Experiments in Criticism

In the poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (Shakespeare’s chief source for the play), Arthur Brooke argues that Romeo and Juliet are villains. They are guilty of

thralling themselves to unhonest desire; neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends; conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity; attempting all adventures of peril for th’ attaining of their wished lust; using auricular confession the key of whoredom and treason, for furtherance of their purpose; abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage to cloak the shame of stolen contracts; finally by all means of unhonest life hasting to most unhappy death. 

Let us know how you feel, Arthur!

Of particular importance for my investigation of the play is the sentence “neglecting the authority…of parents and friends.” Shakespeare’s adaptation of Brooke leaves more room for a sympathetic reading of Romeo and Juliet by showing that their disordered affections are the product of their disordered society.

Brooke’s argument condemns the Friar, and Shakespeare too, I think, condemns the Friar, or at least finds him a representative of an ineffective church. The fact that the Friar is Catholic is not incidental. A conspicuous doctrine of Catholicism is that men in holy orders do not marry. Where, then, can a minister present a model healthy romantic love? Romeo and Juliet only see family as a means of exerting earthly power. They react by imbuing their love with spiritual authority. The results are devastating.

Seven insights, then, on this final act of the play…

Continue reading “Romeo & Juliet: Act 5 Observations”

As the turning point in the play, Act 4 gives us three different authorities, all asserting their power. The power they invoke is, analogically, the same as the playwright’s.

Each authority wants to write the script for the rest of the play’s action.

Shakespeare contrasts the desire for agency with the repeated theme of fate. Juliet tells Paris, “What must be shall be.” The Friar agrees, and he’s supposed to be the voice of spiritual reason! The conflict, then, is between two transcendent sources for visible authority: a personal God or impersonal fate. The visible rulers in this act are as follows.

1. Paris – the fiancée. He talks to Juliet as though they are already married: “my lady and my wife!” He asserts the rights a husband has over a wife by taking a kiss and scolding her for ruining her face with tears, which he calls “mine.” In short, Paris is this act’s substitute Romeo. He wants to fold Juliet into a new family with himself as the husband and visible authority.
2. The Friar – the churchman. Juliet comes to the Friar ostensibly for confession. This is a rightful part of The Friar’s authority. Neither a husband, father nor county Prince can hear confessions and forgive sins. The danger comes when the Friar begins plotting something for Romeo and Juliet far outside the bounds of the church’s authority. He sides with the lovers, two young people who have already turned idolatrous in their passion. He goes against the Prince, the Prince’s kinsman (Paris), and the Capulets and Montagues. Consequently, the Friar must lie to the Capulets and Montagues while serving as priest following Juliet’s supposed death. He spins a yarn to them that “the heavens” have taken Juliet as a punishment for “some ill.” The Friar baptizes his actions with rhetoric that isn’t particularly Christian. He warns, “Move them [the heavens] no more by crossing their high will.” The Friar uses spiritual judgment to enforce his authority because the threat of negative sanctions from the civil government has proven incapable of curbing familial power.
3. Capulet – the father. We never see Capulet happier than when Juliet tells him, “Henceforward I am ever ruled by you.” Of course, she’s lying to his face, and in the next scene, she takes the poison that makes her appear dead. Capulet asserted authority over Tybalt in Act 1 and over Juliet in Act 3. Both assertions were rhetorical bluster. Neither accomplished actual submission. Here, he gets concession, but it’s false. If the family is an authority, it no longer exerts influence through extended kinship. The power of a husband trumps the control of a father.

It will take more than the Friar’s Machiavellian scheming to fix the broken social hierarchy.

1. For all of Romeo’s talk, he has difficulty living in a new way as a result of Juliet’s love. Having watched his friend Mercutio die at Tybalt’s hand, Romeo says, “O Sweet Juliet, / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valor’s steel.” This is some next-level excuse making: something akin to Adam’s hatchet job on Eve in the garden of Eden. Romeo has been nothing but passive for the entire play. He hasn’t played an active role in the feud. It’s unclear how Juliet is to blame for his blundering attempt at making peace with Tybalt. At least he’s now participating in the life of the community instead of wholly removing himself from it. Juliet’s effects, such as they are, point Romeo in the right direction, not the wrong one. He gets this wrong.
2. Since the prologue’s reference to “fatal loins” and “star-crossed lovers”, the play HAS had a deterministic vibe. The play’s plot has already been decided. What will be will be. Thus, when Romeo kills Tybalt, he cries out, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” He sees himself subservient to an impersonal force that controls his actions.
3. According to Benvolio, Romeo should be worrying about the Prince, not Fortune. It is the Prince’s judgment that that will “doom” Romeo to “death.” The first scene of this act ends with the Prince renouncing mercy: “I will be deaf to pleading and excuses; / Nor tears nor prayers shall purchase out abuses.” The Prince talks a good game, but the end of the play testifies to his ineffectiveness at carrying out his threats.
4. Juliet continues to idolize Romeo. After hearing about Tybalt’s death at Romeo’s hands and the Nurse’s curses on Romeo, Juliet says, “Upon [Romeo’s] brow shame is ashamed to sit. / For ’tis a throne where honor may be crowned / Sole monarch of the universal earth.” This is another statement of hierarchy. For her, Romeo is the ultimate earthly authority.
5. For all his desires to escape the mores of Verona, Romeo thinks even less of the rest of Italy. He tells the Friar that banishment his a fate worse than death: “There is no world without Verona walls, / But purgatory, torture, hell itself.” Why? “Heaven is here, / where Juliet lives.” He has refigured the world into heaven and hell through the power of his love.
6. The Friar urges Romeo to see his banishment as grace, not law. The law demands Romeo’s death. The Prince has shown grace in merely banishing him. This is interesting because in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, “grace” and “justice” are joined together in the following prayer: “That it may please thee to blesse and keepe the Magistrate, geuing them grace to execute Justice.” The Prince’s grace here has not executed strict justice on Romeo. Does this connection imply the Prince isn’t doing his job, or is the Friar right to commend the Prince’s actions to Romeo?
7. The Friar too goes after Romeo’s manhood when Romeo threatens suicide. “Art thou a man?” he cries. “Unseemly woman in a seeming man!” This question of appropriate action and gender is also connected with hierarchy.
8. It’s Juliet’s turn now to invoke Fortune and the impressions of an “ill-devining soul!” In what sense is the fate of this play orthodox Christian teaching about God’s sovereignty, and in what sense are the invocations of fate a shadow doctrine of an impersonal force that rules the world? The “fate” and “fortune” governing the play are analogous to the romantic love that imitates but cannot replace the doctrine of love’s true mystery which points to Christ and the church. There is a secret providence at work in the world. It is not mere fortune. Romantic love is an amazing mystery. It is not an end in and of itself, however.
9. The act ends with competing lords. Juliet has sworn allegiance to Romeo. Capulet demands subservience to him: Juliet will marry who he tells her to marry. The consequences for disobedience? The same as Romeo’s: banishment. “Get thee to church a Thursday / Or never after look me in the face.”

The act is thus filled with competing authorities: the Prince, the church, and the family (with at least three groups duking it out in this particular institution). An authority’s ultimate power rests in judgment: who can levy the greatest punishment? The Prince and family threaten banishment. The power of heaven and hell, typically the domain of the church, only get invoked by Romeo to describe life without Juliet.

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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.
4. 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?
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

1. The play begins with representatives of the two families that we never see again. Sampson and Gregory manifest the power of hierarchy: “The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.” This is the way authority works. Everyone has to serve somebody.
2. That familial hierarchy must be reconciled with other authorities, namely the law. Sampson and Gregory ask, “Is the law on our side?” This world contains competing hierarchies.
3. The punishment for transgressing those hierarchies is death: symbolically or literally. “If ever you disturb our streets again,” the Prince says, “Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.”
4. Part of Romeo’s problem is his unhealthy devotion to love. He replicates the oaths of covenantal death that mark the hierarchies of the family and state: “She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow / Do I live dead that live to tell it now.”
5. Romeo uses spiritual language to describe his devotion: “the devout religion of mine eye.” There is a competing third institution to the family and state: the church. Romeo sees romantic love as that spiritual institution’s embodiment.
6. Mercutio and the Nurse voice another view of love, though one that is no less dependent on hierarchy. For them, love and sex are physically embodiments of authority. The Nurse talks about women lying on their backs and having children as a result of marriage. Mercutio talks about sex from a male point of view as a way of asserting power and gaining pleasure. So this is this first act’s key tension: is romantic love part of the familial hierarchy, the spiritual hierarchy, or some kind of general societal hierarchy (i.e. men over women)?
7. We see the covenantal/symbolic side of familial death in Capulet’s conversation with Tybalt. Capulet will exile Tybalt if the young man questions his superior’s authority.
8. Romeo and Juliet exchange a sonnet in their first dialogue that is overloaded with religious imagery. If much of Act 1 reveals a world marked by sin, then Romeo believes romantic love has the ability to take that sin away.

There are three hierarchies at war in The Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet:

1. The family
2. The church
3. 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.

Continue reading “The Prince and the Play”

I started a new play this week: The Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet. Here’s my initial outline for the Covenantal Shakespeare e-course.

PLOT
1. The Montagues and Capulets are in a blood feud that has engulfed Verona.
2. In the middle of this feud, the respective heirs of each family–Romeo and Juliet–meet, fall in love, and secretly marry.
3. In a brawl, Romeo avenges his friend’s death by killing Juliet’s kinsman, Tybalt.
4. Romeo is banished from Verona and Juliet arranged to marry a local prince; to avoid the marriage, Juliet takes a poison that makes her appear dead.
5. Romeo comes back upon hearing of Juliet’s death, kills Juliet’s arranged fiancée, then commits suicide beside her body; Juliet awakens, finds Romeo dead, and commits suicide too. The dead youth are enough to get Montague and Capulet to end their feud.

THEME
The family and church battle against the state for the rights to be the dominant visible form of authority in the city. The play reveals that idolatrous love is just as tragic as idolatrous state.

Continue reading “Romeo & Juliet: A Covenantal Outline”