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Romeo and Juliet for Grownups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2017

Mera J. Flaumenhaft
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Abstract

Romeo and Juliet is often the first play by Shakespeare that students and playgoers encounter. For many it remains the paradigmatic depiction of pure and passionate love, ruined by a meaningless feud and unsympathetic opponents. Scholarly interpretations often encourage this view. This article shows that the play is more complicated—and more interesting. Although the lovers and their passion are noble and beautiful, or precisely because they are pitched at so high a level, they cannot endure and mature as viable adults in a healthy community. Verona itself is characterized as stunted: in its civic arrangements, relations among and within families, incentives for adolescents to grow up, and in the inadequate guidance of spiritual institutions. The article explores the relation between the private passion of young love and the political circumstances which nourish or destroy it. It aims to deepen the responses of audiences that love the play, its memorable lovers, and love itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 79 , Issue 4: Dennis WM Moran: In Appreciation and Gratitude , Fall 2017 , pp. 545 - 563
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2017 

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References

1 All textual references are to Romeo and Juliet, ed. Weis, René, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen Drama, 2012)Google Scholar.

2 In thinking about feuds, revenge, and political organization, I have found useful the following: Miller, William Ian, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Jeanne L. Schroeder, book review of The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals about the Future of Individual Freedom, by Mark S. Weiner (Faculty Research Paper No. 399, Cardozo Law, June 2013). The secondary literature on Romeo and Juliet is vast and interesting and I have learned much from it. I mention here three particularly relevant discussions: Kahn, Coppélia, “Coming of Age in Verona,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Ruth, Carolyn Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 171–93Google Scholar. Bloom, Allan, “Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5–28 Google Scholar, so well appreciates what rightly moves most people about the young lovers, while recognizing why they are socially and politically unviable. Jensen, Pamela, “Love, Honor, and Community in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet ,” in Shakespeare and the Body Politic, ed. Dobsky, Bernard J. and Gish, Dustin (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 95–116 Google Scholar, is rightly interested in the politics of Shakespeare's Verona. Her gateway (“nod”) is largely the thought of Machiavelli, who wrote both treatises on politics and plays about love. For limitations of this approach, see note 10 below.

3 I do not follow Bloom's more positive reading of Mercutio.

4 Romeo and Juliet, dir. Alvin Rakoff, BBC Television, 1978.

5 Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) was Shakespeare's main source. All references to this work are to Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Bullough, Geoffrey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 1:284–367 Google Scholar. There were earlier Italian versions of the story by Luigi da Porto and Matteo Bandello. Dante mentions the feuding Montagues and Capulets in Purgatorio (6.106).

6 Othello, 1.3.284–85, Duke to Brabantio, for example.

7 Arden edition, 129n72.1.

8 In a thoughtful discussion of the reasons for reading great literature, Robert Heilman describes a similar “growing up” as we are both “joyfully at one with Falstaff” and “at the same time… reject him… . To place Falstaff should be a step in growing up.” Literature is a “maturer of humanity”; it “ripens” us to live good lives as individuals and as members of political, especially democratic, societies (“Literature and Growing Up,” in The Ghost on the Ramparts and Other Essays in the Humanities [Athens: University of Georgia, 1973], 19–31 Google Scholar). On the Nurse, see Everett, Barbara, “ Romeo and Juliet: The Nurse's Story,” Critical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1972): 129–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Webster's New World College Dictionary, 5th ed., s.v. “wean.”

10 See Scruton, Roger, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (New York: Free Press, 1986), 169–73Google Scholar, on “Tristanism” and on Dante's Francesca. Jensen, in her “political” reading of Shakespeare, describes the lovers’ “impetuosity,” lack of friends, and affinity for dark night, but does not explore fully the nature of the elevated eros that Bloom and I, and so many readers, find in Shakespeare's play. She says Greek plays are all tragic, and that Machiavelli's Mandragola has a comic ending that facilitates desire. Shakespeare is in between. But in Mandragola, we happily accept debased human desire. Romeo and Juliet is inherently tragic; there can be no happy outcome for their kind of love, even with a prudent Prince, smarter Friar, and well-ordered community of young and old. The passion of Romeo and Juliet is intensified by their situation but is, in its pure and elevated form, in tension with viable households and communities, that is, with life. In As You Like It, Shakespeare's paradigm comedy of love, the attractive lovers will mature into viable marriage in a reordered community of couples; love will inform human life by night and by day, and complete human nature, rather than undermine it. Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra can only end tragically: the transcendent and beautiful human loves they depict cannot be assimilated in functioning communities in time.

11 See Orlando in As You Like It, for example.

12 Arden edition, 169n42.

13 Lois Leveen, “Romeo and Juliet Has No Balcony,” The Atlantic, October 28, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/romeo-and-juliets-balcony-scene-doesnt-exist/381969/. The “balcony scene” in the Oxford copy of the play at the Bodleian Library is the most smudged and worn, apparently a favorite passage of the young male scholars who made a sort of “pilgrimage” there.

14 Arden edition, 247n4.