My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
The play starts with a sonnet followed by the whole “bite your thumb” confrontation. It’s like the language is reflecting the action on multiple levels. R&J is about the generation gap. Shakespeare would go on to address this again and again. Look at Hamlet. Polonious is the perfect example of an out-of-touch silly old guy, unprepared for the moral and ethical thoughtfulness of the younger generation. It’s also there in King Lear, of course, and the Henry IV plays, where Prince Hal, youthful and irresponsible, pals around with Falstaff, getting a taste of “real” life. As You Like It, too – rigid parents lay down the law and their rebellious daughter puts on men’s clothes and flees into the woods. Midsummer predates As You Like It, but it’s the same deal: Daughter, marry the man you don’t love or you will be put to death. In Romeo & Juliet, we have the square elders and the rambunctious youth. The “form” of life (which Juliet references) vs. the actuality of life. Rules vs. freedom. (also Venus vs. Mars … pretty important to how things play out. And nightingale vs. lark: which is also symbolic of night vs. morning.)
Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy, and it shows the deterioration of the old guard’s rules, their certainty of how the world should operate. In keeping with this, the play starts with sonnet, and sonnets have very specific forms and rules in terms of syllabels, length, rhyme scheme. You can’t just make up your own sonnet rules! Heaven forbid. But: “bite your thumb” nips at the sonnet’s heels, in all its slang and confrontation. The youth live in a world of their own, completely divorced from parental control or even parental awareness (it’s like Rebel Without a Cause: clueless parents, complicated tormented kids dealing with huge issues with no guidance OR role models). The kids – and they really are kids – break free of the conformity imposed on them by their society. They obviously pay a price for this rebellion – I mean, they all die – but the final scene – where the dads, who are much to blame for perpetuating the stupid feud, compete on building golden statues dedicated to their dead children – shows that the parents are still as uncomprehending as ever.
Most of the play happens at night. Day is to be gotten through, preferably as quickly as possible. Remember that plays in Shakespeare’s time were done in the open-air and in the afternoon. There weren’t even candles for footlights as came two centuries later. If you are going to place a play at night, then “night” has to be in the language. You can’t rely on effects. This is why Shakespeare includes language like “O night” to clue the audience in, or, whatever, “Hand me your torch, I can’t fucking see”. Whatever is happening atmospherically has to be spoken out loud. Romeo & Juliet is an extreme example of this (although it doesn’t hold a candle to the shimmering night scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the whole play takes place at night, and the language is drenched in references to the moon, the silvery light, the dewdrops – the atmosphere is so thick you can SEE it.) Midsummer and R&J were written relatively close together and the plays have a lot in common. The Pyramus and Thisbe play put on by the troupe in the final scene of Midsummer is basically the Romeo & Juliet story.
As one of his most famous – and most performed plays – there’s a danger in taking it for granted. It was really worth it to go back and read it again, to not just assume I remember it. It’s so intense. The whole “star-cross’d” thing is pretty heavily laid out, and I feel like this is something Shakespeare moved away from as he got more sophisticated in plot- and world-building. Where people make bad choices and therefore they “fall”, it’s not that the stars are crossed and tragedy is your fate. Here, events conspire against these two kids from the start. There’s the feud, first of all. And then there are the three totally incompetent “advisers” and confidantes of R&J: Friar Lawrence, Mercutio and the Nurse. Mercutio and the Nurse are scene-stealers but they give bad advice, they are too cynical about love, and don’t really understand the stakes – and the Nurse actually betrays Juliet (Mercutio dies before a betrayal). Friar Lawrence infuriates me because the whole thing could have been avoided if he didn’t run out of the tomb because he “heard something”. After all THAT, you get spooked and aren’t there to tell Juliet what’s going on?
But what we have here is pure undistilled romance, with the most beautiful passionate erotic language Shakespeare ever used up to this point. He really understood first love and first sexual feelings. The play VIBRATES with it. It’s powerful because in a world of rules, Romeo and Juliet choose each other, and they do so at first sight. They’re toast from the moment they lay eyes on each other. The play is a frank acknowledgement of the power of chemistry. Even with all the star-cross’d stuff it’s very human and if not universal then … almost universal. Everyone remembers a high school crush. Where it feels like you’re swooning on a balcony every time he walks by you in the hallway.
It’s also interesting to just keep in mind that on the Elizabethan stage, men – and boys – played all the parts. Essentially, it was drag. Meaning: we perform our gender, whether or not we choose to do so or not. Society tells us how to do that (which we clearly see in R&J). All of it is a performance. Those double entendres about womanhood and maidenhead and all the rest sounds very different when spoken by a 14-year-old boy.
Romeo and Juliet was written (probably) in the 1590s. And it still plays like a bat out of hell. Amazing.
