Romeo compares Juliet to the sun: his ruler. The moon, with its connotations of virginity and chastity, is cast away. Her eyes are “two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,” and they exert a reality-bending effect: they fool the birds into thinking that night is day.
Juliet expresses an unusual form of the Genesis 2 verse, “a man shall leave his father and mother,” when she requests that Romeo “deny thy father and refuse thy name.”
Romeo uses spiritual language to describe love’s transformative power. It’s a new sacrament. “Call me but love,” he says, “and I’ll be new baptized.” He means here that he’ll have a new name like the one that the sacrament of baptism typically included for the new Christian, but he’s also talking about love as a sacrament equivalent in power to baptism.
Here is the play’s crux. If we agree with critics like Harold Bloom that Juliet demonstrates a maturity beyond Romeo’s, then what do we make of her declaration that Romeo’s “gracious self” is “the god of my idolatry”? That is, if Juliet is the one with the most fully formed ideal of love, is that kind of statement a good thing?
The next time Juliet articulates something about love’s divinity, she’s the one showing it. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” she declares. “The more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” This is beautiful poetry, but its sentiment is the troubling obverse of her calling Romeo her god. She’s the one who is the god now. In the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, the “infinite” is a quality of God (his “infinite love” and “infinite goodness and mercy” are declared repeatedly). Now this hints at the scandal of Romeo and Juliet’s love: that instead of pointing to God’s love, their love has become their god.
The friar’s speech on “grace and rude will” at the beginning of Scene 3 deserves attention. He says that everything on earth contains “some special good.” He associates that good with “powerful grace.” The beauty and grace of intimate human love is a blessing. Mercutio’s bawdy reduction of love to sex is one way of making that grace into rudeness. So too is Romeo’s sterile unrequited affection for the ghostly Rosaline. But also problematic is the elevation of this grace into a god. That is, the answer to Mercutio and pre-Juliet Romeo is not the divinization of romantic love. It is seeing in romantic love’s grace the love of its giver, God himself.
Mercutio and the Nurse again act as counterweights to the “god of my idolatry” rhetoric. Mercutio’s language is as ribald as ever. He doesn’t want Romeo to commit to a woman. He doesn’t consider that authentic. He just wants Romeo to stop overdramatizing his emotions. The Nurse supports marriage as far as it goes, but for her it mainly means a chance for sex: “But you shall bear the burden soon at night,” she tells Juliet.
The last words of the act come from the Friar: “[Y]ou shall not stay alone / Till Holy Church incorporate two in one.” The Friar’s declaration evokes the description of marriage from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer where we read that this mystery of metaphysical union speaks of “Christ and of the Congregation.” The covenant between a husband and wife symbolically points us to Christ. If that pointing is happening here, I can’t see it right now. Part of what’s happened in this scene is that Romeo and Juliet themselves have become divinized: their love is a substitute process of canonization.
Experiments in Criticism 