SOURCE: "Thinking in Romeo and Juliet," in The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Culture, Verso, 1991, pp. 231-53.

[In the following essay first presented in 1985 at a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, Rustin argues that the action of Romeo and Juliet is shaped by emotional forces, particularly that of romantic sexual love, on which the characters fail to consciously reflect.]

In a selective approach to [Romeo and Juliet], I seek to show how 'thinking' (that is, the capacity or incapacity to reflect on the forces unleashed by overwhelming emotions) is a central issue, perhaps the central issue. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare explores what happens when 'modern' emotions (in this case of romantic sexual love) are experienced and seek expression in a familial and social context which is largely unprepared for them. The tragedy shows almost all its participants being carried away by feelings they cannot think about—about which, indeed, they choose not to think, preferring precipitate action instead. Or, faced with the possibility of confronting and acting upon the truth, other participants choose the apparently safer path of deception and lies. Since the thunderstorms of adolescence (and the envies, jealousies and struggles for control which they evoke in older adults) remain disturbing in our own society, Romeo and Juliet remains almost as evocative as it ever was, since Shakespeare understood and gave shape to this particular moment of the life cycle at the point when it was first possible to experience it in its modern form. It is not a tragedy of evil or bad intentions: nearly everyone—parents, children, Friar, Nurse—means well; this is one reason why the play remains one of the best-liked and most-often-performed in the canon. Those on the stage seem to have feelings little different from those which members of the audience are liable to experience in the corresponding adolescent or adult roles, when faced with the impact of similar emotions, events, and social pressures.

Romeo and Juliet explores the historical conjuncture of two opposed conditions. On the one hand, the emergence of individuals with identities to some extent separate from those prescribed for them by family and social roles, and capable of intense and personal choices of love-objects. On the other hand, the persistence of a social code and structure of patriarchy in which fathers controlled the lives and especially the marriage choices of their children, particularly of their daughters. The play emerges at a historical transition point, in which both the emergent romantic individualist conception of sexual love of modern times and the authoritarian structures of patriarchal authority could be seen to exercise great power over the lives of representative dramatic figures.¹ Both these structures are represented in Romeo and Juliet as fragile and unstable; hence the tragic outcome of the play. Patriarchical authority, at the level of both state and family, is weak, because of the feud of the two families and the uncertain authority of the Duke of Verona. The individual passions and desires of the son and daughter of the two leading families are shown as having some meaning and weight for their respective parents, but uncertainly so. Ultimately, family interest and authority are going to count for more, especially when these are both placed under severe external pressure.

The account of the play which follows attempts to show how these conflicting forces are represented. The primary interest of the account is not, as with earlier kinds of psychoanalytic writing, in the 'diagnosis' of the characters' inner states of mind, but rather in the way the action is shaped by emotional forces which are only fitfully and incompletely brought to consciousness. The title of this chapter arises from the Bion-influenced concern of current Kleinian psychoanalysis with thinking, but its contention is that Romeo and Juliet dramatizes a failure of thinking, of a still resonant kind.

What first strikes one in thinking about this play is how rushed and hectic it is. The action takes place within five days, and our attention is often drawn to what day, or time of the day or night, it is. On the first day, a Saturday, Romeo is in love with Rosaline, and his sadness and oppressed spirits are worrying his friends and his parents. 'What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?' Benvolio asks him. But in the evening he is taken off to a party at the Capulets' house, and there he sees Juliet and falls instantly in love with her. The balcony scene takes place later that night. On the second day he secretly marries her, with the help of the Nurse and the Friar. But later, in the afternoon, there is an incident in which Tybalt kills Mercutio and is in turn killed minutes later (as it is shown on the stage) by Romeo. Romeo is then banished by the Prince, and after his night with Juliet he flees to nearby Mantua. On the third day (Monday) Juliet's father Capulet tells her that she must marry Paris, a kinsman of the Prince, only three days later, on Thursday. But when, on the next day (Tuesday), she pretends to consent to this, after visiting the Friar supposedly to obtain absolution for her earlier disobedience to her father, Capulet brings the wedding forward one day, to 'tomorrow', despite Lady Capulet's doubts. On Tuesday night, on the eve of her obligatory wedding (she is of course already secretly married to Romeo), she takes a potion intended to simulate her death, the plan being that Romeo will come and help her to escape when she awakes in the family tomb. Just to conclude the story, on Thursday morning in Mantua Romeo receives the false news that Juliet is dead. His response is swift action:

ROMEO: … get me ink and paper,
And hire post-horses, I will hence tonight.
                                         (V, i)²

When he goes to buy poison for his own death, he finds that the apothecary's shop is shut for a holiday, as shops often are when you need them in a hurry, and he has to knock him up. In the graveyard, on his way to die with Juliet, he meets Paris, her suitor, and 'is provoked', as he says, to kill him. He has failed to take in, on the journey, what his man has told him of Paris:

ROMEO: What said my man, when my betossèd
  soul
Did not attend him as we rode? I think
He told me Paris should have married Juliet.

He also fails to take in the evidence before him that Juliet might after all be alive:

ROMEO: … beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advancèd there.
                                            (V, iii)

He kills himself:

ROMEO: O true apothecary:
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

Juliet wakes to find Romeo dead, and she is also impelled to act without delay:

JULIET: Yea, noise? Then I'll be brief. O happy
dagger!
This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.
                                         (V, iii)

This headlong pace is not merely a consequence of dramatic convenience and compactness. The words of the play repeatedly draw our attention to the undue haste of what is happening. When Romeo asks the Friar in Act II:

ROMEO: … but this I pray,
That thou consent to marry us today.

the Friar replies:

FRIAR: Holy St Francis! What a change is
   here?
Is Rosaline, that thou did love so dear,
So soon forsaken?

Their dialogue concludes with Romeo exhorting:

ROMEO: let us hence! I stand on sudden haste.

The Friar replies:

FRIAR: Wisely and slow. They stumble that run
  fast.
                                                          (II, iii)

Later in Act III the audience is made aware that Capulet's decision to insist on Juliet's marriage to Paris two days after Tybalt, his nephew, is killed is precipitate. Capulet tells his wife:

CAPULET: Wife, go you to her ere you go to bed;
Acquaint her here of my son Paris' love,
And bid her (mark you me?) on Wednesday
  next—
But soft! What day is this?
PARIS: Monday, my lord.
CAPULET: Monday! Ha! ha! Well, Wednesday is
  too soon,
A' Thursday let it be—a' Thursday tell her,
She shall be married to this noble Earl:
Will you be ready? Do you like this haste?
We'll keep no great ado—a friend or two;
For hark you, Tybalt being slain so late,
It may be thought we held him carelessly,
Being our kinsman, if we revel much.
                                     (III, iv)

Another dimension of this is that the normal boundaries of day and night are continually upset in the play. Romeo's father is worried about him:

MONTAGUE: Away from light steals home my
  heavy son,
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.
                                           (I, i)

Capulet later decides not to go to bed at all on the eve of his daughter's intended wedding:

CAPULET: I'll not to bed tonight; let me alone:
I'll play the housewife for this once …
                                             (IV, ii)

and he spends the night hurrying the servants along in the kitchen. Then he has another burst of impatience when morning breaks:

CAPULET: … hie, make haste,
Make haste! The bridegroom, he is come
 already;
Make haste I say.

When they wake up after their night together, Romeo and Juliet dispute over whether or not it is morning, and time for Romeo to flee:

JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near
  day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of mine ear …

and Romeo replies:

ROMEO: It was the lark, the herald of the morn;
No nightingale …
                                                     (III, v)

Very different experiences of the passage of time are represented in the play, by no means wholly corresponding with the conventionally opposed perspectives of youth and age. The sense of time remembered and anticipated by the Friar and the Nurse is contrasted with Romeo and Juliet's desperate immediacy of sensation and desire. The Friar's measured reflections on the coming of the day and the natural cycle of nature in Act II, as he collects flowers and herbs:

FRIAR: The grey-eyed morn smiles on the
   frowning night,
Check'ring the Eastern clouds with streaks of
   light:

and

The earth that's Nature's mother is her tomb,
What is her burying grave, that is her womb:

is interrupted by Romeo's unexpected arrival so early in the morning. The Friar notes the mental disorder which this signifies:

FRIAR: Benedicite!
What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?
Young son, it argues a distempered head
So soon to bid good morrow to thy bed:
                                    (II, iii)

In another scene the Nurse fondly remembers Juliet's childhood:

NURSE: 'Tis since the earthquake now eleven
  years,
I never shall forget it and she was weaned,
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:
For I had then laid wormwood on my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall.
My Lord and you were then at Mantua.

But Lady Capulet wants to get on with immediate business:

LADY CAPULET: Enough of this. I pray thee hold
  thy peace.

The Nurse insists on completing her train of thought:

NURSE: Peace, I have done. God mark thee to
  his grace,
Thou wast the prettiest babe that 'ere I
  nursed.
And I might live to see thee married once,
I have my wish.

But Lady Capulet gets to her urgent point:

LADY CAPULET: Marry, that 'marry' is the very
  theme
I came to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet,
How stands your disposition to be married?
                                      (I, iii)

Later, for the Friar, Romeo's banishment promises the eventual prospect of his happy return to Juliet and his reconciliation with the Prince. But the idea of separation from Juliet has, on the contrary, left ROMEO

FRIAR: There on the ground, with his own tears
  made drunk.
                                              (III, iii)

Romeo and Juliet can imagine each other as stars looking down from heaven:

ROMEO: … her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so
  bright,
That birds would sing, and think it were not
  night:
                                        (II, ii)

but cannot bear even hours of separation. Troubled in a different way is their parents' sense of time. Their main experience of it is that there is little of it left to them. Their anxieties about this—and especially the Capulets'—have a major influence on the action.

Not only is time disordered in the play, but its customary properties are disrupted. The undue haste of Juliet's proposed wedding to Paris, so soon after Tybalt's death, is commented on. Paris understands that:

PARIS: These times of woe afford no time to
  woo.
                                              (III, iv)

Juliet protests that she will not marry him:

JULIET: Now by Saint Peter's Church, and
  Peter too,
He shall not make me there a joyful bride!
I wonder at this haste, that I must wed
Ere he that should be husband comes to woo.
                                     (III, v)

And the Friar observes to Paris:

FRIAR: On Thursday, sir? The time is very
  short.

The action of Romeo and Juliet depends on many sudden and impetuous changes of mind. Romeo falls out of love with one woman and into love with another, in the course of an evening—almost in a moment. Capulet is at the beginning considerate of his daughter's feelings regarding the choice of her future husband:

CAPULET: But woo her, gentle Paris, get her
  heart;
My will to her consent, is but a part.
And she agreed, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent, and fair according voice.
                                       (I, ii)

But later he peremptorily tells her to marry when and whom she is told to marry:

CAPULET: … mistress minion you?
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no
  prouds,
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday
  next
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church:
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.
                                        (III, v)

In the Mantuan street Romeo at first refuses to fight Tybalt, feeling himself now to be kin to him following his secret marriage to Juliet. Mercutio, not understanding this, fights on his behalf, and Romeo's intervention leads to his death. 'Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm,' protests the dying Mercutio, and Romeo replies feebly, 'I thought all for the best' (III, i). Moments later, Romeo feels that he must avenge Mercutio, and his own reputation; he fights Tybalt and kills him.

The Friar, who has advised Romeo against marrying hastily, in fact then conducts his marriage to Juliet. The Nurse, who has abetted Romeo and Juliet's marriage and its consummation, then advises Juliet to forget about Romeo and to marry Paris as her father orders:

NURSE: Then since the case now stands as so it
  doth,
I think it best you married with the County,
O he's a lovely gentleman!
Romeo's a dishclout to him:
                                        (III, v)

Romeo, told of Juliet's death, decides at once to return to Verona, against his servant's caution:

BALTHASAR: I do beseech you sir, have
  patience:
Your looks are pale and wild, and do import
Some misadventure.
                                        (V, i)

The misadventure that follows is that Romeo buys poison to join Juliet in her grave.

What are the explanations for this precipitate and, as it turns out, catastrophic rush of events? We have already noted the disruption of time in the play, and I want to suggest that this is both cause and symptom of the disruption or preemption of thought. Space as well as time are at issue. The Chorus tells us that Romeo, 'Being held a foe, [he] may not have access / To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear' (Prologue, II).

Romeo risks death to visit Juliet:

JULIET: The orchard walls are high and hard to
  climb,
And the place death, considering who thou
  art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here.
                                     (II, ii)

Their courtship and its consummation take place at a masked party where Romeo should not be, outside her window, in the Friar's cell, and in Romeo's illicit presence in her bedroom on the night of their secret wedding. There is no place where they are able to be peacefully together, which can symbolically and actually contain their intense feelings. Night thus becomes the only 'place' where they can be and do what is forbidden to them by day.

One central aspect of all this confusion is clearly the nature of sexual passion itself, as it is depicted in the play. Love is represented as a madness, and Romeo's state of mind is the subject of worried comment by his mother and father, by his friends Mercutio and Benvolio, by the Friar, and later by his servant. Both Romeo and Juliet threaten to stab themselves if the Friar will not find a way for them to remain together after Romeo's banishment, and of preventing Juliet's forced marriage to Paris. Romeo describes himself as driven out of his mind towards the end—by grief, and guilt for the deaths he had caused. In the graveyard, he tells Paris to:

ROMEO: … live, and hereafter say,
A madman's mercy bid thee run away.
                                      (V, iii)

But I want to stress not so much the feelings of the lovers themselves as the absence in the play of any sufficient symbolic or social containment for them. Juliet says:

JULIET: … Romeo is banished:
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word's death; no words can that woe
  sound.
                                       (III, ii)

It is the understanding of why these feelings are too overwhelming for words or thought that most concerns me. In some of his later comedies Shakespeare shows that such sexual feelings, given a more hopeful imaginary setting, can have a more benign outcome. The dreams described by Mercutio in his Queen Mab speech become the forest of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the enchantments of love end happily. So our attention should be focused, in thinking about Romeo and Juliet, on the setting of these passions, as much as on the passions themselves.

One situation bearing on this in the action of the play is the weight of political power on everyone taking part. This is by no means attributable only to the quarrel of the two feuding families, the Montagues and Capulets. A third looming presence over the action is the interest of the Prince, and the fear of his power. The play may reflect a moment—still significant at the time when Shakespeare was writing—in which the English monarchy's authority over its most powerful aristocratic families, and its effective monopoly of the means of violence, is only just being consolidated, and we can see the play as a transposition of the experience of this situation into the fictional world of Verona and Mantua.

We initially see the effects of this impulsion to obey in the first scene. The servants of Capulet and Montague are cautiously going through the motions of quarrelling as their loyalties seem to require, while stopping short of actual violence, when Benvolio and Tybalt, kinsmen respectively of Montague and Capulet, come into sight and the servants decide that they had better make their fight more authentic. The pacific Benvolio's reaction is to tell them to:

BENVOLIO: Part, fools!
Put up your swords. You know not what you
  do.

But the servants had correctly anticipated Tybalt's attitude, and he immediately draws his sword on Benvolio.

We must understand that the Prince's threats to both houses after he has restored order are taken seriously:

PRINCE: On pain of torture, from those bloody
  hands,
Throw your mistempered weapons to the
  ground …

and,

If ever you disturb our streets again,
Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.
                                    (I, i)

So when Mercutio, the Prince's kinsman, is killed by Tybalt, a Capulet, and Romeo is awarded only the comparatively lenient sentence of banishment, old Capulet is made fearful. The Prince takes reprisals against both houses for the death of his kinsman:

PRINCE: But I'll amerce you with so strong a
  fine
That you shall all repent the loss of mine.
                                        (III, i)

But it is a Capulet, not a Montague, who has killed the Prince's kinsman, and Capulet is seeking to restore his family's good grace with the Prince by bringing about Juliet's marriage to Paris, who is also the Prince's kinsman. Earlier, Capulet had put Paris off:

CAPULET: My child is yet a stranger to the
  world,
She hath not seen the change of fourteen
  years;
Let two more summers wither in their pride
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
                                      (I, ii)

But in the new political circumstances, there can be no delay. The precarious authority of the Prince, who later blames himself for 'winking at your discords', is itself a cause of uncertainty. The climate of weak and disputed authority is reflected also in Tybalt's challenge to his uncle's authority at the party over the presence of Romeo and his friends, and even in Romeo's distance from his father. More important is the way violence keeps erupting, as the Prince says:

PRINCE: Three civil brawls, bred of an airy
  word,
By thee, old Capulet and Montague,
Have thrice disturbed the quiet of our
streets …
                                     (I. i)

Though there is a clear awareness of who ought to obey whom, and the Prince shows the capacity to exercise his due powers, in practice authority every-where seems to be precarious and unstable.

Such considerations of fear and policy are also the background to the Friar's and Nurse's respective changes of mind. The Friar's reason for supporting Romeo and Juliet's marriage is political. He says to ROMEO

FRIAR: But come young waverer, come go with
  me,
In one respect I'll thy assistant be:
For this alliance may so happy prove,
To turn your households' rancour to pure
  love.
                                       (II, iii)

Later, when he has already married Romeo and Juliet and yet is called on to conduct the marriage of Juliet and Paris, he is in a dangerous position, and the desperate expedient of counterfeiting Juliet's death is a possible means of escape for him as well as for her. Juliet suspects as much:

JULIET: What if it be a poison which the Friar
Subtly hath ministered to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be
  dishonoured
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is; and yet methinks it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
                                      (IV, iii)

We see the Friar genuinely concerned for the young people, and able to give them good advice, but also feeling compelled for political reasons to undertake risky actions—first the marriage of Romeo and Juliet, then the expedient of faking Juliet's death. He is able to maintain his friar's appearance of holiness and propriety even while concealing the truth. He reproves the Capulets for their intemperate grief at the loss of Juliet:

FRIAR: Peace ho, for shame! Confusion's cure
  lives not
In these confusions. Heaven and yourself
Had part in this fair maid—now heaven hath
  all,
And all the better is it for the maid:
                                        (IV, v)

while knowing that she is neither dead nor a maid. His panic-stricken flight from the graveyard finally contributes to Juliet's death.

The Nurse's about-face is also to be understood as a realistic adjustment to the dangers facing both her (as the abetter of Juliet's marriage) and Juliet herself. It is particularly disastrous for the young people that the understanding on which they depend from their older friends is betrayed under these various pressures. Juliet says as much after the Nurse has advised her to forget Romeo, and she begins to think of her own death:

JULIET: … Go counsellor,
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be
  twain.
I'll to the Friar to know his remedy;
If all else fail, myself have power to die.
                                         (III, v)

In this climate of authoritarian relationships and obligations, fears are rapidly converted into swift action. Norbert Elias's argument, in The Civilizing Process, that the development of thoughtfulness and complexity of affections in individuals historically depended on the removal of the threat of violence from everyday life is powerfully realized in this play, where the threat and fact of violence are very much present. The rapid conversion of fear into action overwhelms the space where reflection might other-wise take place. While sometimes this is commented on, as in the Friar's reproaches to Romeo, mostly it is dramatized in action. We learn of Capulet's fear and anxiety not because he tells us about it but through his fierce temper, rapid changes of mind, and manic excitement.

Another anxiety of Shakespeare's time which weighs heavily on all the participants in the action is the fear of death. We learn early on that the Capulets and Montagues are old ('A crutch, a crutch! Why call you for a sword?' cries Lady Capulet) and that theirs is an old quarrel. Romeo and Juliet are their parents' only surviving children:

CAPULET: Earth had swallow'd all my hopes
  but she;
She is the hopeful Lady of my earth.
                                      (I, ii)

Their anxiety is for their succession, both as natural parents and in regard to the fortunes of their houses, and this is stirred up by the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio. In the end, Montague reports his wife's death from grief at Romeo's exile moments before he hears that Romeo has preceded him into the grave.

The graveyard and its spectres, after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt and the reported death of Juliet, are powerful images for both Romeo and Juliet, and Juliet terrifies herself at the thought of waking from her sleep there:

JULIET: O if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environèd with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefathers' joints.

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his
  shroud …
                                   (IV, iii)

These images generate terror, especially because of an inability properly to mourn the dead. Lady Capulet is full of feelings of revenge rather than grief for Tybalt, and Capulet and she are enraged by Juliet's apparently excessive sorrow. The plan to marry Juliet to Paris within three days seems in part motivated by the wish to displace one feeling with another:

LADY CAPULET: Well, well, thou hast a careful
  father, child;
One who, to put thee from thy heaviness,
Hath sorted out a sudden day of joy,
That thou expect'st not, nor I looked not for.
                                         (III, v)

Capulet seems to be in manic flight from mourning in his nocturnal preparations for the wedding day. Romeo and Juliet give no thought to the dead Mercutio and Tybalt during their night together, but we learn later that Juliet has her dead cousin much in mind, and Romeo, also oppressed by his guilt for the earlier deaths, rushes to join her in her supposed grave. An inability to mourn individuals in this play coexists with a state of terror and guilt for their deaths, and obsession with their physical realities.

Also at issue in the play is the capacity for understanding other strong feelings, and especially the passionate states of mind of Romeo and Juliet. They depend on the Friar and the Nurse for sympathy and understanding more than they do on their parents. Juliet is very young (not yet fourteen), and there is an implication that both she and Romeo live in a world of feelings which their parents do not at all share. But the Friar and Nurse are both weak in relation to these noble families, and it is hard for them to remain consistent and loyal either in word or deed in relation to the young people. Romeo and Juliet are also both adept at making the old feel deficient in feeling. Juliet says of her nurse, while she is waiting impatiently for her to return from ROMEO

JULIET: … yet she is not come.
Had she affections and warm youthful blood,
She would be as swift in motion as a ball;
My words would bandy her to my sweet love,
And his to me:
But old folks, many feign as they were
  dead—
Unwieldy, slow, heavy, and pale as lead.
                                    (II, v)

Romeo takes a similar tone with the Friar, who is trying to advise him:

FRIAR: Let me dispute with thee of thy estate.

Romeo replies:

ROMEO: Thou canst not speak of that thou dost
  not feel.
Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,
An hour but married, Tybalt murderèd
Doting like me, and like me banishèd,
Then mightst thou speak, then mightst thou
  tear thy hair,
And fall upon the ground, as I do now,
Taking the full measure of an unmade grave.
                                     (III, iii)

In other words, you can't understand. The distance of the parental relationships and the manipulability of their substitutes—both by the lovers and by more powerful external forces—is what leaves Romeo and Juliet so isolated and thus vulnerable to their own overwhelming feelings.

There is also a dimension of symbolic or cultural space whose destruction is dramatized in the play, and which helps to explain both its intense lyricism and its fateful consequences. This seems to be the meaning of the balcony scene where Romeo overhears Juliet's soliloquy about him. While this might seem like a romantic wish come magically true, Juliet is troubled by the impropriety:

JULIET: Thou knowest the mask of night is on
  my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek,
For that which thou hast heard me speak
  tonight.
Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
What I have spoke: but farewell compliment!

She goes on:

I should have been more strange, I must
  confess,
But that thou overheard'st ere I was ware,
My true love passion …
                                          (II, ii)

There is reference here to the convention that such revelations of feeling should take place more slowly, so that trust can be established and a woman not give herself too easily. Or to put it more generally, as the Friar does, that lovers should not become committed to each other too quickly. Once their love has been openly declared, immediate marriage and its consummation seem to be required:

FRIAR: Come, come with me, and we will
  make short work;
For by your leave, you shall not stay alone
Till Holy Church incorporate two in one.
                                       (II, vi)

There seems to be in particular the idea that sexual desire, once experienced and acknowledged as such, is uncontrollable.

Improper self-disclosure is the topic of another exchange—between Juliet and Paris at the Friar's cell. Paris asks her:

PARIS: Come you to make confession to this
  father?
JULIET: To answer that, I should confess to
  you.
PARIS: Do not deny to him that you love me.
JULIET: I will confess to you that I love him.
PARIS: So will ye, I am sure, that you love me.
JULIET: If I do so, it will be of more price,
Being spoke behind your back, than to your
  face.
                                       (IV, i)

Juliet here asserts the proper boundaries between one kind of conversation and another, reminding us of how privacy has earlier been breached in the balcony scene. The failure to mourn Tybalt and the confusion of the time of his funeral with Juliet's wedding is a further invasion of ceremony which is enacted and commented on in the play. The disruption of due form is another aspect of the destructive isolation of Romeo and Juliet.

Finally, I would like to draw attention to the ways in which thinking is an explicit topic of Romeo and Juliet, and how its absence or perversion is pointed to as a chief source of harm. This is the topic of the Friar's reproachful speech to Romeo, when he denounces his 'unreasonable fury' and points to wit, or reason, as the essential attribute of a man:

FRIAR: Thy wit, that ornament, to shape and
   love,
Misshapen in the conduct of them both,
Like powder in a skilless soldier's flask,
Is set afire with thine own ignorance,
And thou dismember'd with thine own
  defence.
                                      (III, iii)

Juliet's main appeal to her father is to listen to her:

JULIET: Good father, I beseech you on my
  knees,
Hear me with patience, but to speak a word.

She is told angrily:

CAPULET: Speak not, reply not, do not answer
  me.

The Nurse intervenes:

NURSE: May not one speak?

and is told:

CAPULET: Peace, you mumbling fool!
Utter your gravity over a gossip's bowl,
For here we need it not.

Lady Capulet adds her own refusal:

LADY CAPULET: Talk not to me, for I'll not
speak a word.
                                                  (III, v)

There are still more violent attacks by Lady Capulet on truth, after the death of Tybalt:

LADY CAPULET: He is a kinsman to the
  Montague,
Affection makes him false, he speaks not true:
Some twenty of them fought in this black
  strife,
And all those twenty could but kill one life.
                                       (III, i)

Misinformation is the immediate cause of Romeo and Juliet's tragedy, when Romeo receives the false news about her pretended death which was intended for everyone but him. Thus the recourse to deception initiated as a desperate expedient by the Friar with Juliet ends in disaster.

In contrast is the Prince, whose principal strength is his commitment to the truth. On his arrival after each of the two occasions of killing, he insists in measured tones on finding out what has really occurred before indulging in emotion:

PRINCE: Seal up the mouth of outrage for a
  while,
Till we can clear these ambiguities,
And know their spring, their head, their true
  descent.
And then will I be general of your woes,
And lead you even to death. Meantime
  forbear,
And let mischance be slave to patience.
                                      (V, iii)

He recognizes his own share of blame, too. ('All are punished.')

My argument is that the flight from thinking into desperate action in Romeo and Juliet is a central aspect of the failure of the society it depicts to contain the feelings of the young hero and heroine in any sufficient form. The feud of the two families, which the Chorus describes as the main source of tragedy, seems in fact to be only one element in a larger story. We can see a certain kind of familial relationship, and a general climate of violence, in conflict with the youthful romanticism of the hero and heroine. Romeo and Juliet convert little of their experience into conscious thought, and differ from Shakespeare's later tragic heroes in their lack of acquired self-knowledge.

Romeo and Juliet find mental pain unbearable, whether it arises from separation or guilt. They seek escape from it in marriage, sexual embrace, physical action, drugs, and death, reactions to anxiety typical of adolescence. Romeo kills twice in a state of deep distress and confusion and, if we count Mercutio, is responsible for three deaths. This image of the young being unable to bear the feelings inside them is perhaps the most potent and resonant of the play, now many times repeated and elaborated in the history of what we call youth culture. Their tragedy reveals the incompatibilities between an idealized world of feelings—which must already have been a powerful presence in Shakespeare's world, and for his audience—and the sometimes unyielding and brutal qualities of actual Elizabethan life. This has also been transformed into a lasting image of misunderstanding between the generations.

In some of his later comedies Shakespeare explores similar situations—of conflict between youthful passions and patriarchal authority—in other ways, and he imagines other possible outcomes of it. The Forest of Arden, in As You Like It, the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the enchanted island in The Tempest, provide more benign and magical environments in which love can be pursued, not as the naked and instantaneous merger of two bodies and souls but as more sustained encounters and conversations. These later plays create a symbolic space—a literal place and time, more benign parents (Duke Senior and Prospero) and roles of make-believe (Orlando wooing Rosalind in her disguise as Ganymede) through which real persons can become known to each other. A symbolic containment is thus created by Shakespeare through which audiences, then and now, can imagine more hopeful outcomes of sexual feeling.

It should be evident that the method of analysis which I have used here is not based primarily on the psycho-analysis of character, but more on a response to the emotional states aroused in the reader by the action of the play as a whole. It is what the characters do and say in the here and now of the action, under the pressures which this play very vividly evokes, which conveys the play's meanings to us. This method is consistent with the emphasis within Kleinian and Bionian psychoanalysis on thinking about present feelings within the analytic relationship, as the main experience with which analysts and patients can work, rather than on the bringing to consciousness of past biographical events or states of mind.

I hope I have succeeded in showing that the concept of thinking, as a human capacity which depends on a certain kind of benign social environment, and on relationships of parental affection, is illuminating in understanding The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

Notes

¹The consequences of patriarchal and authoritarian family structures for emotional life and a sense of individual identity are explored in Lawrence Stone (1979). A different view of this transition to 'modern' family forms is taken by Linda Pollock (1983).

²All quotations are taken from The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, Cambridge University Press, 1984.