SOURCE: Levin, Harry. “Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 11, no. 1 (Winter 1960): 3-11.

[In the essay below, Levin examines the style and form of Romeo and Juliet, and contends that the play is an elaborate and innovative experiment in romantic comedy.]

“Fain would I dwell on form—”, says Juliet from her window to Romeo in the moonlit orchard below,

Fain would I dwell on form—fain, fain deny
What I have spoke; but farewell compliment!

(II. ii. 88-89)¹

Romeo has just violated convention, dramatic and otherwise, by overhearing what Juliet intended to be a soliloquy. Her cousin, Tybalt, had already committed a similar breach of social and theatrical decorum in the scene at the Capulets' feast, where he had also recognized Romeo's voice to be that of a Montague. There, when the lovers first met, the dialogue of their meeting had been formalized into a sonnet, acting out the conceit of his lips as pilgrims, her hand as a shrine, and his kiss as a culminating piece of stage-business, with an encore after an additional quatrain: “You kiss by th' book” (I. v. 112). Neither had known the identity of the other; and each, upon finding it out, responded with an ominous exclamation coupling love and death (120, 140). The formality of their encounter was framed by the ceremonious character of the scene, with its dancers, its masquers, and—except for Tybalt's stifled outburst—its air of old-fashioned hospitality. “We'll measure them a measure”, Benvolio had proposed; but Romeo, unwilling to join the dance, had resolved to be an onlooker and carry a torch (I. iv. 10). That torch may have burned symbolically, but not for Juliet; indeed, as we are inclined to forget with Romeo, he attended the feast in order to see the dazzling but soon eclipsed Rosaline. Rosaline's prior effect upon him is all that we ever learn about her; yet it has been enough to make Romeo, when he was presented to us, a virtual stereotype of the romantic lover. As such, he has protested a good deal too much in his preliminary speeches, utilizing the conventional phrases and standardized images of Elizabethan eroticism, bandying generalizations, paradoxes, and sestets with Benvolio, and taking a quasi-religious vow which his introduction to Juliet would ironically break (I. ii. 92-97). Afterward this role has been reduced to absurdity by the humorous man, Mercutio, in a mock-conjuration evoking Venus and Cupid and the inevitable jingle of “love” and “dove” (II. i. 10). The scene that follows is actually a continuation, marked in neither the Folios nor the Quartos, and linked with what has gone before by a somewhat eroded rhyme.

                                                                                                                        'Tis in vain
To seek him here that means not to be found,

Benvolio concludes in the absence of Romeo (41, 42). Whereupon the latter, on the other side of the wall, chimes in:

He jests at scars that never felt a wound.

(II. ii. 1)

Thus we stay behind, with Romeo, when the masquers depart. Juliet, appearing at the window, does not hear his descriptive invocation. Her first utterance is the very sigh that Mercutio burlesqued in the foregoing scene: “Ay, me!” (II. ii. 25). Then, believing herself to be alone and masked by the darkness, she speaks her mind in sincerity and simplicity. She calls into question not merely Romeo's name but—by implication—all names, forms, conventions, sophistications, and arbitrary dictates of society, as opposed to the appeal of instinct directly conveyed in the odor of a rose. When Romeo takes her at her word and answers, she is startled and even alarmed for his sake; but she does not revert to courtly language.

I would not for the world they saw thee here,

she tells him, and her monosyllabic directness inspires the matching cadence of his response:

And but thou love me, let them find me here.

(77, 79)

She pays incidental tribute to the proprieties with her passing suggestion that, had he not overheard her, she would have dwelt on form, pretended to be more distant, and played the not impossible part of the captious beloved. But farewell compliment! Romeo's love for Juliet will have an immediacy which cuts straight through the verbal embellishment that has obscured his infatuation with Rosaline. That shadowy creature, having served her Dulcinea-like purpose, may well be forgotten. On the other hand, Romeo has his more tangible foil in the person of the County Paris, who is cast in that ungrateful part which the Italians call terzo incòmodo, the inconvenient third party, the unwelcome member of an amorous triangle. As the official suitor of Juliet, his speeches are always formal, and often sound stilted or priggish by contrast with Romeo's. Long after Romeo has abandoned his sonneteering, Paris will pronounce a sestet at Juliet's tomb (V. iii. 11-16). During their only colloquy, which occurs in Friar Laurence's cell, Juliet takes on the sophisticated tone of Paris, denying his claims and disclaiming his compliments in brisk stichomythy. As soon as he leaves, she turns to the Friar, and again—as so often in intimate moments—her lines fall into monosyllables:

O, shut the door! and when thou hast done so,
Come weep with me—past hope, past cure, past help!

(IV. i. 44-45)

Since the suit of Paris is the main subject of her conversations with her parents, she can hardly be sincere with them. Even before she met Romeo, her consent was hedged in prim phraseology:

I'll look to like, if looking liking move.

(I. iii. 97)

And after her involvement she becomes adept in the strategems of mental reservation, giving her mother equivocal rejoinders and rousing her father's anger by chopping logic (III. v. 60-205). Despite the intervention of the Nurse on her behalf, her one straightforward plea is disregarded. Significantly Lady Capulet, broaching the theme of Paris in stiffly appropriate couplets, has compared his face to a volume:²

This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him only lacks a cover.
The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride
The fair without the fair within to hide.

(I.iii.89-90)

That bookish comparison, by emphasizing the letter at the expense of the spirit, helps to lend Paris an aspect of unreality; to the Nurse, more ingenuously, he is “a man of wax” (76). Later Juliet will echo Lady Capulet's metaphor, transferring it from Paris to Romeo:

Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound?

(III.ii.83-84)

Here, on having learned that Romeo has just slain Tybalt, she is undergoing a crisis of doubt, a typically Shakespearian recognition of the difference between appearance and reality. The fair without may not cover a fair within, after all. Her unjustified accusations, leading up to her rhetorical question, form a sequence of oxymoronic epithets: “Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical, … honorable villain!” (75-79) W. H. Auden, in a recent comment on these lines, cannot believe they would come from a heroine who had been exclaiming shortly before: “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds … !” Yet Shakespeare has been perfectly consistent in suiting changes of style to changes of mood. When Juliet feels at one with Romeo, her intonations are genuine; when she feels at odds with him, they should be unconvincing. The attraction of love is played off against the revulsion from books, and coupled with the closely related themes of youth and haste, in one of Romeo's long-drawn-out leavetakings:

Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books;
But love from love, towards school with heavy looks.

(II.ii.157-158)³

The school for these young lovers will be tragic experience. When Romeo, assuming that Juliet is dead and contemplating his own death, recognizes the corpse of Paris, he will extend the image to cover them both:

                                                                                          O give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune's book!

(V.iii.82)

It was this recoil from bookishness, together with the farewell to compliment, that animated Love's Labour's Lost, where literary artifice was so ingeniously deployed against itself, and Berowne was taught—by an actual heroine named Rosaline—that the best books were women's eyes. Some of Shakespeare's other early comedies came even closer to adumbrating certain features of Romeo and Juliet: notably, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with its locale, its window scene, its friar and rope, its betrothal and banishment, its emphasis upon the vagaries of love. Shakespeare's sonnets and erotic poems had won for him the reputation of an English Ovid. Romeo and Juliet, the most elaborate product of his so-called lyrical period, was his first successful experiment in tragedy.⁴ Because of that very success, it is hard for us to realize the full extent of its novelty, though scholarship has lately been reminding us of how it must have struck contemporaries.⁵ They would have been surprised, and possibly shocked, at seeing lovers taken so seriously. Legend, it had been heretofore taken for granted, was the proper matter for serious drama; romance was the stuff of the comic stage. Romantic tragedy—“an excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet”, to cite the title-page of the First Quarto—was one of those contradictions in terms which Shakespeare seems to have delighted in resolving. His innovation might be described as transcending the usages of romantic comedy, which are therefore very much in evidence, particularly at the beginning. Subsequently, the leading characters acquire together a deeper dimension of feeling by expressly repudiating the artificial language they have talked and the superficial code they have lived by. Their formula might be that of the anti-Petrarchan sonnet:

Foole said My muse to mee, looke in thy heart and write.(6)

An index of this development is the incidence of rhyme, heavily concentrated in the First Act, and its gradual replacement by a blank verse which is realistic or didactic with other speakers and unprecedentedly limpid and passionate with the lovers. “Love has no need of euphony”, the eminent Russian translator of the play, Boris Pasternak, has commented. “Truth, not sound, dwells in its heart.”⁷

Comedy set the pattern of courtship, as formally embodied in a dance. The other genre of Shakespeare's earlier stagecraft, history, set the pattern of conflict, as formally embodied in a duel. Romeo and Juliet might also be characterized as an anti-revenge play, in which hostile emotions are finally pacified by the interplay of kindlier ones. Romeo sums it up in his prophetic oxymorons:

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!

(I.i.162-164)

And Paris, true to type, waxes grandiose in lamenting Juliet:

O love! O life! not life, but love in death!

(IV.v.58)

Here, if we catch the echo from Hieronimo's lament in The Spanish Tragedy,

O life! no life, but lively form of death,

we may well note that the use of antithesis, which is purely decorative with Kyd, is functional with Shakespeare. The contrarieties of his plot are reinforced on the plane of imagery by omnipresent reminders of light and darkness,⁸ youth and age, and many other antitheses subsumed by the all-embracing one of Eros and Thanatos, the leitmotif of the Liebestod, the myth of the tryst in the tomb. This attraction of ultimate opposites—which is succinctly implicit in the Elizabethan ambiguity of the verb to die—is generalized when the Friar rhymes “womb” with “tomb”, and particularized when Romeo hails the latter place as “thou womb of death” (I.iii.9, 10; V.iii.45). Hence the “extremities” of the situation, as the Prologue to the Second Act announces, are tempered “with extreme sweet” (14). Those extremes begin to meet as soon as the initial prologue, in a sonnet disarmingly smooth, has set forth the feud between the two households, “Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (4). Elegant verse yields to vulgar prose, and to an immediate riot, as the servants precipitate a renewal—for the third time—of their masters' quarrel. The brawl of Act I is renewed again in the contretemps of Act III and completed by the swordplay of Act V. Between the street-scenes, with their clashing welter of citizens and officers, we shuttle through a series of interiors, in a flurry of domestic arrangements and family relationships. The house of the Capulets is the logical center of action, and Juliet's chamber its central sanctum. Consequently, the sphere of privacy encloses Acts II and IV, in contradistinction to the public issues raised by the alternating episodes. The temporal alternation of the play, in its accelerating continuity, is aptly recapitulated by the impatient rhythm of Capulet's speech:

                                                            Day, night, late, early,
At home, abroad, alone, in company,
Waking or sleeping …

(III.v.177-179)

The alignment of the dramatis personae is as symmetrical as the antagonism they personify. It is not without relevance that the names of the feuding families, like the Christian names of the hero and heroine, are metrically interchangeable (though “Juliet” is more frequently a trochee than an amphimacer). Tybalt the Capulet is pitted against Benvolio the Montague in the first street-fight, which brings out—with parallel stage-directions—the heads of both houses restrained by respective wives. Both the hero and heroine are paired with others, Rosaline and Paris, and admonished by elderly confidants, the Friar and the Nurse. Escalus, as Prince of Verona, occupies a superior and neutral position; yet, in the interchange of blood for blood, he loses “a brace of kinsman”, Paris and Mercutio (V.iii.295). Three times he must quell and sentence the rioters before he can pronounce the final sestet, restoring order to the city-state through the lovers' sacrifice. He effects the resolution by summoning the patriarchal enemies, from their opposite sides, to be reconciled. “Capulet, Montague,” he sternly arraigns them, and the polysyllables are brought home by monosyllabics:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

(291-293)

The two-sided counterpoise of the dramatic structure is well matched by the dynamic symmetry of the antithetical style. One of its peculiarities, which surprisingly seems to have escaped the attention of commentators, is a habit of stressing a word by repeating it within a line, a figure which may be classified in rhetoric as a kind of ploce. I have cited a few examples incidentally; let me now underline the device by pointing out a few more. Thus Montague and Capulet are accused of forcing their parties

To wield old partisans in hands as old,
Cank'red with peace, to part your cank'red hate.

(I.i.100, 102)

This double instance, along with the wordplay on “cank'red,” suggests the embattled atmosphere of partisanship through the halberds; and it is further emphasized in Benvolio's account of the fray:

Came more and more, and fought on part and part.

(122)

The key-words are not only doubled but affectionately intertwined, when Romeo confides to the Friar:

As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine.

(II.iii.59)

Again, he conveys the idea of reciprocity by declaring that Juliet returns “grace for grace and love for love” (86). The Friar's warning hints at poetic justice:

These violent delights have violent ends.

(II.vi.9)

Similarly Mercutio, challenged by Tybalt, turns “point to point”, and the Nurse finds Juliet—in antimetabole—“Blubb'ring and weeping, weeping and blubbering” (III.ii.165; iii.87). Statistics would prove illusory, because some repetitions are simply idiomatic, grammatical, or—in the case of old Capulet or the Nurse—colloquial. But it is significant that the play contains well over a hundred such lines, the largest number being in the First Act and scarcely any left over for the Fifth.

The significance of this tendency toward reduplication, both stylistic and structural, can perhaps be best understood in the light of Bergson's well-known theory of the comic: the imposition of geometrical form upon the living data of formless consciousness. The stylization of love, the constant pairing and counterbalancing, the quid pro quo of Capulet and Montague, seem mechanical and unnatural. Nature has other proponents besides the lovers, especially Mercutio their fellow victim, who bequeathes his curse to both their houses. His is likewise an ironic end, since he has been as much a satirist of “the new form” and Tybalt's punctilio in duelling “by the book of arithmetic” as of “the numbers that Petrarch flowed in” and Romeo's affectations of gallantry (II.iv.34, 38; III.i.104). Mercutio's interpretation of dreams, running counter to Romeo's premonitions, is naturalistic, not to say Freudian; Queen Mab operates through fantasies of wish-fulfilment, bringing love to lovers, fees to lawyers, and tithe-pigs to parsons; the moral is that desires can be mischievous. In his repartee with Romeo, Mercutio looks forward to their fencing with Tybalt; furthermore he charges the air with bawdy suggestions that—in spite of the limitations of Shakespeare's theatre, its lacks of actresses and absence of close-ups—love may have something to do with sex, if not with lust, with the physical complementarity of male and female.⁹ He is abetted, in that respect, by the malapropistic garrulity of the Nurse, Angelica, who is naturally bound to Juliet through having been her wet-nurse, and who has lost the infant daughter that might have been Juliet's age. None the less, her crotchety hesitations are contrasted with Juliet's youthful ardors when the Nurse acts as go-between for Romeo. His counsellor, Friar Laurence, makes a measured entrance with his sententious couplets on the uses and abuses of natural properties, the medicinal and poisonous effects of plants:

For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.

(II.iii.25, 26)

His watchword is “Wisely and slow”, yet he contributes to the grief at the sepulcher by ignoring his own advice, “They stumble that run fast” (94).¹⁰ When Romeo upbraids him monosyllabically,

Thou canst not speak of that thou doest not feel,

it is the age-old dilemma that separates the generations: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait (III.iii.64). Banished to Mantua, Romeo has illicit recourse to the Apothecary, whose shop—envisaged with Flemish precision—unhappily replaces the Friar's cell, and whose poison is the sinister counterpart of Laurence's potion.

Against this insistence upon polarity, at every level, the mutuality of the lovers stands out, the one organic relation amid an overplus of stylized expressions and attitudes. The naturalness of their diction is artfully gained, as we have noticed, through a running critique of artificiality. In drawing a curtain over the consummation of their love, Shakespeare heralds it with a prothalamium and follows it with an epithalamium. Juliet's “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”, reversing the Ovidian “lente currite, noctis equi”, is spoken “alone” but in breathless anticipation of a companion (III.ii.1). After having besought the day to end, the sequel to her solo is the duet in which she begs the night to continue. In the ensuing débat of the nightingale and the lark, a refinement upon the antiphonal song of the owl and the cuckoo in Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo more realistically discerns “the herald of the morn” (III.v.6). When Juliet reluctantly agrees, “More light and light it grows”, he completes the paradox with a doubly reduplicating line:

More light and light—more dark and dark our woes!

(35, 36)

The precariousness of their union, formulated arithmetically by the Friar as “two in one” (II.vi.37), is brought out by the terrible loneliness of Juliet's monologue upon taking the potion:

My dismal scene I needs must act alone.

(IV.iii.19)

Her utter singleness, as an only child, is stressed by her father and mourned by her mother:

But one, poor one, one poor and loving child.

(v.46)

Tragedy tends to isolate where comedy brings together, to reveal the uniqueness of individuals rather than what they have in common with others. Asking for Romeo's profession of love, Juliet anticipates: “I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’” (II.ii.90). That monosyllable of glad assent was the first she ever spoke, as we know from the Nurse's childish anecdote (I.iii.48). Later, asking the Nurse whether Romeo has been killed, Juliet pauses self-consciously over the pun between “Ay” and “I” or “eye”:

                                                                                          Say thou but ‘I,’
And that bare vowel ‘I’ shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice.
I am not I, if there be such an ‘I’;
Or those eyes shut that make thee answer ‘I.’
If he be slain, say ‘I’; or if not, ‘no.’
Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe.

(III.ii.45-51)

Her identification with him is negated by death, conceived as a shut or poisoning eye, which throws the pair back upon their single selves. Each of them dies alone—or, at all events, in the belief that the other lies dead, and without the benefit of a recognition-scene. Juliet, of course, is still alive; but she has already voiced her death-speech in the potion scene. With the dagger, her last words, though richly symbolic, are brief and monosyllabic:

This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die.

(V.iii.170)

The sense of vicissitude is re-enacted through various gestures of staging; Romeo and Juliet experience their exaltation “aloft” on the upper stage; his descent via the rope is, as she fears, toward the tomb (III.v.56).¹¹ The antonymous adverbs up and down figure, with increasing prominence, among the brief sounds that determine Juliet's woe (e.g., V.ii.209-210). The overriding pattern through which she and Romeo have been trying to break—call it Fortune, the stars, or what you will—ends by closing in and breaking them; their private world disappears, and we are left in the social ambiance again. Capulet's house has been bustling with preparations for a wedding, the happy ending of comedy. The news of Juliet's death is not yet tragic because it is premature; but it introduces a peripety which will become the starting point for Hamlet.

All things that we ordained festival
Turn from their office to black funeral—

the old man cries, and his litany of contraries is not less poignant because he has been so fond of playing the genial host:

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.

(IV.v.84-90)

His lamentation, in which he is joined by his wife, the Nurse, and Paris, reasserts the formalities by means of what is virtually an operatic quartet. Thereupon the music becomes explicit, when they leave the stage to the Musicians, who have walked on with the County Paris. Normally these three might play during the entr'acte, but Shakespeare has woven them into the dialogue terminating the Fourth Act.¹² Though their art has the power of soothing the passions and thereby redressing grief, as the comic servant Peter reminds them with a quotation from Richard Edward's lyric In Commendacion of Musicke, he persists in his query: “Why ‘silver sound’?” (131) Their answers are those of mere hirelings, who can indifferently change their tune from a merry dump to a doleful one, so long as they are paid with coin of the realm. Yet Peter's riddle touches a deeper chord of correspondence, the interconnection between discord and harmony, between impulse and discipline. “Consort”, which can denote a concert or a companionship, can become the fighting word that motivates the unharmonious pricksong of the duellists (III.i.48). The “sweet division” of the lark sounds harsh and out of tune to Juliet, since it proclaims that the lovers must be divided (v.29). Why “silver sound”? Because Romeo, in the orchard, has sworn by the moon

That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops.

(II.i.108)

Because Shakespeare, transposing sights and sounds into words, has made us imagine

How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears!

(167-168)

Notes

1. Line-references are to the separate edition of G. L. Kittredge's text (Boston, 1940).

2. On the long and rich history of this trope, see the sixteenth chapter of E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953).

3. In the paper-bound Laurel Shakespeare, ed. Francis Fergusson (New York, 1958), p. 26.

4. H. B. Charlton, in his British Academy lecture for 1939, “Romeo and Juliet” as an Experimental Tragedy, has considered the experiment in the light of Renaissance critical theory.

5. Especially F. M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies (San Marino, 1957), pp. 63-88.

6. Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922), p. 243.

7. Boris Pasternak, “Translating Shakespeare”, tr. Manya Harari, The Twentieth Century, CLXIV, 979 (September, 1958), p. 217.

8. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York, 1936), pp. 310-316.

9. Coleridge's persistent defense of Shakespeare against the charge of gross language does more credit to that critic's high-mindedness than to his discernment. The concentrated ribaldry of the gallants in the street (II.iv) is deliberately contrasted with the previous exchange between the lovers in the orchards (1-135).

10. This is the leading theme of the play, in the interpretation of Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Themes and Characters (New York, 1956), pp. 10-25.

11. One of the more recent and pertinent discussions of staging is that of Richard Hosley, “The Use of the Upper Stage in Romeo and Juliet”, Shakespeare Quarterly, V, 4 ([Autumn, 1-137], 1954), 371-379.

12. Professor F. T. Bowers reminds me that inter-act music was probably not a regular feature of public performance when Romeo and Juliet was first performed. Some early evidence for it has been gathered by T. S. Graves in “The Act-Time in Elizabethan Theatres”, Studies in Philology, XII, 3 (July, 1915), 120-124—notably contemporary sound cues, written into a copy of the Second Quarto and cited by Malone. But if—as seems likely—such practices were exceptional, then Shakespeare was innovating all the farther.