Romeo & Juliet
Romeo & Juliet
Summary:
Romeo and Juliet, the two children of warring noble houses the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively, meet by chance at a ball and fall madly in love with each other. They rush off to the altar and are secretly married, but their families prevent them from embracing a happy life together. Matters are further complicated when the feud erupts into open combat in the streets, and Romeo kills one of Juliet’s cousins. He is banished, and Juliet meanwhile is betrothed to the local count. Juliet devises a scheme to fake her own death to escape this new marriage, but deceives Romeo as well, and he returns and kills himself at her grave to be with his love again. Juliet awakens to the dead body of her lover and, overcome with grief, kills herself as well. The lovers are reunited in death, and their families are moved by grief to end their feud.
What It’s About:
True love conquers all obstacles.
This is the big one - even if you’re completely unfamiliar with the extended works of William Shakespeare, and have no theatrical knowledge whatsoever, you’ve heard of Romeo & Juliet. It is an absolute fixture on high school reading lists, and on the off chance you somehow skipped it (or, more realistically, skimmed a summary before taking a quiz), the play itself has so permeated the English-speaking collective consciousness that you’re probably familiar with the plot and themes just by osmosis. Young lovers, warring families, star-crossed romance, tragic ending. At this point, we all know the beats.
Perhaps because of that, R&J is the play in Shakespeare’s canon most subject to interpretation adaptation, and general thematic malleability. Everyone knows the work, and so everyone has an opinion on how it should be interpreted beyond the textual reading. The most common ‘contrarian’ interpretation is that the play isn’t really about romance - it’s about the dangers of young, passionate love and the titular’s characters’ foolhardy nature in rushing into something so quickly. This idea tends to play up Romeo and Juliet’s young age, and paints both as newcomers to romance who, overcome by their hormonal teenage natures, rush off to be married the very day after meeting each other. This is supported by their actions throughout the play as well - both show a startling lack of patience, and are convinced (in very teenage fashion) that every minor inconvenience that stimes their wishes is the end of the world.
Beyond that, there’s a whole host of theories and scholarly opinions on the theme of the play; it’s about the impossibility of language to transcend signifying and reach metaphysical ideals, about the struggle to realize individual identity distinct from hostile societal pressure, about inherent and insurmountable dichotomies of gender. A personal favorite of mine is that the play is a ‘parody’ of Shakespearean romances - that it has all the classical trappings of a romantic comedy, with young lovers meeting at a revel, multiple betrothals, and even a bumbling friar and a bawdry nurse. Even the text feels comedic, rife as it is with sexual innuendo and dirty jokes. However, the play takes a dark turn with the death of Mercutio (himself the source of a great deal of comedy) and spirals into tragedy from there, showing the darker side of tropes like mistaken identity and miscommunications between lovers as it does so.
All this is to say that because of its near-omnipresence, Romeo & Juliet may be one of the most discussed and debated pieces of fiction. However, all these various and sundry interpretations define themselves in opposition to that which is textual. This is not to say that those interpretations are wrong or invalid, but rather that to understand them, and understand the point they are trying to make, you still need to grasp the play at its most baseline level and move forward from there. And at its core, R&J is a story about the power of true love to transcend barriers and overcome obstacles. Feuding families, incompetent friends, bloodshed, violence and death all stand in Romeo and Juliet’s way, but in the end their families come together, and they themselves are united in the stars - love triumphing over all.
If This Were A Movie:
It’s tempting to put this into the category of Oscar-bait drama and be done with it - that’s certainly how the play has come to be seen by modern readers. It has a deeply tragic story that provides solid fare for everyone to show their chops, and both Romeo and Juliet, though by necessity roles for younger actors, get solid death scenes and speeches that lend themselves very well to 30-second award show clips.
However, the purpose of this exercise is not necessarily to view the play in light of the modern interpretation, but rather how it should be viewed based on the text, and through that lens this play trends much more towards a tragicomedy than it does towards a pure drama. As mentioned above, this play is dense with wit and wordplay, a lot of it specifically focused on making increasingly vulgar sex jokes; Mercutio, for his part, is basically a walking double entendre. To ignore all that and turn this play into a dour tragedy is to ignore one of the very elements that has given it such staying power through the years.
The Line From The Play That You Know:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet - 2.1.85-86
The famous, often misquoted line - ‘a rose by another name would still smell so sweet.’ Delivered by Juliet as part of the justifiably famous and quotable balcony scene as she pines for her new love Romeo, and bemoans the fact that he is what he is - a Montague. No part of Romeo himself is hateful to her, and it is just the simple accident of his birth that has set the two of them against each other. Given the sheer volume of wordplay in R&J, it makes sense that much is made of the power of words; that they have the power to both transcend and limit the things they describe.
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
Which, as they kiss, consume. - 2.5.9-11
Though by no means as famous, this line is certainly more in vogue lately thanks to HBO’s Westworld - though I expect quite a few people will be surprised to learn that this phrase comes from R&J. Spoken by the friar as he counsels Romeo on how to deal with his new, passionate love, he rightly point out that such fierce passions as move people to marry within 24 hours of meeting often end just as quickly, burning themselves out with the very fire that made them so attractive. Of course, the line is also steeped in irony considering the very violent ends that await both Romeo and Juliet. In general, the play goes extremely hard in foreshadowing the lovers’ deaths - nearly every scene includes some form of dramatic irony speaking to their impending doom.
The Line You Should Know:
Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. - Prologue.1.1-4
The play opens with a chorus, who lays out the entirety of the plot in a sonnet. Beyond giving us an overview of the events to come, this also sets expectations of the readers and listeners as to the language that will be used in the play. As you no doubt learned in high school English, this is a Shakespearean sonnet - fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter, with an ABAB rhyming scheme through the first twelve lines, and ending on a rhyming AA couplet. Iambic means the stress on the syllables alternates between short and long, which gives the entire thing a sense of driving motion. Much of Shakespeare is written in iambic verse, but none follows the structure quite so diligently as this prologue. Given the intense poetic language to follow, it serves as a good warning of what you are getting into.
Notable Adaptation:
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is absurd in the way that all his films tend to be; opulent, lavishly costumed, and dripping in excess. It is also conspicuously and brilliantly faithful to the text, only updating the setting to a thinly veiled Los Angeles and positioning the Montagues and Capulets as rival gangs. As an aside, this is one of the most commonly chosen setting updates for R&J (see also: West Side Story) - in some ways it’s become a trope unto itself, which is the kind of delightful meta-context you get when a play well and truly has permeated the English-speaking consciousness.
Brilliantly (and I can’t take credit for making this observation as I saw it pointed out in the tweet above), rather than rewrite the dialogue to account for the fact that none of the characters are using daggers or swords, all the firearms in the movie just have ‘dagger,’ ‘rapier,’ or ‘broadsword’ written on them. It’s an extremely literal-minded approach to adaptation. Rather than try to reconcile the irregularities between Shakespeare and the modern day, Luhrmann embraces them and folds them into his characteristically over-the-top style, and it all simply works.
General Notes:
I want to make one thing perfectly clear; I think Shakespeare absolutely must be taught in English classes; in many ways it’s foundational to the language. On top of that, I think R&J should be taught in those classes as well. Beyond the value in making sure generations are familiar with one of the most referenced works in the English-speaking canon, it is an interesting, deep, and poetic play that not only develops a universal theme in an interesting way, but also presents a canvas on which students can build their own thoughts, ideas and arguments. All that is a caveat to this; Romeo & Juliet is just about the worst play you can read as an introduction to Shakespeare, and I’d hazard a guess that around half the people that claim to dislike the Bard’s work do so because they had to start off on this play.
The problem with Romeo & Juliet is that it is incredibly dense. It’s often said that Shakespeare’s plays may as well be written in a foreign language. I think that’s an overstatement, but the sentiment is correct; beyond building a new vocabulary and learning the odd constraints of meter versus blank verse, the fact of the matter is you’re reading something 400 years old - language has evolved in that time (in some cases, thanks to Shakespeare). That is an incredibly challenging jumping-off point for a younger reader, and the problem is exacerbated in R&J because more than any work we’ve looked at so far this play absolutely loves to play with language. It is full to bursting with puns, double-meanings and jokes, and moreover its full of those things written for an audience four centuries ago. Is it any wonder then, that the natural poetry of the language or the humor in Mercutio’s speeches is lost when a reader spends most of their time checking the footnotes to try to figure out what he just said? Compare this to plays like Much Ado About Nothing or even Macbeth and you’ll find that the language, while still challenging and archaic at points, is much more straightforward and plain-spoken.
I’m not the first person to notice this - in fact one of my high school English teachers recommended to our entire class that we read each scene in R&J twice - once looking at the annotations to discern the meaning of the lines, and a second time ignoring them, just to hear the poetry and rhythm of the language. It’s a good idea, but frankly I think it was ambitious to assume a room full of 15 year olds was going to read the play once, let alone twice. And I understand the impulse to give young people the big Shakespeare straight up - R&J has its position in the canon for a reason, and presents a good opportunity to teach meter, verse, and iambic pentameter, which are valuable things when you’re working on a compressed curriculum. All I can say is that perhaps it would be best to ease students into this play, and let them learn to drive on the family car before putting them behind the wheel of the Shakespearean equivalent of a souped-up up Ferrari.
A Monologue Dialogue For the Road
Eschewing the traditional monologue for Romeo and Juliet’s first shared dialogue, which takes the form of a shared sonnet and captures perfectly the way that form, meter and verse can elevate language and capture the romantic sparks flying between the two.
Romeo:
If I profane with my unworthy hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, did ready stand
To smooth the rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet:
Good pilgrim you do wrong your hands too much
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims hands do touch
And palm to palm is holy palmers kiss.
Romeo:
Have saints not lips, and holy palmers too?
Juliet:
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo:
Oh then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet:
Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.
Romeo:
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. - 1.4.204-218