SOURCE: Farrell, Kirby. “Love, Death, and Patriarchy in Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare's Personality, edited by Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris, pp. 86-102. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Farrell probes the patriarchal subtext of Romeo and Juliet and the play's subversive critique of this social system.]

I

Recent criticism has tended to depict patriarchy primarily as an authoritarian institution for the regulation of society. Where Elizabethan theorists praised the system for its order, we now have difficulty seeing beyond its flagrant injustices and limitations, especially its misogyny. Yet repression is not the whole picture. What made patriarchy tolerable, even valuable, to so many Elizabethans? No one in Shakespeare's Verona, for example, openly rebels against patriarchy. Like Romeo, Juliet blames fate that she “must love a loathed enemy” (1.5.141); she desperately tries to placate her father with “chopt-logic” (3.5.149). For all their touchiness about being thought slaves, even the servants are willing to fight for their houses. Why would individuals consistently subordinate their desires to the will of a patriarch?

The answer I read from the play is that like religion, patriarchy provides crucial symbols which validate the self and enable people to imagine that they can transcend death. Anxiety about death pervades Romeo and Juliet. The word “death” itself shows up more often here than in any other work in the canon. In the lyrical balcony scene (2.2.53-78) no less than in the ominous Prologue, love is “death-mark'd.” Yet even before his first glimpse of Juliet, Romeo worries that “untimely death” will overtake him (1.4.111). This “black and portentous” dread, I shall be arguing, dramatizes the breakdown in Verona of patriarchy's ability to control anxiety about death and unconsciously anticipates the dangerous consequences of that breakdown.

Patriarchy itself evolved from ancient systems of social order based on heroic leadership and strength. Insofar as he became a symbol of personal vitality and mythologically the progenitor of his people, the hero objectified the will to life and its opposition to death. As the term hero-worship itself implies, such a figure was usually invested with supernatural powers. Renaissance patriarchy combined ancient heroic models with forms drawn from Christianity, which revered “the Lord” and projected a heroic drama in which the heavenly father and his son triumph over a rebellious servant, Lucifer, and confer eternal life on the obedient children who identify with them.

Like Christianity, in which priestly fathers commonly exercised worldly as well as spiritual influence, patriarchy gave a local master superhuman sanction. Elizabethan theorists associated the father with the king and with God himself: it was he who created, defined, and validated his child's personality. He granted and guaranteed the psychic life of all who depended on him. The faithful servant or child could share in the father's righteous potency with a heightened sense of vitality and invulnerability tantamount, as Ernest Becker would say, to a conviction of immortality (Becker 1973). Tasso reveals the underlying premise in reporting that he confided in his patron “not as we trust in man, but as we trust in God. It appeared to me that, so long as I was under his protection, fortune and death had no power over me” (Bradbrook 1980, 73).

In early modern England “no one in a position of ‘service’ was an independent member of society. … Such men and women, boys and girls, were caught up, so to speak, ‘subsumed’ is the ugly word we shall use, into the personalities of their fathers and masters” (Laslett 1971, 20-21). Dependents necessarily cultivated the worshipful self-effacement psychologists call transference: living vicariously through a master who reciprocally lived through his house. The father's strength energized the entire family. In this perspective patriarchy was a process that consolidated diverse wills into one extraordinary will and generated a communal feeling—in effect, a spell—of immortality.

At the same time, like God's majesty, patriarchal potency included powers of annihilation as well as of love. The prince seeks to control his “rebellious subjects” by threatening their lives (1.1.97). Old Capulet roars a murderous curse at the uncooperative Juliet: “Hang, beg, starve, die in the streets” (3.5.192). More than mere discipline is involved here, for he who commands death seems to transcend it. In Otto Rank's words, “the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying” (Becker 1973, 99). In Verona the fathers' command over death remains symbolic. Nevertheless, even a child's unconscious anxiety about a rejection akin to death must have reinforced identification with the father.

In such a system only self-effacement brought a share in the father's power. Autonomy equalled rebellion and meant a rejection tantamount to death. In theory, either one identified with one's master and vicariously shared his power by lording it over inferiors (as Sampson and Gregory would dominate rival servants and women) or one was dominated. Dreading to be thought slaves—“That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall” (1.1.13)—the Capulet servants associate aggression on behalf of their master with escape from the nullity of servitude. Yet their inferiority is the creation of their masters and produces volatile ambivalence in them. They summarize their situation with an ambiguity too dangerous to be consciously faced: “The quarrel is between our masters, and us their men” (1.1.19-20)—not merely between houses but between masters and servants.

In seeking to dominate, the servants act out the submerged values of their masters. Since patriarchy is founded upon the promise of security to dependents such as women, Sampson imagines humiliating his enemy by violating his women. Likewise, he appropriates the patriarch's role of godlike judge when he fantasizes that he “will be civil with the maids—I will cut off their heads” or maidenheads (1.1.24-25), equating rape with execution. By contrast, Romeo acts out patriarchy's benevolent generativity when he first approaches Juliet, assigning her an identity (the sun) and commanding her to arise and claim her rightful place in the order of things (2.2.3-9). These examples reflect one of the crucial paradoxes of the play's imaginative world: that even those who seemingly oppose patriarchy internalize patriarchal values.

The marriage old Capulet would make for his daughter helps to explain the willing self-effacement of dependents. By meekly wedding the paternally sanctioned Paris, thereby making him a patriarch in his own right, Juliet would fulfill her father's will and also transform herself. Lady Capulet fetishizes Paris as a book of spellbinding value that “in many's eyes doth share the glory” (1.3.91). By marrying him, Juliet too would be glorified and would share in “all that he doth possess, / By having him, making [her]self no less” (1.3.93-94). With its connotations of worship, “glory” exactly expresses the religious assumptions underlying the patriarchal system. By compelling admiration from others, Juliet's marriage would exalt her and by extension her parents. For a dependent deference can be a means to vicarious triumph.

In Verona, however, patriarchy is under stress. The prince envisions himself protecting the city's declining “ancient citizens” from the turmoil of “rebellious subjects” (1.1.82, 97). At the same time romance has begun to rival patriarchy as an alternative mode of love and deliverance. As a result, the fathers' demand at the least for deference and at the most for total self-sacrifice or death sets off a violent chain of events. Social patterns and preoccupations inherent in the patriarchal system create conflicts that make rebellion inevitable.

In patriarchy the conviction of well-being depends on mystification, since in the end a master's strength is finite and people do helplessly die. Any threat to that spell jeopardizes the community's sense of security. The principal threat, however, is succession (Farrell 1984, 87-93). Sooner or later a son must take his father's place. As a result an aging father may become apprehensively tyrannical, or his child disenchanted and rebellious. Withdrawing his strength from the father, weakening their shared identity, the child cannot help but evoke dread.

Since the system polarizes roles into extremes of dominance and submissive identification, the moment when those roles at last reverse may be terrifying. Having made mothers of his daughters, as the Fool protests, King Lear suddenly becomes as powerless as a child who is subject to whipping and utter effacement. Hence the potential violence of paternal retaliation. Acting the righteous judge, a father can pronounce doom on an unruly child and thereby—however painfully—make the child's loss confirm his own vitality.

One solution to the problem of succession splits the conception of power. The father becomes an unmoved mover, as it were, a conscience-figure or judge who controls a seemingly static house or kingdom by directing his powers of life and death inward in the form of blessings and executions. By contrast, the annihilation of enemies acts out the heroic mastery of death, and that power may be delegated to sons and followers. In this way the potency of the father remains incontestable.

Since Verona has no outside enemy, however, heroic aggression is turned inward. When old Capulet calls for his broadsword, for example, he is about to assault old Montague, who is tacitly his “brother” in relation to the patriarch who governs them, the prince. In this context the otherwise peculiarly gratuitous feud is a device that allows males to seek forbidden self-aggrandizement by scapegoating rivals, and each house kills in the name of righteousness. Although the feud helps to preserve the illusion of immortality essential to patriarchy's survival by providing a safety valve for aggressive feelings against masters, it only postpones the inevitable crisis of succession.

Hence the need to glorify the submission of the child while elevating the father to “be as a god” (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.47). The model for that submission is Christianity, in which the central action is the atonement of the son with the omnipotent Father. Christ resists Satan's temptation to personal dominion over the earth and by self-sacrifice earns eternal life for humankind. While God remains the unmoved mover, his son struggles in the world and earns through his faithful death a resurrection that transforms him from lamb to fatherly shepherd, from victimized mock-King of the Jews to the militant warrior who will harrow Hell and rout Antichrist in the last days. In this arrangement the shepherd/warrior ambiguously shares in the identity of the Father without threatening his preeminence as everlasting judge.

In a fallen world, however, as Renaissance sectarianism made plain, the urge to rebellion remained strong. Reformers repudiated the patriarchal pope and feuded with each other, seeking to dethrone each other's “false” god and win the eternal life afforded by the true Father. The English, typically, construed their own rebellion as the rescue of true faith from Antichrist. The patriarchal analogue to religious schism is Verona's feud. Like rival dispensations, each house kills in the name of righteousness. Cursing Benvolio, for example, Tybalt cries, “I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee” (1.1.71). In psychoanalytic terms fanaticism such as Tybalt's suggests a reaction formation, a means of suppressing one's own taboo impulses by killing off the devilish enemy of authority one might otherwise become.

In Verona as in Christianity the patriarchal role is split between incontestable control and heroic expansiveness, yet the reconciliation of roles is repeatedly subverted. Prince Escalus functions as conscience and judge, commanding obedience “on pain of death” (1.1.103). But the prince seems weak, and his unruly “sons” deviously aggressive; although they profess obedience, they repeatedly maneuver for power. Instead of suffering abuse, as Christ did, they perpetuate a rivalry in which every little indignity contributes to a rising spiral of violence. The rivalry itself ambivalently allows “sons” to challenge and curry favor with their lord. Capulet, for example, insists on Juliet's marriage to the prince's kinsman, Paris, which presumably would give him an edge over his rival, Montague. His scheme not only expresses the mentality of the feud but also signifies an effort to identify with the supreme source of strength in Verona. Not surprisingly: for in a larger context these “sons” are themselves fathers covertly challenged from below.

Within his own house a lord such as old Capulet is himself a weakened conscience, his role as warrior being appropriated by actual or surrogate sons, such as Tybalt, and below them by unruly servants. Tybalt, after all, boldly usurps the role of warrior lord. Wishing to assault Romeo at the ball, he tests his surrogate father's authority to the limits, provoking old Capulet to roar: “Am I master here, or you?” (1.5.78).

As a potential son-in-law Romeo himself is tacitly a rival son with Tybalt, competing to inherit Capulet's power. Like old Capulet and old Montague, Tybalt and Romeo displace their resentment of superior authority onto one another. Furthermore, Romeo scales the patriarch's orchard wall to steal his daughter's heart and thereby his posterity, yet he denies all hostility in himself and others: “There lies more peril in thine eye / Than twenty [Capulet] swords” (2.2.71-72). Eventually, as Verona's sons destroy one another, Romeo will join Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris in the graveyard.

As the means of producing new life and one means of mediating the child's eventual appropriation of the parent's position, marriage becomes the object of intense parental control. As old Capulet insists, “[all] my care hath been / To have [Juliet] matched” (3.5.177-78). Ideally, such intimate control compensates the father by corroborating his will even as it guarantees an undying line of posterity. Hence the tragic nature of the parental dread that spurs Juliet's defiance. Lamenting Tybalt's death and prevented by the prince's edict from taking comfort in the usual fantasies of triumphal revenge, old Capulet keenly feels his own mortality: “Well, we were born to die” (3.4.4). Promptly he makes a “desperate tender / Of my child's love” to Paris (3.4.12-13). For a moment he loses faith in his own ordained mastery and tries to secure the future by force. Bullying his daughter to wed Paris and thereby fatally alienating her, the old man brings on the horror he seeks to dispel.

Let me emphasize that we are looking at a system of behavior. Without imputing Machiavellian motives to Prince Escalus, for instance, it should be noted that the feud actually serves to protect his limited power from expansive ambitions from below. By blaming the fathers, he can exercise his threat to execute troublemakers and thus “maintain his posture as a decisive ruler” (Brenner 1980, 50). Until the night of the ball at least, the fathers have similarly profited from the distressing competition between feisty sons impatient for power.

The feud presupposes, then, that one “son” may kill another to identify with the father's strength as warrior-hero. With the emphatic symmetry of “Two households, both alike in dignity” (Pro. 1), Capulet and Montague are virtual alter egos, as are Tybalt and Romeo and, in the opening brawl, the opposed servants. Externalized, the doubling plays out fratricidal rivalry. Fully internalized in a vulnerable character, patriarchal conflicts may produce self-murder. And that, I maintain, is what finally destroys Romeo and Juliet.

II

For all their lyrical tenderness, Romeo and Juliet create their love out of the tragically conflicting materials of their own culture. In Romeo's changing desires, for instance, the chorus sees a struggle to inherit a father's position: “Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie, / And young affection gapes to be his heir” (2.Pro. 1-2). The lovers attempt to evade the world of the feud, yet in making love they unwittingly act out patriarchal and Christian forms. Construing love as worship and substituting the beloved for father and God, they seek apotheosis in each other. Out of the resulting turmoil comes death and “a glooming peace” (5.3.305): an equivocal vision of redemptive destruction that resists any ready evaluation.

In an imaginative world where children grow up transfixed in the aura of a protective lord or else face terrifying nullity, we should not be surprised that love may reproduce in a beloved the engulfing, life-giving power of godlike parents. Insofar as the polarization of power in Verona requires either continual submission or the devious homicidal assertiveness of the feud, love's mutual worship answers profound needs. For if individuals become disenchanted with absolute security and heroic aggression, as Romeo and Juliet do, they need alternative convictions to sustain them. Love is therefore counterphobic not only as any system of immortality must be but also as a defense against the anxious demands of an ideology whose spell is no longer wholly efficacious.

Romeo envisions Juliet as a supernatural being, a masculine “bright angel” and “winged messenger of heaven” who overmasters awestruck “mortals” so that they “fall back and gaze on him” (2.2.26-32). At the same time, Romeo's vision expresses the infantile wish to be chosen by, and identified with, a majestic father, as is shown by the gender of the angel. His imagination finds fulfillment in the paradox of empowering self-effacement at the heart of patriarchy. The fantasy's completion comes in Romeo's dream that Juliet has awakened him from death and ordained him an emperor, the paramount patriarchal role (5.1.9).

Juliet participates in the same fantasy when she equates orgasm and immortality in her cry,

Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night.

(3.2.21-24)

Like “all the world,” Juliet will be subsumed as a worshiper in Romeo's apotheosis. If his transformation into stars alludes to Caesar's apotheosis as a “goodly shyning starre” in Ovid, as one editor has suggested (Gibbons 1980, 170), then Juliet is envisioning an analogue to Romeo's dream that sexual love (her kiss) can revive him from death to become an emperor. By “dying” through sexuality “are happy mothers made” (1.2.12). By the same means, reciprocally, may a woman make a youth an immortal lord. In its imagination of power this fantasy is profoundly patriarchal. Like Romeo's vision of the angel, however, this celebration of all the world absorbed in the face of heaven also suggests a worshipful infant's concentration upon the all-important, life-giving face of a parent.

The lovers' mutual worship expresses a generosity, subverted or repressed elsewhere in Verona, that balances their self-destructiveness. In their lovemaking, for example, Romeo and Juliet repeatedly fantasize that deathlike self-effacement can lead to apotheosis. Repudiating their own names (2.2.34-57), loving in darkness, they try to be invisible in hopes of escaping patriarchal control. They imagine innocent self-nullification that excuses their actual defiance of their fathers even as each casts the beloved in the role of life-giving lord. When Juliet wishes Romeo were her pet bird, a “poor prisoner” (2.2.179) whose liberty she would be “loving jealous of” (2.2.181), Romeo eagerly assents. Yet Juliet declines to dominate him, protesting that “I should kill thee with much cherishing” (2.2.183).

Finally, however, their behavior is equivocal, and that doubleness makes their self-effacement perilous. Confronted by Tybalt after his secret marriage, Romeo tries to play possum and placate him. Yet Romeo's passivity allows Tybalt to use him as a screen, thrusting under his arm to kill Mercutio (3.1.103). Immediately guilt and anger overwhelm Romeo. His will released, Romeo first turns against Juliet—“Thy beauty hath made me effeminate,” he cries, “And … soft'ned valor's steel” (3.1.113-15)—and then, murderously, against Tybalt.

In this crisis actual uncontrollable death breaks the spell of symbolic immortality, and the underlying patriarchal structure asserts itself. Defeated by Tybalt's “triumph” (3.1.122), called a “wretched boy” (3.1.130), Romeo feels overwhelmed by “black fate” (3.1.119-20). In reaction he tries to reassert heroic control over death by levying a death sentence on Tybalt (3.1.129). Rebelling—against the emasculating “angel” Juliet as well as against the would-be master Tybalt—Romeo discharges his rage at a rival “son” and alter ego. In the complex of motives that produces the lovers' suicides this process is important. For there the part of the self that identifies with the patriarch and demands mastery finally punishes with death that part of the self that for the sake of love would suffer enemies and surrender all claims to worldly power in the hope of deferred rewards. The internalized father slays the weakening child.

Because the basic patriarchal structure governs even rebellion, desires for autonomy tend to call up opposite roles organized around fantasies of death and omnipotence. When Gregory and Sampson jest about breaking the law, for instance, they promptly fantasize about slavery and execution, and then, in reaction, about annihilating their enemies. Similarly, the Juliet who would make Romeo outshine Caesar is also the paralyzed child who helplessly hears her parents wish her dead. Exposed in his rebellion by the murder of Tybalt, the Romeo who would be an emperor (5.1.6-9) abases himself, feeling himself put to death by the mere word “banishment,” with which the friar, like a patriarchal judge, “cut'st my head off” (3.3.21-23). Taunted as a slave by Tybalt (1.5.55), Romeo goes to his doom with grandiose defiance of slavery, vowing to “shake the yoke of inauspicious stars” (5.3.111). Death and omnipotence are two faces of the same fantasy. Their dissociation contributes to the irrational violence of the feud as well as to the lovers' “mad scenes”—Romeo's tantrum on the floor of the friar's cell and Juliet's near hallucinatory collapse as she dispatches herself with the sleeping potion.

It happens that we can glimpse the origins of this polarization of the self in Romeo and Juliet. Heading toward the Capulets' ball, Romeo worries about “some vile forfeit of untimely death” that may overtake him before he can redeem the “despised life clos'd in my breast” through some heroic act (1.4.111, 110). His imagery implies that he has mortgaged his life and will lose it since the term will “expire” before he can pay. Punning, he fears an untimely debt as well as an untimely death, one that will “forfeit” his “despised life.” A sense of guilty inadequacy makes him expect the punishment of death or foreclosure.

In patriarchy, however, the child owes the godlike father a death inasmuch as he or she holds life at the father's will. In Theseus's summary of the doctrine, the child is “imprinted” by the father, and it is “within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it” (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.50-51). What is more, the child owes a debt of obedience or self-effacement, in which guilty wishes for autonomy are repressed in a symbolic death. Where patriarchy splits into the roles of the father who is a judge and the son who is a warrior, the son additionally owes this conscience-figure a debt of heroic glory, which may have to be paid by risking his life. Such a debt produces the self-hate in Romeo's “despised life” and helps to explain his desperate reassertion of lost valor in the murder of Tybalt.

Juliet's behavior also reveals an underlying psychic debt, the origin of which surfaces in the nurse's account of Juliet's weaning (1.3.16-57). Though physically capable, the child angrily resisted her own independence. Her first efforts at autonomy led to a fall, and the fall brought not parental support and further self-assertion but a surrogate father's queasy joke that a woman lives to fall: “Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit” (1.3.42). Yet Juliet's fall produced “a perilous knock” and implied a threat of death, especially for a child whose alter ego Susan is “with God” (1.3.19).

In falling, Juliet gave her “brow” “a perilous knock,” the same injury she imagines inflicting on herself upon awakening in the monument. Trapped in the suffocating family tomb—within reified patriarchy itself—she fears she will be overcome by guilty rage and destroy her brain, seat of the self and forbidden autonomy. In turn she would punish herself by means of a “great kinsman's bone” (4.3.53), metonymic parental force. As in the anecdote about weaning, a venture toward autonomy produces (in her mental life) first a fall toward death, then trauma.

The nurse's husband's joke tacitly proposes a patriarchal solution to counter the fall toward death. A “fall backward” into sexually submissive marriage and motherhood will rescue the child from the terrifying fall toward autonomy at the cost of being able literally to stand on one's own two feet. Juliet consents to pay a debt/death through a marriage that will at once efface and exalt her. Girls must fall sexually to be redeemed by a new lord and win posterity for the family and themselves, even as young males must be willing to fall in battle to win immortalizing glory.

In this imperative of self-sacrifice lies the germ of the idea of a play-death such as Juliet acts out by means of the friar's potion. Her fall in a death-counterfeiting sleep would appease an outraged parental judge and lead to a lordly resurrection from the family tomb with the banished Romeo. Making Verona new in amity, Juliet would be fulfilling a patriarchal fantasy comparable to Romeo's dream of love awakening him from death as an emperor. The play dramatizes the pervasiveness of this fantasy in Verona. In engineering Juliet's resurrection, the ostensibly humble friar gives himself a godlike role—he plans literally to raise her from the grave. Uniting the lovers and aspiring to atone for all Verona, he parodies old Capulet's marriage plans, implicitly correcting them, as if to prove himself “the best father of Verona's welfare” (Brenner 1980, 52). “Ghostly sire” (2.2.188) and worldly father are implicitly competitors in the larger system of patriarchal rivalry.

III

Reconstituting patriarchal forms to serve their own desires for autonomy, Romeo and Juliet never openly defy their parents. Yet with the wish for autonomy comes a veiled recognition of the suffocating claims their parents make on them. Their parents' will to subsume each child's identity comes unconsciously to seem to the lovers like cannibalism. The monument that embodies her family in Verona becomes to Juliet an imprisoning mouth (4.3.33-34) and to Romeo a devouring “maw,” womb, and mouth (5.3.45-47). Just as the mother becomes an expression of the father's will, and the father expresses ideologically the life-giving and potentially life-withholding generativity of the mother, so the tomb conflates the parents into one ravenous orifice.

As in Lear's fantasy of the savage who “makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite” (King Lear, 1.1.116-18), the threat is not merely of parental wrath or incestuous desire but also of cannibalistic self-aggrandizement, a frantic hunger to incorporate more and more life in order to overcome death. Such aggrandizement is the more terrible for being sharply felt by the child and yet invisible. In effect, the lovers fear an infantile voracity such as a once-subsumed child, having at last come to dominate, might release against its own offspring. Since monuments objectify a claim to transcend annihilating time, the “hungry” tomb expresses patriarchy's deepest and most primitive drive, the drive for survival.

We need to remember that the father's claims to mastery over death are corroborated in his role as judge and even executioner. If the father is a god, as Theseus decrees, he is also always potentially death himself. In this respect the prince's struggle to contain the feud is a struggle—echoed in the world outside the Elizabethan theater—to reserve for a supreme patriarch the right to command death.

At its most benign this power thrillingly confirms the lord's generosity. By conspicuously sparing the child's life, the father (or monarch) makes the love between them incalculably valuable. Thus, in his amorous submission to Juliet, Romeo exults, “O dear account! my life is in my foe's debt” (1.5.18). At its most terrifying, when internalized by the child, such power generates intolerable insecurity, as in Romeo's dread of the hostile stars and his suicidal sense of doom.

From this standpoint, the lovers' suicides reflect the dynamics of patriarchal control. To master her fate, Juliet would play a lordly role (“myself have power to die” [3.5.242]) as Cleopatra does to escape Caesar. Unconsciously, however, the introjected imperatives of the parental judge can make suicide a form of execution in which an alienated conscience destroys a rebellious self, as in Juliet's vision of dashing out her own brain with an ancestral bone, the objectified will of the father. Likewise Romeo's conscience punishes him with suicidal self-hatred. Banished for his defiance, he “[falls] upon the ground … / Taking the measure of an unmade grave” (3.3.69-70). Angry at Juliet for his own defiance in slaying Tybalt (3.1.113-15), he turns his anger against himself, fantasizing that his own name has murdered her (3.1.102-5). With Juliet he calls down punishment on himself, as Elizabethan noblemen routinely did in speeches from the scaffold professing love for the queen: “Let me be put to death. / I am content, so thou wilt have it so” (3.5.17-18); “Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so” (3.5.24). Ambiguously, however, he calls Juliet “my soul” (3.5.25), so that this execution is also internalized.

As patriarchy's internal conflicts become intolerable, its radical connection with death threatens to surface in consciousness, most equivocally in the personification of death by parent or child. Old Capulet envisions death as a young, rivalrous inheritor who has “lain with” Juliet and usurped his control over her (4.5.36). His description of his adversary exactly fits Romeo. In the Capulets' monument Romeo himself, in turn, personifies death as a rival. Death is a warrior-king whose “pale flag” has not yet fully “conquered” Juliet (5.3.93-96). Then the rival becomes an “amorous … lean abhorred monster” (5.3.104), who will make Juliet his “paramour.” Romeo imagines Juliet sexually enslaved in the palace of a monster who is also a warrior-king.

This fantasy projects the long-denied dark side of the patriarchal forms in which the lovers have construed each other. Romeo dissociates from himself as Death the part of him that would be made an emperor by Juliet's kiss. In this final moment of tenderness he rejects the devouring triumphalism latent in all patriarchy. He repudiates the death that “hath suck'd the honey” of Juliet's breath. Otherwise Juliet, by loving such an emperor Romeo, would be submitting to rape, like the women Sampson fancies “ever thrust to the wall” (1.1.16). Sampson identifies with patriarchal tyranny, the same tyranny that Romeo at last projects on death and vows to resist to the end of time.

Giving his own life with chivalric honor to rescue Juliet from a monster, Romeo finally plays out the sacrificial, warrior's debt of the son to his father. Even as he sacrifices himself in part for patriarchal values, he would “shake the yoke of inauspicious stars” (5.3.111) in a final repudiation of the fathers. This is the fatal paradox at the heart of patriarchy: when rebellion against a myth is insidiously possessed by that myth, it serves the myth. In taking his own life to defend Juliet's sexuality against the rival warrior-king Death, Romeo gives new life to Verona's feud.

At the end of the play benevolence takes disturbing form in the funerary statues the fathers decree. Still thinking in terms of demands, Capulet vows, “This is my daughter's jointure, for no more / Can I demand.” To this Montague replies, “But I can give thee more.” Thereupon he boasts that he will make Juliet the golden cynosure of all true lovers: “There shall be no figure at such a rate be set / As that of true and faithful Juliet” (5.3.296-304). The father's economic vocabulary and competition call to mind the psychic debts felt by the children and the ominous economic term Romeo associates with death—“engrossing” (5.3.115). In addition, such greedy possession calls to mind Romeo's imagery of the tomb as a “detestable maw,” a womb of death (5.3.45). The metaphors place the young in an engulfing parental womb that would suffocate, not grant, life. The womb and the sexually enslaving monster express the parents, whom the lovers love and fear and also, unknowingly, hate.

Now that marriage and the sword have failed, the fathers would reconstitute their conviction of immortality by re-creating their children as holy martyrs to love, “poor sacrifices of our enmity” (5.3.304). As icons the children will be fabricated into exemplary types. Yet there must be a difference between the golden statues and the poignant individuals we have seen. That difference is of course the basis of the play's critique of patriarchy. In the end it also measures the dramatist's need to honor the structure of power outside the Globe Theater and no doubt in his own upbringing, while onstage—and in the sympathies the play evokes—it enacts a challenge to that power.

Audiences have often interpreted this challenge as a justification of romantic exaltation, even as various critics have taken it to legitimate the lovers' aspirations to autonomy. By contrast, at least one historian maintains that the original Globe audience would have felt obliged to condemn the play's disobedient children (Stone 1977). However, if we understand patriarchy as a system of beliefs evolved to control anxiety about death, these contradictory responses to the play appear in a new light. Seizing on a limited truth, each tries to protect the illusion of security at stake in the play, either by revaluing the social order (for example, by postulating its reform through love) or, more often, by repudiating patriarchal values on behalf of a substitute system of beliefs. Like the voices onstage, we too need to fortify ourselves against the prospect of annihilation.

Because of the danger of offending an audience, especially an audience of Elizabethan patriarchs, the play does not forcibly disenchant its myths. Instead it creates conditions in which imagination might discover itself as a tissue of beliefs. Such a recognition would at least momentarily turn the imagination against itself, showing the triumphal verities onstage and off to be as compulsive and insubstantial as dreams. In such a moment of alienation the self could begin to appreciate its dependency, even (to echo Sampson and Gregory) its enslavement. In that dizzying moment lies the possibility of change and, perhaps, a new ground for love.

Although Romeo and Juliet seems to me deeply disenchanted at its core, it dramatizes the imagination's resilience in the face of annihilation. As London, and Shakespeare himself, survived devastating plague in the early 1590s (a catastrophe echoed in 5.2.8-12), so the play registers the shock of mortality to a privileged system of belief. The final lines show Verona turning blasted life into art (“never was a story of more woe” [5.3.309]), as Shakespeare himself, having sensed the darkness beyond the bright dreams of culture, would go on generating fictions that engage that darkness, including the flagrantly dreamlike late romances.

IV

The quality of disenchantment in Romeo and Juliet suggests a Shakespeare who was radically equivocal about authority and creativity. As the son of a modestly eminent father of declining fortunes, Shakespeare may have discovered early in life that patriarchy could no longer make good—if it ever had made good—its promises and demands. Perhaps, as in Romeo and Juliet, a disenchanted son used his obligatory self-effacement to evade an ineffectual father. Making himself invisible, “an artificial night” (1.1.140), Shakespeare may have cultivated a poetic passion through which he pursued his own destiny. After all, Romeo's daring imagination wins him the prized daughter of a lord and, belatedly, the admiration of an entire city that has misjudged him. Analogously, Shakespeare forsook his father's world and sought his fortune in the theater—a psychic orchard, so to speak—where he could influence the hearts of some of the most important people in England while earning fame and the place of a gentleman.

Let me develop this fanciful metadramatic analogy a bit further. Himself an agent and beneficiary of change, the young artist must have sympathized with the Romeo who steals Juliet—old Capulet's posterity—by his imaginative passion. Yet Romeo can find no way to reconcile this poetic autonomy with the harsh daylight world of the city; and since it may tragically internalize patriarchal values, poetry's intoxicating power may be untrustworthy or even fatal. Shakespeare's own solution was to use poetry to lure the city, London, into the theater of the Capulets' tomb where exaltation could be gloriously expended again and again for profit, insight, and mutual pleasure.

Shakespeare's was a personality, then, that learned to transform its own aggression and aspirations into vicarious heroic forms that could bind the sympathy of others, at least for one intense, profitable moment, and then be ambiguously relinquished. Rather than endorse or repudiate the world's verities in art, as conventional writers did, Shakespeare dramatized their natural irrationality—their status as fantasy. He presented not the doctrine of patriarchy, for example, but the network of veiled assumptions about death and heroism that the doctrine implied. He put that elusive psychic reality before audiences as a mystery or a dream (“or did I dream it so?” [5.3.79]). To be sure, he let an onstage chorus of conventional wisdom interpret the dream (“All are punish'd” [5.3.295]) in order to escape retaliation for arousing wishes and fears presumably repressed (or banished) by many in his audience since early childhood.

Recognition that people live by strategic fictions such as patriarchy opens up all aspects of behavior for negotiation and therefore provides a basis for consensual relationships and, not incidentally, the artist's own creativity. Disconnected from underlying physical forces and appetites, by contrast, a cultural fiction may be a terrifying illusion, a candle lighting fools the way to dusty death. If disenchanted, Shakespeare saw, human behavior may reduce to a fierce appetite for domination and nurture tenuously held in check by ruthless strategy: in Verona a feud, or in the imagery of the history plays a dialectical struggle between a king and ravenous wolves.

Hence Shakespeare's equivocation. Like the strong-willed yet famously slippery Queen Elizabeth, whose regime revived old forms such as chivalry to disguise its innovations, he survived public life in a world of homicidal religious and political rivalry by honoring venerable cultural forms while re-creating them. In one sense his genius lay in devising ways of making disenchantment healthy. His own Romeo and Juliet appears simply to echo Brooke's familiar, lifeless Romeus, although in fact it functions as a sort of pun on Brooke's story, producing a new meaning. Such a quibbling imaginative stance permitted devious self-assertion in the ostensible service of deference. As a result, although Shakespeare retired to the outward life of a country patriarch in Stratford, his actual relationship to that role is a mystery.

With its tendency to loosen the self's desperate attachments to the world and make reality dreamlike in moments of crisis, Shakespeare's style of equivocation must have helped control the dread of death, as had patriarchy. In addition, it enabled him to devise new forms of authority for experience: for example, to reconstitute patriarchy in the theater itself, where he vicariously commanded “his” spellbound audience's sympathies even as he urged spectators to exercise their own autonomy (“as you like it,” “what you will”). For as he wittily deferred to the spectators, the dramatist was implicitly redefining them and directing their fantasies toward a new vision of life. Invested with ambiguous cultural authority (“the Lord Chamberlain's Men,” “the King's Men”), Shakespeare created a surrogate, provisional family that could console for death by encouraging imaginative sympathy in the spectators and clarifying relationships in the world outside the theater that were already evolving beyond the drastic bonds of patriarchy.

Works Cited

Becker, Ernest. 1973. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Bradbrook, M. C. 1980. Shakespeare: The Poet in His World. London: Methuen.

Brenner, Gerry. 1980. “Shakespeare's Politically Ambitious Friar.” Shakespeare Studies 13:47-58.

Farrell, Kirby. 1984. “Self-Effacement and Autonomy in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Studies 16:75-99.

Gibbons, Brian, ed. 1980. Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen.

Laslett, Peter. 1971. The World We Have Lost. 2d ed. New York: Scribner's.

Stone, Lawrence. 1977. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. New York: Harper and Row.