SOURCE: Bergeron, David M. “Sickness in Romeo and Juliet.” CLA Journal 20, no. 3 (March 1977): 356-64.

[In the following essay, Bergeron explores Shakespeare's use of the language and imagery of illness as a central tragic metaphor in Romeo and Juliet.]

If we have cut our critical teeth on tragedies like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, and The Revenger's Tragedy, we may have some difficulty in locating the tragic sense in Romeo and Juliet. Indeed some theatre directors choose to present it as a comedy, emphasizing Mercutio, the Nurse, and the sacrificial nature of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet which ultimately bring reconciliation of the Capulets and Montagues, virtually a felix culpa. That this play differs markedly in design from Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth is undeniable, but I believe that no degree of emphasis on sacrifice can truly mitigate the tragedy that occurs. The play in fact becomes a tragedy as it turns away from its comic possibilities.¹ It finally more nearly resembles the Pyramus and Thisbe story than it does A Midsummer Night's Dream.

One of the imagery and thematic threads that run throughout Shakespeare's drama is sickness; in the tragedies illness is not susceptible to cure, while typically in the comedies a healing agent or device makes all whole. The concrete, physical examples of sickness are subsumed in the larger, metaphorical pattern which allows the dramatist to construct the play-world either with spiritual disease and corruption (tragedy) or with graceful healing and reconciliation (comedy). The remedies offered in tragedy are ineffective, while in comedy they are efficacious.

Despite the initial festive quality of Romeo and Juliet—its feasts, dances, love stories—the play abounds with images of sickness, boding the tragedy to come. This pattern of imagery has largely gone unnoticed,² but I believe that it provides another means of defining the tragedy. Romeo gives a clue to the imagery in his first appearance. Outlining his troubled response to love for Rosaline, he sums up the nature of love in a series of oxymorons, including “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health …” (I.i.178).³ While this may seem fairly tame and conventional stuff, the paradox of “sick health” is arresting, implying the threat to health which exists in this play as the images of disease and illness give rise to a tragic world of disorder, fragmentation, and finally death. The polarities of sickness and health suggest a tragic axis on which the play turns, and on the plot graph of this play tragedy is a function of illness and health. In the analysis which follows, one can chart both the categories of disease and the attempts at remedies, thereby answering in one way at least, how the play is tragic.

The maladies in the play may be categorized as illness of body, of spirit, and of body politic. The physical ailments cover a rather wide range of problems with varying degrees of seriousness: the bump on the head which Juliet received as a child (I.iii.53); the corns mentioned by the elder Capulet at the dance (I.iv.19-20); the suggestion by Mercutio that Romeo may have the pox (II.iv.51-52); the aching bones, backache, and headache suffered by the Nurse (II.v.26, 48, 50); Juliet's anemia (III.v.157); the unruly spleen mentioned by Benvolio (III.i.155); Tybalt's onslaught of choler (I.v.90); Romeo's vague “distemp'rature” (II.iii.40). In addition to actual problems the characters are aware of the crucial importance of health. As the Capulet household busies itself with preparation for Juliet's forthcoming wedding to Paris, the Nurse urges Capulet to get to bed: “Faith, you'll be sick to-morrow / For this night's watching” (IV.iv.7-8). But he insists on his health: “What, I have watched ere now / All night for lesser cause, and ne'er been sick” (9-10). That boast turns back upon him with sharp irony as a few minutes later he learns of the apparent death of Juliet. When Balthasar arives at Mantua in V.i, Romeo's first questions and statements concern health: “Is my father well? / How fares my Juliet? That I ask again / For nothing can be ill if she be well” (14-16). But of course Balthasar brings “ill news.”

Individually considered, the physical maladies may not seem very important, but collectively they add to the tragic tone and epitomize a world infected and in need of healing. There are at least two instances of physical sickness which are dramatically crucial and which help determine the tragedy. One is the shedding of blood in III.i, the moment at which the play clearly turns toward a tragic inevitability. Benvolio notes in the opening lines that there is “mad blood stirring” in Verona, and within a few minutes that mad blood manifests itself in the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, reminding one of the words in the Prologue that civil blood would make civil hands unclean. Mercutio's cry for a surgeon goes unheeded; and his curse of “A plague o' both your houses!” (89, 97) may have more literal tinge to it than one usually thinks. In the next scene, III.ii, the Nurse reports to Juliet the horrible events that have happened, emphasizing the wounds and blood she has observed. Coming as it does shortly after the marriage of Romeo and Juliet in II.vi, this new sickness is juxtaposed paradoxically to the potential health implicit in the lovers' wedding, thus echoing Romeo's early oxymoron of “sick health.” Medically, the shedding of blood is often necessary and may lead to healing, but ironically in the play this event is both cause and effect of sickness—the ultimate result of a festering sore between the households and the trigger to further tragic action.

The series of physical illnesses culminates dramatically in the report of Friar John in V.ii, that he did not get to Mantua because in the name of visiting the sick in Verona he and a fellow friar were sealed up in a house suspected of containing “the infectious pestilence” (l. 10). An actual sickness has thus prevented the dramatically crucial letter from reaching Romeo. Shakespeare's device here seems perfectly consistent with the pervasive images and reports of illness. Thus in III.i, with the shedding of blood and here in V.ii, with the plague, all possibilities for averting tragedy are lost, and we now await the inevitable. While on a worthy mission Friar John is detained in a house of apparent pestilence, as Romeo and Juliet with their own worthy motives will be sealed in the tomb of death.

Though emotional stress of various degrees afflicts a number of characters, the sickness of spirit most discussed is lovesickness, which has both its literal and figurative aspects. It is, of course, an illness frequent in Shakespearean comedy, for example, in Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night. Before Romeo enters the play, his kinsmen discuss his condition, the humor that troubles him. Montague tells Benvolio: “Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow, / We would as willingly give cure as know” (I.i.152-53). It is soon clear that Romeo suffers from love, which he characterizes as “a madness most discreet” (l. 191). Benvolio urges him to discuss the problem, but Romeo responds: “Bid a sick man in sadness make his will. / Ah, word ill urged to one that is so ill! (200-201). Later Romeo points out that he has been wounded by love, “enpierced with his shaft …” (I.iv.19). The more profound ailment comes of course in his new love for Juliet, having survived the “sickness” for Rosaline. Romeo opens the famous balcony scene with reference to sicknes: “He jests at scars that never felt a wound” (II.ii.1). When he sees Juliet, he likens her to the sun that kills the envious moon, “Who is already sick and pale with grief” (l.5)—this moon whose “vestal livery is but sick and green” (1.8). But Juliet's premonitions here and in III.v.54-57, imply the threat to their healthy love; her “ill-divining soul” is alert to the troublesome paradox of sick health.

From the Prologue which opens the play to the closing lines of the drama, a metaphorical sickness in the body politic envelops the world of Verona, namely, the ancient grudge between the Capulets and Montagues, which finally spawns heartbreaks and death. The fact of these warring houses frames the action, implying the disorderly and unhealthy world of Verona. Only the deaths of Romeo and Juliet finally expunge the illness, but, of course, at a great and tragic price. Though in some sense the play is a “domestic tragedy,” the larger, external world of the festering conflict between families is forever colliding with the will of the lovers. The public conflict in I.i, and III.i, finds its counterpart in the private resentment expressed in the Capulet festive scene in I,v, where the rash Tybalt recognizes Romeo as a Montague, “our foe” and would “strike him dead” for the family's honor. At the play's end the Prince points out to the Capulets and Montagues: “See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love” (V.iii.292-93). The tomb offers mute testimony to the destructive illness that has infected the households.

But what about the attempts at healing? Remedies, prescriptions, and “physicians” are present, but singly or collectively they fail. The breathless and aching Nurse in II.v, asks for a “poultice” (1.66) but receives none. Feeling her woes and sorrows, she asks for “aqua vitae” (III.ii.87), but to no avail. And when the Nurse discovers the seemingly dead Juliet, she again cries out for “Some aqua vitae” (IV.v.16); but such a prescription is pointless. The dying Mercutio asks for a surgeon (III.i.97), but none is to be found. Thus even these practical maladies and wounds know no healing.

Resorting to the Friar for help (IV.i), Juliet receives his prescription, a potion which will induce a death-like state. This medicine suggests a way of gaining health for the distraught couple; but in the privacy of her chamber Juliet wonders: “What if it be a poison which the friar / Subtly hath minist'red to have me dead …” (IV.iii.24-25). It is no poison, though its effect aggravates rather than cures the situation. Certainly Juliet's parents must assume that she is dead; and death, not Paris, is the ostensible bridegroom. Laying rosemary on the corpse takes the place of the expected festive wedding.⁴

The prescription most often discussed and finally sought to resolve the ills of the play-world is poison, underscored by the fourteen times that the word is used in the play—the highest incidence in all of Shakespeare's drama. Arden of Feversham, Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Duchess of Malfi represent a small, partial list of Renaissance tragedies that utilize poison in some dramatically significant manner. In one of this play's most important thematic speeches Friar Laurence notes that within the flower that he holds, “Poison hath residence, and medicine power …” (II.iii.24). There is no clearer statement of the paradox of “sick health.” As with the flower, so with the play: comedy and tragedy are potential in the same situation; healing could come, or poison work its fatal power. When night's candles have burned out and Romeo parts from Juliet at their last meeting, Juliet assumes the role of outrage at this man who has killed her kinsman Tybalt. She says to her mother: “… I never shall be satisfied / With Romeo till I behold him—dead …” (III.v.94-95); and she promises that if a man could be found “To bear a poison,” she would “temper it” and offer it to Romeo (l. 98). Surely these words must haunt Juliet in that final moment in the tomb as she awakens to find her Romeo indeed poisoned.

It is Romeo who seeks poison from the Apothecary in V.i, a quest that counterpoints the innocent potion given Juliet by the Friar—the potion-poison dichotomy corresponds to the “sick-health” paradox. Romeo asks for “A dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear / As will disperse itself through all the veins / That the life-weary taker may fall dead …” (V.i.60-62). The Apothecary has such “mortal drugs” though to sell them is illegal. But Romeo will not tolerate the nicety of the law and thrusts gold on the Apothecary, claiming that money is “worse poison to men's souls …” (l. 80). Both literally and figuratively Romeo pays a dear price for what he insists with ironic self-justification is not poison. Instead, he calls it a “cordial,” but there is no heart-saving medicine in it. Cordials assist health; poison produces sickness. And Romeo's early paradox gets yet another twist.

As we know, poison in the closing scene of the play seals the tragic doom of the lovers. Preparing to drink the fatal potion, Romeo refers to it as “bitter conduct,” “unsavory guide” (V.iii.116); and he sees his “seasick weary bark” as now run aground on the dashing rocks. He drinks and exclaims with a fine ambiguity: “O true apothecary! / Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die” (119-120). Juliet finds the cup of poison and chides her lover for not having left a “friendly drop” for her (l. 163); so she kisses the lips, hoping to find poison “To make me die with a restorative” (l. 166), echoing her lover who called the poison a “cordial.” By this point in the action the lovers are willing to distort meaning, to designate that which kills them as a balm for their weary souls. But there is no health for them. The axis of “sick health” has become a polarity with tragic waste pre-empting comic fruitfulness and life.

In addition to these “medicines” there are several characters who function as possible “physicians,” but in fact there is no adequate agent who can bring about healing, no efficacious doctor. The Nurse might be expected to provide a cure, but such is not the role the dramatist has laid out for her. Instead of offering Juliet a way out of her dilemma, the Nurse rather cynically suggests that Juliet ought to go ahead and marry Paris since Romeo has been banished. The apothecary trafficks in poison rather than life-sustaining medicines. Only Benvolio truly offers a cure, but for a minor infection—Romeo's lovesickness for Rosaline. Benvolio's remedy is that Romeo should give liberty unto his eyes and “Examine other beauties” (I.i.226). He further suggests to Romeo:

Tut, man, one fire burns by another's burning;
                    One pain is less'ned by another's anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
          One desperate grief cures with another's languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die.

(I.ii.44-49)

As Franklin Dickey observes: “Benvolio's reasonable prescription for Romeo's complaint emphasizes the textbook nature of the illness.”⁵ The cure works as Romeo abandons Rosaline at the sight of Juliet. Lovesickness is, then, readily susceptible to treatment and cure, though not without irony: the healthy Romeo hopelessly falls for Juliet and the new infection knows no final cure.

The Prince has a potential healing role; certainly he diagnoses the illness in the state and warns that if left unchecked, the disease will consume the families. His three appearances come at timely moments which call attention to the nature of the problem and the need for a remedy. He interrupts the squabble in I.i, and urges:

… you men, you beasts,
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins!
On pain of torture, from those bloody hands
Throw your mistemp'red weapons to the ground …

(81-85).

He asks the Capulets and Montages to curb their “cank'red hate,” but the enmity erupts into murder in III.i. Here the Prince orders surgery by banishing Romeo from Verona, but again no permanent healing comes. As he presides over the unraveling at the play's end, the physician Prince rightly blames the families for the fatal illness that has befallen Romeo and Juliet and chides himself “for winking at your discords …” (V.iii.294). As a result, “All are punished” (l. 295).

At the dramatic and thematic center of the search for a cure is Friar Laurence, but he too is ultimately unsuccessful; in fact, he, ironically, exacerbates the illness. In his speech in II.iii, he observes the conflict between medicine and poison, the paradox of sick health. He finds in nature both “baleful weeds” and “precious-juicèd flowers,” a dazzling array of contraries (l. 7). Noting the duality in nature, he can also perceive it in men, the tension between “grace and rude will” (l. 28); “And where the worser is predominant, / Full soon the canker death eats up that plant” (29-30)—health gives way to sicknes. So perceptive a person has the capacity to reconcile, to heal; his failure to do so is another measure of the play as a tragedy.

When Romeo in the first flush of his new-found love for Juliet arrives at the Friar's cell, the Friar immediately senses that something is wrong, believing that Romeo is “uproused with some distemp'rature …” (II.iii.40). But Romeo says that he and Juliet suffer only the wound of love, and he pinpoints the problems for the Friar: “Both our remedies / Within thy help and holy physic lies” (51-52). This man who understands the medicinal power of herbs is now called on for spiritual medicine, and indeed he hopes to turn the family rancor into love (l. 92). He understands the potential for a universal spiritual cure; thus he consents to perform the sacrament of marriage for Romeo and Juliet, with all its healthy, “comic” possibilities.

But the frantic Romeo who confronts the Friar in III.iii, is suicidal: “Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife, / No sudden mean of death …” (44-45). Friar Laurence calms Romeo's agitated spirit and sketches a strategy, a possible cure, that will permantly and safely unite the lovers. In her final speech of Act III Juliet sets out to the Friar's cell: “I'll to the friar to know his remedy” (III.v.243). And she greets him in IV.1: “Come weep with me—past hope, past cure, past help!” (l. 44). She cries out for a “remedy,” and the Friar says: “… if thou darest, I'll give thee remedy” (76). He gives Juliet the potion and dispatches letters to Romeo in Mantua. Tragically, the cure does not work, and the holy physician must watch his patients die. His final suggestion of escape to Juliet in the tomb goes unheeded; instead death and contagion prevail. Friar Laurence is not the cause of the sickness in the play, but he is able to do little to assuage it. Given the sickness prevalent in the play, both physical and metaphorical, and the ineffective prescriptions and physicians, there can be little doubt of the tragic action and tragic spirit.

Notes

1. For an excellent discussion see Susan Snyder, “Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy,” Essays in Criticism, 20 (1970), 391-402.

2. Most students of the play's imagery have discussed the light-dark imagery as dominant. See, for example, Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). Curiously out of the 204 images that Miss Spurgeon notes in the play a mere eight are categorized under the heading “Sickness and Medicine” (Appendix IV, p. 366). I think that she has greatly misjudged the importance of this category of imagery. See also, E. C. Pettet, “The Imagery of Romeo and Juliet,” English, 8 (1950), 121-126.

3. All references are to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969). For a full discussion of the oxymoron device in the play see Robert O. Evans, The Osier Cage: Rhetorical Devices in “Romeo and Juliet” (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966).

4. Cf. the Nurse's linking in a joking manner of rosemary and Romeo which becomes indirectly explicit now at Juliet's “death” (II.iv.195).

5. Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1957), p. 79.