OF the various versions of the Romeo and Juliet story by Luigi da Porto, Matteo Bandello, Luigi Groto, Boaistuau, William Painter, and Arthur Brooke, there are some slight indications that Shakespeare may have read besides Brooke, Painter, da Porto, and Groto; but as Brooke asserts that he saw ‘the same argument lately set foorth on stage’, some of the indebtedness to Italian sources may be illusory. It will be necessary, however, to detail the more significant of the alleged borrowings.1
Luigi da Porto’s tale is set in Verona, the feuding families are the Montecchi and the Cappelletti, and Romeo goes in disguise to the Cappelletti house in the hope of seeing a woman who has scorned him. He and Giulietta fall in love. Romeo frequently climbs her balcony to listen to her discourse; on one occasion she happens to see him and exclaims:2
Che fate quì a quest’ ora così solo?
(ed. E. Cochin, p. 46)
So Juliet in the play asks:
What man art thou that thus bescreened in night
So stumblest on my counsel?
(II. ii. 52–3)
Giulietta, like Juliet, goes alone to the Friar’s cell for her wedding. In the versions of Bandello and Brooke, Romeo is attacked by Tybalt and forced to defend himself; in da Porto he attacks Tebaldo only when he has seen many of his kin wounded. So in Shakespeare Romeo attacks Tybalt only after the death of Mercutio. In the tomb Giulietta awakens just before Romeo dies of the poison; she dies, somewhat improbably, by holding her breath.
Some fifty years after Luigi da Porto’s version, Luigi Groto dramatized it in Hadriana (1578). There are two possible links with Shakespeare, In the scene of parting at dawn, there is a reference, as in Romeo and Juliet, to the nightingale:3
S’io non erro, è presso il far del giorno.
Udite il rossignuol, che con noi desto,
Con noi geme fra spini, e la rugiada
Col pianto nostro bagna l’herbe.
(II. iii. 237–40)
But, of course, nightingales make frequent appearances in aubades. The other parallel concerns the consolation offered to Juliet’s father:
Non perde il suo colui, che l’altrui rende.
A la terra doveansi i corpi; l’alme
A Dio, tutto ’l composto a la Natura.
Non biasmate colui che ve li toglie
Si tosto.
(IV. iii. 2–6)
So Friar Lawrence declares:
Heaven and yourself
Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all,
And all the better is it for the maid.
Your part in her you could not keep from death,
But heaven keeps his part in eternal life.
(IV. v. 66–70)
Here again this is stock consolation to be expected from a friar; and Shakespeare may well have arrived at the idea quite independently.
This play was preceded by Bandello’s tale (1554), by Pierre Boaistuau’s French version (1559), and by Painter’s English translation in his Palace of Pleasure (1567). Of these Shakespeare probably knew Painter, although the one sign that he did so is the resemblance between ‘40 houres at the least’ (Painter) and the ‘two and forty hours’ during which Juliet would be under the influence of the drug. Brooke does not mention the duration. It should be mentioned, however, that Shakespeare agrees with Boaistuau, and not with Bandello, Painter, or Brooke, in making Romeo go to the Capulet’s ball in the hope of meeting his cruel mistress.
The main source, perhaps – as Professor Bullough thinks – the only source, of the play was undoubtedly The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke (1562), a poem based on Bandello. Brooke describes the feud between the Montagews and Capulets, and the attempt by Prince Escalus to effect a peace. Romeus, after months of unrequited love for a wise and virtuous maid, is persuaded by a friend to frequent balls and banquets, so as to discover a kinder mistress. At Christmas-tide he and his friends go to a masked ball at the Capulets’ house; he and Juliet fall in love and afterwards discover each other’s identity. Romeus passes by her window week after week and gazes at her until one night she sees him and insists that, unless he intends marriage, he must cease his suit. Romeus thereupon goes to consult Friar Lawrence, who eventually consents to the marriage, hoping thereby to effect a reconciliation between the two families. Juliet, using her Nurse as a messenger, is told to go to confession, where she is married to Romeus. A month or two after the marriage a fight breaks out, in the course of which Romeus kills Tibalt in self-defence. Romeus is banished and, after a last night together, the lovers are parted. Juliet’s mother, seeing her grief but unaware of the cause, gets Capulet to find her a husband. Juliet refuses to marry Paris and, on the advice of Friar Lawrence, she takes the sleeping-potion. In due course she is placed in the family vault. Meanwhile the messenger sent by the Friar to Romeus fails to reach him; Romeus hears from his servant of Juliet’s death, buys poison of an apothecary, returns to Verona, and takes the poison in the vault. Friar Lawrence arrives just as Romeus dies; Juliet awakens and asks for her husband; seeing him dead, she takes his dagger and kills herself. The Watch arrive together with the Prince, and the Friar gives a lengthy account of the whole story. The Nurse is banished, the Apothecary hanged, the Friar pardoned, and the families reconciled.
Shakespeare disposes his material in accordance with the requirements of Five-Act Structure. He begins his play with a brawl between the two families; the climax of the third act is the fight between Romeo and Tybalt, representing the warring families, which results in the hero’s banishment; and the conclusion of the play is the reconciliation of the two families. Within this structure, the personal tragedy of the lovers is played out. In the first act the lovers meet; in the second act they are married; in the third act the marriage is consummated and the lovers are separated; in the fourth act Juliet has her mimic death; and in the last act the lovers severally commit suicide. The action is condensed from the months of Brooke’s poem into a few days. This not only increases the speed and intensity of the action: it also shows the passionate impulsiveness of the lovers, and they consummate their marriage in the knowledge that they must separate on the morrow. In some ways, of course, especially when considered in relation to the later tragedies, the play is ‘immature’. Shakespeare was writing a tragedy of fortune, the only kind his story allowed, and too much depends on accident: the quarantine which delays the messenger, and the awakening of Juliet one minute too late. But already Shakespeare was manipulating his source-material with a masterly sense of dramatic possibilities.
Brooke purported to describe
a coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselues to vnhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and aduise of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of vnchastitie) attemptyng all aduentures of peryll, for thattaynyng of their wished lust, vsyng auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for furtheraunce of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull mariage, to cloke the shame of stolne contractes, fmallye, by all meanes of vnhonest lyfe, hastyng to most vnhappye deathe.
Luckily for his poem, however, Brooke does not carry out this didactic programme. Sympathy for the lovers keeps breaking in; and Shakespeare goes much further in enlisting the sympathies of his audience. Old Capulet’s abominable treatment of Juliet has the effect of retrospectively justifying her secret marriage. Although the Friar, if judged by standards of realism, behaves very foolishly, Shakespeare nowhere explicitly condemns him, but even uses him as raisonneur. We are never in danger of supposing that the love of Romeo and Juliet is merely a lust of the blood, partly because Shakespeare juxtaposes it with the bawdy comments of Mercutio and the Nurse. Few English critics have agreed with Masefield’s strange description of Juliet as ‘a deceitful, scheming liar’ and of Romeo as ‘a frantic madman’.4 On the contrary, Shakespeare shows us Romeo ‘behaving with exemplary composure and forbearance, though insulted by a quarrelsome bully in the presence of his friends’.5 We are convinced of Juliet’s integrity and essential purity by her delicate avowal of love in the balcony scene, by her soliloquy when awaiting the arrival of her husband on their wedding night, by her repudiation of the Nurse as ‘ancient damnation’, and by her courage when she drinks the potion.
The character of Mercutio is developed from a single reference by Brooke to
one calde Mercutio.
A courtier that ech where, was highly had in price:
For hee was courteous of his speeche, and pleasaunt of deuise.6
(254–6)
The character in the play, in life as in death, exemplifies the futility of the blood-feud; he acts as a foil to Romeo and as a critic of romantic love; and his death involves Romeo in the act that leads to his banishment. Tybalt, likewise, appears only once in Brooke’s poem as a young man ‘exercisde in feats of armes,/And noblest of the rowte’ (964). In the play he is not noble. He is introduced into several scenes as the most violent of the Capulets – so irrational that even without Mercutio’s death all our sympathies would be with Romeo. The development of the character enabled Shakespeare to emphasize again the futility of the feud, and to give every provocation to Romeo. This was the more necessary, as he had altered the time of the fight, so that it takes place on the day of the wedding, Romeo challenging Tybalt instead of killing him in self-defence.
The other characters are developed from hints given by Brooke. Paris, Capulet, Montague, and the Nurse are not essentially different from the characters in the poem, but they are made much more real and effective. Juliet is younger than in the source; and Romeo’s passion for Rosaline becomes the typical romantic love of the sonneteers for a cruel beauty, instead of the sexual pursuit of a virtuous maid. It makes a more effective contrast with Romeo’s love for Juliet.
It has been shown7 that there are many verbal echoes of Brooke’s poem in Shakespeare’s play. On three occasions the phrasing of the poem is repeated almost word for word.8 Friar Lawrence’s words to Romeo, after he has been sentenced to banishment, for example:
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art…
(III. iii. 109)
are close to Brooke’s line:
Art thou (quoth he) a man: thy shape saith so thou art.
(1353)
Sometimes two phrases in the poem are fused together.9 When Romeus first sees Juliet ‘he swalloweth downe loues sweete impoysonde baite’ (219); and Juliet after the feast exclaims:
What if with friendly speach the traytor lie in wayte?
As oft the poysonde hooke is hid wrapt in the pleasaunt bayte?
(387–8)
The two passages are linked by ‘poison’ and ‘bait’; and the Chorus at the beginning of Act II says that Romeo
to his foe suppos’d he must complain,
And she steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks.
(7–8)
Benvolio’s description of the fight ‘To’t they go like lightning’ was possibly suggested by Brooke’s comparison of the two combatants to ‘thunderboltes, throwne downe out of the skie’ (1031). The scene in which Juliet drinks the potion is closely based on Brooke’s account – her fear of being stifled, her fear of waking too soon, her fear of Tybalt’s corpse. Romeo asks the Apothecary for ‘such soon-speeding gear’, and Brooke’s Apothecary hands Romeus the poison with the words ‘This is the speeding gere’ (2585).
There are many other examples of verbal indebtedness, some of them being in a different context. Brooke’s lovers, on their wedding night, lament its brevity and the ‘hastiness of Phoebus steeds’ (920). Shakespeare’s Juliet, longing for the consummation of her marriage, cries:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds
Towards Phoebus’ lodging; such a waggoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
(III. ii. I-4)
Golding used the epithet ‘fiery-footed’ and speaks of Phaethon as a waggoner; and Shakespeare was apparently reminded of the passage in Ovid, as well as of the lines in Marlowe’s Edward II:10
Gallop apace bright Phoebus through the skie,
And duskie night, in rustie iron carre:
Between you both, shorten the time I pray.
Some of the imagery of the play, particularly that relating to voyages, seems to have been suggested by Brooke, who has many images derived from his experience of seafaring. He speaks of the lodestars,11
the wery pilates marke,
In stormes to gyde to hauen the tossed barke;
an image used by Shakespeare in one of the grandest of his sonnets:
an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his higth be taken.
Brooke, like Shakespeare, speaks of Juliet’s bed as the ‘long desired port’ towards which Romeus’s ‘stearless ship’ (800), his ‘Sea-beaten barke’ is driven. Another long simile describes the efforts made to reach harbour:12
As when the winter flawes with dredfull noyse arise,
And heaue the fomy swelling waues vp to the starry skies,
So that the broosed barke in cruell seas betost,
Despayreth of the happie hau’n, in daunger to be lost:
The pylate bold at helme, cries Mates strike now your sayle:
And turnes her stemme into the waues, that strongly her assayle,
Then driuen harde vpon the bare and wrackfull shore,
In greater daunger to be wract, than he hath been before:
He seeth his ship full right against the rocke to runne,
But yet he doth what ly’th in him the perilous rocke to shunne:
Some times the beaten boate, by cunning gouernment,
The anchors lost, the cables broke, and all the tackle spent:
The roder smitten off, and ouerboord the maste,
Doth win the long desired porte, the stormy daunger past.
(1361–74)
Whiter, with his customary acuteness, pointed out the images relating to voyages in Shakespeare’s play.13 He referred to the scene where the Nurse is hailed by Mercutio as a sail, and Peter as a convoy, and Romeo’s two speeches, just before he meets Juliet for the first time, and just before his suicide. The first of these runs:
I fear, too early; for my mind misgives
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels and expire the term
Of a despised life clos’d in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
But He that hath the steerage of my course
Direct my sail!
(I. iv. 106–13)
Here the sequence of words and images is close to that of the later speech. In both we have stars, bitter(ly), date(less), and death; sail and steerage correspond to pilot and bark; and the legal expressions of term and forfeit correspond to seal and bargain:
Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty…
O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide.
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark.
(V. iii. 92–3, 109–18)
This speech, however, is linked not merely to the earlier one quoted, but also to a sonnet in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, No. 85:
I see the house, my heart thy selfe containe,
Beware full sailes drowne not thy tottring barge:
Least joy, by Nature apt sprites to enlarge,
Thee to thy wracke beyond thy limits straine…
But giue apt seruants their due place, let eyes
See Beautie’s totall summe summ’d in her face:
Let eares heare speech, which wit to wonder ties,
Let breath sucke vp those sweetes, let armes embrace
The globe of weale, lips Loue’s indentures make:
Thou but of all the kingly Tribute take.
In Romeo’s speech and in Sidney’s sonnet we have the same injunctions to eyes, arms, and lips, and in the same order. Shakespeare’s ‘suck’d’, ‘honey’, and ‘breath’ may be compared with Sidney’s ‘breath suck vp those sweetes’; the legal image of sealing a bargain with a kiss is echoed from Sidney’s ‘indentures’; and the image of the weary bark shipwrecked on the rocks is echoed from Sidney’s ‘tottring barge’ and ‘wracke’.14
The same speech was also influenced by the concluding stanzas of Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, as editors have recognized:
When naught respecting death, the last of paines,
Plac’d his pale collours, th’ensigne of his might,
Vpon his new-got spoyle before his right…
Pittifull mouth (quoth he) that liuing gauest
The sweetest comfort that my soule could wish:
O be it lawful now, that dead thou hauest,
Thys sorrowing farewell of a dying kiss.
Ah how me thinks I see death dallying seekes
To entertaine it selfe in loues sweet place:
Decayed Roses of discoloured cheekes,
Doe yet retaine deere notes of former grace:
And ougly death sits faire within her face.
Here we have the idea of the beauty unmarred by death, a reference to Death as a lover, the mention of a farewell kiss to a dead woman, and the mention of the ensign of death, to suggest Romeo’s lines:
Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And Death’s pale flag is not advanced there…
Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
(V. iii. 94–6, 102–5)
Brooke could give Shakespeare little beyond the story and a number of phrases and images; but into his play Shakespeare infused the quintessence of Elizabethan love-poetry. In the last scenes he wrote the finest poetry which had yet been heard on the English stage; it was the first play in which he went beyond Marlowe; and in the characters of Mercutio and the Nurse he displayed for the first time his unequalled power for the dramatic presentation of character.15