There are three hierarchies at war in The Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet:
- The family
- The church
- The state
At the play’s end, the families are ruined. The Montagues and Capulets have no more heirs.
The church, too, has been embarrassed. Friar Laurence has exacerbated the situation with his poison plot. He declares:
[I]f aught in this
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life
Be sacrificed, some hour before his time,
Unto the rigour of severest law.
The Prince responds, “We still have known thee for a holy man,” but it seems clear that he is being merciful. There’s no “if.” The Friar’s fault has led to three additional deaths.
That leaves the Prince, whose lines end the play.
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and Romeo.
The sun, of course, is a symbol of leadership. In this play, the Prince has been the sun who has not sufficiently shown his head. One reason the families and church have acted rashly is because the state has been lax. At best, the Prince has tried to end the violence not by punishment but through political maneuvering. It is his kinsman who will potentially marry into the Capulet family.
These final lines hint at the Prince’s main form of authority: the right to punish wrongdoing. But who exactly will receive punishment? The Friar who he just said has a holy reputation? The heads of the families, who he has just witnessed make peace? The poor Apothecary? The nurse? Peter? There aren’t a lot of options.
Arthur Brook’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet has the Prince hand out these punishments.
- The nurse is banished
- The apothecary is hanged
- Peter is exonerated
- The Friar is exonerated but chooses to live a cloistered life thereafter
In Shakespeare’s play, the Friar says he will undergo “the rigour of severest law” should it be necessary.
That law’s avatar is the Prince. He is anything but severe. He is ineffectual. Shakespeare has weakened the Prince from his source. The family and church are to blame for this tragedy. So too is the state.
Experiments in Criticism 