SOURCE: Waters, D. Douglas. “Fate and Fortune in Romeo and Juliet.” Upstart Crow 12 (1992): 74-90.

[In the following essay, Waters contends that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of fate and fortune influenced by the writings of Ptolemy and Seneca.]

In critical discussion of Romeo and Juliet in the last three decades or so, there are at least three significant ways of approaching the play: 1) traditional character-study as the key to the tragedy, 2) a recent de-emphasis on the genre of tragedy in favor of discussion of culture, sexual difference, and ideology, and 3) the role of fate as the key to the tragedy. The complexity of these issues necessitates clarification of my own critical stance. First, I think the character-study critics have overemphasized the study of character in this play, but not because I think, as Christopher Norris writes in “Post-Structuralist Shakespeare: Text and Ideology” (1985), that character-study in itself is naive.¹ Still, what Norris writes might have at least some bearing on Romeo and Juliet. Second, I admit that my representation of many current approaches to this play as de-emphasizing the genre of tragedy is in itself a debatable judgment and one possibly subject to some few slight exceptions of which I am not aware. Third, I intend here to open up the debate about fate and fortune in Romeo and Juliet and to reargue their importance in the play's tragic pattern. I shall operate in the hybrid tradition of historicist/formalist concerns for ideas in history which possibly have some bearing on the form of the tragedy. I am conscious of the dominant influence of Murray Krieger's Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System (1976), Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory (1979), Words About Words About Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Texts (1988), and other works including his introductory essay in The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History (1987), where he agrees with David Carroll's emphasis in another essay in this same volume, “Narrative, Heterogeneity, and the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard.” Here Carroll refers to the frustration and reaction recent critics have made “to the fact that formalism in some form or other just won't go away no matter how often and how forcefully history and politics are evoked to chase it away.”² Carroll then adds significantly:

Another version of formalism always seems ready to rise out of the ashcan of history to take the place of previously discarded versions. This may in large part be due to the fact that the critique of formalism has too often taken the form of a naïve, precritical historicism, one whose shortcomings certain types of formalism (for example, a certain Russian formalism and early, critical structuralism) have quite effectively exposed and challenged. Such critiques, rather than being post-formalist (or post-structuralist, if this term has any sense), are really preformalist (prestructuralist). Perhaps the problem even is not really how to become post-formalist at all, as if one could ever really leave the problem of form behind, but rather how to establish a critical perspective on form and history that does not depend on either formalist or historicist, post-formalist or metahistorical assumptions.³

In an essay entitled “Poetic Presence and Illusion II: Formalist Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor” Krieger makes a significant distinction between “narrow formalism” and “broad formalism.” A narrow formalism, which was associated in various ways by various critics with the once “New Criticism” in America, “equated formalism with aestheticism as a doctrine which would cut the art object off from the world while treating only its craftsmanlike quality as an artifact.”⁴ This definition of narrow formalism has been erased by the efforts of structuralists and poststructuralists during the last three decades. Krieger defines broad formalism as follows:

At its broadest, formalism must recognize (and has recognized) the several elements in the aesthetic transaction to which the word “form” may be applied. There is the imaginative form as it is seen, grasped, and (it's to be hoped) projected by the mind of the poet; there is the verbal form, at once diachronic and synchronic, that is seen, grasped, and projected in the course of the reader's (or, in stage production, the audience's) experience; and there is the form that becomes one of the shapes which culture creates for its society to grasp its sense of itself.⁵

These broader concerns with form bring us “closer to that original sense of form bequeathed to us by its Kantian heritage, a sense of form which ties it at once to our vision of the world.”⁶ Krieger elaborates as follows:

This would make nonsense of those anti-formalist claims that denigrate the study of form by seeking to empty form out, excluding all worldly relations from it. … [Form] is what gives us the shapes of our world, the creation of the worldly stage and its objects within which we move. … Form in this sense is primal vision and, far from escaping reality for empty shows, it becomes power that constitutes all the “reality” which we feel and know. A formalism deriving from such a fundamental notion of form—precisely the notion of form which philosophers have left with us for two centuries—must be phenomenological as well as anthropological from its very outset.⁷

Though Krieger is not discussing Shakespeare and though I shall not be concerned here primarily with literary theory as such, I mention these assumptions because they are the groundwork for my study of tragic form in Romeo and Juliet. The chief bone of contention in tragedy being form and the chief neglect among structuralists and post-structuralists being literary form, it is easy to see why relatively few books have been written on the nature of tragedy, either Shakespearean or otherwise, in the last decade or so. In this context, my purpose is to reargue the importance of fate and fortune in the tragic pattern of Romeo and Juliet. But first I must examine some recent treatments of the tragedies in general and Romeo and Juliet in particular. Terry Eagleton in William Shakespeare (1986), a book which is, of course, not typical of all approaches, writes about plays in all genres and explains that he does so with “no particular attention to generic divisions, the importance of which seems to be overrated.”⁸ Stephen Greenblatt's recent book, Shakespearean Negotiation: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988), is less interested in tragic patterns (which many recent critics assume to be either static or unimportant or both) than in defining what he sees as Shakespeare's larger cultural and political ideas. Though Greenblatt concedes the importance of genre, included in what he calls “formal and linguistic design” which “will remain at the center of literary teaching and study,” he says that in this book he intends “to look less at the presumed center of the literary domain than at its borders” in an attempt, by tracking “what can be glimpsed, as it were, at the margins of the text,” to offer “insight into the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered.”⁹

Madelon Gohlke in “‘I Wooed Thee with My Sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms” (1980) gives a provocative reading of Shakespeare's tragedies in the light of Theseus' words in A Midsummer Night's Dream (quoted in Gohlke's title); she asserts that there is in the tragedies “a matriarchal substratum or subtext within the patriarchal text. The matriarchal substratum itself, however, is not feminist.” She views Shakespeare's tragedies “as a vast commentary on the absurdity and destructiveness” of the masculine defensive posture of defining “femininity as weakness” and of instituting “the structures of male dominance designed to defend against such an awareness.” Her frontal attack on Freud's concept of “femininity as weakness” is a healthy tonic in itself, an idea worth further consideration in relation to the tragedies; but the formal design of the tragedies will not always fit into her Procrustean bed of sexual difference. But this is not the place to argue about tragedies other than Romeo and Juliet; though I do not wish to deny that, as Gohlke notes, Romeo momentarily perceives “himself as having been feminized by love,” I simply reply that this attitude does not, in itself, cause the tragedy.¹⁰ Fate is against both of the lovers—but this is to anticipate my argument.

I wish to glance now at the article by Edward Snow, “Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet.” The main contribution of this article, as I see it, is not his main point—the sexual difference of the lovers—but his implications about the positive value of love in both title characters. Review of his thesis is unnecessary here—for my concern is with his slight attention to the tragedy (or more correctly his dismissal of it) and what I see as a wrong-headed interpretation of Romeo's alleged limitations in love as his apparent sharing of something “with the male protagonists in Shakespeare's darkest treatments of love and sexual desire.” Snow admits to the practice of what contemporary critics are fond of expressing metaphorically as reading not the text but the margins of Shakespeare's text: Romeo and Juliet's subtler affirmations have to do not with romantic love but with female ontology.”¹¹ This is quite all right if one chooses to respond to “the margins of the text” in such a way, but surely one can also—if she or he wishes—take an old-fashioned look at the text of Romeo and Juliet itself. When she does, she will find after all that the real text is a tragedy regardless of how we may pretend that it is not. The tragic fate of the lovers—not their sexual difference—forces them both (not just Romeo) to experience a lack (not in themselves) and an estrangement (but not from one another). I think one of the best recent analyses of Shakespeare's early love tragedy is Coppélia Kahn's “Coming of Age: Marriage and Manhood in Romeo and Juliet,” a part of a chapter in her Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981). Much of what she writes about love and “the feud as an extreme and peculiar expression of patriarchal society, which Shakespeare shows to be tragically self-destructive,” is reasonable and very well taken. Shakespeare's creation of our deep sympathy for Juliet as she is bullied by her authoritarian father is enough in itself to justify many of Kahn's remarks about the inhumanity of patriarchy in Verona. Her stress on the feud is also effective, but only as far as it goes: The inheritance from their feuding parents “makes Romeo and Juliet tragic because it denies their natural needs and desires as adolescents.” But I wish here to contest the validity of Kahn's view that “the feud in a realistic social sense is the primary force in the play—not the feud as an agent of fate.”¹² In order to show the weakness of this assumption I intend, as I noted above, to reopen this complicated, long standing, and important controversy.¹³ Thus, I shall contend that Romeo and Juliet is indeed a tragedy of fate, and I shall argue the relevance of astrological ideas (including fate and chance) in Ptolemy and Seneca and the concept of fortune (chance) in Seneca. Kahn's concessions in this regard are quite revealing:

Undeniably, the feud is bound up with a pervasive sense of fatedness, but that sense finds its objective correlative in the dynamics of the feud and of the society in which it is embedded.¹⁴

Again, she grants the following point:

It cannot be denied that through the many references to fate Shakespeare wished to create a feeling of inevitability, of a mysterious force stronger than the individuals, shaping their courses even against their will and culminating in the lovers' death.¹⁵

But her real point is that fate is really unimportant in the play, making the following assertion, which, as she reminds us, Gordon Ross Smith made in 1965:

The play employs fate not as an external power, but as a subjective feeling of the two lovers. And this subjective feeling springs understandably from the objective social conditions of life in Verona.¹⁶

In arguing for Shakespeare's use of fate in the tradition of Ptolemy and Seneca, I shall glance in both directions—toward the current critics in the tradition of Gohlke, Snow, and Kahn and toward the traditional critics of the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's, who were mainly character-study critics. Unlike most traditional criticism which discusses Romeo and Juliet in the light of astrology or fortune, I propose treating the play in light of both these elements, for Seneca is in much the same astrological camp as Ptolemy and in his plays and prose works discusses fortune quite often.¹⁷

Just as fate and fortune (chance) are both significant in Ptolemy and Seneca, Shakespeare makes similar use of fate and fortune in Romeo and Juliet; specifically, the dramatist's treatment of astrology is much more like that of Ptolemy and Seneca than the usage of English Renaissance astrological writers such as Christopher Heydon, Richard Harvey, and Robert Burton. The dramatist does not, for example, even hint that a Christian God is behind the stars, unlike the others mentioned here who, in the words of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), contended that the stars “rule us, but God rules them” (I. ii. 4.).¹⁸ F. E. Robbins, the translator of the Tetrabiblos in the modern Loeb Classical Edition, notes significantly that Ptolemy “took, in general, an Aristotelian position philosophically, though his predilection for mathematics led him to regard that division of science with far greater reverence than the more biologically minded Aristotle.” Robbins reminds us, “The book is a systematic treatise on astrology but it should be remembered that in Ptolemy's time” astrology and astronomy were the same “and that he called what we mean by ‘astrology’ … prognostication through astronomy.”¹⁹

Ptolemy divided the subject of astrology into two areas: universal aspects and particular aspects. Universal or general astrology, which treats the movements of planets, the sun, and the moon and their influence throughout the realms of nature and nations, is developed in Books I and II; and particular or “genethlialogical” astrology, which treats the influence of celestial bodies on the destiny and fortune of individual human beings as parts of the realm of nature, is developed in Books III and IV. In both theory and practice Ptolemy stressed the importance of prognostication. He anticipated and answered the objection about the “uselessness of prognostication” based on the assumption “that foreknowledge of events that will happen in any case is superfluous.”²⁰ He argued, first,

that even with events that will necessarily take place their unexpectedness is very apt to cause excessive panic and delirious joy, while foreknowledge accustoms and calms the soul by experience of distant events as though they were present, and prepares it to greet with calm and steadiness whatever comes.²¹

This much is based on the assumption that some things in the world happen by necessity. Then Ptolemy, taking recourse to a set of “first causes” correspondent to concepts perhaps implied in Aristotle's “unmoved mover,” admitted that “the movement of heavenly bodies … is eternally performed in accordance with divine, unchangeable destiny”; in Aristotelian fashion again Ptolemy was interested in discussing changes in “earthly things,” not in defining the nature of ultimate causes. Here, again paralleling Aristotle, Ptolemy emphasized the fact that “the change of earthly things is subject to a natural and mutable fate, and drawing its first causes from above it is governed by chance and natural sequence.”²² And here is where astrology is focused; Ptolemy cleared up one popular misconception about necessity as follows:

We should not believe that separate events attend mankind as the result of the heavenly cause as if they had been originally ordained for each person by some irrevocable divine command and destined to take place by necessity without the possibility of any other cause whatever interfering.²³

In order to clarify this assumption further Ptolemy employed his famous distinction between universal and particular astrology as follows:

Some things happen to mankind through more general circumstances and not as the result of an individual's own natural propensities—for example, when men perish in multitudes by conflagration or pestilence or cataclysms, through monstrous and inescapable changes in the ambient, for the lesser cause always yields to the greater and stronger; other occurrences, however, accord with the individual's own natural temperament through minor and fortuitous antipathies of the ambient.²⁴

Ptolemy believed the heavenly bodies operate by necessity but contended that, in the government of earthly things, where chance and natural sequence have parts to perform, necessity is not absolute but a matter of degree. Some earthly events therefore take place necessarily, and others take place contingently.

Seneca treated astrology in Questiones Naturales (63 or 64 a.d.) and “De Consolatione ad Marciam.” In the first mentioned work, for example, he discussed the significance of comets through the use of a sympathetic analogy comparing them with astrologers or “the Chaldaean soothsayers who tell what sorrow or joy is determined at birth by the natal star.”²⁵ He accepted here what Ptolemy later called particular or “genethlialogical” astrology and what people in Shakespeare's day called “judicial” astrology. Seneca's emphasis again on the limitations of the Chaldeans appears in the following passage from Questiones Naturales (II. 32):

The Chaldaeans confined their observations to the five great planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn plus the sun and the moon). But do you suppose that the influence of so many thousands of other bright stars is naught? The essential error of those who pretend to skill in casting the horoscope lies in limiting our destinies to the influence of a few of the stars, while all that float above us in the heavens claim some share in us.²⁶

He asked Marcia to imagine, in “De Consolatione ad Marciam,” that the sun, moon, and “the five planets … whirl through their unwearied rounds” and to imagine also that “on even the slightest motions of these hang the fortunes of nations, and the greatest and smallest happenings are shaped to accord with the progress of a kindly or unkindly star.”²⁷ Here are anticipations of Ptolemy's universal astrology and perhaps even particular astrology. Seneca's well-known stress on fate as an unalterable force appears in Natural Questions (II. 34, 35, 36, 37, and 39) and his plays. He defined fate as “the binding necessity of all events and actions, a necessity that no force can break.”²⁸

As Kahn is herself aware, many traditional critics assume that Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet never makes unambiguous allusions to the astrological importance of individual nativities;²⁹ still he does give details which are suggestive of it. With the “foresight” of an astrologer, he has the Chorus (the Prologue to Act I) foretell that:

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.

(5-8)

Connecting here the “star-cross'd lovers” and “the fatal loins of these two foes” (the feud), Shakespeare suggests some malignant influence from the stars at the times of the lovers' birth.³⁰ To the degree that the lovers are “star-cross'd” and their love is “death-marked,” to that degree these references can be interpreted in the light of Ptolemy's particular astrology. Here the stars can symbolize fate as external circumstances both cosmic and social (not just social as Kahn would have them). In harmony also with Ptolemy's view Shakespeare underscores Romeo's following sense of foreboding and/or premonition of fate:

                                                            My mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life clos'd in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.

(I. iv. 106-11)

This is an example of the dramatist's practice of having characters, in the words of Don Cameron Allen in The Star-Crossed Renaissance (1941), “assuming that stars dominate the flesh and perhaps the spirit of man.”³¹ Romeo suspects that this night will ultimately be fatal to him, as indeed it will be. After many “misadventures” (which are not all the fault of the lovers themselves) and when he hears the news of Juliet's supposed death, Romeo defies his stars, again a symbol of “inauspicious” fate:

Is it (e'en) so? Then I (defy) you, stars!

(V. i. 24)

Upon reaching Juliet's tomb and after having killed Paris, Romeo vows to put his body beyond the influence of the stars:

                                                                      O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

(V. iii. 109-12)

As in the instance of Oedipus leaving Corinth so as not to kill his “father” and yet killing Laius, his actual father, on the road to Thebes, in Sophocles's play as well as Seneca's, Romeo and Juliet's malignant fate, symbolized by the “inauspicious stars,” ironically uses their deaths for its own ends.

If one objects that there are too many Christian allusions in Romeo and Juliet for Ptolemy's and Seneca's ideas to have much, if any, significance, I respond that Shakespeare's Christian setting in Renaissance Verona came from his source, Arthur Brooke's narrative poem, The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), with all the paraphernalia of institutionalism such as the church, the priest, the daily mass, the religious and cultural conventions of marriage, and Juliet's authoritarian parents. These are mere outward trappings of Christianity, and in no way do they indicate an interest on Shakespeare's part in Christian theology as Roy W. Battenhouse and others would wish us to believe.³²

If one wishes to do so, he or she might explain Shakespeare's use of fate in Romeo and Juliet in terms of what Stephen Greenblatt calls, in a discussion of I Henry IV, the dramatist's use of “subversiveness,” but not necessarily in an exclusively political and social context.³³ As I have suggested, fate in the play can be seen in a number of instances other than in the Prologue to Act I: the first street fight, where the Prince's doom of death for the next offenders will ironically affect Romeo, and the “star-cross'd” lovers' meeting and falling in love before learning that they are enemies.

Shakespeare shows that fate works not only through the feud but also through chance, human contingency, and accident. That fate works through chance occurrence is also suggested in a number of ways: for example, by having the illiterate servant ask Romeo to read Old Capulet's list of invited guests, by Romeo seeing Rosaline's name on it and attending the party, by Romeo later attempting unsuccessfully to avoid a fight with Tybalt, and by the miscarrying of Friar Lawrence's letter. Shakespeare, in the scene where Mercutio and Tybalt are killed, has woven together the workings of fate, fortune (chance), and human contingency. True, some philosophers and some literary critics are quick to assure us that if all things occur by the necessity of fate, then fate would exclude chance and human contingency. But neither Ptolemy nor Seneca contended that all things are controlled by fate to the point of excluding everything else. I have explained that Ptolemy believed “unchangeable destiny” governed the heavenly bodies and that Seneca claimed fate was, in some sense, unalterable. However, Ptolemy, as was also noted earlier, conceded that “earthly things” are controlled by “natural and mutable fate,” and Seneca agreed that some events in this world occur by chance without any conflict with fate. So, coming back to the duel scene, we can see that fate as a mysterious, cosmic force operating in external circumstance in connection with the feud forces Romeo into a fight with Tybalt. The hero tries to be a peacemaker, but Tybalt's insult to him is challenged by Mercutio, the latter getting himself killed in the circumstances which are now obviously beyond Romeo's control. So his attempt to avoid a fight is useless; he is involved in spite of his trying to avoid such involvement. He cries:

This day's black fate on moe days doth depend,
This but begins the woe others must end.

(III. i. 119-20)

In these fatal circumstances fortune (chance) aids fate by causing Mercutio's death (while Romeo stood between him and Tybalt) and by abandoning Romeo to irrational forces. The element of human contingency works in a number of ways, including Tybalt's refusal to accept Romeo's reason for not fighting, Mercutio's taking Romeo's part and thus fighting for his friend's honor, and Romeo's thinking “it all for the best” that he step between Mercutio and Tybalt. The chance killing of Mercutio by Tybalt is thus in harmony not only with fate but with the cosmic and social chain of events against Romeo. Now that Romeo fights Tybalt and kills him there is indeed a sense in which he is, as he says, “fortune's Fool” (III. i. 136). Now Fortune, who is not interested in morality or justice, has not only not given the good individual (Romeo as peacemaker) a break by allowing him to avoid a fight but also has aided fate in that Mercutio's chance death by Tybalt has brought Romeo into a fight at last. At this point Fortune turns her back on Romeo, using him as a plaything in that she abandons him to irrational forces. As the Chorus in Seneca's Hercules Furens puts it, “O Fortune, jealous of the brave, in allotting thy favours how unjust art thou unto the good!”³⁴ In pseudo-Seneca's Octavia the Chorus connects fate and fortune (chance) as follows: “Our mortal race is ruled by fate, … each coming day … brings ever-shifting chances.”³⁵ Here fate does not exclude chance but works through it. In the Chorus' lament in Seneca's Hippolytus we have the same ideas on fate and fortune (chance): “Fate without order rules the affairs of men, scatters her gifts with unseeing hand, fostering the worst …” (1: 399) and “How chance whirls round the affairs of men!”³⁶ Fate is without order to the extent that it sometimes works through chance. Again, in the duel scene, where Mercutio meets his death by chance and human contingency, Fortune has been unfair to the brave Romeo, just as fate, a necessary cosmic and social chain of external events, has been against the lovers from the beginning. Here also fate works through chance. When the compulsion of external circumstances (including the chance killing of Mercutio) renders Romeo susceptible to irrational forces within himself, he exclaims:

Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire (-ey'd) fury be my conduct now!

(III. i. 123-24)

So in this duel scene where Tybalt is killed by Romeo, Shakespeare shows that there are pervading here, as elsewhere in the overall structure of the drama, the dooming presence of fate, fortune (chance), human contingency, and irrational forces involving Romeo in the violation of the Prince's law, a law which he has tried to avoid breaking.³⁷

Another emphasis by the dramatist on the interaction of fate and fortune (chance) occurs just after Juliet calls on Fortune: “Be fickle, Fortune: / For then I hope thou wilt not keep him long, / But send him back” (III. v. 62-64)—where Old Capulet by chance insists that Juliet marry Paris, accelerating matters from Thursday to Wednesday. Those critics intent on condemning the lovers, and thus clearing God of any responsibility in their piteous destruction, must simply ignore this element outside the control of the lovers. Shakespeare also has Juliet protest the unfairness of her fate as follows:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds
That sees into the bottom of my grief?

(III. v. 196-97)

This is not unlike the protests of characters in Seneca's plays. Megara, the wife of Hercules in Hercules Furens, says, “Unrighteous fortune seldom spares the highest worth”;³⁸ and Jason, in Medea, like Juliet doubting the existence of pity in the clouds, seems momentarily to doubt the existence of justice: “O holy justice, if in heaven thou dwellest, I call thy divinity to witness.”³⁹ And Oedipus in Seneca's Oedipus: “By fate are we driven; … all things move on in an appointed path. … To each his established life goes on, unmovable by any prayer.”⁴⁰

Again, instead of making fate a force—as Kahn and others say—existing subjectively only in the minds of the lovers, Shakespeare shows objectively in the plot itself that the lovers' fate includes such chance occurrences as Friar John's failure to deliver Friar Lawrence's letter to Romeo—a failure which Friar Lawrence refers to as “unhappy fortune” (V. ii. 17) and as an “accident” (V. iii. 251)—Romeo's reception of the untimely message of Juliet's supposed death, Friar Lawrence's late arrival at the Capulet monument, Romeo's death, and Juliet's awaking only after Romeo's death. Upon seeing Romeo dead, Friar Lawrence exclaims, “Ah, what an unkind hour / Is guilty of this lamentable chance!” (V. iii. 145-46). Though as a Christian priest the Friar might apologize according to Christian options, his statement to Juliet—“A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents” (V. iii. 153-54)—would in the context of the play make some orthodox Catholics and especially most Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists and some Church of England men like Jewel, Whitgift, William Fulke, and others) cringe because it could remind them of classical ideas of Ptolemy and Seneca; in Greenblatt's terms the cosmic implications of fate would be too subversive for comfort. It is no wonder that, unlike Shakespeare, the Christian critics blame the lovers rather than cast any reflection on God by reading fate as a cosmic force. Shakespeare apparently had no worries about his unorthodox implications—or apparent contradictions.

Critics—usually character-study critics—too easily assert or imply that if Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of fate, then fortune, action on the part of the characters, and accident are out of place.⁴¹ All these stipulations—which in fact Shakespeare's practice defies—may hold for philosophy and/or literary theory, but all we need to remember is that tragic drama is not philosophy. And where the latter is violated—as it is in Romeo and Juliet—we must jettison not the drama but the theory. Those critics who deny that Romeo and Juliet is a successful tragedy of fate do so on grounds foreign to the play itself; if we attend to the classical concepts of fortune and fate in the play, the tragedy can be seen as effective indeed in a somewhat similar manner as that of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. As Kenneth Muir noted in Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence (1972),

It may be suggested the fate of Oedipus depends even less on character than Romeo's does, and not many would question the greatness of Oedipus Rex.⁴²

In the light of recent discussions which do not define the tragedy in the play (or in Kahn's separation of the feud from fate and banishing the latter) and in the light of the impasse of traditional criticism which denies that it is a tragedy, it will perhaps be permissible for me to summarize here what makes the tragedy. Romeo and Juliet has two young people of the utmost worth, dignity, and importance who are mainly victims of cosmic, natural, and social circumstances beyond their control. Their love and loyalty to each other endear them to the extent that we are conscious of the fact that they are nobler and more praiseworthy and hence more important than any other character in the drama; their attempts to live together on their own terms allow them to grow toward maturity and thus elevate their worth as human beings. Fate in collaboration with fortune (chance), human contingency, and accident upsets the timing of the events in their efforts to live together as husband and wife. The tragedy is that fate as cosmic and social circumstance works against them and does not allow them to prosper. Because they live and die on their own terms, they and their love triumph in death. They triumph spiritually in that they win even when they lose. But paradoxically this is their tragedy, that the timings of fate are so against them throughout their short career as lovers that they are doomed to die as the only means of destroying their parents' strife (and we have known this fact from the beginning). If we feel that the price which they had to pay was too much for the social gains that were accomplished—and surely this is what we do feel—then perhaps that very feeling bespeaks the power of the play as a tragedy. Only if we demand a priori that tragedy be of only one kind—tragedy of character—can we pretend that the workings of fate, fortune, and accident disqualify Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy.

Notes

1. Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 47-66. Much of the research for this article was made possible by a sabbatical grant from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire School of Graduate Studies and University Research Committee during the Fall 1987. I wish to thank especially Dr. Ronald N. Satz, Dean, Graduate Studies, and Director, University Research, for this generous support of my studies on the tragedies of Shakespeare.

2. David Carroll, “Narrative, Herterogeneity, and the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard,” The Aims of Representation: Subiect/Text/History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 69-106, 69-70.

3. Carroll, p. 70.

4. Krieger, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 139-68, 140.

5. Krieger, Poetic Presence and Illusion, pp. 140-41.

6. Krieger, Poetic Presence and Illusion, p. 141.

7. Krieger, Poetic Presence and Illusion, p. 141.

8. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. ix.

9. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 3-4.

10. Madelon Gohlke, “‘I Wooed Thee with My Sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,” The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lentz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 150-70, esp. 161, 163, 162, and 159.

11. Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, eds. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 168-92, esp. 173 and 170.

12. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 84, 85.

13. Though Kahn herself gives a useful review of this controversy (84-85), that by Gordon Ross Smith, “The Balance of Themes in Romeo and Juliet,” is more complete in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gordon Ross Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 15-66, but these accounts have been superseded by G. Blakemore Evans's treatment in his “Introduction” to the New Cambridge Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), treating the most vexing questions as follows:

    Is Romeo and Juliet in the usually accepted sense a successful tragedy or an experiment that fails to come off? Is the play a tragedy of Fate or a tragedy of character? Or is it both?

    (p. 13).

    As everyone recalls, there are many responses to each of these questions. To the first, there are those, like H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), who contend that it is unsuccessful, hence a failure as tragedy (mainly because of Shakespeare's stress on fate); in contrast to this view, there are those, like Franklin M. Dickey, “Not Wisely But Too Well”: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1957), and John F. Andrews, “The Catharsis of Romeo and Juliet,” Contribute Dell' Instituto Di Filologia Moderna, Serie inglese (I. Milano: Catholic Univ., 1974), pp. 142-75, who think it is a successful tragedy. To the second question—whether it is a tragedy of fate or a tragedy of character—some like Andrews, again, argue that it is a tragedy of character. As G. Blakemore Evans, Kahn, and Gordon Smith remind us, the older view—taken by Boas (1896), E. K. Chambers (1929), E. E. Stoll (1937), and Bertrand Evans (1950 and 1979)—is that it is a tragedy of fate. One complicating factor is that many character-study critics link the tragedy up with Christian theology—another aspect which some critics of our time do not really accept and which no one has thus far attempted to refute. The emphasis on the Christian ideas of Providence, destiny, and fortune has been supported by Irving Ribner in “‘Then I Denie You Starres’: A Reading of Romeo and Juliet,” Studies in English Renaissance Drama in Memory of Karl Julius Holzknecht, ed. Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall, Jr. (Washington Square: New York Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 269-86, and John F. Andrews (1974) but, again rejected by Bertrand Evans (1950 and 1979), who does not really try to define any tradition other than the Christian view; he does reject traditional Christian ideas of Providence and fate and, in “Fate as Practiser: Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 22-51, suspects “that Fate is malign and aware rather than benign and unaware” (32). Unlike Bertrand Evans, I am interested in my paper in re-evaluating Romeo and Juliet in terms of classical ideas of fate and fortune. My purpose is to show that this aspect of the play, which many contemporary critics ignore, is important to an understanding of the tragedy's form and meaning.

14. Kahn, Man's Estate, p. 84.

15. Kahn, Man's Estate, p. 99.

16. Kahn, Man's Estate, p. 99.

17. See such background studies as Howard R. Patch's The Goddess Fortune in Medieval Literature (New York: Octagon Press, 1961; first prtd. 1927), p. 4, and Frederick Kiefer's Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1983), p. xvii, both showing the prevalence of Fortune and chance. Kiefer treats sixteenth-century “doubts and fears of a culture whose faith in providential design was at times precarious” (p. xvii). He devotes Chapter I, “Pagan Fortune in a Christian World,” to medieval and Renaissance popularity of Fortune, to “the efforts of Christians to come to terms with a pagan symbol of change and contingency,” p. 2.

18. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Philadelphia: Clayton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1875), p. 130.

19. Robbins, ed., Claudius Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, 1940 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Heinemann, 1964), pp. vii, citing F. Boll, Studien (1894) pp. 66-111, 131-63, and ix. This edition is used throughout.

20. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, I. 3.11, p. 23.

21. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, I. 3.11, p. 23.

22. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, I. 3.11, p. 23, italics added.

23. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, I. 3.11, p. 23.

24. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, I. 3.11, pp. 23 and 25.

25. Seneca, Physical Science in the Time of Nero Being a Translation of “The Questiones Naturales” of Seneca, trans. John Clarke, with Commentary and Notes by Archibald Geikie (London: Macmillan, 1910), VII. 28, p. 302.

26. Seneca, Quaestiones Naturales, II. 32. p. 81.

27. Seneca, “De Consolatione and Marciam,” Moral Essays, trans. John Basore, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Heinemann, 1965), II: pp. xviii, 2-3, p. 59; II: xviii, 3, p. 61.

28. Seneca, Quaestiones Naturales, II. 36, p. 84.

29. The arguments by E. B. Knobel, “Astronomy and Astrology,” Shakespeare's England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age (1916), 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 1: 444-61, and Carroll Camden, “Astrology in Shakespeare's Day,” Isis, 19 (1933), 26-73, are, in my estimation, the most useful. The article by Moriz Sondheim, “Shakespeare and the Astrology of His Time,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2 (1938-39), 243-59, which asserts that Romeo and Juliet is not a tragedy of fate in the sense that the influence of the stars is crucial, is offset by that of John W. Draper, “Shakespeare's Starcrossed Lovers,” Review of English Studies, 15 (1939), 16-34; but this latter work and that of James C. Smith, “Ptolemy and Shakespeare: The Astrological Influence on Romeo and Juliet,” Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Conference 7, 2 (1982), 66-70, do not make distinctions between Renaissance and medieval implications on the one hand and on the other hand those of classical writers like Ptolemy and Seneca.

30. See also Kent's words in King Lear: “It is the stars / The stars above us govern our conditions” (IV. iii. 32-33). Though there are variously contrary views given characters in other plays (for example, Cassius in Julius Caeser [I. ii. 139-41]; Helena in All's Well That Ends Well [I. i. 216-19]; Prospero in The Tempest [I. ii. 178-84]; and Edmund in King Lear [I. ii. 118-33]), in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has the Chorus give premonitions of the ill workings of fate as seen in the stars. I quote throughout from Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

31. (New York: Octagon Press, 1966), p. 167.

32. See Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 103, 128-29, and 150 on Romeo and Juliet. See also Ribner and John F. Andrews on theology in the play.

33. Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 43.

34. Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Heinemann, 1960). l: p. 51.

35. Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies. 2: p. 485.

36. Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies. l: p. 399 and l: p. 411.

37. The idea of Edward H. Cain, “Romeo and Juliet: A Reinterpretation,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 22 (1947), 163-92, that Romeo “perishes because of a tragic flaw or weakness in his character” (p. 190), is not exact, for this medieval and Renaissance scale of values cannot, as I attempt to show in my text, account for classical ideas of fate and fortune in the play; Shakespeare did not limit himself to the presentation of a tragic flaw in the lovers, as Cain himself admitted. Too many chance happenings and accidents occur in the course of the play so that not everything can be attributed to the weakness of the lovers.

38. Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies, l: p. 29.

39. Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies, l: p. 265.

40. Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies, l: pp. 515 and 517.

41. Those who judge the play a failure as tragedy include H. B. Charlton, G. B. Harrison, and Clifford Leech. In Shakespearian Tragedy (1948) Charlton wrote that “as a pattern of the idea of tragedy, it is a failure” (p. 61). Harrison complained in Shakespeare's Tragedies (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), about Shakespeare's use of “unlucky accident” or “sheer bad luck” (p. 48) and the immaturity and lack of “fullness” in the lovers—both maturity and fullness, he wrote, “tragedy requires” (p. 64). And Leech, in “The Moral Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,” English Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, eds. Standish Henning, Robert Kimbrough, Richard Knowles (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976), concludes, “we cannot find that tragedy has fully emerged” and “(it) is above all the casualness of the play's cosmology that prevents us from seeing it as tragedy fully achieved” (p. 73).

42. (London: Hutchinson Univ. Library, 1972), p. 35.