of doing good, he can contravene tradition, engage in massive deception, and encourage law-breaking as well. He can place himself above and beyond ordinary moral and political restrictions because he thinks of himself as working for, and part of, a higher authority, privileged to be a major figure in God’s plan for man. It is paradoxical, but true, that this good man unintentionally facilitates the tragic end of the lovers.
The friar’s counterpart is the nurse—certainly one of Shakespeare’s most wonderful creations.6 If he represents Christianity in the play, she herself makes it clear that she represents nature, for what other conclusion can we come to after her graphic (and repeated) description of the way she weaned Juliet by putting wormwood on her nipple? She’s not a medical nurse but a wet nurse who nurses and nourishes babies. To draw attention to her occupation, she is the only one in the play whose only name is her occupation. Can there be any better symbol for nature than the conjunction of breast and the baby—a word that in its Greek origin (phusis) refers to growth, to causes that work from within living things especially, that make them what they are, independent of artificial, conventional, or external stimulation? The nurse gives milk by nature, and by nature the baby receives that nourishment and keeps growing as a human baby. The milk helps the baby become more of what it already is by nature.
The nurse’s character is consistent with this natural view: she is very physical and down to earth, even vulgar, in her humor. She values sex and money, and takes them for granted as natural and proper ends. With Romeo banished, she advises Juliet to marry Paris, knowing perfectly well of Juliet’s prior marriage to Romeo, since she helped arrange it. Her materialism, crass as it is, finds its expression in one short line: “Death’s the end of all.” (III. iii.95) And when, after a long and overly optimistic speech by the friar to Romeo, she says, “O Lord, I could have stayed here all the night to hear good counsel! O, what learning is!” (III.iii.162–63), we know that she is talking pure irony. Far from being the fool she makes herself out to be, the nurse is a consummate actress who must be watched with care.
So the protagonists have had very different educations. Juliet, we are to understand, was not only nursed by the nurse but left by an absentee mother to be brought up by her, just as Romeo was brought up by Friar Lawrence. True to her name, Juliet was born in mid-July, almost fourteen years earlier—again, a reminder of nature, in its summer heat and flaming fullness, and also of female nature becoming fully feminine. Just before falling in love with Juliet, Romeo had been feverishly in love with Rosaline, but unlike Rosaline, Juliet has taken no vow of chastity. At first, she appears timidly obedient to her parents in affairs of marriage, to which, she says, she has till then given no thought. At the party, however, she falls precipitately and unreservedly in love with Romeo and confesses as much in the balcony scene immediately afterward, when, thinking she is alone, she asks him to doff his name (because he is a Montague) and “Take all my self” (II.ii.50). Here she says nothing of parental consent, or even of marriage, as if the natural operation of love does not require either marriage or parental consent. And concerning her marriage to Romeo, once it is determined she never speaks a word to her parents, much less seeks their prior consent. She is a revolutionary for the natural as compared to the conventional. Ironically, she did not realize how receptive her father, at least, might have been to this match.
Having confessed her love for Romeo—in his hearing, as it turns out—she goes on, knowingly in his hearing, to call him “the god of my idolatry” (II. ii.117). She means her words. He is her god and she has no other god: what is this but a form of forbidden idolatry? When Romeo complains of being left unsatisfied she asks: “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” To which he replies: “Th’ exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.” (II.ii.130–31) And soon, after describing her love as boundless, Juliet wants him to show that his love is honorable and that he intends marriage by arranging “where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,” after which she will “follow thee my lord throughout the world” (II.ii.150, 152). Juliet does not directly ask him to get Friar Lawrence to perform the rite of marriage, and her language allows the possibility that it is Romeo himself—her god—who performs it all by himself. But she does expect marriage, and we wonder why, with her less Christian upbringing at the hands of the nurse, this is her expectation. Unlike Cressida, who never speaks of marriage, and Cleopatra, who refers to Antony as her husband only at the very end, as she commits suicide, marriage comes almost immediately to Juliet’s mind.
Juliet is not simply a replica of the nurse. It is likely that just being brought up as a Christian in a Christian family and society makes her insist on marriage, but it also seems demanded by Juliet’s own virtue, which makes of love a much finer and nobler thing than the simple natural conjugation the nurse has in mind. Christianity’s requirement of marriage may jibe with the purity of Juliet’s own impulses—with the infinite bounty and depth of the love she confesses to Romeo. Nevertheless, she realizes that marrying Romeo would be impetuous, and Friar Lawrence himself realizes how precipitate this marriage would be. We must not forget that Shakespeare has them marry the afternoon after the evening they first meet, having known each other only for a few minutes at the party and a few more in the balcony scene shortly afterward. It is one of those many cases where Shakespeare exaggerates a reality in order to make a deeper point—or uses an untruth for the sake of a deeper truth. He has the lovers do something rather incredible: marry voluntarily after having known each other so briefly. So we cannot help but agree with the friar’s initial assessment. He speaks very sensibly when he tells them to proceed much more slowly and carefully, but he ends up marrying them anyhow, and for the sake of preventing their sinning through fornication.
The character of Romeo is much more complex than that of Juliet. We meet him first through the account given by Benvolio and his father. His life is completely upside down. Walking abroad before dawn, in tears, he returns to shut himself in his room all day. The cause of this grief—this extreme, excessive, and unnatural grief—is Rosaline’s effort to “merit bliss” by remaining chaste,” whereby she “cuts beauty off from all posterity” (I.ii.213, 211). By this Romeo implies that he has no doubt Rosaline does merit the bliss (in the afterlife) she seeks, but by her chastity she also keeps herself from passing her beauty on, through reproduction, to her progeny. He fails to mention another consequence of her chastity—his own frustration, and the unnatural behavior that is the counterpart of hers. She voluntarily suppresses her own sexual nature; he suffers acutely and excessively from sexual deprivation. In this extreme form his lovesickness even becomes an object of derision to his friend Mercutio, who hardly places on love the high value both Romeo and Juliet do.
Romeo is a very unsteady person, quite different from both the exuberant Mercutio and his more moderate friend, Benvolio. Just as he had sped from depths of despair over Rosaline to ecstasy over Juliet, impulsively exchanging one love for the other, so in his spiritedness he lurches from one extreme to another. Trying to mediate the argument between Tybalt and Mercutio, and justifying his peace-keeping efforts by saying “I thought all for the best” (III.i.96), he unintentionally allows Tybalt to kill Mercutio. Whereupon, despite the likelihood that the prince would himself have had Tybalt killed as a murderer, he reverses his excessive passivity and rages for revenge, exclaiming that Juliet’s beauty had made him effeminate. In this mood he kills the returning Tybalt, yet on learning of the prince’s decision to banish him, this imprudent display of extreme manliness vanishes, and instead he is found groveling and weeping on the floor of Friar Lawrence’s cell. Seeing him in this condition, it is the old nurse who first exclaims, “Stand up, stand up! Stand, and you be a man” (III.iii.91)—language echoed shortly afterward by Friar Lawrence, calling upon Romeo to show spirit, to act like a man, to cease acting like a woman (see III.iii.113-118)—that is, to act in accordance with his male nature.
Romeo also believes in dreams. He has a sense of doom (in one place, at the beginning of the last Act, it is temporarily transformed into wild unfounded optimism), and believes some power beyond him directs his fate. He has thought of suicide before, just as it is the first thing that comes to his mind when he learns of Juliet’s supposed death, failing to ask even the most elementary questions about the circumstances of her death. Such is his eagerness to die with her that he kills Paris outside the tomb when Paris tries to arrest him for unlawfully returning from exile. Let us sum up Romeo’s traits. First, far from “burying love” as he was taught by the friar, he has become excessively erotic. And his Christian education may also have been responsible for his wavering between too much and too little spiritedness, between excessive manliness and excessive womanliness. As he himself says when fury against Tybalt seizes him—“Away to heaven, respective lenity” (III.i.115)—he returns “lenity” or gentleness to the heaven from which it came. And it may have been the same teaching that led to his forebodings of evil, his unease at living (since this life is so temporary) and his sense of fore-ordained destiny. Driven by this combination of passions, he ends up exercising very little forethought or prudence. He is neither entirely Christian nor entirely pagan, being pulled either way by one element or the other. He is a kind of minor league Hamlet, more erotic, more lovable, much more active but lacking Hamlet’s powers of thought and expression.
Old editions of Shakespeare’s plays (meant for high school and college use) regularly contained time analyses of the action of the plays. Shakespeare often omits details of time, but when he wants us to know the duration of action, or the month, day, and even hour, or the year, the information will be there, sometimes quite plainly, sometimes less conspicuously. In Romeo and Juliet, not only are the lovers married the day after they meet, but the whole action takes less than a week to complete, beginning early on a Sunday morning in mid-July and ending early on the following Friday morning.7 At one point, well into the play, Capulet—arranging the marriage of Juliet to Paris—asks him what day it is, and Paris replies: “Monday, my lord.” (III.iv.18–19) Capulet decides the wedding will be Thursday, since Wednesday would be too soon to make the necessary preparations (III.iv.15–17, 20–33). The next day—Tuesday—he moves the wedding ahead to the next day, when the “peevish” Juliet seems to express a sudden change of heart about the marriage after her meeting with the friar (IV.i.90–91, ii.15–35). As her father races to prepare through the night, Juliet drinks the potion given to her by the “holy” friar—and is discovered “dead” by the nurse in the morning, as Paris waits. Here are the only indications we are given of the days on which the action of the play takes place. Working back from Monday, we learn that all the action so far has taken place in less than two days, while the remaining action takes three days more: the lovers meet Sunday night, marry Monday afternoon, and then are both dead by Thursday night.8 It is mere speculation, but the time left in the week almost exactly coincides with the period in the Gospel of Matthew between the Friday of Christ’s crucifixion and early Monday morning, when his body is discovered missing. If this is correct, it would be like an arrow pointing to the subject of the play—which is to say, the effect of Christ’s life and teaching on the lives of human beings.
What lessons can be drawn from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? That young men and women should not fall in love? That they should have longer courtships? That their families should not feud? That lovers should not consult friars? That friars should not accommodate impetuous lovers and preempt the role of parents, or create elaborate schemes that involve massive deception and law-breaking? That they should not consider themselves above the law? The friar was right in thinking that by marrying the lovers he might ultimately unite the families themselves—but it was the death of their children, not their marriage, that finally brought the families together. The friar impresses us as a good man, a virtuous man, but at the end he shows himself to be much less admirable. Entering the tomb at night, while Juliet is still asleep, he discovers both Romeo and Paris lying there dead. Only moments later she awakens from the drug he had given her, just as he had said she would. Seeing him, but not Romeo, she asks where Romeo is. The friar replies (V.iii.159–64):
Come, come, away.
Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead;
And Paris too. Come, I’ll dispose of thee
Among a sisterhood of holy nuns.
Stay not to question, for the watch is coming.
Come, go, good Juliet. I dare no longer stay.
Could his answer have been more blunt or shocking? And how quickly and neatly he has devised a solution for her woes: he will get her to a nunnery. Juliet refuses to run; but to save himself the friar does, despite knowing how desperate she was. Perhaps he could not know she would kill herself with Romeo’s dagger, but by leaving he bears some direct responsibility for her death.
Only this late in the play does one of its major themes reveal itself fully: the problem posed for political rule by Christianity. Escalus, the Prince of Verona, makes three appearances in the play—at the beginning, middle, and end. He has not been a strong ruler. We never learn the cause of the hostility between the Montagues and Capulets. We do learn from the Prince that this was their third fight, yet only now does he threaten them with death should any further disruption occur. So, including the brawl that has just occurred, three have gone unpunished. Not a very effective prince. It is not long before he gets a chance to show the new rigor he has promised. Romeo kills Tybalt, despite Tybalt’s obvious guilt as the initiator of the fight and the killer of Mercutio. When old Montague pleads with the Prince for his son’s life, this is the very point he makes in his defense, since by killing Tybalt Romeo only did what the law would itself have done. Nevertheless, Romeo is banished. The Prince must have accepted Montague’s point in mitigation of Romeo’s guilt, but he does banish him. He probably thought Romeo had to be punished for taking the law into his own hands, and banishment, after all, as the friar attempts to persuade Romeo, is a good deal milder than death.
But the Prince’s new-found rigor does not continue. Just before he arrives on the dismal graveyard scene, the Third Watchman reports a captive: “Here is a friar that trembles, sighs, and weeps.” (V.iii.189) The friar had not succeeded in escaping, but precisely why he is weeping we are not told. He knows his scheme for the lovers failed, knows of their deaths and knows he himself must be a suspect, so his concerns are understandable. Nevertheless, when the Prince asks about suspects, he voluntarily steps forward: “And here I stand both to impeach and purge / Myself condemned and myself excused.” (V.iii.231–32) He tells the whole story, and while he tells it accurately, he fails to make plain the enormity of his wrong-doing—that is, his lies, deceptions, usurpations, and illegalities. He ends with the lines (V.iii.271–73):
And if aught in this miscarried by my fault,
Let my old life be sacrificed some hour before his time,
Unto the rigor of severest law.
There is really no “if” about the friar’s fault, and, while expressing his willingness to die, he indirectly pleads with the prince not to take his life “some hour before his time”—that is, as an old man who hasn’t long to live. The Prince’s response is astonishing. And it comes in a single, simple sentence: “We still have known thee for a holy man.” (V.iii.274) Case closed. No inquiry into the bizarre series of events that left three people dead in the tomb. No punishment at all for the part Friar Lawrence played in the calamity. Gone is the rigor the Prince began by banishing Romeo, and we can guess why. He is in awe of the Church and thus bows to its higher authority. In effect, he allows the Church to rule even in secular affairs—to commit crimes, and get others to commit crimes, with impunity.9 We must conclude that the biggest—but invisible—division in Verona and the greatest challenge to the Prince is not, despite all appearances, the antagonism between Montagues and Capulets, which actually shows signs of abating, but the much deeper antagonism between the temporal and spiritual authorities, which, as we can see from this retreat by the Prince, shows no sign of abating.
In the sources that scholars believe Shakespeare used for the play, going back to the late fifteenth century, the Italian names “Montecchi” and “Capelletti” are used for feuding families. But these names also appear in Dante’s Divine Comedy, an earlier and much greater work than these other sources. In Purgatorio, Dante addresses “enslaved Italy, a place of great grief,” like a “ship without a master in a great storm,” where fellow-citizens “are always at war” and, “thrown together within the same wall,” cannot live “without biting one another.” “Wretched country,” he continues, “look around your shores … and then into your heart … see if any part enjoys peace” (VI.76–87).10 And after accusing the clergy—“you people who are supposed to be devout” and who allowed Italy to grow untamed and vicious, “not having been corrected by spurs” since they laid their “hands upon the bridle”—Dante assails the Holy Roman Emperor for abandoning the Italian saddle, permitting a “garden … to be turned into a desert,” and calls for his return to Italy to quell the bitter feuding of its nobility (VI.106–10):
Come and see, you who are negligent,
Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi:
One lot already grieving, the other in fear.
Come, you who are cruel, come and see the distress
Of your noble families, and cleanse their rottenness.
Without imperial rule, according to Dante, Italy is riven by lawless dissension, even or especially within its cities. The “devout” should obey God’s injunction to leave unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but instead they have deprived Caesar of his authority without being able to rule effectively themselves, while the temporal ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor, has permitted this usurpation of the civil power by the Church. Dante uses the names of the noble families, like the Montagues and Capulets, as examples of Italy’s plight. By using these names as well, Shakespeare confirms the idea that the deeper source of disorder in Verona (and Italy) is the weakness of the secular or imperial power relative to the spiritual power. The feud between the families is more a consequence than a cause, for its root is the lack of a political authority sufficiently strong to keep them both in awe. This may also be the reason why Shakespeare refrains from specifying any particular grievances as the cause of their hostility.11
Why do we love the lovers, and what makes the story of Romeo and Juliet tragic? We love the young lovers because they fall in love at first sight, infatuated with each other’s beauty. We love to love love. We even approve of their possessiveness, of their wanting to remain in the presence of that beauty and keep it for themselves. They declare their love quickly, barred by no convention, with nary a word about offspring, or raising a family (though the nurse mentions these things), for that would dilute the passion of love itself, their devotion to each other alone. Our approving interest in their love continues, even as they manage to spend their wedding night together—an event distinguishing this play from Othello, for example, where it is doubtful that the marriage of Othello and Desdemona is ever consummated. With help from both the nurse and the friar—but in violation of the Prince’s decree banishing him—Romeo surreptitiously mounts a ladder to Juliet’s bedchamber and stays until the following morning, when he must perforce, surreptitiously still, depart from Verona and his new bride.
The lovers are measureless in their love, risking all for each other, and giving all too. After an inner struggle, Juliet overcomes her detestation of Tybalt’s killer, who is her husband, and, of course, the lovers end up dying for each other. We are struck, in particular, by the purity and nobility of Juliet’s character, and while we can hardly admire Romeo as much, his devotion to Juliet itself disposes us to think less harshly of him. But they have made the kinds of mistakes impetuous lovers will make. They have married too quickly and disregarded their parents, as if they had no need for parents or even of society at large. Nor were they mature enough to understand that the character of the beloved, much more than physical beauty, makes for a durable marriage. They are young and foolish. But such is the charm with which Shakespeare endows them that we find it impossible to hold their faults against them.12
A final reason for loving them is that in their last breaths they speak and think of almost nothing but love. Neither says a word about the afterlife.13 Both seem to regard death as the end, just as the nurse had, thus making their sacrifice even greater. Mistakenly believing Juliet dead, and on the point of killing himself, Romeo is still struck by her beauty and imagines, rather grotesquely, that “Death is amorous” and keeps her as “his paramour.” To protect her he will die and join the worms, her “chambermaids,” setting up his “everlasting rest” right there and shaking off the “yoke of inauspicious stars” from his “world-wearied flesh” (V.iii.101–12). Gazing upon her one last time, embracing her, and with a final “Here’s to my love!” he quaffs the poison and, “Thus, with a kiss,” slumps down across her (V.iii.113–20). Juliet, for her part, must die in even greater haste, before the guards enter. Finding no “friendly” poison left in his cup, she kisses him—“Thy lips are warm”—and immediately kills herself with his dagger (V.iii.165–75). She does not imagine a role for herself after death, as he does; for her it is simply the end.
These are the reasons why we love them. The young lovers are heroes of love, made all the more admirable in our eyes by the brief duration of their love, which maintains its intensity from beginning to end. The tragedy is that such lovers should die by their own hand so soon, and by a series of mistakes, most of them made by Romeo. Jointly they erred in not appealing to their parents in the name of love and in marrying so swiftly. But it was Romeo alone who brought about his banishment by senselessly killing Tybalt. And it was Romeo who, disregarding his banishment, shot like an arrow to Juliet’s side, intent (mistakenly) on dying along with her. By contrast, Juliet’s merit shines so much more brightly. She refuses to marry Paris, despite intense urging from her parents and even the nurse. She is brave enough to accept the friar’s terrifying plan to take his drug, seem to die, and be buried in the tomb of her ancestors. Finally, at the sight of her dead husband, she prefers death to life. In moral virtue and nobility Juliet—the child of nature—soars far above and beyond the low materialism of the nurse. Yet we cannot say that her intellect is mature or her choices wise. She is, after all, not quite fourteen years old. An older, wiser woman would not likely have been swept off her feet by Romeo or sought marriage so swiftly. It is possible, had she known him better, that she would even have found it unnecessary to die for him.
All in all, we love the lovers in Romeo and Juliet. And here we find the most important general object and effect of the play taken as a whole—one so obvious it is easily overlooked. It is to restore sexual love, the love of men and women for each other, to a very high place in life. A sign of why restoration was necessary is given in the play by the ideal of chastity that both Rosaline and the friar cherish. This Christian ideal is partly rooted in the fact that the love of the body, or erotic love, necessarily involves selfish pleasure-seeking, the very lust Christ strongly condemns. Juliet’s speech from her balcony affords another reason: that idolizing the beloved deifies him, and at least detracts from, if it does not nullify, the worship of God. In effect, the beloved becomes our “lord and master” (see II.ii.115–18, 147–52). At any rate, for God’s sake, highly Christian societies will tend to make chastity a general ideal not confined to abstinence before marriage, where it has a proper place.14
Today, it seems we have sunk so low that the words “chastity” and “virtue” make us blush and stammer, fearing the worst of all accusations: prudery. We have come to regard sex merely as an innocent and temporary, if not momentary, recreation—a thrill, and not much more. So common, accepted, and popular has this carnal view become that it is hard for us to regain the perspective from which Shakespeare wrote about love, where not the emancipation of sex without love, but its natural and proper connection with love had to be established against an excessive Christian asceticism. Indeed, while no one knew better than Shakespeare the wide range of misuse and abuse to which our sexual desires are subject, he made it one of the chief objectives of his work as a whole—including his sonnets and long poems—to help create a more natural and complete view of love than the one prevailing in his time, which was still heavily influenced by Christianity. This meant reviving the ancient Greek view of eros, but it also meant going beyond the value placed on sexual love by classical philosophers and celebrating a higher form of that love in a new way. In Romeo and Juliet, a low level of erotic love is represented by the crude sexual boasting of the Capulet servingmen; yet the attitudes of Mercutio and the nurse are only variations on the same theme. We scorn these, and love only the lovers and their true love. Yet the harm and danger that even true love can bring, we also learn from Shakespeare—which is why his plays about love, like Twelfth Night and As You Like It, can end very happily, while others, like Othello and Romeo and Juliet, end very unhappily.
The unhappy ending of these lovers, which Christianity might be tempted to read as proof of the need to rein in or suppress erotic love, is nevertheless far from outweighing, in our minds, the admirable and happy goodness of love itself. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the thought that the friar and his pupil, Romeo, are together primarily responsible for the tragedy. What they have in common, underlying or in some way causing their defects and mistakes, is their Christian belief, whereas Juliet, representing nature in a more elevated form, is their victim. Broadly speaking, this is the essence of the play. How, then, can a play that is critical of Christianity still be salutary for Christians—even Christians today—to read? For one thing, Shakespeare generally is without peer in conveying a sense of the full depths and span of human life. In addition, they will learn much about their religion—more than they are likely to learn by themselves, especially in corrupt times. Christianity makes great demands on its believers. Christ commands: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48) This is no matter of mere self-esteem; after all, self-esteem writ large is nothing more than sinful pride. And when Christ proclaims that his kingdom is not of this world, Christians must understand that it transcends this world and that they are to look to eternity, far beyond the reach of our material concerns.
Above all, Shakespeare is concerned with understanding the effect the Christian view of perfection has on human life. The earliest Christians expected the return of Christ imminently, and did their best to live the good life, to rise above our natural selves, to be perfect, in accordance with his precepts; once that return did not occur, life had to settle down, with all its natural problems and concerns returning. In his plays, if we look carefully, we can see that the standard Shakespeare uses to judge people—their goodness, justice, nobility, greatness—reflects something like the natural morality found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, along with the conception of political life found in his Politics. These are closer to what our nature requires. But his criticism of Christianity is quiet, not clamorous. Usually, unless we look with care, it is barely visible, hidden under the veil of an entrancing or gripping story. Shakespeare is no “Machiavel,” nor one of his many descendants, making war on Christianity in order to destroy it. He has no ideology, presents no program. Shakespeare gives guidance by portraying better and worse people, better and worse courses of action, exploring the inner workings and outcomes of the vastest range of human possibilities. Like Socrates before him, but through the medium of drama and poetry, he brings the fundamental alternatives to life before us and even, by having us consider them seriously, helps us become better ourselves.15
1. Parenthetical references herein, unless otherwise indicated, are to the division of the play into Act, Scene, and Line numbers in William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, eds. Bernice Kliman and Laury Magnus, The New Kittredge Shakespeare Series (Focus Publishing, 2008). This edition follows the text of the Second Quarto.
2. See George Kittredge’s Introduction, in Kliman and Magnus 2008, x: “The premonitions of disaster continue throughout the play, but they are interlaced with evidence of human shortsightedness and weakness.”
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarks that Shakespeare shows us in Romeo and Juliet “the fineness of his insight into the nature of the passions”: see Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. H. N. Coleridge (London, 1849), Vol. 1: 155; and “The Lectures of 1811–1812,” in Romeo and Juliet, ed. Sylvan Barnet, Signet Classics Series (Penguin Books, 1998) 134–42.
4. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version, Third Edition, ed. Michael Coogan et al. (Oxford University Press, 2001).
5. See John C. Briggs, “Romeo and Juliet and the Cure of Souls,” Ben Jonson Journal 16 (2009) 281–303, esp. 286: “The first scene of the play, which has no precedent in the sources is especially revealing, for it … is indicative of the erotic and thumotic … aspects of catharsis as they play out in a Verona of intense rivalry and powerful longing.”
6. To one critic, the nurse is a “triumphant and complete achievement” who “lives and breathes in her own right from the moment she appears”—a portrait un-surpassed in its fullness of character “till [Shakespeare] gives us Falstaff.” See Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Atlantic Publishers, 2007), Vol. IV: 71–73.
7. See the “Timeline” in Kliman and Magnus (2008, 127–29), which tentatively proposes that the play begins on Saturday. Most modern editors, including Kittredge, believe that Shakespeare plays “fast and loose with exact times” (2008, ix–x, 127), but there is evidence to the contrary that—when it suits his purpose—Shakespeare pays careful, though unobtrusive attention to the passage of time in his plays.
8. There is a parallel in Shakespeare’s dark comedy, Measure for Measure, where it is possible (with somewhat greater difficulty) to track the time elapsed from a Tuesday—also mentioned once—through Wednesday and Thursday, a duration of only three days. On the significance of these three days, see David Lowenthal, Shakespeare and the Good Life: Ethics and Politics in Dramatic Form (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) 251–57.
9. See Jerry Weinberger, “Pious Princes and Red-Hot Lovers: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” Journal of Politics 65/2 (2003) 350–75, esp. 373: “At the play’s end, Friar Laurence is the one who really rules Verona.”
10. Dante: The Divine Comedy, Oxford World Classics, tr. Charles Sisson, ed. David Higgins (Oxford University Press, 2008).
11. On the political problem posed by Christianity, see Lowenthal 1997, 32–36, 56–59; see also, Allan Bloom, “Romeo and Juliet,” in Love and Friendship (Simon and Schuster, 1993) 277–78, 291–96.
12. See Bloom 1993, 275, 283: “Romeo and Juliet are the perfect pair of lovers.” “The terrible consequences of their love could have been avoided at many points if either lover had been moderate or reflective, but this would have been like cutting the wings of birds and still expecting them to fly.”
13. See Coleridge 1849, 160: “All deep passions are a sort of atheists, that believe no future.” Coleridge’s remark is a gloss on Romeo’s exchange with the friar (III.iii.9–72) that banishment is a fate worse than death: “There is no world without Verona walls, / But purgatory, torture, hell itself.” “’Tis torture, and not mercy: heaven is here, / Where Juliet lives” (18–19, 30–31). In his despair Romeo rejects the friar’s “armor” against adversity, the consolation of his “philosophy”: “Hang up philosophy, / Unless philosophy can make a Juliet … / It helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more” (III.iii.59–62).
14. See Harry V. Jaffa, “Chastity as a Political Principle: An Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. John Alvis and Thomas West (ISI Books, 2000, second edition) 203–40.
15. In this respect, Shakespeare’s intention is much like that of Abraham Lincoln, who continued to read and recall his Shakespeare all through the darkest days of his Presidency. See John C. Briggs, “Steeped in Shakespeare,” Claremont Review of Books (Winter 2008/2009) 63–66.