SOURCE: Knowles, Ronald. “Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, edited by Ronald Knowles, pp. 36-60. London: Macmillan, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Knowles applies Mikhail Bakhtin's cultural theory of the carnivalesque to Romeo and Juliet, particularly in regard to the drama's themes of love and death.]

As the title Rabelais and His World indicates, Bakhtin is primarily concerned with medieval culture, but he does offer many fascinating asides on the carnivalesque in the early modern world, and in Shakespeare particularly. ‘Shakespeare's drama’, he writes, ‘has many outward carnivalesque aspects: images of the material body lower stratum, of ambivalent obscenities, and of popular banquet scenes.’ He also suggests that ‘the analysis we have applied to Rabelais would also help us to discover the essential carnival element in the organization of Shakespeare's drama. This does not merely concern the secondary clownish motives of his plays. The logic of crownings and uncrownings, in direct or indirect form, organises the serious elements also’ (p. 275).

In this essay I shall argue that Shakespeare's inheritance of carnival or festive culture finds expression in Romeo and Juliet by means of the three Bakhtinian categories indicated above: the body, bawdy and the banquet.¹ I shall argue that the complex figure of Juliet's nurse can be seen beyond her obvious comic realism as representing something much larger, the Bakhtinian ‘grotesque body’ as well as ‘mock’ Fortune. Secondly, Capulet's ‘old accustom'd feast’ (1.2.20),² though not a public carnival, has carnivalesque elements, along with the highly structured comedy of the servants and musicians, generally. Thirdly, there are the many instances of proverbs and bawdy wit in the play. Together these three elements contribute to much of the comedy, but this comedy has a profound cultural ambivalence. The issue is ultimately not so much Carnival versus Lent, as life versus death. For Bakhtin the triumph of life is always expressed by the laughter of the people.

In most discussions of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare's most radical carnivalesque innovation usually goes unacknowledged. In drama, romantic love was commonly the subject of comedy. Shakespeare challenges the worlds of myth and legend which conventionally provided tragic heroes and heroines by introducing the first romantic tragedy. Critics have indeed always recognized the preponderance of comic materials in Romeo and Juliet though nearly all modern productions severely cut the carefully placed comic scenes of Act 4. A carnivalesque critique of Petrarchan love in the play is found in several forms, but perhaps most tellingly in the technique of burlesque juxtaposition in scenic structure. The subjective world of idealized love is seen to resist the social world of festival and to succumb to ‘star-cross'd’ fate in spite of all the ministrations of an earthly Fortune which is benignly represented in the domesticated and naturalized figure of Juliet's nurse. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet will always remain the fulcrum, but the cultural dimensions of the play reach back to the collectivity of joyous carnival on the one hand, and on the other look forward to what Bakhtin calls ‘the interior infinite’ (p. 44), the capitalist culture of individualism which developed out of the Middle Ages.

For Bakhtin the ideology which carnival challenged derived from the dogma of Catholicism. In Romeo and Juliet the ideology of romantic love is conjoined with that of the death cult of the second half of the fifteenth century which persisted into the Renaissance, particularly in painting, illustrations and emblems linking love, festivity and death, as we shall see.

Three associated ideas underpin Bakhtin's theory of carnival culture: ‘the material bodily principle’, ‘the concept of grotesque realism’ and ‘the collective ancestral body’ (pp. 18-19). The occasion of carnival itself makes apparent the relationship of the materialist principle with the pattern of the cyclical year in which the ecclesiastical is naturalized by seasons, in contrast to the eschatological rigours of linear time, from creation to doomsday. All these ideas are implied in the Nurse's speech in her first appearance on stage (1.3.2ff).

Juliet's nurse is a metamorphosis of Bakhtin's material bodily principle. Lower-class comic garrulity, taken from a hint in the source, always runs the risk of critical condescension—perhaps nowhere more so than in Coleridge's reference to the Nurse's ‘uncultivated understanding’³—but the discernible carnivalesque pattern of the Nurse's references transcend critic, character and caricature. The boy-actor or actress of the Nurse should appear aged. Shakespeare made the disparity in age between Juliet and the Nurse even greater than in his source by lowering Juliet's age from 16 to 13 while following the original reference to the Nurse as an ‘ancient dame’.⁴ Her senility is indicated by her relative toothlessness, ‘I have but four’ (l.13) she says, and her physical appearance should be consonant with this.

The Nurse's first words in response to Lady Capulet's ‘where's my daughter’ (l.1), ‘Now by my maidenhead at twelve year old / I bade her come’ (ll.2-3) ironically parallel her with Juliet, who will also lose her maidenhead at thirteen in the course of the play. Youth, puberty, virginity and the onset of sexual life are evoked as part of a pattern of natural human growth. The religious imprecation ‘God forbid’ (l.4) follows the endearments ‘What, lamb. What, ladybird’ (l.3), thus aligning human and divine affection and concern in terms of the natural world. Following her first query concerning ‘Lammas-tide’ (l.15) the Nurse embarks on what has become known as ‘the Nurse's speech’, which includes two more references to ‘Lammas Eve’ (ll.17, 21), Juliet's birthday. These are the only references to this festival in Shakespeare's works. This, again, aligns the religious with the natural; Lammas, or loaf-mass day, with old age and birth. Lammas day is the first of August, a harvest festival at which loaves of bread made from the first ripe corn were consecrated. Harvest is often found as a metaphor or analogy for death (for example ‘all flesh is grass’, Isaiah 40.6), but here death is transformed into life in the provision of sustaining food. Ominously, Juliet is to be cut down by death before Lammas eve, preempting the natural harvest of her body in the fructification of marriage. Juliet is paralleled with the Nurse's daughter: ‘Susan and she—God rest all Christian souls— / Were of an age’ (ll.18-19). The phrase ‘Well, Susan is with God’ (l.19) is free from regret or sadness, and the recollection of the earthquake in the same context as Susan's death and Juliet's weaning suggests again both death and birth, disaster and generation, as natural occurrences, just as ‘Shake! quoth the dovehouse’ (l.33) converts danger and death to laughter and life. (The weaning is important for the iconography of the Nurse as Fortune and will be returned to shortly.) The established pattern of the naturalization of the religious, a carnivalesque inversion, is extended in the juxtaposition of ‘by th' rood’ (l.36), ‘God be with his soul’ (l.39) and ‘by my holidame’ (l.43) with the Nurse's recollection of her husband picking up Juliet after an accident:

‘Yea’, quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit,
Wilt thou not, Jule?’

(ll.41-3)

A dead man is brought to life in comic anticipation of young Juliet eventually fulfilling her sexual nature, a cyclic continuity of life emphasized by the Nurse's hyperbolic vindication of the triumph of nature over time.

The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay’ …
I warrant, and I should live a thousand years
I never should forget it.

(ll.44, 46-7)

Remembered as a toddler, Juliet is then anticipated as a bride: ‘And I might live to see thee married once’ (l.61). After Lady Capulet's literary conceit on ‘the volume of young Paris' face’ (l.81) concluding ‘By having him, making yourself no less’ (l.95), the Nurse roundly adds ‘No less, nay bigger. Women grow by men’ (l.95), thereby completing the cyclic pattern of her speech with yet further generation. This sense of cyclic generation is continued within a festive setting when old Capulet exchanges reminiscences with his cousin at the revels, looking on the young masquers, recalling their youthful masking, weddings and birth (1.5.16-40). But as we shall see, this carnivalesque dance of life is haunted by the late medieval dance of death.

In the Nurse and Juliet we have in emergent realism a splitting of the image of the grotesque body. Bakhtin remarks that ‘in the seventeenth century some forms of the grotesque began to degenerate into static “character” presentation and narrow “genrism”’ (p. 52). In earlier culture the images of the ‘real grotesque … present simultaneously the two poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying, and that which is being born; they show two bodies in one.’ Elsewhere Bakhtin points out terracotta figures from antiquity, of ‘senile pregnant nags … laughing … it is pregnant death, a death that gives birth’ (p. 25). As an example of an image of the duality of the body surviving but only as ‘a pale reflection of its former dual nature’ Bakhtin cites the suckling of a child (p. 322), and refers to Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe in which the German poet speculates that in a lost painting called ‘The Weaning of a Child’, then attributed to Correggio, ‘the sacred becomes all-human’ (p. 252). Unfortunately, in his consideration of Romeo and Juliet, this carnival inversion of Goethe's views did not extend to the Nurse and Mercutio, for ‘these two figures, and what surrounds them, come in only as farcical interludes, and must be as unbearable to the minds of the lovers on the stage as they are to us’.⁵ Carnival laughter, central to Bakhtin's theory, annoys Goethe as merely ‘farcical interludes’, but Shakespeare's mixture of comedy and tragedy may be seen as an insistent festive laughter resisting the prescriptions of neoclassicism, though to some extent compromising with genre by giving a certain kind of comedy to the lower orders. The Nurse's laughter echoes a whole culture, not simply a character from below stairs. In Bakhtin's terms, Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare embodied the Renaissance conception of laughter in its ‘deep philosophical meaning’, affording ‘one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world’, when ‘the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint’ (p. 66). In the Nurse's speech and laughter life-affirming joyousness subsumes the metaphysics of religion and death, banishes fear, and celebrates the regenerative cycle of organic being—the essence of carnival.

As the Nurse represents a certain kind of love and life which is contrasted in the play with romantic love and death, so at a conscious level, probably taking a few hints from Chaucer, Shakespeare seems to have contrasted malign fate with the Nurse as benign fortune. The Nurse, like Friar Laurence, has several functions within the play beyond the limitations of naturalist character furthering plot. In his ramified presentation Shakespeare includes both pragmatic carnivalesque and human limitation. Howard R. Patch's The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature⁶ still remains one of the best sources of information on the subject and the following references are indebted to this study. In one of the seminal works of western culture, Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy, Fortune as nurse says, in Chaucer's translation, ‘Whan than nature brought the foorth out of thi modir wombe, I resceyved the nakid and nedy of alle thyngs, and I norissched the with my richesses’.⁷ In Renaissance iconography Fortune is consequently depicted with the right breast exposed and bearing a cornucopia.⁸ Changeable Fortune laughs and cries; we have heard the Nurse laughing and she later weeps.⁹ Perhaps the most common attributes of Fortune are her fickleness and the idea of her as a strumpet. ‘O Fortune, Fortune! All men call thee fickle’, Juliet cries; and later in the same scene the Nurse declares, ‘Romeo's a dishclout to him’ (3.5.219), fickly transferring her allegiance to Paris. Earlier the Nurse approaches Romeo seeking ‘some confidence’, upon which Mercutio exclaims ‘A bawd! A bawd! A bawd!’ (2.4.126, 128). To add physical emphasis to this symbolic incrustation on realist character, Shakespeare has Juliet insist, impatient of the Nurse's return from Romeo, ‘O, she is lame’ (2.5.4). This echoes a detail of Chaucer's depiction of Fortune in The Book of the Duchess, ‘she goth upryght and yet she halt’.¹⁰ Shakespeare's suggestion is in direct contrast to the source in Brooke, where at one point the Nurse rushes home ‘with spedy pace’.¹¹ This is made into a rather blatant joke immediately after by Juliet, who responds to the Nurse's ‘Hie you to the cell’ with ‘Hie to high fortune! Honest Nurse, farewell’ (2.5.78-9). In contrast to the comedy of the Nurse and Fortune's hobbling, Fate and death will strike with tragic haste.

However, it is in the evocation of the nurse weaning Juliet that Shakespeare most finely balances traditional iconography and dramatic character:

When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug.

(1.3.30-2)

Patch comments, ‘As we thirst for her gifts, so Fortune gives us sweet and bitter to drink, by turns honey and gall’.¹² Romeo, as yet in thrall to Rosaline, invokes this commonplace: ‘A madness most discreet, / A choking gall, and a preserving sweet’ (1.1.190-1). It is repeated by Tybalt when restrained by Capulet at the feast: ‘but this intrusion shall / Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt'rest gall’ (1.5.90-1). Finally, the Nurse is linked to nature herself on whom ‘divers kind / We sucking on her natural bosom find’ (2.3.7-8). Like the Nurse and Fortune, nature provides honey or gall, or, in Friar Laurence's words, ‘poison’ or ‘medicine’. The Friar's speech here (2.3.1-26) espouses a concept central to both Bakhtin's thought and Shakespeare's representation of death and carnival, and will be returned to. The Nurse's love and comedy provide a carnivalesque contrast with romance and tragedy, but mock-Fortune is no match for blind Cupid, blindfold Fortune and masked Death.

Bakhtin sees carnival as a cultural form of opposition, subversion and liberation from what he terms the ‘official’ ideology propounded by the ecclesiastical orthodoxy of the Middle Ages, whereas Shakespeare's use of the carnivalesque in Romeo and Juliet provides a contrastive frame for the inherent values of romantic love as it had developed in literature by the late sixteenth century into an amalgam of courtly love, Petrarchism and neo-Platonism. Many critics have looked at those elements variously considering them as comic, satirical or burlesque. They have primarily looked at the first half of the play, often without giving due weight to the later comic scenes of the Nurse's response to Juliet's seeming ‘death’ and the festive-funeral musicians (4.5). More broadly considered, comedy can be seen to draw on the carnivalesque and to become something of a touchstone in a cultural critique of romantic tragedy.

First, it might be said that it is difficult to understand how, if Shakespeare had intended to present only a poignant tragedy of ideal love, he chose to emphasize Romeo's first love, Rosaline, who is swiftly passed over in the source. Garrick dropped all references to her entirely. In the early exchanges between Benvolio and Montague, Romeo is pictured as having ostracized himself for love, and his behaviour is explained in heavily parodic Petrarchan language (1.1.116ff). Having discovered the identity of Romeo's lover who is included in the list of Capulet's guests, Benvolio challenges Romeo with:

Go thither and with unattainted eye
Compare her face with some that I shall show
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.

(1.2.87-9)

Immediately on entering the Capulet festivity, with a single glance at Juliet and without any prompting whatsoever from his friend, Romeo confirms Benvolio's scepticism:

So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows …
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight.
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

(1.5.47-8, 51-2)

This change happens without any such externalized agency as the magic potion of love-in-idleness administered to the lovers by Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The paradox of love as both arbitrary and absolute creates a richly comic moment which is developed in the scene and in what follows not least when Mercutio unwittingly echoes Romeo's words, ‘Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover! / … Cry but “Ay me!” Pronounce but “love” and “dove”’ (2.1.7,10), and then goes on, unaware of Romeo's new love, to evoke the chaste Rosaline in comically inappropriate erotic terms. Again, Friar Laurence assumes that Romeo has been with Rosaline. This Romeo hastily denies with ‘I have forgot that name, and that name's woe’ (2.3.42), but his language inadvertently recalls Juliet's ‘What's in a name?’ (2.2.43) and their amorous wordplay on ‘forgetting’ (2.2.170-5). Little wonder that the Friar continues to chide:

Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear,
So soon forgotten? Young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts but in their eyes.

(2.3.62-4)

The dramatic interplay of such references serves to compromise, if not undermine, the evident partiality of a purely romantic response created by traditions of performance from Garrick to Franco Zeffirelli, in which most of the comedy was cut to emphasize romance and pathos.¹³ Moreover, if we return to the Capulet festival aspects of the staging suggest a further comedic dimension.

As the young men make their way to the Capulet house visors are distributed. Most likely these would have been full-face visors, like those in Much Ado About Nothing (2.1), of a grotesque nature and attention is specifically drawn to this detail in Mercutio's dialogue:

Give me a case to put my visage in:
A visor for a visor. What care I
What curious eye doth quote deformities?
Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me.

(1.4.29-32)

For Bakhtin the mask reveals ‘the essence of the grotesque’ (p. 40) in the carnivalesque conversion of the fearful into the funny, an analogue to carnival death in which the hideous becomes humorous. Tybalt identifies Romeo by his voice since his visage is ‘cover'd with an antic face’ (1.5.55); Capulet restrains Tybalt from violence; and Romeo pays court to Juliet with a quatrain which develops into a sonnet in an exchange on the Petrarchan commonplace of the lover as pilgrim worshipping at the shrine of his ‘saint’.

In the source ‘All dyd unmaske’,¹⁴ but Shakespeare does not indicate any unmasking in an explicit stage direction. In fact the stage directions He kisses her at ll.105, 109 were provided by Rowe and Capell in response to the cue lines ‘Thus from my lips’ (l.106) and ‘You kiss by th' book’ (l.109). Romeo has seen Juliet's beauty, so she is not wearing a lady's half-mask. Harley Granville Barker simply assumed that ‘Romeo, his mask doffed, moves towards her’.¹⁵ This is far from certain. Although recognized by Tybalt and identified to Capulet, for Romeo to have unmasked would surely have given such provocation as to have cancelled the hospitality which initially admitted the masked revellers. But if Romeo remains masked until the kiss, it means that Juliet has instantly fallen in love with a visor and a quatrain. If Romeo unmasked at the beginning of the ‘sonnet’, then Juliet falls for someone she doesn't know, albeit handsome, who recites modish love verses. However it is seen, idealized romance is rather undermined in contrast with the source, which stresses that Romeo's love-lorn complexion convinces Juliet of his devotion.¹⁶ The prologue to Act 2 may imply something less than ideal in the comment that both were ‘Alike bewitched by the charm of looks’ (l.6).

The Arden editor, Brian Gibbons, points out that the Act 2 scene division inaugurating the famous balcony exchange between Romeo and Juliet is traditional and convenient for reference, though in fact Romeo's first line—‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound’—rhymes with the preceding line of Benvolio, ‘Go then, for 'tis in vain / To seek him here that means not to be found.’ More significant, given this fluidity of the Elizabethan stage, is the fact that one of the most celebrated scenes in romantic literature begins with the grossest example of explicit bawdy in the play echoing in the audience's ears, Mercutio's

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open-arse and thou a poperin pear!

(2.1.37-8)

Surprisingly, Bakhtin only touches on bawdy in passing, though he recognizes that it is fundamental to the carnivalesque acceptance of life in its derisive ‘degradation’ of high to low: ‘mockery and abuse is almost entirely bodily and grotesque. The body that figures in all the expressions of the unofficial speech of the people is the body that fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying’ (p. 319). Bawdy can give expression to revulsion and lead to pornographic hatred as in Othello, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. On the other hand, almost throughout Romeo and Juliet bawdy is used not only for structural and thematic contrast, but for something larger and more positive—the carnivalesque embrace of existence.

Bawdy reduces passion to the lower bodily stratum. It demystifies the romantic with the physical. Romantic love privatizes passion by subjectifying experience, and excludes life by claiming all existence. Perhaps John Donne summarizes the situation most succinctly and ironically, ‘She is all states, all Princes, I, / Nothing else is.’¹⁷ The literary imagery of Petrarchan love alienates further with its elitist cult of suffering and isolation, and in the excesses of poets like Marino and Serafino subjectivity becomes merely a reified rococo artefact. Shakespeare sees both the comic and tragic implications of dramatizing Petrarchan conceits in contrast with bawdy.¹⁸ Bawdy reflects the collective levelling culture of carnival. Sex is part of life and bawdy imagery reflects not sonnet sequences but the marketplace, the tavern, the kitchen, the farmyard, and so on—nature and society as one. However vulgar, bawdy is social in its humorous relation, person to person, in anecdote, proverb or joke, and this is duplicated in the theatre with the collectivity of laughter.

Mercutio's vulgarism, though characteristic of his bawdy wit, here draws on folk culture in the dialect names for fruits popularly considered to resemble in shape the male and female sexual organs. Sex and fruit compound the carnival images of earth and body mutually sustaining and reproducing. From such a point of view this is not obscene but a comic affirmation shared by ‘maids … when they laugh alone’ (2.2.36), that is, amongst themselves. In contrast to such earthiness Romeo's romantic expostulation invokes the celestial: ‘It is the east and Juliet is the sun!’ (2.2.3). The incipient comedy of such contrast is increased by Juliet's seeming deafness at this point and Romeo's consequent descent into near-bathos: ‘She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?’ (1.12). Juliet's eventual interjection in what has been appropriated as one of the most celebrated of love overtures, again adding a touch of burlesque, is merely ‘Ay me’ (l.25), precisely fulfilling Mercutio's parodic prediction of 56 lines earlier. The staging here indicates that Juliet cannot see Romeo, who is listening—‘Shall I hear more’ (l.37)—‘bescreen'd in night’ (l.52), but she eventually recognizes his voice: ‘Yet I know the sound’ (l.59). Instead of romantic union in love, at this point the lovers are spatially, psychologically and socially separated from each other and others. Thus it is rather difficult to accept the idea of maturity accorded the thirteen-year-old Juliet in this scene. Later, awaiting fulfilment of ‘amorous rites’, Juliet's language of love (3.2.1-30) converts the physicality of orgasm—‘… come Romeo … when I shall die’—into the poetic transcendence of passion. Yet as we shall see, the literalness of death once more is anticipated. Here, in the balcony scene the Nurse's calling voice (ll.149, 151) is like the voice of reality, structurally placed in answer to Romeo's

                                                                                          I am afeard
Being in night, all this is but a dream,
Too flattering sweet to be substantial.

(ll.139-41)

The social mode of bawdy is perhaps nowhere better seen in the play than in Mercutio's ribald chiding later in the act in which he effects a carnivalesque rescue of Romeo, a rescue albeit like carnival itself, only temporary. As we have seen in the alternating structure so far, after the balcony exchange Romeo has to endure Friar Laurence's sober criticism, and on entering in the following scene he faces Mercutio's welcoming witty play on his name.

Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified. Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura, to his lady, was a kitchen wench—marry, she had a better love to berhyme her—Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so …

(2.4.38-44)

Early in his introduction Bakhtin hints at the ‘comic crownings and uncrownings’ (p. 11) of carnivalesque inversion in Shakespeare and others. This is the case with Petrarch throughout the first half of Romeo and Juliet and here, in particular, the laureate poet is ‘uncrowned’. Seizing on the anomaly of Petrarch's chaste love, Mercutio laughs at the metamorphosis of carnival sex, ‘flesh’, into Lenten ‘dried herring’, as if this love was actually life-denying.¹⁹ Brian Gibbons points out that the OED cites this passage as an illustration of ‘roe’ as the sperm of male fish.²⁰ Conversely the romantic heroines of legend and history are travestied in a mode anticipating a figure frequently referred to by Bakhtin—Scarron. Romeo responds with extensively witty word-play culminating in Mercutio's bawdy capitulation—‘I was come to the whole depth of my tale and meant to occupy the argument no longer’ (ll.98-9)—which, in fact, is a victory, ‘Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo’ (l.89).

Mercutio's laughter at Petrarch's Laura as a kitchen maid has been anticipated earlier in a carefully structured scenic interpolation which is a perfect cameo of Shakespeare's carnivalesque method in Romeo and Juliet, and has a specifically Rabelaisian echo. This is Act 1, scene 5 where the stage directions. ‘They march about the stage, and Servingmen come forth with napkins’ indicate the entry of Romeo's group into the Capulet household. Immediately preceding this is Romeo's speech of foreboding which recalls the tragic motif of the prologue:

                                                            … 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.

(1.4.106-11)

As the servants enter a question immediately introduces a Rabelaisian note: ‘Where's Potpan?’ (1.5.1). Amongst the 64 cooks of book IV of Gargantua and Pantagruel is ‘Pudding-pan’ in Urquhart's translation, ‘Piepan’ in the modern Penguin edition.²¹ Whereas Romeo has a fated assignation at the revels, the servants are arranging their high jinks below stairs.

Away with the joint-stools, remove the court-cupboard, look to the plate. Good thou, save me a piece of marchpane, and as thou loves me, let the porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell—Antony and Potpan!

(1.5.6-10)

It seems unlikely that these lovers will exchange Petrarchan conceits—Susan Grindstone's carnivalesque surname says it all, alluding to motion in coition and an avid sexuality wearing out the male. Yet, as we have seen above, sex and the body are also combined with nature and sustenance in a regenerative cycle. All harvest corn will be threshed and the seed ground for flour to make bread to feed people. The servants and their girlfriends will enjoy food and sex with their own banqueting and revels while ‘the longer liver take all’ (1.5.15), a proverbial relegation of death, in direct contrast to Romeo's apprehension of ‘some vile forfeit of untimely death’ (1.4.111). Carnival death is subsumed into the social and natural cycle in which human and harvest seed ensure life, whereas Romeo and Juliet are singled out by another kind of death for extinction.

It has been argued, with some justification, that Romeo and Juliet in large part dramatizes the proverb festina lente, hasten slowly.²² But much more central than this cautionary morality is the philosophy of nature as espoused by Friar Laurence drawing on proverbial knowledge encapsulating the carnivalesque. From this point of view the play dramatizes a dialogism between high and low cultures—between the Renaissance philosophy of love and proverbial folk wisdom, between emergent subjective individualism and communal consciousness. At the centre of the play we hear from the Friar:

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb:
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find.

(2.3.5-8)

This proverbial knowledge gains particular force in English with the rhyming agnomination of ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’, a rhetorical figure at the heart of the play and a figure which both unites and divides the later middle ages and the Renaissance. In his lengthy chapter on ‘The Grotesque Image of the Body’ we find in Bakhtin:

Death, the dead body, blood as a seed buried in the earth, rising for another life—this is one of the oldest and most widespread themes. A variant is death inseminating mother earth and making her bear fruit once more … Rabelais speaks elsewhere of the ‘sweet, much desired embrace of … Mother Earth, which we call burial’ … This image of burial is probably inspired by Pliny, who gives a detailed picture of the earth's motherhood and of burial as a return to her womb.

(p. 327)

In a speech combining the rhythm of the seasons, human growth and social festivity, Capulet explains of Juliet to Paris that ‘Earth has swallow'd all my hopes but she; / She is the hopeful lady of my earth’ (1.2.14-15). Carnival and capitalist notions seem to be played against each other here if the second ‘earth’ is taken as referring ambiguously to either Capulet's body, alive and dead, or to his lands. Given the prevalent references to age and youth, summer and winter, the cyclic carnival element is to the fore, earth as womb and tomb.

The design of Romeo and Juliet does not fall into a simple division of a tragic following upon a comic movement, and neither is there an unbridgeable dichotomy between the language of romantic love and sexuality, as we have seen above. Until Act 5 comedy and tragedy alternate. ‘My grave is like to be my wedding bed’ (1.5.134), Juliet remarks, while Romeo later declares, ‘Then love-devouring death do what he dare’ (2.6.7). Many proleptic notes like this are sounded throughout the play. In contrast, the carnival world persists in the midst of death; Menippus laughing in the underworld is a favourite image for Bakhtin (see p. 69), whereas in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio jests at death, ‘you shall find me a grave man’ (2.1.99). But carnival surrenders to tragedy at the close. More precisely, the reversals in Capulet's ‘festival’/‘funeral’ speech (4.5.84-90), agnomination again, pattern Act 4 as a whole. In scene 1 Juliet evokes the horrors of the charnel house and death-shrouds, whereas scene 2 opens with proverbial jokes about cooks licking their fingers. In scene 3, just before taking the potion, the horrors of being entombed are vividly before Juliet. And then the carnivalesque world of food and the body is heard once more—‘more spices’, ‘They call for dates and quinces’, ‘Look to the bak'd meats’ (ll.1, 2, 5). The Nurse as weeping Fortune discovers Juliet's body in scene 4, and the festive musicians decide to stay on for a funereal free meal. The homiletic association of death and musicians is of great importance and will be touched on shortly. Suffice it here to note how the social festive world vies with the medieval horrors of death, and eventually with the development of death as lover.

In Act 5, in the Capulets' tomb, the festive is finally superseded by the counter-carnival triumph of death, and carnival day and festive light are extinguished by tragic darkness. Capulet's feast was to ‘make dark heaven light’ (1.2.25), but Montague had acknowledged that his son ‘locks fair daylight out / And makes himself an artificial night’, a ‘black … humour’ that indeed proves ‘portentous’ (1.1.137-9). Yet ‘night’ also gives expression to the most potent love language in the play, touched on above.

Come gentle night, come loving black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars …

(3.2.20-2)

The orgasmic reading of ‘die’ is now commonplace and the proleptic punning equally so, but ‘black-brow'd night’ bears re-examination in a context in which Juliet recalls her first meeting with the masked Romeo on a festive occasion, ‘So tedious is this day / As is the night before some festival’ (3.2.28-9). The speech is remarkable for its affirmation and conversion of sexuality to poetry, and in effect offers an inherent rebuff to bawdy, but this in turn is severely qualified, yet again, by ‘death-mark'd love’. ‘Black-brow'd night’ recalls the ‘beetle [i.e. overhanging] brows’ of Mercutio's grotesque visor and anticipates the ‘overwhelming brows’ (5.1.39) of the death-like apothecary who delivers the deadly potion. ‘Black-brow'd night’ seems part of a half-realized metaphor of night as a masquer at the revels. Romeo the antic masquer brings both love and death. In this the iconographic complex of death, festivity and romance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century graphic art is recalled, particularly that of the ‘Dance of Death’.

Shakespeare would have first encountered the iconography of the ‘Dance of Death’ as a child. John Stow noted in his copy of Leland's Itinerary that this imagery, common to all Europe by the beginning of the sixteenth century, was found on the wall of the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon.²³ The ‘Dance of Death’ was otherwise known as the ‘Dance Macabre’ from its original attribution as ‘The Dance of Machabree’, as it appears in John Lydgate's translation.²⁴ The original fifteenth-century French poem with accompanying illustrations adorned the walls of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. Lydgate's version was similarly used with illustrations in old St Paul's cathedral, where it became an object of devotion for Sir Thomas More contemplating death without us, and within us.²⁵ Holbein's 41 woodcuts for his work, commonly referred to as The Dance of Death, are well known and they became the basis for the psaltery of Queen Elizabeth's Book of Common Prayer (1569) with the number of border illustrations of The Dance of Death expanded to 71.²⁶

The Dance of Death might well have arisen in response to the horrors of the Black Death, but from a larger perspective it was a development of the death obsession of the Middle Ages as exemplified in Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Condicionis Humane (1195) which was circulated throughout Europe in manuscripts and books, and translated by George Gascoigne in his The Droomme of Doomes Day (1576).²⁷ This literature focused on bodily corruption, death, burial and decomposition, with Death the leveller used to reinforce the hierarchy of the Church. In The Dance of Death the estates of man, and eventually woman, are led off to their inevitable end. Tomb sculpture often reflected this worm-ridden fate.²⁸

The Dance of Death strikes at the heart of carnival since it concentrates on final bodily putrefaction, whatever might await the soul, whereas carnival celebrates bodily regeneration on earth. As the word ‘dance’ implies, music and dancing reflect the festive world of carnival, banqueting and romance. Throughout Romeo and Juliet Capulet's household reflects both this revelry and impending death. As we have seen with the old Capulets looking on at the revels (1.5) the carnivalesque is affirmed in spite of Romeo's forebodings. Acts 4 and 5 with the preparations for the wedding feast, festive musicians, and so on, reverse this, finally succumbing to death, tragedy and the tomb. Romeo and Juliet was performed within a culture in which the iconography of death had persisted, yet with some degree of development in which moral censure of the carnivalesque and festive partly displaced the homiletic corpse or skeleton. All this is reflected in the design of play.

Arthur Brooke's source had provided the commonplace from which Shakespeare developed. In Brooke Romeo pursues his love 'till Fortune list to sawse his sweete with sowre’, until ‘all his hap turnes to mishap, and all his myrth to mone’.²⁹Romeo and Juliet's ‘womb’/‘tomb’, ‘festival’/‘funeral’ have been touched on. Brooke's figure of agnomination, ‘myrth’/‘mone’, echoes what seems to have been a source for English Renaissance rhetoric, St Gregory the Divine (Gregorious Nazianzen). In his translation of Innocent III, Gascoigne cites St Gregory on the contrasts to joy in a heavenly Creator; ‘all other myrth is mournyng, all other pleasure is payne, all sweete soure, all leefe lothsome, and all delyghtes are dollorous’. John Lyly's Euphuism would appear to owe something to Church Fathers like St Augustine and St Gregory as John Hoskins notes, while providing his own carnivalesque-lenten example in ‘feasting’/‘fasting’.³⁰ The conflation of antitheses in the iconography of death partly developed from this homiletic rhetoric, and particularly seized on images of the carnival and festive, above all music, masks and dancing. In Thomas Nashe's diatribe Christ's Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), just a few years before Romeo and Juliet, we find: ‘Your morne-like christall countenances shall be netted over and (Masker-like) cawle-visarded with crawling venomous wormes’.³¹ The most well-known dramatic example is, of course, Vindice in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) holding a skull and declaring; ‘It were fine, methinks / To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts’, to ‘put a reveller / Out of his antic amble’ (3.5.89-93). This is precisely what the illustrations of death did.

In Bruegel's still harrowing painting ‘The Triumph of Death’, which included several motifs from the ‘Dance of Death’ sequences, we see in the lower right-hand corner a cloaked and masked death overturning flagons of wine, disrupting feasting and gaming as a jester tries to hide, while two lovers, blithely unaware, sing and play music accompanied by another unseen death.³² Similarly, in a Dürer woodcut a shrouded figure introduces a corpse into a banquet. Most of the guests, including two lovers, are too engrossed to notice.³³ In Ripa's Iconologia (1603) Death is masked and in a burden carries ‘musical instruments … of worldly joys’ along with symbols of power and pleasure.³⁴

Shakespeare's musicians in Act 4 do not convert festival to funeral, mirth to moan, but persist in a carnival humour with Peter, the Capulet servant. The carnivalesque element is uppermost as, before their actual entry, the musicians' festive music is heard even as Juliet's ‘dead’ body is discovered. The original stage direction at 4.4.20 is ‘Play music’, as Capulet says, ‘The County will be here with music straight, / For so he said he would. I hear him near’ (4.4.21-2). As the Nurse, Capulet and Lady Capulet heavily bemoan death, comedy supervenes since the audience knows that Juliet is drugged, not dead—in the midst of death we are in life, the reverse of the iconographic tradition.

In at least nine of Holbein's woodcuts for The Dance of Death death and music are associated, nearly always, with death as a musician. Number 35 shows newlyweds seemingly engrossed in each other while Death dances before them striking a festive tabor, an image reflected in the Bruegel painting. The fifth illustration shows the entrance to a tomb with half a dozen partly clothed skeletons playing instruments which compound festival with funeral—crumhorns, kettle drums, a hurdy-gurdy, a shawm, and so on. There is an apocalyptic element here whereas some earlier sequences, such as the 1491 La grande Danse macabre had included ‘The Orchestra of Death’.³⁵ A variant of this tradition is found in Pierre Michault's fifteenth-century poem La Dance aux aveugles which in an illustrated Geneva manuscript shows the three ‘blind’—or blindfolded—ones, Cupid, Fortune and Death, disposed in a triptych. At the foot of each panel seated musicians look on awaiting those led to this dance of death.³⁶Romeo and Juliet reflects Michault's structure as the lovers move from Cupid's blind, or masked, passion through fatal misfortune to death with, at one point, musicians in attendance. Queen Elizabeth's prayer book separates the musicians from death. As they play a skeleton looms behind. And in contrast to the carnivalesque death-birth, tomb-womb cycle we have seen in the Nurse's speech particularly, one of the woodcuts shows Death behind a nurse cradling her charge, with the words ‘give suck no more; for I am at the door’.

Emblems and paintings not directly concerned with eschatological death nevertheless endorsed an anti-carnivalesque view of music, dancing and love. Joos van Winghe's Nocturnal Party (1588) depicts masked musicians joining in with dancers before a statue of Venus.³⁷ Drunken abandon make the moral implications quite clear. More directly pertinent to Romeo and Juliet is Otto van Veen's emblem entitled ‘Voluptatum Usurae, Morbi et Miseriae’ (‘Pleasure's Usury, Sickness and Misery’) in his Horatii Emblemata, 1612.³⁸ Masked dancers accompanied by a masked musician with a drinker and a venal couple looking on dominate the foreground. In the background gamblers play, an old man grasping a cupid-putto is admitted, while at the rear on a darkened sickbed reclines a figure whose urine is being examined in a glass bottle by a physician. Arthur Brooke's source for Romeo and Juliet indirectly provides a comment since precisely at that point quoted above where he considers ‘myrth’ and ‘mone’, he draws on the same moral commonplace which gave van Veen his title, the metaphor of usury for pleasure; Fortune ‘payd theyr former greefe with pleasures doubled gayne, / But now for pleasures usery ten folde redoubleth payne.’³⁹ In the polyglot verses beneath several lines from Latin sources once again we find predictable antitheses of pleasure and pain, joy and tears, glossing van Veen's picture. Van Veen and Brooke both share a common moralizing outlook. Sickness and death follow upon indulgence of vice. Shakespeare's comparable scene, the revels with the aged Capulets looking on, affirms the carnivalesque by including age with youth suggesting a triumph of life.

But this is not to be. As James Black has noted of the repeated stage picture of the prince of Verona and his feuding subjects, with youth killed off and the aged solemnly gathered; it ‘is made progressively tragic as it becomes more and more a pageant of death’.⁴⁰

On entering the tomb Romeo's language recalls the carnivalesque death-earth-womb but transforms it into death as a ravenous monster, a traditional hell-mouth.

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death
Gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I'll cram thee with more food.

(5.3.45-8)

Inside, the sight of Juliet's beauty transforms her surroundings. Complementing her earlier speech when she had related night, death, and festival, Romeo says, ‘her beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence, full of light’ (5.3.85-6). As his first glimpse of Juliet was in the midst of revels and banqueting, an image as we have seen associated with the entrance of death, so the tomb scene inverts this and festival enters into the midst of death. Analogously, as he was lover at the festival, so death is lover here:

                                                                                Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

(5.3.102-5)

And so Romeo rivals death who can only be the final triumpher as Bruegel rehearsed in a title which Petrarch bequeathed to the Renaissance in The Triumph of Death from his Trionfi.⁴¹ In carnival there can be no triumph of death, only a triumph of life in human generation. Echoing the sonneteers, Romeo had said that Rosaline's chastity ‘Cuts beauty off form all posterity’ (1.1.218). Romeo and Juliet were briefly lovers but now it is her beauty which is cut off from all posterity. This is the larger, more inclusive sense of tragedy, from a carnivalesque perspective: not simply the poignancy of their deaths, but that only death came from their love, not the renewal and thus reaffirmation of life. When Capulet follows Juliet to the tomb that will be the end of his line. And the same for the Montagues since Brooke included the detail that Romeo's ‘parentes have none other heyre, thou art theyr onely sonne’.⁴² The funereal gold statues are no substitute for the warmth of new life. But carnival can never really be defeated. It finds new life in new forms as long as there is comedy. It is said that The Dance of Death itself arose partly as a homiletic reaction to a peasant custom—of dancing in graveyards.⁴³

Notes

1. This essay, a slightly edited version of that published by Shakespeare Survey (49, 1996: pp. 69-85), has benefited from comments on readings of preliminary drafts at the Reading Renaissance Research Seminar, and the ‘Shakespeare, Carnival and Society’ wing of Reading's Literature and History Conference, 1995. At the former my attention was drawn to Kent Cartwright's extensive and subtle chapter ‘Theater and Narrative in Romeo and Juliet’, in his Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (Pennsylvania: Pennylvanian State University Press, 1991). In his concentration on the central topic of ‘spectatorial distance’ he alludes several times to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque functioning within the play in ways close to my own, but we differ fundamentally concerning Romeo and Juliet's love. He sees it as part of, I see it as opposed to, the carnivalesque.

2. All references are to Brian Gibbons (ed.), Romeo and Juliet, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1980).

3. Terence Hawkes (ed.), Coleridge on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 87-8.

4. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. I (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York, Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 295, 1.344.

5. ‘Shakespeare ad Infinitum’, in Oswald Le Winter, Shakespeare in Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 66.

6. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927).

7. Ibid., p. 56. F.N. Robinson (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 330.

8. Ibid. Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum Quaestionum de Universo Genere [Bologna, 1574], ed. Stephen Orgel (New York and London: Garland, 1979), G1^r.

9. Patch, p. 44.

10. Ibid., p. 37, Robinson, p. 273, l.622.

11. Bullough, p. 303, l.673.

12. Patch, p. 52.

13. See Jill L. Levenson, Shakespeare in Performance: Romeo and Juliet (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

14. Bullough, p. 290, l.169.

15. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930), p. 8.

16. Bullough, p. 297, ll.413ff.

17. A.J. Smith (ed.), John Donne. The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). See ‘The Sun Rising’ p. 80, ll.21-2. Romeo exclaims: ‘Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out’ (2.1.2); cf. ‘The Sun Rising’ 1.30—‘This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere’.

18. For an argument opposite to that made here, see Ann Pasternak Slater, ‘Petrarchism Come True in Romeo and Juliet’, in Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D.J. Palmer and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 129-50.

19. For a parallel interpretation see François Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 210.

20. Gibbons, p. 144.

21. The Works of Francis Rabelais by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux (London: H.G. Bohn, 1849), Vol. 2, p. 311. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 535.

22. Marjorie Donker, Shakespeare's Proverbial Themes (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), ch. 2.

23. J.M. Clark, The Dance of Death (Glasgow: Jackson Son and Co., 1950), p. 15.

24. Two manuscript versions of Lydgate's poem, with further collation, ed. Florence Warren and Beatrice White, are published as The Dance of Death (The Early English Text Society, no. 181, London: Oxford University Press, 1931).

25. ‘The Four Last Things’, The English Works of Sir Thomas More (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York, Lincoln MacVeagh, 1931), Vol. I, p. 468.

26. See Francis Douce, Holbein's Dance of Death (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1898). The Queen Elizabeth prayer book reproduced here is the version by William Pickering, London, 1853. See Ruari McLean, Victorian Book Design (London: Faber: 1963), pp. 10-12. The woodcuts were by Mary Byfield. I am indebted to Christopher and Phillipa Hardman for help with this reference.

27. Robert E. Lewis (ed.), De Miseria Condicionis Humane (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978), pp. 3-5 survey the transmission of manuscripts. John W. Cunliffe (ed.), The Complete Works of George Gascoigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), Vol. II, The Glasse of Government and Other Poems and Prose Works, pp. 209-450.

28. See ‘The Vision of Death’, ch. XI of J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Doubleday, 1954).

29. Bullough, p. 310, ll.932-46.

30. Directions for Speech and Style (1599), ed. Hoyht H. Hudson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), pp. 16, 37. Gascoigne, p. 398.

31. Ronald B. McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904), Vol. II, pp. 138-9.

32. See Walter S. Gibson, Bruegel (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 116.

33. Willi Kurth, The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Arden Book Co.), illustration 15. I am indebted to Pat Righelato for this reference.

34. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim and New York, 1970, ‘istromenti de l'allegrezze mondane’, p. 340.

35. Le Sentiment de la Mort au Moyen Age (Montreal: L'Aurore, Les Editions Univers Inc., 1979), p. 199.

36. Bruno Roy, ‘Amour, Fortune et Mort: La danse des trois aveugles’, in Le Sentiment de la Mort au Moyen Age, pp. 121-37. The illustration is reproduced in Erwin Panofsky's seminal chapter ‘Blind Cupid’, in Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), plate XLVI.

37. Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), p. 177.

38. Otto van Veen, Horatii Emblemata, New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979, pp. 38-9.

39. Bullough, p. 310, ll.953-4.

40. James Black, ‘The Visual Artistry of Romeo and Juliet’, Studies in English Literature 15 (1975), p. 250.

41. D.D. Carnicelli in his edition of Lord Morley's Tryumphes of Frances Petrarcke (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) provides much useful introductory material, pp. 1-74.

42. Bullough, p. 289, l.120.

43. See Lydgate, The Dance of Death, p. xiii.