SOURCE: Toole, William B. “The Nurse's ‘Vast Irrelevance’: Thematic Foreshadowing in Romeo and Juliet.” South Atlantic Bulletin 45, no. 1 (January 1980): 21-30.

[In the following essay, Toole studies the character of the Nurse through an analysis of her speech about Juliet's childhood.]

One of the most fascinating aspects of Shakespeare's dramatic artistry lies in his ability to create minor characters whose highly individualistic manner of speech can on occasion be true to their personalities and at the same time point the audience indirectly in one way or another to something crucial in the experience of the central characters of the drama. A particularly brilliant illustration of this technique may be found in the Nurse's digression on Juliet's infancy in I, iii, 23-48. The digression vividly establishes the mind and character of the Nurse as it foreshadows a theme close to the heart of the play: growth through adversity. To appreciate fully the extent to which this passage is related to the main thematic and structural patterns of the play, we must, after reviewing it, look at it in the light of the protagonists' character patterns, the relationship of eye/star, flower, and gold imagery to the motif of poison, and the symbolic significance of the final tragic actions.

I.

In the scene in question the Nurse has been invited to remain while Lady Capulet sounds out Juliet on the prospect of marriage to Paris. Before the question is put, the topic of Juliet's age comes up and the Nurse begins to reminisce about incidents which had taken place in her charge's infancy. She rambles on at some length about the time of Juliet's weaning, the circumstances accompanying it, and a fall which Juliet had taken in the presence of the Nurse's husband the day before the weaning.

The whole speech, as Professor Sutherland observes, is “a vast irrelevance.”¹ The Nurse's prattle comically slows the action of the episode and provides us with a picture of robust indelicacy combined with supremely confident simplemindedness; impressionistically speaking, the character reflected in this passage might be described as the illegitimate daughter of Dogberry and the Wife of Bath. At any rate, it is not surprising to find later at a crucial point in the action of the play that the Nurse can wander morally as well as intellectually far from the point. It is, however, somewhat startling to see the extent to which the irrelevant story the Nurse tells is tied into the main structural lines of the play through connotation, analogy, and contrast.

Let us begin with the last part of the speech. When the Nurse relates her husband's reaction to Juliet's fall, she reflects the simple earthiness of her own personality as well as his; at the same time, however, her amused recounting of the relationship he saw between Juliet's fall as a child and the sexual awakening that lay in the future—“‘Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit, / Wilt thou not, Jule?’” (I, iii, 41-43)²—is obviously very much to the structural point. As is, for that matter, the child-like directness of Jule's response to a question the significance of which she does not understand—“The pretty wretch left crying and said, ‘Ay’” (I, iii, 44). These lines help to prepare us for what is to come. When Juliet is sexually awakened, the child-like forthrightness she displays in admitting her love—or in admitting that under other circumstances she would have played harder to get—seems linked with that innocent “Ay” of infancy. And the natural earthiness of the attitude toward sex displayed by the Nurse and her husband is both related to and contrasted with what Juliet experiences when she acquires “more wit.” For the powerful sensual attraction she feels for Romeo is blended with an idealism so intense that it can only be stated in religious, spiritual, or supra-lunary terms: “O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon …” (II, ii, 109).

This part of the Nurse's digression follows naturally from her memory of Juliet's falling out with the wormwood-anointed dug and of her own reaction to the earthquake which occurred on the day Juliet was weaned. Her frantic response to the earthquake—“… 'twas no need, I trow, / To bid me trudge” (I, iii, 33-34)—and the manner in which Juliet recoiled from the wormwood led her mind to the episode which had occurred the day before:

For then she could stand high-lone: nay, by th' rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow.

(I, iii, 36-38)³

All of this is wonderfully natural considering the mental processes of the Nurse. And so is her description of the moment of Juliet's weaning; for of all the characters in the play, only the Nurse would have the kind of mind capable of personifying the dove-house under which she sat and juxtaposing her reaction to the earthquake with Juliet's response to the wormwood:

When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool
To see it teachy and fall out wi'th' dug!
Shake, quoth the dove-house; 'twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge.

(I, iii, 31-34)

Like the fall which Juliet had taken on the preceding day, this description of Juliet's weaning and of the event which accompanied it, or which the Nurse associated with it, takes on structural significance.⁴ Juliet's weaning is given comic magnitude through its association with the earthquake, and because of the unregulated intelligence responsible for the coincidence of detail there is nothing artificial about the passage. The reference to the stricken dove-house as part of the presentation of Juliet's bitter weaning is not simply relevant to the mind from which it emerges; it directs us to the central pattern in the play.

II.

Juliet's sexual awakening marks the first step in her development from the child whose docility is reflected in her singsong response to the news of Paris' courtship—“I'll look to like, if looking liking move; / But no more deep will I endart mine eye / Than your consent gives strength to make [it] fly” (I, ii, 97-99)—to the wife whose independence is reflected in the resolute action she takes after the Friar has fled in fear from the tomb—“… O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (V, iii, 169-70). Similarly, the Romeo who, near the end of the play, says, “Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night” (V, i, 34) is a far cry from the Romeo who loved and suffered by rote. That Romeo was well defined by Mercutio's conjuration: “Cry but ‘Aye me?,’ [pronounce] but ‘love’ and [‘dove’]” (II, i, 10). Such contrasts indicate that both Romeo and Juliet experience a very special kind of weaning as a result of the shocks to which their relationship is subjected.

Their characters are, however, not developed in precisely the same way. Romeo's first reaction to adversity calls attention to the flaw which will contribute to his and Juliet's tragedy as he displays the immoderate passion which the Friar has warned him against. Distraught over the sentence of banishment, he cries out for poison or a knife to end his life. Later in his frenzy he attempts to stab himself and the Friar rebukes him for “womanish” tears and “wild acts” (III, iii, 110). Juliet is never presented in so unattractive a light,⁵ but there is a distinct parallel made between her reaction and Romeo's to the bitter circumstances which began with Tybalt's death. When the Nurse inquires about Romeo, the Friar points to where he is lying “on the ground, with his own tears made drunk” (III, iii, 83); and the Nurse observes that he is “even in my mistress' case” (III, iii, 84).

It is important to note that the Friar's admonition following Romeo's attempt to stab himself anticipates Juliet's final action: “Wilt thou slay thyself, / And slay thy lady that in thy life [lives] … ?” (III, iii, 116-17). By the same token, Juliet's action in taking a potion which she momentarily suspects may be “poison” (III, iii, 24) anticipates Romeo's final action. But where Romeo's womanish and wild frenzy does not do credit to him, the strength of will which Juliet displays in taking the potion compels our admiration. Nevertheless, in spite of the differences which we may observe as the characters of the lovers are developed, ultimately we look at them in the same light. Their final actions reflect the same ambivalent juxtaposition of profound virtue and youthful flaw, and each of the lovers' actions points us back to a preceding action of the other. When Juliet stabs herself, we are meant to be reminded of Romeo's impetuousness earlier; and when Romeo takes the poison, we may well be reminded of the strength of resolution which Juliet had displayed when in order to be reunited with Romeo she underwent a “thing like death” (IV, i, 74).

These cross correspondences point to the essential mutuality of the lovers' characters within the context of the play as a whole. And they also remind us that the contrast between the protagonists we first meet and the lovers we see at the end of the play is not simply the result of love; it is the result of a love which has been deepened and defined, given new dimension, by adversity. The changes we see in them are brought about by a love which realized its potential through the bitter circumstances to which it was subjected and by which it was tested.

If the Nurse's relation of the bitter weaning, an episode which marks a transition from one phase of human life to a higher phase, is designed to point us to the significance of what happens to Romeo and Juliet by the end of the play, then it may be well to note that this movement to a kind of physical independence is presented in conjunction with an earthquake. For this movement of the earth may be meant to provide a correspondence to the far more powerful astral movement which leads to the spiritual development of the characters of Romeo and Juliet. To see the idea reflected by these analogies whole, we must trace the complex manner in which the motif of poison binds together several sets of images and directs our attention to the profound paradoxical point upon which the play comes to rest—one which blends the theme of providential direction with that of human error and achievement.

III.

All of the images we will be concerned with are presented in the two scenes which precede the Nurse's description of Juliet's weaning and initially are connected either to Romeo's relationship to Rosaline or Paris' relationship to Juliet. In Act I, scene i, the comically Petrarchan Romeo, upon being pressed by an amused Benvolio, explains why he is so melancholy. Rosaline will not play the game of love: She is immune to “Cupid's arrow,” “assailing eyes,” and “saint-seducing gold” (I, i, 209, 213, 214). Benvolio suggests that Romeo look for another love, advice which he repeats metaphorically to a skeptical Romeo in the next scene: “Take thou some new infection to thy eye, / And the rank poison of the old will die” (I, ii, 49-50). This suggestion follows Capulet's invitation to Paris to attend his party so that he may enjoy the beauty of “earth-treading stars” (I, ii, 25) and experience the delights of young love, which are comparable to the pleasure brought by “fresh fennel buds” (I, ii, 29) in the spring.

Following the Nurse's digression on the “bitter” weaning, these images gradually become more intensely and ironically focussed on the relationship that develops between Romeo and Juliet. Juliet assures her mother that she will “endart” her “eye” (I, iii, 98) in conformance with the wishes of her parents; and in the next scene Romeo tells a cynical Mercutio of a premonitory dream and of his conviction that there is some event “hanging in the stars” (I, iv, 107) which will “bitterly begin” (I, iv, 108) its process with the pleasures of the evening. At the party it is Romeo rather than Paris who is endarted by the eye of Juliet, and the “new infection” which he takes to his eye ultimately carries with it a poison that will end his life. There is a similar irony in the amused statement which Mercutio makes shortly before the fatal encounter with Tybalt: Believing that Romeo is still infatuated with Rosaline, he assures Benvolio that Romeo is “dead, stabb'd with a white wench's black eye, … the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft …” (II, iv, 13-16).

By means of this Petrarchan imagery, Shakespeare begins to develop through a comic perspective an atmosphere of tragic inevitability. The metaphorical effluence or dart emitted from the lady's eye is associated with poison, connected to the maleficent striking power of the stars,⁶ and presented as reflexive in its action. Romeo, as we observed, was endarted by the eyes of Juliet, one of the “earth-treading stars” at the party. Then in the first balcony scene, he looks up at her and compares the light of the stars to that in her eyes:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, [do] entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

(II, ii, 15-17)

And when she expresses concern for his safety, he assures her that there is “more peril in thine eye” (II, ii, 71) than in the swords of her kinsmen. That the endarting action has been reflexive is suggested later when Romeo tells Friar Lawrence of his new love. In response to the Friar's question regarding his whereabouts, Romeo says: “I have been feasting with mine enemy, / Where on a sudden one hath wounded me / That's by me wounded …” (II, ii, 49-51). Unlike Rosaline, Juliet has not been immune to “assailing eyes.”

Following the death of Tybalt, who had sworn to turn Romeo's happiness to “bitt'rest gall” (I, v. 92) and who ironically succeeded in confirming Romeo's premonition of a process in the stars “bitterly” beginning, the idea of death brought about by an endarted or poisoned glance is presented from another angle. Believing that the Nurse has brought her news of Romeo's death, Juliet cries:

Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ay,
And that bare vowel I shall poison more
Than the death [-darting] eye of cockatrice.

(III, iii, 45-47)

It may be well at this point to suggest the significance which this imagistic framework has with regard to the providential theme. It should be regarded as a metaphorical bridge between the opening reference by the Chorus to star-crossed lovers (6) and the Prince's statement at the end of the play concerning the manner in which providence has punished Capulet and Montague (V, iii, 292-93). Part of the meaning which emerges from this structural connection may be expressed as follows: To bring an end to the disorder in Verona caused by the hatred of the Capulets and Montagues, providence made use of a love set in motion by the stars through the eyes of Juliet and subjected to adverse circumstance. The love carried from the eyes of Juliet to Romeo and back again is presented in terms of a poison or death dart because the bitter circumstances they encountered as lovers led them to death.⁷

The significance of the motif of poison is expanded further through Shakespeare's development of the flower imagery in the play. Old Capulet, thinking of Paris and Juliet, compared the pleasures of young love to the beauty of a “fresh fennel bud” in the spring. Later Juliet described her relationship with Romeo as a “bud” which could ripen into a “beauteous flower” (II, ii, 121, 122). And in the next scene Friar Lawrence, in a speech which most critics regard as choric,⁸ contemplates the significance of a “weak flower” (II, iii, 23) which has both poisonous and medicinal powers, seeing a correspondence between the potentiality of the flower and man's capacity for “grace” and “rude will” (II, iii, 28).

This line of imagery serves several purposes. Friar Lawrence's observations indicate that free will is as much a part of the world of Romeo and Juliet as providential oversight. And though the primary responsibility is placed on the fathers who have made the lovers the “poor sacrifices of our enmity” (V, iii, 304), it seems clear that Romeo and Juliet must assume a measure of responsibility for what happens to them. At the same time our sense of the loss of something important is heightened through such imagery. Like the lightning imagery,⁹ the flower imagery is an apt symbol for the beauty and brevity of young love. It is important to observe further that the flower of the love engendered through the senses by the stars exercises its dual potentiality in a single action: By killing the joys of Capulet and Montague, it heals the malignant hatred which has separated the families. Friar Lawrence's philosophical meditation points us to the significance of what takes place at the end of the play, but the complex of meanings reflected in those final actions makes the Friar's wisdom seem simplistic.

Through the association of poison with the image of gold we are led to another profound dimension in the thematic structure of the play. Romeo thought of gold as a means of corruption when, in ruefully commenting on Rosaline's chastity, he observed that she would not “ope her lap to saint-seducing gold” (I, i, 214). Though he thinks of gold in similar terms when he visits the apothecary, the grimness of his observation at this juncture provides ironic counterpoint to that earlier casual reference and thus reflects the impact of bitter experience upon his cast of mind. The gold which he gives to the apothecary in exchange for the instrument of his death is, he says, the real poison of the world for through it men “poison” their “souls” by pandering to the vices of the flesh (V, i, 80).¹⁰ Appropriately enought, in view of the network of paradoxes upon which this drama is built, gold is presented from an entirely different perspective at the end of the play. The only light reflected in the concluding lines is that found in the promise of the golden statues which will memorialize the lovers. Here gold is presented not as something which brings about corruption in men but as a symbol of a quality that can enable humanity to transcend the flaws within itself and its environment, and thus to triumph over the inevitability of the canker death.¹¹ If the flower represents the brevity and the corruptibility of human beauty and love, the gold symbolizes that part of it which can endure.

IV.

When Romeo and Juliet fall in love, they do so, as the chorus introducing Act II explains, because they have been “bewitched by the charm of looks” (6). This star-directed love was first presented in terms of poison and, as we noted, contributed to the development of an atmosphere of tragic inevitability. But though the sense of loss which attends a tragic action is in no way diminished, by the time we reach the conclusion of the play we have been invited to look at the implications of poison in a different light. Believing Juliet dead, Romeo purchases poison from an apothecary so that he can join his love by separating himself from the world of the senses—from that part of life which is subject to the stars and to the corruption that gold can bring to the hearts of men. His interpretation of poison as a “cordial” (V, i, 85) corresponds to the declaration which he made upon hearing of the supposed death of Juliet: “Then I [defy] you, stars” (V, i, 24). Both statements reflect the quality of his love—a love which has come a long way from the charm of looks with which it began. Ironically enough, in taking the “cordial,” he becomes, in a sense, scourge and minister to his relationship with Juliet; he fulfills the providential instruments which have worked through the pressures of the flesh.

Romeo's interpretation of poison is echoed by Juliet when upon observing the manner in which he died, she attempted to extract the “restorative” (V, iii, 166) from his lips. Thus, through the development of the motif of poison, love, which was presented initially as an infection to which the flesh is heir, is shown to be a power in the universe or a quality in human nature that offers humanity a means of transcending its dull earth. The final actions of the protagonists indicate that their feeling for each other has transcended the world of the senses in which it had taken root and has lived up to the extravagant declarations with which it was first expressed.¹² And the gold of the memorial statues, reflecting its potential in itself as a primate rather than in its misuse as an instrument of vice, becomes an appropriate symbol of the level of their achievement.

The motif of poison ties together in various ways the theme of providential direction and that of the human potentiality for corruption and growth. The poisoned effluence of a love directed by the stars takes us first to the bewitchment of appearances and then leads us through the bitter intersection of mischance and misinterpretation to a character-flawed spiritual declaration of independence which results in a glooming peace and the gleam of promised gold.¹³ The Nurse's irrelevant story of the wormwood weaning provides an important, if rudimentary, index to this complex pattern. And the nice balance of themes which emerges from the pattern itself might be summed up in this way: On the one hand, if providence through the stars engenders a poisoned love in order to bring the still, sad music of humanity from the mouth of outrage, the bitter circumstances directed by providence lead the lovers to the level of transcendence they attain; and on the other hand, if the lovers must bear a measure of responsibility for their fate, they also must be given a measure of the credit for what is created within themselves out of their fate.

A final qualification: Transcendence is perhaps at once too strong and too easy a word for what has been attained by lovers so young and so real. Throughout the play they retain the generic flaws of youth and their final precipitant actions give life to the metaphors which were used to describe the significance of their initial attraction—the stabbing dart or poisonous effluence of love. Thus the instruments of their destruction remind us of the beginning of their love. After taking poison, Romeo, with a kiss, dies on Juliet; and following a kiss, Juliet thrusts Romeo's dagger into her body, its “sheath,” so that she may “die.” The suggestiveness of the final words and actions of the lovers remind us of the sensual basis of their passion¹⁴ even as these actions in themselves reflect the extent to which their love has weaned itself from the world of the senses. The movement from idealized sensuality to a kind of sensualized transcendence—this is ultimately what the bitter weaning¹⁵ of Romeo and Juliet brings about.

Notes

1. James Sutherland, “How the Characters Talk,” in Shakespeare's World, ed. James Sutherland and Joel Hurstfield (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), p. 127.

2. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3. Professor Sutherland, p. 128, points out that “To get the modern equivalent of this … remark we should have to substitute something like ‘You bet there was no need to tell me to hop it.’”

4. Joseph S. M. I. Chang, “The Language of Paradox in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Studies, 3 (1967), 25, has noted that the Nurse's story is far more than “a comic setpiece.” The point of it, he says, “lies in the symbolic import of weaning, a milestone attained in the infant's progress to death.” And in a more detailed analysis of this portion of the play, Barbara Everett, “Romeo and Juliet: The Nurse's Story,” Critical Quarterly, 13 (1972), 14, attaching special significance to that part of the story which involve Jule's being picked up by the Nurse's husband after her fall, comes to this conclusion: The Nurse's “speech establishes a natural milieu in which earthquake and weaning, a fall and a being taken up so balance that the ill effects of either are of no importance; and insofar as what she says relates to the rest of the play, it helps to suggest that the same might be true of love and death.” My conclusions concerning the significance of the earthquake and the weaning differ from those of Professor Chang and Professor Everett.

5. Cf. Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 104, who observes that, unlike their prototypes in Brooke's poem, Juliet is more courageous, mature and sensible than Romeo.

6. E. C. Pettet, “The Imagery of Romeo and Juliet,” English, 8 (1950), 123, has pointed out that Shakespeare has fused star and eye images in such a way as to suggest that Juliet “is now Romeo's star, his fate; and, as his star, she has the magical power of transforming night into day, of changing his wretchedness into radiant joy and the bitter hatred of their families into love.” He does not see the manner in which Shakespeare has extended the implications of these images through the association with poison. The brilliant adaptation of this line of the imagery must have been triggered by the following lines in Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957], 291, 292): Fed by the sight of Juliet, Romeus' “houngry eyes”

   … swalloweth downe loves sweete empoysende baite,
   .....So is the poyson spred throughout his bones and vaines.

   (ll. 218, 221)

   And Juliet, who had previously escaped the “sharpe inflaming darte” (l. 231) of love, upon seeing Romeus, became the target of “warlike love” who with “golden bowe and shaft” (l, 229) … sent forth an arrow which “so touchd her to the quicke, / That through the eye it strake the hart, and there the hedde did sticke” (ll. 233-34).

7. This reading is in line with that of Professor Lawrence E. Bowling, PMLA, 64 (1949), 217, who says that the basic theme of the play is the “wholeness and complexity of things,” as well as that of Paul N. Siegel, “Christianity and the Religion of Love in Romeo and Juliet,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 12 (1961), 385, who observes that the play “dramatizes the concept of a cosmic love manifesting itself through sexual love and working against strife and disorder in society.”

8. An excellent review of the criticism of Romeo and Juliet which includes a good bit of discussion concerning Friar Lawrence's function in the play may be found in Gordon Ross Smith's “The Balance of Themes in Romeo and Juliet,” Essays on Shakespeare, ed. G. R. Smith (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 15-44. The present critical consensus seems to be reflected by the positions of Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1956), p. 92, who notes that Shakespeare establishes the Friar as chorus and then makes him the spokesman for the theme of haste; and by Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1942; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 92, who states that “Friar Lawrence is a chorus to the emotions of Romeo, just as … the Prince of Verona is a chorus to the feud.” But there are dissenting voices. To cite two: Robert Y. Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 232, maintains that the Friar's behavior “at the tomb is too personal for an authoritative choral figure”; and Ruth Nevo's reading of the Friar's part in the tragedy, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 44, leads her to the conclusion that it should “help to preclude a providential reading of the play.”

9. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), p. 312, states that “Shakespeare saw the story, in its swift and tragic beauty, as an almost blinding flash of light, suddenly ignited, and as swiftly quenched.” Professor Spurgeon was the first critic to point out the extent to which the imagery of light and darkness pervades the play.

10. Professor Ruth Nevo, p. 54, maintains that the “motif of corrupting gold has not been sufficiently integrated into the play's conceptual material to make the observation resound as it should.” It seems to me that this point is valid only if this motif is not seen as a significant part of the ambivalence which is at the conceptual heart of the play.

11. Warren D. Smith, “Romeo's Final Dream,” Modern Language Review, 62 (1967), 583, sees a different kind of irony in the gold of the statues. Since the play suggests through Romeo's second dream that the lovers have been reunited in another life, the point, he says, lies in the fact that they have need neither of golden statues nor golden rays of sunlight. An even more negative interpretation is that of Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), p. 117, who sees in the gold a “tinge of commercialism.”

12. Though these actions reflect the youthful flaws of the protagonists, there is no suggestion that their suicides are to be associated with damnation. As Irving Ribner points out, “Then I Denie You Starres: A Reading of Romeo and Juliet,” Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. J. W. Bennett, et al. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), p. 284: Shakespeare in this context is not “the theologian illustrating a text … but the dramatist using symbolically a detail inherited from his sources in order to illustrate a greater and more significant truth.” In the Renaissance, he goes on to say, “there was … much respect for the classical notion of suicide as a noble act by which man fulfills his obligations and attains a higher good than life itself, and on the stage suicide was often portrayed in such terms.”

13. This statement, in a very general way, reflects the most prominent elements that have been singled out by critics as the springs of the tragic action. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1948), p. 50, says that the propelling force is “Fate and Fortune.” Seeing the play as a “tragedy of unawareness,” Bertrand Evans, “The Brevity of Friar Lawrence,” PMLA, 65 (1950), 850, observes that “Fate, or Heaven … or the ‘greater power’ … operates through the common human condition of not knowing.” Harley Granville-Baker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol. II (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 312-13, states that “in the end” the play is “a tragedy of mischance” but goes on to note that the “two lovers … in themselves … [are] prone to disaster.” H. Edward Cain, “Hang Up Philosophy,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 22 (1947), 201, maintains that in Romeo Shakespeare clearly represents “the consequence which hangs not only in the stars, but in ourselves.” Franklin M. Dickey, pp. 110-11, sees Romeo's character as the key to the tragedy; and Robert Y. Turner, p. 232, points out that Juliet, “like Romeo, makes a deliberate choice in killing herself, a choice which qualifies the absoluteness of the opening statement by the chorus that their lives are star-crossed.”

14. Cf. Philip J. Traci, “Suggestions About the Bawdry in Romeo and Juliet,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 71 (1972), 586, who observes that “the deaths of Romeo and Juliet … are clearly erotic.”

15. The following passage from Cawdray's Treasurie or Storehouse of Similies, 1600, which is used as a gloss on the reference to wormwood weaning in the Furness Variorum edition of Romeo and Juliet (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871), p. 45, may lend support to the line I have followed in my analysis:

    “… Even so, though God's Preachers preach unto us, and exhort us to forsake the corrupt milke of the world and of the flesh, yet we seeme deaf still, and are always backward, untill God put upon these cursed teates the mustard and wormewood of afflictions to weane us.”

    Though his homily was published a few years after Romeo and Juliet, it is possible that Shakespeare had read or heard an earlier version. However this may be, it is interesting to see the profound gulf between such hardshell moralizing and the complexity and subtlety of Shakespeare's use of this theme.