SOURCE: Adams, Barry B. “The Prudence of Prince Escalus.” ELH 35, no. 1 (March 1968): 32-50.

[In the following essay, Adams contends that Prince Escalus is a partially emblematic figure in Romeo and Juliet who represents the double-faced image of prudence and Fortunata and who links the drama's themes of chance, fate, time, wisdom, and divine providence.]

Escalus, Prince of Verona, makes his first appearance on stage relatively early in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. The noisy street brawl touched off by the rival serving men is in full swing, and the Prince at first has trouble making himself heard. When he does finally gain the attention of his “rebellious subjects” he addresses them as follows:

Three civill brawles bred of an ayrie word,
By thee old Capulet and Mountague,
Have thrice disturbd the quiet of our streets,
And made Veronas auncient Citizens,
Cast by their grave beseeming ornaments,
To wield old partizans, in hands as old,
Cancred with peace, to part your cancred hate:
If ever you disturbe our streets againe,
Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.

(I.i.96-104)¹

This is the first extended speech in the play, and its delivery by a character of obvious civic prominence in the sudden lull which follows the confused exchange of insults and blows is calculated to gain our attention as well as that of the rebellious subjects. We notice first, perhaps, the stylistic traits which mark the speech as “early Shakespeare”: the heavy alliteration, the studied syntactical balance and parallelism, and especially the somewhat strained word-play in “Cancred … cancred” and “partizans … part.” But the rhetorical manner is not empty mannerism. It is dramatically suited to the speaker and the occasion, and, more important, it introduces in an extremely subtle and allusive way an issue which lies at the heart of the play. Although the present study is concerned ultimately with this larger issue and its bearing on matters of interpretation, it is best to begin with the more immediate question of dramatic propriety.

Speaking in his official capacity as chief political representative of Verona, the Prince is quite naturally concerned above all with the public nature of the disturbance, and as a result the bulk of his speech deals with Verona's “streets” and “Citizens” rather than with the particular individuals involved. His observations are carefully fitted to the abstract peace-hate antithesis spelled out in line 102 and probably hidden behind “civill brawles” of line 96, which appears to be an oxymoron partially obscured by the ambiguity of “civill.” These generalizing and abstracting tendencies, together with the heightened rhetorical manner of address, reflect the authoritative and relatively aloof position which the speaker occupies within the play world. Even though he later claims to have lost a “brace of kinsmen,” his contact with the feud (as well as the love affair) remains essentially impersonal and dispassionate. By insisting on the Prince's responsibility and detachment, Shakespeare from the outset presents us with a character uniquely qualified as observer and commentator, and thus as mediator between play world and audience.

Even more revealing in this connection is the logical structure of the speech. The Prince first presents in brief a summary of events antecedent to those dramatized on stage (96-102); then, in an effort to prevent future violence, he threatens the heads of the feuding parties with the death penalty (103-04). The progression from past to future is clear and orderly, as befits the official representative of the state in a public exercise of his duties. More specifically, it gives concrete form to the speaker's preeminent rationality—the quality that Hamlet refers to as the “large discourse / Looking before and after,” the “capabilitie and god-like reason” which distinguishes a man from a beast (Q2, II.iv.36-38). It is precisely the exercise of this capability which dictates the structure of the Prince's speech: the present moment of “pernicious rage” is seen and presented by the speaker not as an isolated occurrence but as an event which has its roots in the past and which will, unless countered by the force of civil authority, inevitably lead to future disruptions of social concord. The principle of causality implicit in this view of affairs is brought home to the participants only at the end of the play, when all are finally made aware of how their actions have contributed to the tragic catastrophe.² The audience, on the other hand, privileged to witness more than any of the characters, has the opportunity of seeing the principle in operation; and lest it neglect this opportunity, Shakespeare has given the principle a special prominence at an important juncture early in the play by means of the Prince's Janus-like speech.

The Prince assumes this same Janus-like stance in his two later appearances in the play. His entrance in III.i, again at the climax of a noisy street brawl, brings to a halt the confused fighting which has resulted in the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt. He first gets from Benvolio a summary of the preceding action (157-80) and then by passing judgment on Romeo (191-92: “And for that offence, / Immediately we do exile him hence”) extends his influence into the future by establishing a necessary condition for the unfolding of the subsequent action. Similarly, his arrival at the Capulet monument in V.iii imposes order on the prevailing confusion stemming from the discovery of the bodies of Paris and Romeo beside the “newlie dead” Juliet. At his insistence and under his firm direction, the most important events lying behind the tragic spectacle are narrated by Friar Laurence (229-69). After this lengthy circumstantial summary has been supplemented by information derived from Balthasar, the County's page, and Romeo's letter (272-90), our attention is directed to the reconciliation which lies in the future—a future which, although it stretches beyond the limits of the play world, is forced on our attention by the plan for erecting statues of the dead lovers, and particularly by the Prince's assurance that “Some shall be pardond, and some punished” (308).

By momentarily interrupting the forward progress of the play as he does, the Prince on each of his three appearances serves to check the generally precipitant haste with which the tragedy develops, and in the breathing spaces thus provided the audience is invited to share his uniquely rational view of affairs in which the present is seen in relation to past and future. One important consequence of this device is that dramatic action, which is by nature dynamic, is at these moments presented as a static phenomenon. To the extent that past and future are both caught up in the present, the movement of events through time is frozen and acquires an almost purely spatial existence. Furthermore, as a result of the careful placement of the Prince's interruptions, this static presentation of the inherently dynamic eventually encompasses the entire play. His three appearances divide the play into four units, with his second appearance, close to the physical center of the play, dividing the bulk of the action into two balanced units of roughly equal length.³ His first and third appearances, near the beginning and end of the play respectively, complete the framing of the two central units and establish boundaries for two additional, incomplete, sections. The pattern which emerges may be thought of in spatial terms and represented as A) B C (D, with the A section extending into the play's past just as the D section extends into the future. B and C stand as completely framed units of action disposed symmetrically on either side of the Prince's second appearance, which serves as their common boundary.

It would seem on the face of it that a pattern of this kind is not accidental; and in fact the conscious and purposeful nature of the symmetrical design is confirmed by the way in which scenes or incidents within the first complete frame or unit (B) are duplicated or closely paralleled in the second (C). Deliberate parallelism is evident, for example, in the two passages in which the impatient Juliet tries to extract news of Romeo from the Nurse. In II.v Juliet is made to suffer through the Nurse's garrulous complainings and irrelevancies before she is assured of Romeo's intentions; she then leaves for Friar Laurence's cell while the Nurse sets about procuring the rope ladder by which Romeo will climb to Juliet's chamber. The general situation and a number of specific details recur in III.ii, where the Nurse, after throwing down the rope ladder mentioned at the close of II.v, muddles through the news of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment, exciting the impatient Juliet to extremes of conflicting emotions before finally agreeing to help the lovers by fetching Romeo from Friar Laurence's cell. In neither situation, it should be noted, can the audience fully share in Juliet's impatience: it has heard Romeo confirm his intentions of honorable marriage (II.iv.191-94), just as it has heard the Prince's sentence of banishment (III.i.191-92). By virtue of its superior knowledge of the context, it is able to view the Nurse's first suspenseful message as no more than a temporary thwarting of Juliet's joyful expectations. When the situation is caught up and repeated within the radically different context of the C-section of the play, the privileged audience can again see beyond Juliet's temporary frustration at the Nurse's incoherences, only this time it sees the impending misfortunes which are to overcome the lovers.

Other pairs of parallel scenes and passages from either side of the Prince's second appearance are arranged to much the same purpose. The excited bustle of preparation for the Capulet ball (I.v.1-16) is echoed in the preparation for the Juliet-Paris nuptials (IV.iv.1-20), with the joyful expectation of the B-frame transmuted to a sorrowful anticipation of the grief and despair which must follow if Capulet's plans for the marriage of his daughter are successful. Seeing Paris at Friar Laurence's cell arranging for his marriage to Juliet (IV.i.1-15), we are reminded of an earlier consultation with the Friar in which Romeo arranged his marriage to Juliet (II.iii). The basic ironies implicit in such parallels are obvious; old Capulet's plaintive observation that “all things change them to the contrarie” (IV.v.90) describes them accurately enough. What calls for comment is the careful way in which actions located within frame B and colored with what the audience recognizes as a generally hopeful or beneficent quality acquire a tragic malignancy when transplanted into frame C. The governing principle, which goes beyond Capulet's comments on the observable facts, appears to be that actions which are themselves neutral or indifferent take on their comic or tragic significance from the frame or context in which they happen to fall. The same principle of change, complicated by an added dimension of irony, can be seen to operate in Romeo's sudden premonitions—the first a premonition of disaster (I.iv.106-11) which is quickly contradicted by the rapture of his first meetings with Juliet, the second a premonition of joy just before Balthasar delivers his mistaken report of Juliet's death (V.i.1-11). It is perhaps worth noting that the parallelism in this instance is reinforced by the fact that each premonition is based on a dream.

The two “window” or “balcony” scenes, one from either side of the Prince's second appearance, illustrate the same pattern of change and point even more clearly to the underlying principle. In the first, the betrothal scene, Romeo remains below, gazing up at Juliet; in the second he descends from Juliet's chamber until he is once again below, while Juliet gazes down at him.⁴ The difference between Romeo's looking up at Juliet and Juliet's looking down at Romeo is at least poetically valid. In the earlier situation it is Romeo who dominates the scene and from whose point of view the most effective imagery develops: he describes Juliet in terms of sun, moon, heavens, spheres, airy regions, birds, angels, and the like (II.ii.2-32). In the corresponding passage from the later scene, the most compelling piece of directional imagery is put into the mouth of Juliet: “Me thinkes I see thee now, thou art so lowe, / As one dead in the bottome of a tombe” (III.v.55-56). In each case the imagery develops naturally from the immediate theatrical situation;⁵ but it may also be said to develop from a larger context. In terms of plot structure, the first scene is looking “up” to the marriage, while the second is just as surely looking “down” to the catastrophe at the Capulet's monument. Or, in terms of the symmetrical patterning of events and situations under consideration, the first receives its character from the comic tonality of B, the second from the tragic tonality of C.

The dominant qualities of B and C are not, however, simply matters of tonality. The events of B culminate in the marriage following the end of Act II, those of C in the double suicide of Act V; and insofar as marriage and death, especially in Renaissance drama, are distinctive signs (if not actually determinants) of genre, we may describe Romeo and Juliet as a comedy followed by a tragedy. This is a useful description, as far as it goes; any final analysis of the play, however, must of course treat these two movements as elements of a larger unity. The structural formula most readily available to describe this larger unity is obviously that of the rise and fall of a de casibus tragedy. And one important feature of this kind of tragedy brings us back to Prince Escalus, who represents, among other things, the power of the goddess Fortuna. But before pursuing this line of inquiry it is necessary to return to our earlier observations on the Prince's rationality.

In his repeated examining of antecedents and consequences, his habitual “looking before and after,” the Prince is exercising not simply his “large discourse” of reason but specifically the intellectual virtue of prudence. Or, since the question of naturalistic character portrayal is not of primary interest here, it would be more accurate to say that his characteristic mental activity is meant to represent the nature and operation of prudence as these were commonly understood in the Renaissance. According to the brief but authoritative analysis in Cicero's De inventione, prudence, defined as the knowledge of things good, bad, and indifferent, consists of three “parts,” memoria, intelligentia, and providentia, corresponding to the division of time into past, present and future:

Prudentia est rerum bonarum et malarum neutrarumque scientia. Partes eius: Memoria, intelligentia, providentia. Memoria est per quam animus repetit illa quae fuerunt; intelligentia, per quam ea perspicit quae sunt; providentia, per quam futurum aliquid videtur ante quam factum est.⁶

Although the idea is not original with Cicero, this particular formulation of it may be safely considered the archetype of a tradition familiar to Shakespeare and his audience.⁷ The much more intricate and subtle analyses in the De officiis and in numerous medieval treatises on the cardinal virtues, while undoubtedly known in Renaissance England, never succeeded in supplanting this convenient triadic scheme based on the familiar notion of the three modes or forms of time. In the Elizabethan translation of La Primaudaye's French Academy, for example, Cicero is cited as an authority and his three faculties (partes) are rendered as the three “eies” of a faintly personified female Prudence: “With the first [Memorie] she beholdeth the time past: with the second [Vnderstanding], the time present: with the third [Prouidence], the time to come.” Thus “a prudent and wise man, by the consideration of things past: and of that which hath followed since, iudgeth of that, which in the like case may fall out in the time following.”⁸

Although the first part of La Primaudaye's explanation reproduces the most conspicuous and essential features of Cicero's analysis, the application which follows (“a prudent and wise man …”) introduces a slightly different emphasis. Where Cicero's severely asyndetic formula gives the three partes strictly equal weight, La Primaudaye's application takes its orientation from the third member of the series, which is evidently felt to be the most important or distinctive. This latter arrangement, in which memoria and intelligentia are subordinated to providentia, represents a common medieval and Renaissance modification of the Ciceronian triad, and was perhaps suggested by the accepted derivation of the term prudentia from providentia, either directly or from the participial root providens.⁹ It stresses the most distinctive trait of the prudent man, which is his attempt to acquire a knowledge of the future. Such a knowledge can only be inferential, of course, and its accuracy will depend on the extent to which the bases of inference—past and present happenings—are fully and accurately understood. What gives validity to the inferential process in the first place is the assumption that the three forms of time are fundamentally of a piece: past, present, and future are so much alike that through careful observation of the first two one can foresee—and thus presumably provide for—the third, which is not subject to observation. The principle is set forth explicitly in 2 Henry IV, where Warwick explains how Richard had been able to prophesy Northumberland's defection from Henry:

There is a Historie in all mens Liues,
Figuring the nature of the Times deceas'd:
The which obseru'd, a man may prophecie
With a neere ayme, of the maine chance of things,
As yet not come to Life, which in their Seedes
And weake beginnings lye entreasured.

(III.i.80-85)¹⁰

Warwick argues that the present (the “Historie in all mens Liues”—in this case the life of Northumberland as it was present to Richard) is a figure or analogy of both past and future to the extent that Richard, recognizing in Northumberland's behavior a pattern of action repeated by other men in “the Times deceas'd,” was able to project that pattern into the future and thus predict the state of affairs currently present to Henry—viz. “the diuision of … Amitie” (79) between him and Northumberland. Some such concept of history evidently underlies La Primaudaye's explanation of prudence and, perhaps, the Ciceronian analysis on which it is based.

The Ciceronian triad appears in a variety of guises in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English works. It is frequently associated with “wisdom” rather than “prudence,” as in Joseph Hall's “Character of the wise man”:

His free discourse runs backe to the ages past, and recovers events out of memory, and then preventeth Time in flying forward to future things; and comparing one with the other, can give a verdict well-neere propheticall: wherein his conjectures are better than anothers judgements.¹¹

Such usage may reflect the shifting of philosophical attitudes toward sapientia which characterizes Renaissance thinking. Traditionally a speculative or contemplative virtue directed toward transcendental truths, sapientia was relegated more and more to the active, practical, and moral sphere, and as a result it frequently became indistinguishable from prudentia.¹² In many cases, however, the substitution of “wisdom” for “prudence” is only verbal. Variations of the type illustrated by Arthur Golding's translation from a French moral treatise are obviously of this kind. Golding first cites “Cicero in his booke of inuention” and then speaks of the three parts of “discreetnesse,” which he calls “Memorie, Skill, and Fore-cast.”¹³ Sir Walter Ralegh, trying to explain the nature of divine providence and distinguish it from prescience, predestination, and destiny, employs a somewhat different set of terms for what is clearly the same concept:

[Divine] Prouidence … is diuided into Memorie, Knowledge, and Care: Memorie of the past, Knowledge of the present, and Care of the future: and wee our selues account such a man for prouident, as, remembering things past, and obseruing things present, can be iudgement, and comparing the one with the other, prouide for the future, and times succeeding.¹⁴

In assuming that “prouident” as applied to human affairs will clarify the nature of divine providence, Ralegh is appealing to what must have been common usage; and his description of the provident man makes use of the ideas and formulas ordinarily identified with prudence.

Sir Thomas Elyot's elaborate and ingenious treatment of this virtue, based in part on the same Ciceronian tradition, is of particular interest in connection with Romeo and Juliet. Elyot attempts to elucidate the eight “branches” of prudence in terms of the motions of the dance. One such branch is “circumspection,” figured in the fifth movement of the dance, and under this rubric we find the familiar triadic scheme, for the province of circumspection is to consider “what hath caused profite or damage in the tyme passed, what is the astate of the tyme present, what aduauntage or perile maye succede or is imminent.”¹⁵ But the most interesting branch of prudence is that which corresponds to the two-part movement known as the “brawl.” The two parts of this movement figure “celeritie” and “slownesse” respectively, while the virtuous mean between these extremes Elyot designates as “Maturitie”—the kind of caution or deliberation which he feels is best expressed in the proverb “speede the slowly.”¹⁶ Friar Laurence's only slightly less pithy variations on the festina lente theme reveal clearly enough his interest in “maturity” in this sense. “Too swift arrives, as tardie as too slowe,” he admonishes Romeo (II.vi.15); and again, with a slight shift in emphasis, “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast” (II.iii.94). The Friar, of course, is warning Romeo against the extreme of “celeritie” or rashness, one of the vices traditionally opposed to prudence and the one to which the young are particularly susceptible. The confrontation between Romeo and the Friar, in fact, is a perfect illustration of the Ciceronian maxim frequently cited by Renaissance writers in connection with prudence: “Temeritas est … florentis aetatis, prudentia senescentis.”¹⁷ In his somewhat unsubtle manner, then, the Friar calls attention to one of the central thematic concerns of Romeo and Juliet.

Another recognizable variant of the Ciceronian triad, this one based on more than the uncertainties of Elizabethan ethical vocabulary, governs Shakespeare's presentation of Prince Escalus. It is given more overt expression in Thomas Heywood's explanation of a pageant in which the god Janus occupies a prominent position. According to Heywood, Janus was reputed by historians to have been “the wisest King in his dayes; remembering things past, and predicting what was futurely to come; and therefore they figured him with two faces. …”¹⁸ By eliminating intelligentia, or the “eye” focused on the present, Heywood appears to have departed from the triadic Ciceronian scheme. It is clear, however, that his Janus is thought of as an emblematic figure planted in a localized “present” as it surveys past and future, and as a result the essential features of the Ciceronian idea are preserved, as they are in earlier Renaissance treatments of Janus bifrons by such authorities as Alciati, Cartari, and Charles Stephanus, all of whom associate the Roman deity with prudence.¹⁹ It seems never to have been noticed that Shakespeare alludes to this same emblematic figure of the two-faced (or, more precisely, two-headed) Prudence in King John, where the Bastard points out in an ironic aside that the allies Austria and France will be attacking Angiers from opposite sides, to their mutual harm:

O prudent discipline! From North to South:
Austria and France shoot in each others mouth.

(II.i.413-14)

Here “mouth” has as its primary referent the muzzles of the opposing cannon, and then, by an easy and barely perceptible extension, the faces of the opposing troops; its further meaning turns on an allusion to the two-faced Prudence, only in this case the faces are seen in a grotesque perversion of the familiar image—confronting one another—to produce a telling picture of imprudence.

While Prince Escalus is not, strictly speaking, an emblematic figure like Heywood's Janus, he does exhibit a striking intellectual bifrontality as he reaches out from a fixed moment in time to embrace past and future events, and this bifrontality is in some respects emblematic. Shakespeare has gone behind the conventional image of prudence to the ethical concept which informs the image; and this concept he communicates not by explicit verbal reference, nor through a visual (i.e., theatrical) image, nor even by verbal imagery, but by means of a distinctive thought process prominently displayed at certain critical moments in the course of the play. This thought process is embodied in and revealed through spoken utterances, which are by nature temporal and discursive rather than spatial and static: we hear the Prince considering first the past and then the future, whereas we see the purely emblematic Janus figure, which enjoys an exclusively spatial mode of existence, attending to past and future simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Prince is at least partially emblematic. Even though he is physically time-bound and thus forced to express his ideas discursively, the intellectual activity embodied in his speech acquires an essentially atemporal mode of existence when it is considered as a completed process. In other words, the mental acts of examining first the past and then the future remain discrete elements in a temporal series only until they are viewed as components of the single intellectual activity known as prudence; at this moment the dynamic and discursive process is perceived as a completed and therefore static and self-contained entity, and to this extent it partakes of the emblematic. And it is this emblematic quality more than the Friar's aphorisms which reveals the full complexity of Shakespeare's interest in prudence. For the bifrontality which is the distinctive trait of the Prince is made to do double duty; it represents not simply prudence but also fortune. It is a vehicle with two tenors, and the interaction of the tenors helps to define the play's meaning.

The image of Fortuna bifrons, although not nearly so pervasive as such ubiquitous iconographical and literary images as Fortuna with her wheel or Fortuna standing on a globe, was certainly a familiar one in Renaissance England. We know, for example, that a dumb-show in Gascoigne and Kinwelmarsh's Jocasta featured “a woman clothed in a white garment, on her head a piller, double faced, the foremost face fair and smiling, the other behinde blacke and louring. …” Needless to say, she is “a plaine Type or figure of vnstable fortune.”²⁰ The same figure appears in Lodge's Rosalynde as part of old Adam Spencer's complaint to Fortune: “‘Fortune, O inconstant friend, that in all thy deeds art froward and fickle. … Thou standest upon a globe, and thy wings are plumed with Time's feathers, that thou mayest ever be restless: thou art double-faced like Janus, carrying frowns in the one to threaten, and smiles in the other to betray. …’”²¹ The image is perhaps related, at least indirectly, to “Two faces in one hood,” a proverbial expression for deceitfulness. It may owe some of its popularity to Chaucer's rendering of the Boethian phrase ambiguus vultus as “the doutous or double visage” of the blind goddess, although most sixteenth-century Englishings of the Consolatio do not preserve this interpolation.²² In any case, the point of the two-faced Fortuna is clearly the contrasting features, representing good and ill fortune and suggesting the likelihood of abrupt change from one to the other.

The relevance of this image to Romeo and Juliet turns on our earlier analysis of the play in the light of Shakespeare's symmetrical patterning of events on either side of the Prince's second appearance. We have seen how this appearance divides the bulk of the play into two roughly equal spatial units, and how events in the first of these sections are repeated with inverted significance in the second. In this view of the play as a static entity made up of two blocks of action with contrasting tonalities, the emblematic Prince at his second appearance stands as an “image” of the bifrontal Fortuna, whose smiling face and benign influence control the first major section of the play just as her lowering face and baleful influence control the second. The extent of her arbitrariness and her power is suggested by the way in which events and situations are so quickly and radically transformed from comic to tragic.

The foregoing analysis of Prince Escalus' bifrontality points to one of the central critical questions of Romeo and Juliet. Simply put, in terms of what Northrop Frye calls the “reductive formulas” commonly applied to tragedy,²³ is the play a tragedy of fate or a tragedy of character? Do we attribute the deaths of the protagonists to the arbitrary workings of some external, superhuman power—fate, destiny, chance, fortune, or the like—and stress the innocence and helplessness of the lovers? Or do we insist on their undeniable rashness, their headstrong disregard for the counsel of their elders, and view their deaths as a logical, just, or fitting result of their behavior? The reference in the Prologue to the “starre-crost lovers,” as well as similar references elsewhere in the play, would seem to encourage an application of the first formula, and in fact modern criticism has for the most part tended toward a fatalistic reading of the play. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to find something like a “character flaw” in the lovers, especially if we are guided by some of the stricter moral judgments of Friar Laurence. In the figure of Escalus, however, Shakespeare has implicitly rejected both positions, at least in their more simplistic forms. By uniting in his bifrontal Prince the antithetical concepts of prudence and fortune, he invites us to abandon the reductive formulas in favor of a more comprehensive and imaginative interpretation.

The opposition between fortune—by definition the power of unreason and disorder—and the intellectual virtue of prudence is a commonplace. In a Christian universe, of course, there is no place for Fortuna, and as a result the classical demi-goddess and the concept represented by her had by the time of the Renaissance long ceased to have any distinctive meaning, at least for careful thinkers. She was seen as an agent of God, and thus not really irrational at all. Or else she was conceived of not as an objective force, or even a personification of an objective force, but as a poetic fiction designed to characterize an imperfect way of looking at reality. Through the proper exercise of his reason, man in effect “destroys” Fortuna by piercing through the apparent confusion of existence to perceive its rational design, thereby making himself impervious to the hardships and disappointments of life.²⁴ Although this latter “remedy” is commonly represented as the victory of Virtue or Wisdom over Fortune, it is not unusual to find Prudence as antagonist and victor.²⁵ In any case, “virtue” in these contexts, whether used in its restricted ethical sense or in its wider, more radical sense, embraces both “wisdom” and “prudence”; and the conflict with fortune, however expressed, is essentially a conflict between the human and the superhuman—or the putatively superhuman.

But the emblematic bifrontality of Prince Escalus suggests something other than a conflict or opposition. By uniting the normally antithetical concepts in a single figure, Shakespeare is insisting that prudence and fortune are not always distinguishable from one another. Although they are logical opposites, in some cases they produce effects which are remarkably similar. Natale Comes, in his paraphrase of a saying attributed to Athenaeus, makes the same point about wisdom and chance, correlatives of prudence and fortune: “Longissimè à sapientia Fors dissidet. / Sed multa perficit tamen simillima.”²⁶ The tragic irony of Romeo and Juliet arises from just such a conflation of the rational and the irrational.

Shakespeare's working out of this tragic irony is best explained in terms of the analogy between prudence and divine providence—an analogy evidently related in some way to the derivation of the former word from the latter. The traditional Christian doctrine of providence rests on the idea of an omniscient being to whom all time is present simultaneously. What man with his limited perception of reality conceives of as past and future is interminably, immutably, and immediately present to the divine mind; and the divine mind, governing absolutely from its vantage point in the “eternal now,” is known as providence.²⁷ Prudence, on the other hand, represents man's attempt to adopt this divine mode of perception; to the extent that his discursive reason is able to embrace past and future in the present, man is approaching the atemporal, providential view of existence. In Hooker's words, he is “affecting resemblance of God in the constancy and excellency of those operations which belong unto [his] kind,” and in so doing he is manifesting the universal tendency of all creatures to “covet more or less the participation of God himself.”²⁸

The specific analogy between prudence and providence, implicit in Ralegh's description of the “prouident” (i. e., prudent) man quoted above …, is developed at length by George Wither in verses intended to elucidate his emblem of Janus bifrons and its motto “Pando recondita”:

          In true Divinity, 'tis God alone,
To whom, all hidden things are truely knowne.
Hee, onely, is that ever-present-being,
Who, by the vertue of his pow'r all-seeing,
Beholds, at one aspect, all things that are,
That ever shall be, and that ever were.
          But, in a Morall sense, we may apply
This double-face, that man to signifie,
Who (whatsoere he undertakes to doe)
Lookes, both before him, and behinde him, too.
For, he shall never fruitfully forecast
Affaires to come, who mindes not what is past:
And, such as doe not, oft, before them looke,
May lose the labour, that's already tooke.
By, sometimes, looking backward, we behold
Those things, which have been done in times of old;
By looking wisely forward, we foresee
Such matters, as in future-times will bee:
And, thus, we doe not onely fruits receive,
From that short space of time, in which we live;
          But, by this meanes, we likewise have a share,
          In times to come, and, times that passed are.(29)

Wither's “true Divinity” is, of course, providence, while his “Morall sense” refers to prudence. The transition from one to the other is an easy and natural one since both concepts are included in the single emblematic figure of Janus.

What makes the analogy between prudence and providence less than a perfect correspondence is, ultimately, the fact that one is temporal and the other eternal. Since man is necessarily time-bound, his attempt to imitate the divine mode of perception can never be totally successful. Even if he can avoid rashness or temerity—forces which interfere with the very exercise of reason—he cannot expect to have at all times a knowledge of past and present sufficient to ensure completely reliable inferences about the future. As a creature existing in time, he can anticipate and provide for his future only by inferring its nature from past and present events. However valid or correct the inferential process may be, the truth or accuracy of its results will obviously depend on the extent of his knowledge of past and present. Man's temporality, in other words, puts him at the mercy of ignorance; and ignorance, as Evans has convincingly demonstrated, is the decisive force impelling the tragic action of Romeo and Juliet. Tybalt's behavior in the opening scene of the play is attributable in part to his ignorance of Benvolio's intentions; in the final scene Romeo kills himself because he thinks Juliet is dead. The most crucial actions between these two points are all dependent in some way on the characters' lack of knowledge: Romeo and Juliet fall in love before they know one another's identity; old Capulet, well intentioned but unaware of Juliet's marriage to Romeo, helps to bring about the catastrophe by pressing his plans for his daughter's marriage to Paris; and most important, Balthasar's report of Juliet's death—a report which brings about Romeo's premature return to Verona—is founded on ignorance. It is this report, and not the detention of Friar John and the consequent failure to deliver Friar Laurence's letter to Romeo, which triggers the tragic catastrophe.³⁰

The audience, as we have seen, is consistently more knowledgeable than the characters. But although it is technically “omniscient,” it is not precisely “providential.” Only Shakespeare can lay claim to a fully realized, instantaneous view of the dramatic action in its totality. The audience, like the characters, is subject to time, but by virtue of its continuous and unimpeded view of a succession of events which move from present to past, it can make accurate inferences about what is to come. It cannot, however, achieve the playwright's providential vision—a vision which is tantamount to control over future events—and to this extent it is helpless.

The Prince, of course, is even more helpless because more ignorant. Considered simply as a character within the play world he is a model of prudence, clearly superior to the other characters in this respect. But although he comes closer than the others to the providential view of affairs, even he fails, precisely because his knowledge of events is incomplete. His rationality is therefore unable to “destroy” the power of fortune, and as a result events fall out in ways unintended and unexpected—that is, they happen by “chance” or “accident” in the strict sense of these terms. But the Prince is more than a character within the play world. He is also an emblem of prudence, and his “failure” in this capacity is an index to Shakespeare's artistic success. The very instability of a symbolic figure in which prudence merges with fortune epitomizes Shakespeare's purpose in Romeo and Juliet. In this view of the play, the underlying tragic conception as embodied in the bifrontal Prince—the character who mediates between play world and audience—turns out to be more sophisticated and profound than most critics have been willing to admit. For Shakespeare is in this play fundamentally concerned with the tragic limitations of man's most ennobling faculty, his “god-like reason”—a faculty which, forced to operate in time and always endangered by ignorance, produces effects virtually indistinguishable from those commonly attributed to the blind, two-faced Fortuna.

Notes

1. Quotations from Romeo and Juliet are from the critical edition by George Walton Williams (Durham, N. C., 1964); act, scene, and line references agree with those of the Globe edition. Except where noted, other of Shakespeare's plays are quoted from the 1623 Folio.

2. See Bertrand Evans, “The Brevity of Friar Laurence,” PMLA, LXV (1950), 845-46.

3. According to the conventional scene divisions of modern texts, each unit consists of twelve scenes.

4. The staging of these scenes is discussed by Richard Hosley, “The Use of the Upper Stage in Romeo and Juliet,” SQ, V (1954), 371-79. Cf. John Cranford Adams, “Shakespeare's Use of the Upper Stage in Romeo and Juliet, III.v,” SQ, VII (1956), 145-52.

5. Cf. Wolfgang H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1966), p. 67. Clemen notices the “metaphorical character of the situation itself” in II.ii, but does not comment on the similar character of the situation in III.v.

6. De inventione II.53.

7. Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and their Posterity (Princeton, 1966), chap. II and Appendix. See also Erwin Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, XVIII (Leipzig and Berlin, 1930), pp. 2-6, and Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1958), p. 45, n. 1.

8. The French Academie, trans. T[homas] B[owes] (London, 1586), p. 105. Cf. Criseyde's lament in Chaucer's Troilus (V. 744 ff.): “‘Prudence, allas, oon of thyn eyen thre / Me lakked alwey. …’” The three eyes of Prudence are referred to again in William Leighton's Vertve Trivmphant (London, 1603), stanza 70. In Titian's Allegory of Prudence the Ciceronian triad is represented by the three human faces of different ages set above a three-headed beast. See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), pp. 146-68 and Fig. 28. More prosaic treatments of the Ciceronian partes appear in Lydgate's Minor Poems, Part II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (EETS: OS 192; London, 1934), pp. 17-20; Cornelius Valerius, The Casket of Iewels, trans. I[ohn] C[harlton] (London, 1571), sig. D₆^v-D₇.

9. Other examples of the modified triad in [Gerard Legh], The Accedens of Armory (n. p., [1568]), sig. A₆^v, and Dominic Mansion, The Myrrour of Good Maners, trans. Alexander Barclay (n. p., n. d.), sig. A₆. Cf. the motto of Titian's Allegory of Prudence (Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 148-49): “Ex praeterito praesens prvdenter agit ni fvtvram actionem detvrpet.” For the etymology of prudentia, see [Guillaume de la Perriere], The Mirrovr of Policie (London, 1598), sig. H₃; Robert Stephanus, Dictionarium seu thesaurus Latinae linguae (Venice, 1551), s. v. prudens.

10. Analogues from classical writers are cited in Matthias A. Shaaber's New Variorum edition (Philadelphia, 1940), p. 228. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia IIae, quaest. 49, art. 1 ad 3.

11. Heaven vpon Earth and Characters of Vertves and Vices, ed. Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick, 1948), p. 148. Cf. Richard Day, A Booke of Christian Prayers (London, 1590), fols. 46, 66^v; Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus linguœ Romanœ & Britannicœ (London, 1584), s. v. prudens; Mansion, trans. Barclay, sig. A₆.

12. Eugene F. Rice, Jr., The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom, Harvard Historical Monographs, XXXVII (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 36, 149-56, 163-77, et passim; Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of “The Faerie Queene” (Chicago, 1942), pp. 221 ff.

13. Jaques Hurault, Politicke, Moral, and Martial Discourses (London, 1595), p. 157.

14. The History of the World (London, 1614), p. 15.

15. The Boke Named the Gouernour, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (London, 1883), I, 254.

16. Ibid., 242-44.

17. De senectute VI.20. Quoted with insignificant variations by Robert Stephanus, Dictionarium, s. v. prudentia; Cooper, Thesaurus, s. v. prudentia.

18. Dramatic Works (London, 1874), V, 364.

19. Andrea Alciati, Emblematum libellum (Venice, 1546), fol. 6^v, and Emblemata (Lyons, 1551), p. 24 (reproduced in facsimile by Henry Green in Vols. IV and V of the Holbein Society's publications, Manchester and London, 1870 and 1871); Vincenzo Cartari, Imagines deorum (Lyons, 1581), p. 31; Charles Stephanus, Dictionarium, ed. Nicholas Lloyd (London, 1686), s. v. Janus. See also Guillaume de la Perriere, Le Theatre des Bons Engins (Paris: Denis Janot [1539]; facs. ed. Gainesville, Florida, 1964, pp. 12-13), and the English translation by Thomas Combe (London, 1614), Embleme I. Prudence is described as a two-faced donna in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (Milan, 1602), p. 224. In some later editions of the Iconologia, the donna is explicitly associated with Janus.

20. Early English Classical Tragedies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Oxford, 1912), p. 139.

21. Ed. W. W. Greg (London, 1907), p. 57. See also Greene's Menaphon (1589), ed. Edward Arber (London, 1880), p. 29; Stephen Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. William Edward Mead (EETS: OS 173; London, 1928), ll. 3036, 3109, 3161; Machiavelli, Di Fortuna, in Tutte le Opere, ed. Francesco Flora and Carlo Cordié, II (n. p., 1950), p. 709. Other examples of the two-faced Fortuna are mentioned by Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven, 1952), pp. 48-49, and Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 42-43.

22. The passage in question occurs in Book II, prose 1 of the Consolatio. When the same phrase appears again in Book II, prose 8, Chaucer translates ambiguus simply as “doutous.”

23. Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1966), p. 209.

24. For a few representative treatments of these ideas in English Renaissance sources, see Remains of Myles Coverdale, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge, 1846), p. 240; The Writings of John Bradford, ed. Aubrey Townsend, I (Cambridge, 1848), 212; The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, ed. John Griffiths (Oxford, 1859), p. 478; the dedicatory epistle to Leicester in Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (ed. W. H. D. Rouse, Carbondale, Ill., 1961, ll. 320-31); The French Academie, pp. 254, 307, 468-69, 477-78; The Book of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints, 1911), p. 79 (Addition III, ll. 1-3).

25. See, e. g., Patch, Goddess Fortuna, p. 48, n. 3; Lydgate's “Mumming at London,” ll. 142 ff., in Minor Poems, Part II, ed. MacCracken; El Libro de la Fortuna: 200 dibujos inéditos de Jean Cousin, facs. ed. Ludovic Lalanne (Buenos Aires, 1947), Lámina 109; The French Academie, pp. 335-36.

26. Mythologiœ … libri decem (Paris, 1583), p. 338 (Lib. IV, cap. ix). Ralegh quotes the same verses and translates as follows (History of the World, p. 17): “From Wisedome Fortune differs farre. / And yet in works most like they are.” Cf. Giovanni Pontano, De Fortuna, Lib. II, cap. viii (Opera [Basle, 1566], I, 857), and Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege, pp. 26-27.

27. The classic formulation—which shows the influence of Plato (Timaeus 37C-38C) and Augustine (Confessiones, Lib. XI, cap. xiii, xiv; De Trinitate, Lib. XV, cap. vii; etc.)—is Boethius' “interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio” (De Cons. Phil., Lib. V, pr. vi). Cf. Montaigne's “Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” in Essayes, trans. Florio (London: Everyman's Library, 1910), II, 325 (here drawing from Plutarch); The French Academie, p. 407; Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York, 1964), p. 82.

28. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: Everyman's Library, 1907), I, 165.

29. Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London, 1634), Book III, no. 4. The same analogy is implicit in the first pageant of the Chester cycle, ll. 13-14, where Deus Pater refers to his “perpetuall prudens.” Two manuscripts contain the interesting variant “provydence” for “prudens.” See The Chester Plays, Part I, ed. Hermann Deimling (EETS:ES 62; London, 1892), p. 10.

30. “The Brevity of Friar Laurence,” pp. 851-62.