SOURCE: Al-Dabbagh, Abdulla. “The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet.” The Comparatist 24 (May 2000): 64-82.

[In the essay below, Al-Dabbagh examines the way in which Romeo and Juliet is influenced by Arabic culture and concepts, noting that the play's use of imagery related to light and dark reflects the conceptions of good and evil found in Islamic Sufism.]

There has always been a tendency in literary and cultural scholarship to barricade oneself behind narrow specificities and a one-sided sense of “uniqueness,” a tendency that may ultimately give the wrong emphasis to national, cultural, or even racial factors. The truly comparative counterapproach has, however, always reached for the universalist standpoint, from which literary phenomena can be regarded across borders and within a complex variety of cultural contexts. In the field of East/West literary relations, and specifically in the area of Arabo-Islamic legacies in Western traditions, major strides have recently been taken in this direction. Although most of the advance has been in Spanish, and in general medieval literature, such work has implications for nearly the whole of the Western literary tradition. And even though numerous detailed investigations have been successfully accomplished, a systematic overview of the field is yet to be achieved.

The acute absence of such a comprehensive cross-cultural perspective—exemplified here by a lack of awareness or an incomprehension of the Oriental factor in certain Western literary phenomena—can sometimes lead to symptomatically misguided conclusions. This paper, however, is inspired by the broader, comparatist approach. It has been written to offer a corrective to the imbalance in many current interpretations of Romeo and Juliet and to contribute to recent advances in medieval/Oriental studies by extending their spirit to Shakespeare, hopefully as a major stepping-stone to the field of Renaissance humanism generally.

Emphasis falls on the Oriental framework as an important key to the play and on its close link with the genre of Oriental tragic romance, an emphasis needed to foreground a major factor and to redress a crucial omission. Still, the essay should not be read in terms of the narrow, one-sided “interpretation” approach and certainly not of the old-fashioned, cultural aggrandizement streak in comparative studies. Indeed, such a reading would defeat its purpose. The paper offers the Oriental framework as a necessary enhancement for any full appreciation of a complex, multidimensional piece of world literature, hoping to contribute, within its limited scope, to genuinely cross-cultural genre studies.

THE TRAGIC ROMANCE IN CULTURAL CONTEXT—A SCHOLARLY ENIGMA

Three critics have been especially well placed to bring out the Oriental framework of Romeo and Juliet: Ahdaf Soueif and M. A. Manzalaoui, both scholars of English literature of Arab origin, and Denis de Rougemont, a master of comparative studies in the West. Yet each of them managed to overlook or failed to address the connection to be proposed in this essay. The most comprehensive attempt to encompass the play's full range of cultural affiliations—unhappily termed its “symbolic context” by Soueif, the Egyptian scholar and later a well-known novelist—rightly affirms, from the beginning, the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of locating Shakespeare's works within an intellectual, or conceptual, framework. Soueif dismisses the view of Shakespeare as the miraculous natural genius happily “untainted” by any need for systematic thinking. Unfortunately, her essay opts for an eclectic conclusion which, while claiming that Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted within the framework of more than one context, ends disappointingly with a conventional recourse to “the miracle […] that in the fire of creative genius even contradictory material may be drilled to work together in harmony.” The article tries to “harmonize” three different contexts for the play: Christianity, courtly love, and Renaissance Neoplatonism. In the end, it is the critic's own bewilderment that bursts to the surface. The goal of harmonising the Christian with the non-Christian and the physical with the platonic leads to the unsatisfactory compromise of “sticking” to the golden mean as “the safest and most credible path to take” (Soueif 18).

Manzalaoui and de Rougemont, whom one would have thought were the most likely to uncover the conceptual framework overlooked by Soueif, sadly have nothing but the most perfunctory and en passant remarks about the play. Manzalaoui's rich and stimulating essay, on “Tragic Ends of Lovers: Medieval Islam and the Latin West,” mentions Romeo and Juliet only in its very last lines. Could the play have been deliberately preserved for a sequel article, one wonders. On the other hand, de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, a scholarly landmark that undoubtedly stands among the best of its kind in the twentieth century, disappointingly gives a mere four pages to Romeo and Juliet and Milton. The two pages devoted to the play, one of which is a lengthy quotation from Romeo's speech immediately before his suicide, contain some rather tangential remarks about how Shakespeare has been alleged to have been a Roman Catholic and how Verona was one of the main centers of Catharism in Italy. More centrally, he merely states, almost in one sentence, with little attempt at elaboration or argument, that “Romeo and Juliet is the one courtly tragedy, as well as the most magnificent resuscitation of the myth [i.e., Liebestod] that the world was to be given till Wagner wrote and composed his Tristan” (190). It is particularly surprising, in light of the varied origins of the Western concept of love that the book details, that de Rougemont should so one-sidedly relegate the play to the Liebestod myth. Significantly, with the very rare exceptions of Nicholas Brooke and Derek Traversi, his brief remarks have not been elaborated upon convincingly in subsequent criticism of the play.

In a very recent study, however, Robin Wells revisits de Rougemont's thesis and discusses it in ways that are pertinent to our argument. First, the writer succinctly sums up the critical history of the play: “Traditionally the play has been seen as a story of youth tragically blighted by fortune, or by irresponsible parents, or even by the lovers' own folly” (917-18). Then he underlines the point at which de Rougemont enters: “But in 1930 Denis de Rougemont suggested a quite different interpretation. Comparing Romeo and Juliet with the Tristan and Iseult story, he argued that what the play is really about is not tragic waste but the desire for death” (918), elaborating, “In fact, says de Rougemont, Shakespeare's play is the last great resuscitation of the myth before Wagner's Tristan und Isolde” (919). Later in the essay, the writer refutes what he calls two postmodernist readings of the play, by Julia Kristeva and Jonathan Dollimore (920-21), which, he argues, have followed de Rougemont's thesis, and concludes that: “Common to Kristeva's and Dollimore's readings of Romeo and Juliet is an indifference to the text. As postmodernists they are primarily concerned to show that Shakespeare is a precursor of their own ‘perverse counter-intuitiveness’ (Dollimore's words)” (923).

Perhaps the classic case of critical bewilderment to which an unquestioning acceptance of de Rougemont's Liebestod thesis leads appears in M. M. Mahood's remarks in her interesting study of Shakespeare's language. After an introductory discussion of the Shakespearean play upon the word “die” and the general verbal association of love and death in Elizabethan times, Mahood declares that, “In all these aspects Romeo and Juliet appears the classic literary statement of the Liebestod myth in which (we are told) we seek the satisfaction of our forbidden desires.” Already, the parenthetical phrase, “we are told,” reveals the writer's skepticism about the Liebestod thesis, and she continues immediately to reveal her doubts.

Shakespeare's story conflicts, however, with the traditional myth at several points. Tragic love is always adulterous. Romeo and Juliet marry […] Romeo faces capture and death, Juliet the horror of being entombed alive, not because they want to die but because they want to live together […] In contrast to this, the wish fulfillment of the Liebestod is accomplished only by the story of a Suicide pact.

This is very well put even though Mahood's inability to pinpoint the play's true generic origin as well as its language of paradox and oxymoron and the pattern of light/dark imagery associated centrally with it leads her astray once again. Thus she begins by declaring, “When we explore the language of Romeo and Juliet we find that both its wordplay and its imagery abound in those concepts of love as a war, a religion, malady, which de Rougemont has suggested as the essence of amour-passion.” She then takes this declaration back when she arrives at almost the exactly opposite conclusion, maintaining that “the distribution of wordplay upon the concepts of love-war, love-idolatry, love-sickness serve to show that the feelings of Romeo and Juliet for each other are something quite different from the amour-passion in which de Rougemont finds all these disorders.” She finishes her chapter on the play by stating that “Shakespeare insures that our final emotion is neither the satisfaction we should feel in the lovers' death if the play were a simple expression of the Liebestod theme, nor the dismay of seeing two lives thwarted and destroyed by vicious fates, but a tragic equilibrium which includes and transcends both these feelings” (58-60).

And yet de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, when taken in a broader perspective that goes beyond the Liebestod thesis to allow for both the general design of its argument and some points explicitly raised in several key passages elsewhere, makes a considerable advance toward establishing precisely the conceptual framework needed for a work like Romeo and Juliet. De Rougemont chooses the appropriate vantage point of the Oriental antecedents of Platonism and the subsequent transmission through Plotinus of the Platonic doctrine of love to the medieval world, to affirm the Oriental origin of Western culture, and indeed of Western man (“all our races come from the East”) as well as the general convergence detected by modern research “in support of the view that the religious beliefs of East and West had a common source” (62). What is more specifically relevant to my discussion of Romeo and Juliet is de Rougemont's focus on the opposite sets of light and dark as a fundamental dualism, expressive of the mystery of Day and Night as well as of the fatal struggle between Good and Evil in the moral sphere, in a wide-ranging variety of Western and Eastern religions and mythologies.

In the more directly literary sphere, de Rougemont argues that the Provençal poetry written by the troubadours of the twelfth century, from which all modern European poetry has emerged, had no precedent, either for its rhetorical forms or for the specific notion of unrequited love that runs as a major theme through it, in any European tradition, and “far from being accounted for by the conditions prevailing at the time, seems to have been in flat contradiction to them” (76). Raising the important question of the non-European origin of the courtly love notion, de Rougemont makes the following telling remarks:

Yet whenever some historian ventures on a theory of how courtly rhetoric came into being, the authorities turn on him with biting irony. Sismondi attributed the origins of emotional mysticism to the Arabs; his theory was disdainfully rejected as monstrous. Diez discerned resemblances in the rhythms and pauses of Arab and Provençal lyric poetry; we are told he must not be taken seriously. […] Thus, no matter what explanation is offered, the authorities are apparently determined to pooh-pooh any attempt to give a meaning to what they have devoted their lives to studying.

(77)

Recently, more than anyone else perhaps, Maria Rosa Menocal has written several closely argued and highly scholarly investigations of these issues in the sphere of Hispanic and medieval romance studies. Her general conclusions, like those of the earlier scholars mentioned above and like this more limited attempt with Romeo and Juliet, move very strongly in the direction of foregrounding the Oriental dimension latent in Western literary and cultural trends. Her work has already become a landmark in recent medieval scholarship.

Later, in a key chapter entitled “Arab Mystical Poetry,” de Rougemont moves unhesitatingly to point to the metaphors of Islamic Sufi literature as strikingly akin to those of courtly rhetoric. In particular, he singles out the antithetical relation of the World of Light and the World of Darkness that informs so much of both literatures. In his concluding words he regards it as a matter proven beyond doubt, and in a manner mockingly damaging to those who dismissed it out of hand, that Arabic poetry, particularly Andalusian Arabic poetry, was the major influence on the courtly poems:

Can it be established that Arab poesy actually influenced cortezia? Renan wrote in 1863: “An abyss separates the form and the spirit of Romance poetry from the form and spirit of Arab poetry.” Another scholar, Dozy, his contemporary, declares that Arab influence upon the troubadours has not been established “and it will not be.” Today his peremptory tone makes us smile […] From Baghdad to Andalusia Arab poetry is one, one in language and one thanks to continuous exchanges. Andalusia was contiguous to the Spanish dominions, whose dynasties were mingled with those of Languedoc and Poitou. By now the blooming of Andalusian lyricism in the tenth and eleventh centuries has become well known. The detailed prosody of the zadjal is that adopted by the first troubadour William of Poitiers, in five of the eleven poems by him that have come down to us. To try to establish Andalusian influence upon the courtly poems is no longer needful. And I could fill pages with passages from Arabs and Provençals about which our great specialists of “the abyss which separates” would possibly fail to guess whether they were penned north or south of the Pyrenees. The matter is settled.

(106-7)

What is even more relevant to any attempt at establishing the literary framework for Shakespeare's first tragedy of love is de Rougemont's concluding paragraph that, opening the way for any subsequent discussion of this issue, deserves to be quoted at length:

There occurred during the twelfth century in Languedoc and in the Limousin one of the most extraordinary spiritual confluences of history. On the one hand, a strong Manichaean religious current, which had taken its rise in Persia, flowed through Asia Minor and the Balkans as far as Italy and France, bearing the esoteric doctrines of Maria Sophia and of love for the Form of Light. On the other hand, a highly refined rhetoric, with its set forms, themes and characters, its ambiguities invariably recurring in the same places, and indeed its symbolism, pushes out from Irak and the Sufis, who were inclined alike to Platonism and Manichaenism, and reaches Arabic Spain, then, leaping over the Pyrenees, it comes in the south of France upon a society that seems to have but awaited its arrival in order to state what it had not dared and had not been able to avow either in the clerical tongue or in the common vernacular. Courtly lyrical poetry was the offspring of that encounter.

(107)

Significantly, most scholars, since de Rougemont's pioneering work, have continued to affirm the absence of an indigenous, contemporary origin for troubadour poetry and for the courtly notion of love, and the necessity of locating their framework elsewhere. Taking only two of the most recent works in the field, here are the words of Dorothee Metlitzki:

In the eyes of most Arabists, “there can be little doubt as to the influence of Arabic poetry on the songs of the troubadours.” [Metlitzki here is quoting von Grunebaum. She also refers to more recent discussions by scholars like Stern, Gabrieli, and Rosenthal]. Their argument runs as follows: the first examples of Provençal poetry that have come down to us exhibit a strictly conventional pattern both in structure and theme, thus representing not a beginning but an established system. No evolution in the direction of troubadour lyric has been traced in the earlier literature of the West. But there are convincing analogues in theme, imagery, and verse form in the poetry of Spain and Sicily preceding the troubadours and what seems to be the closest parallel to the new poetic system is found with Hispano-Arabic poets [again finding support from scholars like A. R. Nykl and K. Menendez Pidal].

(245)¹

In another, more recent study, Bernard O'Donnoghue concludes that while it is certainly “useful and informative” to study the structures of troubadour society, the latter would not account for their theories of love “because the poetry seems to be sufficiently explained by reference to other schools of love poetry” (10). In fact, he focuses specifically on Tauq al-Hamama (The Dove's Neck-Ring), the famous treatise on love written by the Andalusian philosopher, Ibn Hazm, around 1022, as a most likely influence on courtly love concepts, includes excerpts from it in his book, and sums up the supporting views of other scholars in this field, such as P. Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the Love Lyric (1965), and Roger Boase. He specifically endorses the views of A. R. Nykl, Ibn Hazm's translator and editor, on this decisively Arabic, and especially Andalusian-Arabic, influence.² He also refers to the “deeply-researched” articles of A. J. Denomy, later collected in his The Heresy of Courtly Love (1947), of which he chooses to make this very relevant summary:

Denomy's argument, in brief, is that, whereas most of the traditional features of courtly love are to be found in the classics, medieval Latin and Arabic (description of nature in the opening; personification of love as a god; love as sickness; fear of loss of beloved; capriciousness of beloved; need of secrecy; the danger of talebearers, and so on), there are three new features in the love of the troubadours: first, the ennobling nature of human love; second, the elevation of the beloved to a position superior to the lover; third, love as ever-unsatisfied, ever-increasing desire. Denomy says these three characteristics can be found neither in any of the literatures mentioned nor in Albegensianism, but only in Arabic philosophy (not Arabic poetry).

(O'Donnoghue 11-12)

Earlier, Lois Anita Giffin had traced the “Martyrs of Love,” both as a conception and a literary genre, in classical Arabic literature, and approvingly cited the results of von Grunebaum's scholarly research to the effect that “the concept of the martyrs of love constitutes an original contribution of Arabic poetry” (106). She regarded her own pioneering study as “only a first step” in a fascinating investigation of matters awaiting further research and discussion, particularly those concerned with “the relations between the theory of profane love and the ideas of the Muslim mystics on divine love, as well as the points of agreement or contrast between the theories of the Arabs and those of medieval and Renaissance European writers” (121).

It is appropriate here to observe that this belated recognition of the Oriental origins of not merely courtly love notions and troubadour poetry, but also of other areas of Western literature, is not unprecedented, and that the contradictory swings of opinion between the full admission of those origins and the outright dismissal of them have been a reflection of more than merely scholarly considerations. As early as Hamilton Gibb's essay, “Literature,” in that pioneering collection on The Legacy of Islam (1931) edited by Sir Thomas Arnold, this complex and contradictory nature of Western scholarly opinion was fully understood:

A new type of poetry, with a new theme, a new social psychology, and a new technique suddenly comes into existence in southern France at the end of the eleventh century. There is little in the earlier literature of France which points in the direction of this development; on the other hand, the new poetry bears some resemblances to a certain type of contemporary poetry in Arabic Spain. What could be more natural than to suppose that the first Provençal poets were influenced by Arabic models? For several centuries this view met with almost unquestioned acceptance. It was never more confidently or sweepingly asserted than by Giammeria Barbieri in the full tide of the classical revival. On the revival of medieval studies at the end of the eighteenth century, when public imagination was still obsessed with oriental romance, the general opinion led by Sismondi and Fauriel maintained the close association of Provençal with Arabic poetry. It was only in mid-nineteenth century that there appeared a revulsion, among both orientalists and students of Romance philology. The critics demanded documentary evidence of contacts between Provence and Andalusia, and failing to find them swung to the other extreme. If one may without malice attribute some share in the reaction to the overheated nationalism which animated all western nations, it must be conceded that no self-respecting Romance scholar was likely to defend the theory of Arabic influence in the face of the contemptuous pronouncement of the famous orientalist Dozy.

(183-84)

Gibb himself concludes, after further review of more recent evidence regarding the points of similarity and coincidence between Andalusian and Provençal poetry that “for the present the claim that Arabic poetry contributed in some measure to the rise of the new poetry of Europe appears to be justified” (191).

As significantly, Gibb goes on, after a brief review of the debt of medieval Europe to Arabic prose literature, to underline what he says may have been the most important Islamic contribution to European literature, namely, “the influence of Arabic culture and ideas on both poetry and prose, whether accompanied or not by material borrowings from Arabic sources” (197, my italics). Among the major areas of such a debt, Gibb cites, in addition to the rise of modern European poetry in Provence, Dante and the whole tradition of Spanish romances that lead ultimately to the birth of the European novel. He may also have included, in this context, the influence of the Oriental maqamat on the rise of picaresque narrative and the picaresque novel in Spain and, later, in the rest of Europe (see Al-Dabbagh). Although Gibb surprisingly devotes only two lines to the Renaissance, moving to the new forms of Oriental literary influence, following Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights, in the eighteenth century and later in the romantic movement, it is precisely this kind of debt, the debt to culture and ideas not accompanied necessarily by material borrowings from specific sources, to which Renaissance texts such as Romeo and Juliet testify.

THE LEGACY OF ISLAMIC SUFISM IN ROMEO AND JULIET

Appropriately, a discussion of the specific nature of this debt, as a step toward establishing the play's conceptual framework, can best begin with another article in the same pioneering collection, the chapter entitled “Mysticism” by R. A. Nicholson, one of the eminent scholars in this field. The essay affirms from the start the considerable influence exerted by Islamic philosophy, transmitted through Spain, on Christian Europe in the Middle Ages as well as the common ground between medieval Christianity and Islam provided by mysticism (210-11).

Among the Islamic mystics (Sufis), Nicholson rightly singles out Ibn Al-Arabi, who was born in Spain and died in 1240 in Damascus, as the greatest speculative genius. He gives the following account of what he describes as “his system of universal philosophy” as expressed most brilliantly in such works as the Futuhat Al-Makkiyya (Meccan Revelations) and the Fusus Al-Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom):

Ibnu 'l-Arabi is a thoroughgoing monist, and the name given to his doctrine (wahdatu 'l-wujud, the unity of existence) justly describes it. He holds that all things pre-exist as ideas in the knowledge of God, whence they emanate and whither they ultimately return. There is no creation ex nihilo; the world is merely the outward aspect of that which in its inward aspect is God. While every phenomenon reveals some attribute of reality, Man is the microcosm in which all the divine attributes are united, and in Man alone does God become fully conscious of himself. The Perfect Man (al-Insanu al-Kamil), as the image of God and the archetype of Nature, is at once the mediator of divine grace and the cosmic principle by which the world is animated and sustained. And, of course, the perfect man par excellence is Muhammad. Long before Ibnu 'l-Arabi, the dogma of his preexistence had established itself in Islam. His spiritual essence, the first thing that God created, was conceived as celestial light (nur Muhammadi), which became incarnate in Adam and in the whole series of prophets after him from generation to generation until its final appearance in Muhammad himself.

(224-25)

Nicholson goes on to explain Ibn Al-Arabi's philosophy in the following, pertinent, way:

From the fact that the soul is a mode of divine being, Ibnu 'l-Arabi infers that human actions are self-determined. But his system excludes free-will in the ordinary sense. God himself acts according to the necessity of His nature which requires that the infinite variety of His attributes should produce an infinite variety of effects in the objects wherein they are displayed. This involves the appearance of light and darkness, good and evil, and all the opposites on which the possibility of knowledge depends.

(226)

Finally, in addition to the key concepts of the unity of existence, the perfect man, and his special understanding of fate and free will, Ibn Al-Arabi's celebrated religious tolerance and universalism form the last cornerstone of his philosophic system. In the words of one modern, scholarly study, he “proclaimed the actual equality of all religions and creeds in a spirit of maximum tolerance and an orientation to overcoming any confessional and religious alienation between people” (Ibrahim 341).

Nicholson then moves on to point out that Ibn Al-Arabi also provided the intellectual groundwork for the flowering of Islamic mysticism in the East, particularly in Persian Sufi poetry and philosophy, as seen most brilliantly in the love-romance of Nizami, the anecdotal and allegorical writings of Fariduddin Attar, and the Masnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi. Of the three, it is Rumi, a contemporary of Ibn Al-Arabi who died in Turkey in 1273, who stands out as the foremost Sufi philosopher of Persia. In an earlier work, Nicholson has discussed one of the central ideas of Rumi, and of Islamic Sufism generally, that reveal a remarkable similarity to Ibn Al-Arabi's central idea of the unity of existence:

But why, it may be asked, has God created that to which men give the name of evil? And since He is the only real Agent, how are we to blame for the actions that we are caused to commit? It is characteristic of Jalalu'ddin that he finds the answer to this old riddle not in thought but in feeling, not in theological speculation but in religious experience. We can feel as one what we must think as two. Every thing has an opposite by means of which it is manifested; God alone, whose being includes all things, has no opposite, and therefore He remains hidden. Evil is the inevitable condition of good: “out of darkness was created light.”

(Idea of Personality 75)

In a yet earlier work, he expounds on Rumi's views on the same issue:

Approaching the question, “Why does God ordain and create evil?” he points out that things are known through their opposites, and that the existence of evil is necessary for the manifestation of good. Moreover, the divine omnipotence would not be completely realised if evil had remained uncreated.

(Mystics 98-100)

The Islamic Sufi conception of the unity of existence (wahdat al-wujud) and the explanation of evil that it provides, as given here by its two most brilliant representatives, Ibn Al-Arabi and Rumi, along with the general tendency and basic principles of their spiritual philosophy,³ provide the most suitable framework for understanding a play like Romeo and Juliet. Furthermore, the play clearly belongs to the tradition of the tragic, Oriental love romance extending all the way from Nizami's Layla and Majnun to the Kurdish Sufi poet Khany's Mum u Zeen in the seventeenth century. About the tradition of the former, we may recall here the appropriate words of Edward Browne: “the romance of Layla and Majnun […] has been since Nidhami's time one of the most popular, if not the most popular, of all love-stories in the East, not only in Persia but in Turkey, where Fuduli of Baghdad gave the sad tale of the Distraught Lover and the Night-black Beauty a fresh impulse towards the west of Asia” (2: 406). However, a detailed scrutiny of this literary tradition, crucially relevant as it is, lies beyond the scope of this paper.

The argument here focuses only on the conceptual framework provided by Islamic Sufism, which—we shall see—casts light on certain key features of Romeo and Juliet. “Framework,” it may be necessary to reemphasize at this point, does not entail specific, conscious borrowing so much as a rich cultural legacy upon which the work is generally dependent both intellectually and formalistically, without there being the need of even an awareness of such a dependence. With this perspective in mind, we may begin our examination of the play with Friar Lawrence's speech—after he has finished his gardening and at his very first appearance in the play—which is an elaborate and explicit statement of its central idea. Baffling to many critics who are unaware of the work's Eastern background and the specific Oriental mode in which it is written, the speech, in fact, is a perfect expression of the Sufi idea of the unity of existence and of the seemingly paradoxical co-existence of conflicting elements, most supremely of good and evil, in the heart of things, that we have seen to be central to the outlook of such major Sufi thinkers as Ibn Al-Arabi and Rumi:

For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse,
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power;
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, stays all sense with the heart,
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will
And where the worser is predominant.
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

(2.3.17-30)

The relevance of this soliloquy to the whole conception of a play that is about the love of a young couple being born in the midst of the feuding hatred of their families, and of how only the lovers' death can bring about a new life of peace and unity, should not escape anyone. Shakespeare, in fact, very deliberately turns this central idea, this philosophic core of the play, one might say, into a literary motif that runs all the way through it, in the key device of the oxymoron. In addition to lying abundantly at the heart of Friar Lawrence's speech quoted above, oxymora are interwoven throughout the play and are encountered at some of its most important junctures. They appear first in connection with the play's central topic—love—which leads Romeo to describe his dilemma in loving the Capulet Rosaline as

Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create,
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-walking sleep that is not what it is
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

(1.1.168-75)

Similarly, Juliet, in the last lines of that opening act, ironically foreshadows the end of the play when she says of Romeo, before knowing who he is: “If he be married / My grave is like to be my wedding bed” (1.5.133-34), and declares, after recognizing him, in words that echo Romeo's own, quoted above: “My only love sprung from my only hate!” (1.5.137). One of the most memorable lines of the “Balcony Scene” (2.1) is Juliet's “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” which closes the scene and leads immediately to Friar Lawrence's soliloquy referred to above. In the third act, Juliet, again echoing Romeo's lines in Act I, comes out with a series of oxymora that give shape to her dilemma upon hearing of the death of Tybalt at his hands:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical,
Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb
Despised substance of divinest show,
Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!

(3.2.73-9)

In the poignant parting scene, after the playful argument about the nightingale and the lark, Romeo declares: “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.36), but is still more optimistic compared to Juliet's foreboding of death and her intuition that this would be their last meeting: “Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (3.5.54-55). In fact, the oxymora built, in a variety of ways, on coupling love and death dominate the second half of the play. Friar Lawrence tells Romeo, who has just killed Tybalt: “Thou art wedded to calamity” (3.3.3). Juliet's speech before taking the sleeping drug is torn by the two contradictory forces of her love for Romeo and her fear of death. But it is Capulet who best sums up the terms of this particular oxymoron when he discovers Juliet's “death”:

All things that we ordained festival
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary.

(4.5.84-90)

And all things changing to their contrary—indeed containing their contrary—is exactly how the play closes in ways best expressed by Friar Lawrence's words to Juliet, just awakened in the family vault: “A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents” (5.3.153-54), and later to the prince: “I am the greatest able to do the least” (5.3.223). The prince concludes the play with a return to its central oxymoron: “Where be these enemies, Capulet, Montague? / See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love” (5.3.291-93).

Interestingly, it seems that here, too, the literary embodiment of the conflicting feelings aroused by love in the figures of the oxymoron and the paradox is the product of the same Oriental tradition:

The psychological and aesthetic principles, in particular the tendency to paradoxical expression, inherent in troubadour poetry are incomprehensible without reference to the Graeco-Arabic medical tradition. Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine, a standard textbook in European medical schools, contains a section on love-melancholy or 'ishq. According to medical theory and popular opinion, “dying of love” was more than a mere metaphor: if a man was in love with a woman who refused to bestow her bel accueil or some sign of recognition, then his condition was liable to deteriorate into amor heroes or 'ishq, a species of melancholia and a disease of the imagination, leading ultimately to death. European and Arabic court poets were justified in their use of figures of contradiction such as oxymora, hyperboles and dilemmas, by preconceptions about the nature of love itself. These same medical theories underlie the “paradoxical asceticism” of Sufi poetry, and were known to Ibn Arabi, who likened the stages of meditation to the phases of love-melancholy.

(Boase 124)

Like the oxymoron, the other major motif running through the play—the imagery of light and darkness—also reflects a central feature of the Islamic Sufi outlook. As pointed out earlier, Denis de Rougemont had singled out this specific dualism as basic to many Eastern religions and mythologies generally, and to the metaphors of Sufi literature, the presumed source of European courtly rhetoric, in particular. R. A. Nicholson, supported by nearly all scholars of Islamic mysticism, has pointed out the centrality of the imagery of light (versus darkness) to the Sufi conception of both divine and human love. In one school of Sufism, Ishraqism, or the philosophy of Ishraq (illumination), light, from which the school derives its name, is regarded as the substance of all that exists as well as the basic principle of human knowledge (Ibrahim 288).⁴ The centrality of this pattern of imagery in Shakespeare's love tragedy, its initial choice, unique in the canon, as well as the manner of its expression, attest to the undoubted relevance of the Sufi conception and framework to this play, in ways that make the question of whether there may be direct borrowings or not beside the point.

Caroline Spurgeon's pioneering study of the patterns of imagery in Shakespeare's work has confirmed the centrality of light and dark imagery in Romeo and Juliet for conveying Shakespeare's conception of “love as light in a dark world.” It has also underlined the uniqueness, here, of the choice of this pattern of imagery in the Shakespearean canon: “Shakespeare shows no sign of this great interest in light nor of Bacon's almost passionate association of light with intellect, although in Romeo and Juliet we find a beautiful ‘running’ or constantly recurring image which shows that Shakespeare there imaginatively conceives of love as light in a dark world.”⁵ The point to be made here is that this is precisely the conception of the Muslim Sufis. It should be sufficient to remind the reader here of the major instances only. These are Romeo's words upon seeing Juliet for the first time: “O she doth teach the torches to burn bright! / It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear” (1.5.43-45). Interestingly, when Capulet, in that same party scene, dismisses Tybalt, the chief representative of the dark forces fueling the hateful feud, and prevents him from confronting Romeo, he immediately cries out: “More light, more light, for shame!—” 1.5.86) as if exorcising those dark forces. Again, in Act II, in the Balcony Scene, when Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, he breaks out even more tellingly, with: “But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” (2.1.44-45). Ex oriente lux. For further foregrounding, Shakespeare connects his two main literary motifs at several points. Friar Lawrence's oxymoron-studded soliloquy begins with

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Check'ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light;
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path

(2.2.1-4)

Later Juliet, the major light of the play, so to speak, in a telling inversion, will cry for darkness and for night as the cloak that hides and brings Romeo to her: “Come, civil night, / Thou sober-suited matron all in black, / And learn me how to lose a winning match” (3.2.10-12). For Romeo, too, in the parting scene in Juliet's bedroom, light and darkness become inverted and paradoxical: “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.36). And as the ultimate darkness of death begins to loom over the play, it moves to provide the final variation on this recurrent motif, best expressed by Romeo in the Capulet tomb: “For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence full of light. / Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interred” (5.3.85-87).

Indeed Juliet, as the central light of the play, gives vent to typically Sufi conceptions in some of her most memorable lines, such as the insistence on the supremacy of essence over appearance in her “What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (2.1.85-86) and on the endless abundance of true love in her: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep, the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite” (2.1.175-77). Later she returns to this theme:

Conceit more rich in matter than in words
Brags of his substance, not of ornament.
They are but beggars that can count their worth,
But my true love is grown to such excess
I cannot sum up the sum of half my wealth.

(2.5.30-34)

On this particular image and idea, Spurgeon interestingly observes that “the infiniteness of love, however, is suggested or implied so constantly, and by so many different contexts, that one cannot but believe that here Shakespeare unconsciously reveals his own intuitive view” (149).

And, finally, it is only through the proper focus on the Sufi framework of the play that the seeming contradiction can be resolved between “fate” and “free will” which has often troubled critics of this play, most recently G. Blakemore Evans in his preface to the New Cambridge edition of Romeo and Juliet.⁶ Such a focus would also provide the proper philosophic context for the Shakespearean dramatic strategy of portraying “character” as “destiny.” Ibn Al-Arabi, like all the great examples of Sufi thought, firmly rejected the idea of creation out of nothing, and limited the role of interference in the act of creation to that of bringing into concrete existence (wujud 'ayni) only what was potentially known, i.e., existence (wujud 'ilmi). He also gave essence absolute precedence over existence as the cornerstone of his Sufi determinist position. Thus, free choice (ikhtiyar) could only be expressed in conformity with the inner conditions of what is already there.

Moreover, he significantly extended this conception by observing that only when a single thing—action, event, person, etc.—was taken by itself, in isolation from all other things, could its existence seem “free” or “accidental.” But when all things were taken together, in all their causal connections with each other, then it would be discovered that each of them was necessary. In this lay the secret of fate (sirr al-qadar), within which Ibn Al-Arabi resolved the problematic of freedom and necessity. Since everything in the world was necessary, fated, and predestined, where did the freedom of choice lie? The Sufi answer, in essence, is a humanist one. When man understood this secret of predestination and acted in accordance with its requirements, he would act out a noumenal essence, and therefore free a necessary potentiality. Thus man, or the perfect man in Sufi terminology, becomes the agent of uniting freedom with necessity. Achieving this unity, he enters into harmony with the rhythm of the universe and with the rules of existence (Ibrahim 333-38).

SOME CONCLUSIONS

As love is the key Sufi vehicle for the human endeavor to achieve human perfection and thus act out the unity of freedom and necessity that is the secret of existence, exemplary destinies like those of Romeo and Juliet, and like those of many of the heroes and heroines of the genre of the Oriental tragic romance, provide obvious patterns. The Sufi framework, however, is not limited only to this genre. Aspects of its clear relevance to the destinies of such Shakespearean heroes as Hamlet and Lear are well worth investigating. It is hoped that these examples, and the general argument of this paper as a whole, will provide a better basis for understanding the play and open the way for similar studies of Shakespeare's other works. One thinks immediately of such key ideas as submission to Providence in Hamlet, the loss of self in order to gain it in King Lear, and life as a sleep or a dream in The Tempest and in other works, as well as the specific Shakespearean treatment of the nature of good and evil, the perfectibility of man and the connection between madness and inspiration, the figure of the wise fool, in the oeuvre as a whole.

For, indeed, it is not only this particular aspect of the content of Shakespearean drama but Shakespeare's thought generally that has, it might seem shocking to say, not been adequately discussed even at such a late date in the history of Shakespeare criticism. One has only to recall some of the key statements in this field—all the way from Bradley's first lecture “The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy” in his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) to an essay like E. R. Elton's “Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1986)—to be convinced of this inadequacy. In between these two limits, we had, first, the Eliot/Scrutiny denial that Shakespeare had any thought at all, then a long period of the domination, at least in academic circles, of the conservative caricature of Shakespeare's “philosophic” outlook presented in such works as A. O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (1934) and E. M. W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) to be summarised and popularized endlessly to students, in such works as, for example, M. M. Badawi's Background to Shakespeare (1981), and down, finally to the current inconclusive, and not too enlightening, debate between the New Historicists and the Cultural Materialists (see Dollimore and Greenblatt). For in spite of the wealth of new detail and the seemingly radical break with previous criticism offered by these two approaches, their historical vision remains limited to a local and contemporary framework and thus lacks the kind of “deep historical” and more broadly comparative framework that seems to be needed for the study of Shakespeare and, indeed, of Elizabethan and Renaissance literature generally.

Needless to say, far from denigrating Shakespeare, a line of inquiry like the one followed in this paper will serve further to amplify the dimensions of his genius. As Hamilton Gibb said of Dante: “the genius of Dante would tower all the higher could it be shown that he fused into one magnificent synthesis not only the great heritage of Christian and classical mysticism, but also the richest and most spiritual features of the religious experience of Islam” (198). This task, for Dante, was of course brilliantly performed by the Spanish scholar, P. M. Asin. His arguments, recently summarized by James Monroe, led Asin to conclude that Dante belonged with the Muslim illuminists of the Ishraqi school, rather than with the Thomists or the Aristotelians, as evidenced by his frequent use of light symbols. Indeed, “the allegorical ascension of the mystic as expressed by Ibn al-Arabi in the Futuhat coincided with the ascension of Dante and Beatrice in the Paradiso” (Monroe 192).

More generally, of course, situating Romeo and Juliet within the framework of the Oriental, Sufi, and quasi-allegorical stories of tragic love should help establish a more solid basis for the intuitive recognition of the medieval origins of Shakespearean drama that has found it difficult to identify more specific connections. This is a point that is widely made but most eloquently expressed perhaps by George Steiner:

Beneath the fact of the development of dramatic blank verse beneath the Senecan spirit of majestic violence lay a great inheritance of medieval and popular forms. This is the live undergrowth from which the later sixteenth century draws much of its strength […] The clowns, the wise fools, and the witches of Elizabethan drama carry with them a medieval resonance […] And one cannot understand Shakespeare's history plays or his late, dark comedies without discerning in them a legacy of ritual and symbolic proceeding which goes back to the imaginative wealth of the Middle Ages. How this legacy was transmitted and how it conjoined with the nervous freedom of the Elizabethan temper is as yet unclear. But we feel its shaping presence even as late as Jacobean drama.

(22)⁷

Such a step will entail, above all, a more detailed examination of the Oriental genre of tragic romance—the greatest examples of which have their origins in oral tradition, but which are imbued with the spirit and concepts of Sufism in their second literary stage—that provides, as has been the argument of this paper, a major generic framework for understanding Romeo and Juliet. It should be conducted in the spirit of modern genre criticism best defined by Alastair Fowler:

Traditional genres and modes, far from being mere classificatory devices, serve primarily to enable the reader to share types of meaning economically. Moreover his subsequent understanding is also genrebound: he can only think sensibly of Oedipus Tyrannus as a tragedy, related to other tragedies. If he ignores or despises genre, or gets it wrong, misreading results [sic]. Johnson's blunder over Lycidas and the more recent and even more spectacular critical error of taking Paradise Lost as classical epic with Satan the hero are dreadful examples. Clearly, generic forms must rank among the most important of the signal systems that communicate a literary work.

(“Life and Death” 79)

Recognition of this Oriental framework should also establish Shakespeare's play as an example, perhaps the most renowned example in world literature, of the tertiary stage, to use Alastair Fowler's terms (“Life and Death” 90-92), of tragic romance as a genre. It may be remembered that Fowler's persuasive model of genre development had stipulated an early, rudimentary, but essential stage (in this case, mostly folk poetic narratives of the tragic fates of lovers) followed by a phase of close, literary imitation (represented by the most renowned examples of tragic romance) and, finally, a stage of radical revision that, although rooted essentially in the first two stages, lifts the genre to new heights and along new lines of departure (represented for this essay by Romeo and Juliet). Such a model may also be seen, more familiarly for Western readers than in the case argued here, in the relationship between Lycidas and Paradise Lost and the genres of pastoral and epic as they hark back to classical models. But perhaps the approach to Romeo and Juliet taken in this essay would open the way for more cross-cultural genre studies, particularly those involving the literatures of the East, and help reduce a major shortcoming in the field admitted by Fowler himself, in the preface to his own most recent and most substantial contribution: “The book will seem too audacious to some, to others pedestrian. With few exceptions, for example, it deals specifically with English literature. I am aware of the comparatist's objections to genre studies on a national basis, and agree with them” (Kinds v). The spirit of this candid admission is precisely what is needed for a fuller understanding of many a masterpiece of English literature, and indeed of many other “national” literatures, and for the firmer establishment of the truly comparatist and universalist perspective from which they should be approached.

Notes

1. All of Metlitzki's chapter 8, “The Matter of Araby and the Making of Romance” (240-50), is relevant here.

2. See especially Nykl's chapter 7.

3. These topics are discussed in numerous books, but best, perhaps, in all three works by Nicholson and in Browne 1:416-444 (“The Sufi Mysticism”). More recent studies that may be consulted include Corbin, Arasteh, Shah, and Banani et al., especially chapter 4, by William C. Chittick, “Rumi and wahdat al-wujud,” 70-111.

4. See, in general, Ibrahim 288-306 (“Ishraqism,” chapter 11).

5. Spurgeon 18, also 64-66, 213, 310-16.

6. As Evans puts it in his concluding words, “By thus juxtaposing the concepts of Fate and free will, and by the intermittent but powerful play of irony that results, Shakespeare may be seen as attempting to ensure a humanely tempered reaction to his story of young and tragic love. That he juxtaposes these concepts instead of fusing them, as he is able to do in his later major tragedies, may indeed be recognised as a sign of immaturity and inexperience, but it should also be admitted that the play succeeds because of, not despite, what critics have described as Shakespeare's ‘confusion’” (16).

7. See also Curtius's brief but observant and scholarly remarks that hint at links between Shakespeare's images and rhetoric and those of Oriental poetry, 332-47.

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