[In the following essay, Fitter discusses the violence in Romeo and Juliet within the context of the 1595 London riots.]

                    Famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it

[5.1.69-74]

“The aesthetic,” as contemporary literary theory has taught us, is “contextually mobile.”¹ Construed within mutating fields of ideological sensitivity and projection, textual “meaning” lives in metamorphosis. Pressed into normative service, as Gary Taylor and Michael Bristol² have shown, by innumerable regimes of hierarchy and sensibility, Shakespeare's plays in particular have become “products to be wrested if possible from the grip of history and inserted instead into the matrix of tradition.”³ The traditional constructions of the academy, depoliticizing and frequently unhistorical, may easily miss or domesticate the political risk and challenge decoded by earliest audiences, cued by their cultural moment to meanings circumstantially immanent. Conversely, social contexts centuries later may re-expose an old cutting edge of political suggestion, even polish it to a new and threatening sharpness. In the late 1980s, for instance, it was reported in the British press that Israeli authorities had prohibited possession of Hamlet by imprisoned Palestinians. In the crisis years of the intifada, the lofty classic of scholarly veneration, the headache of a million Western schoolboys, had begun emitting intolerable signals. To its readers now it heroized a suicidal devotion to extra-judicial assassination; and for its seditious content, Hamlet had to be proscribed.

In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the play's immediate political context has been obscured by a long tradition of appropriation of the play's meaning for an ethos of romantic “transcendence.” Yet if aesthetic meaning turns out to be ineluctably conjunctural, then the founding meaning of any work—should we seek it—of a popularly acclaimed and widely performed drama such as Romeo and Juliet must be sought with an eye not only to the long-term “structural” beliefs of the era, but to topicality.⁴ To read this play in the light of events in London between 1594 and 1596—the escalating inter-class youth violence, the fear of dearth between 1594 and 1597, and the sensational London riots of 1595 which the combination eventually precipitated—is to recuperate just such an originary and contingent salience, lost to posterity.

A recent and valuable essay by Jill Levenson has highlighted the importance of violence in the drama: “With its feud, street fight, dueling, casualties, and deployment of combat imagery, Romeo and Juliet offers a panoramic view … of violence in Elizabethan England.”⁵ Criticism of Romeo, however, has addressed only aristocratic bloodshed, which was but one term of the dialectical violence of contemporary London and of the play. At the heart of a war-torn, over-taxed, and now hunger-threatened nation, London in the mid-1590s was a congested, polarized, and angry city, in which the Crown and its officials had become hated, and the Lord Mayor made to fear for his life. This context of dearth and citizen violence, erupting in riot after riot, has never hitherto been noted in criticism of Romeo [Romeo and Juliet] criticism; and examination of the play in this light reveals an implicit populist subtext of mordant political suggestion. As the Crown and its agents turned a blind eye to aristocratic mayhem, and imposed upon the sometimes technical violence of famine-fearing lower-class Londoners punishments so severe that they triggered riots, Romeo and Juliet argued a counter-definition of the moral characters of elite and common citizenry. Shakespeare's humanitarian instincts crafted within the romance narrative a critical perspective on sated, indulgent wealth, and structurally juxtaposed the hunger, illiteracy, and toil of the poor. These relatively populist sympathies conferred on the drama—for an audience of London commoners at that particular historical juncture—many elements of a play of political protest.

II

The riots of June 1595 proved merely the sharpest flashpoint of violent tensions in class relations that had erupted sporadically in London from at least the 1580s, and that were notably exacerbated by food and price anxieties from 1594 through 1597. These general conditions thus existed as a resonant context of Romeo at whatever point between 1594 and 1596 the play was written. The year conventionally assigned for Romeo's composition is 1595, which seems likely since the June riots of that year may have been the particular stimulus to the play's creation. “The London riots and rebellions of 1595 constituted the most dangerous and prolonged urban uprising in England between the accession of the Tudor dynasty and the beginning of the Long Parliament,” notes Roger Manning. “There were at least 13 insurrections, riots and unlawful assemblies that year in a dozen parts of London and Southwark, of which 12 took place between 6 and 29 June.”⁶ Martial law was imposed on July 4. (“For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring,” notes a fearful Benvolio at 3.1.4.)

Violent clashes in London that had “pitted apprentices against gentlemen … and against their servingmen”⁷ can be traced to at least June 1581, when apprentices fought the retainers of Sir Thomas Stanhope at Smithfield (toward which traditional sparring ground Gregory and Sampson appear bound at the play's beginning, as Edelman has noted.)⁸ When the ringleader, accused of seeking to inflame one thousand apprentices “to make a rebellion against the gentlemen,” was whipped for his offence, the apprentices rescued him from the cart on which he was being punished. Further large-scale brawls between gentlemen and apprentices are recorded for June 1584 on two successive days outside the Curtain theater, and against Lincoln's Inn in 1590. The fragmentary nature of these documents makes it impossible to know, as Ian Archer suggests, the full extent of rioting before the 1590s (p. 3). However, the number of apprentices in London doubled between 1580 and 1600, reaching at least 30,000, and the number of domestic servants was equal or greater.⁹ Further, the crisis-ridden condition of London's textile workers—many of whom inhabited “the Maze,” a pauper's “warren of tenements” which abutted the Southwark theater district—led to serious, class-based rioting in May 1592, and the closing of the theaters.¹⁰ The riots of June 1595 began when a silk-weaver, who had reviled to his face the government of Mayor Spencer—hated for his wealth and judicial severity—was arrested but then freed by a crowd of 200 or more persons.¹¹ As Richard Wilson puts it, “The modernist nostalgia for Elizabethan England as a model of some classless, pre-industrial Gemeinschaft cannot withstand the picture that is emerging of London's crystallizing class consciousness in the acute social and economic crisis of the 1590s” (p. 40).

Crisis seems precisely the term. C. S. L. Davies has suggested that the conditions of plague, war, and famine produced in the 1590s “what may well have been the low point in the living standards of the mass of the European population, at any rate since the Black Death.” It is now a commonplace that following the harvests of 1594-1597, perhaps the most catastrophic in English history, those years “experienced the most sustained and severe inflation of prices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and culminated in the lowest real wages in English history in 1597.”¹² Real wages in the 1590s were on average 22 per cent lower than in the preceding decade; and, ominously, London was still “filling out at the bottom.”¹³ “Thousands of new apprentices, discharged mariners and soldiers, deserters, and vagrants … arrived each year [adding] to the overcrowding and confusion of the city and its burgeoning suburbs.”¹⁴ The impact of the failed harvests on a city whose population had doubled between 1580 and 1600 “more than doubled the price of wheat and carried that of barley, oats, peas and beans, the food of the poor, proportionately even higher.”¹⁵ An anonymous treatise of Edward's time had asked, “What faith and allegiance will those men observe towards their prince and governor which have their children famished at home for want of meat?”¹⁶ That popular disaffection in the 1590s reached an extraordinary pitch was perhaps inevitable. As Curtis C. Breight's recent work demonstrates, the decade saw the most extensive use of judicial torture in English history, rampant inflation, crushing taxes, and in more than a decade of war against the Spanish empire, the impressment of over 100,000 men (on a class basis). The casualties of war were such as to make “by modern analogy … Elizabethan losses during the war period about fifty times worse than American casualties in Vietnam.”¹⁷ The “permanent background of potential unrest” which characterized social relations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when, as Christopher Hill puts it, “a naked basis of force underlay social relations,”¹⁸ erupted into “an epidemic of disorder”—35 riots and unlawful assemblies—in the last two decades of the century.

Famine seems eventually to have penetrated to the poorer pockets of London, for as Andrew Appleby records, 1597 saw an exceptional number of recorded burials across seven inner-city parishes (pp. 138-40). But it was the fear of hunger, triggered by soaring prices, that typically provoked popular demonstration.¹⁹ “The dearth which doth now raigne in many parts of this land … maketh the poore to pinch for hunger, and the children to cry in the street, not knowing where to have bread. And if the Lord do not stay his hand, the dearth may be yet much more,” wrote the Oxford preacher (and later Archbishop) George Abbot in 1595.²⁰ Such fears seem to have set in as early as November 1593, when Lord Cobham referred to “the present dearth of corn.” By January 1594 the Aldermen of London had ordered a letter to Burghley requesting a ban on grain exports. Even before the first disastrous harvest failure, it was reported in London (in July 1594) that “the poorer sorte … are cheefely pinched with the dearthe,”²¹ and a committee to consider corn imports was established in the capital. M. J. Power develops the picture: a letter from the Lord Mayor to Burghley of September 1595 declared the city's wheat store to be already exhausted; in October he requested that any corn ships taken on the high seas be dispatched to London. November saw London commandeering food from other counties; and through 1594-1595 various sites were sought in the city for the storage of any incoming grain (pp. 372-74). The Stationer's Register lists a work entitled The poor man's Complaint on November 5, 1595, and Sundrye newe and artificiall Remedies against famyne … upon the occasion of this present Dearthe in the following August. It was in this climate of anxiety that Romeo and Juliet, with its food motif and its scenic juxtaposition of hunger with careless patrician feasting, seems to have been composed and performed. It was these conditions, too, that produced what Ian Archer notes to have been the first food riots in London since the 1520s (p. 6).

On June 12, 1595, in response to the soaring of food prices in London, a group of apprentices at Billingsgate had compelled the sale of fish at the price established by the Lord Mayor. The following day, in Southwark, another group of apprentices forced the sale of butter at 3d a pound rather than the 5d that the butterwomen were asking. They also issued a proclamation (simply endorsing the law of England) that butter be brought for sale to the market, not sold in inns or private houses.²² When officials attempted to make arrests, an indignant crowd sought to prevent the taking of prisoners. On June 15, they went on to attack the Counter prison, and rescue prisoners on their way there. An inquest by the Lord Mayor established that there had been at the “butter riot” “nothing ells but a great concourse & presse of people for buying of butter & other victuals without any force or other disorder.”²³ Nevertheless, the Privy Council, acting through the Court of Star Chamber, overrode the judgment of the Mayor and enforced exemplary punishment—of apparently innocent men—so that on June 27, the “butter rioters” were whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned.

Such harsh punishment generated popular outrage. It stood in severe contrast to conditions in the countryside, where magistrates were normally lenient toward food rioters who confined themselves to traditional rituals of price regulation. For the term “riot” here is a graphic misnomer: these actions were something very different from our concept of riot today. The medieval ideal of the commonwealth traditionally maintained the doctrine of a “fair price” and of fair market practices, to be observed by millers, bakers and others, and insured by the authorities. When in times of dearth magistrates proved lax in enforcing market regulation, “food riots” developed which were but the orderly and semi-official initiatives of “disciplined crowds operating according to values which were shared to some extent by the elite in actions designed to remind the magistrates of their duties.”²⁴ Since in the imposition of traditional prices the crowds merely exercised the office of the clerk of the market, we do better to term such activity (as does E. P. Thompson) “taxation populaire.” We must “appreciate that riot was a negotiating strategy,” insists Archer, designed to prod negligent officials—who might well be turning handsome personal profits from the escalation of prices—into tightening up market regulations. In this, the June 1595 food riots were successful. Moreover, such action was ritualized, to reassure the authorities that no political rebellion was intended.²⁵ This was precisely the kind of assessment affirmed in Mayor Spencer's report.

Despite the clarity of such Tudor semiotics of class friction, and despite the element of traditional moral legitimacy to such “taxation,” the Crown, as we have seen, imposed flogging and imprisonment on the butter rioters. The consequence was a protest in which a crowd of 1,800 people gathered in Leadenhall and Cheapside, tore down pillories, attempted to break into the Counter and release prisoners, and finally proceeded to the Lord Mayor's home, where they erected a scaffold outside his door and dared him to come out.²⁶

The period 1581-1602 saw more riots in protest of perceived injustice in sentencing than food riots: fourteen of the former as against twelve of the latter.²⁷ Anti-injustice riots could arise when a double standard in punishment of violence occasioned in an affray was handed down. In 1591, following a skirmish between felt-makers and the Knight Marshall's men, as Manning recounts, a Crown officer accused of manslaughter was released on bail, while a felt-maker was for the same crime hanged (pp. 207-08): a sixteenth-century analogy, perhaps, to the protest riots in Los Angeles over the Rodney King verdict. Or they might be sparked as protests against “the harshness and partiality of justice” (p. 219) frequently commanded of the Mayor and Court of Aldermen by the Queen and Privy Council, whose interventions included on occasion orders for the torture of prisoners under interrogation. In consequence, “Examinations of prisoners in the Marshalsea revealed that they talked freely of rebellion and killing the Queen” (pp. 201, 208).

Friction between Londoners and Crown officials, Manning adds (p. 207), therefore continued through June 1595, to culminate one Sunday afternoon in the astonishing Apprentice's Insurrection of June 29. A thousand people, including husbandmen, vagrants, “apprentices” (a term used vaguely by contemporaries to denote the youthful lower classes generally), discharged soldiers, silk-weavers, shoemakers, and girdlers gathered at Tower Hill, armed, according to the authorities, with pikes and bills, clubs, swords and daggers (p. 210). They brandished much the same assortment of weapons as in the opening brawl of Romeo and Juliet. The assembly and cohesiveness of so variegated a group, flourishing a banner defiantly, embodied a kind of elementary class-consciousness: one sustained, when the watch attempted to disperse them, by a former soldier sounding a trumpet to rally their forces, so that they were able to drive back the watch into Tower Street.²⁸ At this point the line had been crossed between riot and rebellion, whose “governing rules were quite different.” The symbolism of carrying flag and trumpet were, as Buchanan Sharp notes, “acts associated since the late middle ages with the levying of war” (pp. 285-86). In Archer's assessment, however, the scale of disorder was scarcely such as to produce a “generalised social crisis in which all men of property feared for their lives” (p. 7). Revolution was not in the offing. The Lieutenant of the Tower, for instance, actually hindered the efforts of the Mayor's officers in making arrests, in order to score points in his long-running jurisdictional squabbles with the City. Nonetheless these actions led the Crown, deeply fearful of the alliance of apprentices and soldiery, to the exceptional step of hanging, drawing, and quartering five apprentices, and establishing martial law.

Given the limited threat to authority even of the Tower riot, and the firm, if not draconian order established by the Provosts-Marshalls, whom even constables soon came to disobey,²⁹ and given, too, the continuing price rise and fear of dearth in London, a sense of the many moral ambiguities of the entire month's events was presumably strong in the minds of most citizens. If the popular protest had grown out of hand, it had been innocuous enough initially, and had moreover been moved to rebellious violence by the harsh and anti-traditional responses of the Crown. Among the poor and “the middling sort,” at least, opinion in London must have been urgent and divided. It is to precisely such conditions of fertile ambivalence that Shakespearean drama so often is drawn.

The lower-class violence of 1595 had begun with essentially public concerns: with peaceful attempts at popular market regulation, and with mass protests against the ensuing harsh punishments and interrogation by torture. Aristocratic violence in London, however, was of a very different nature, for it was characteristically a matter of endemic gang-feuding among the titled. As Lawrence Stone has written, “In London itself the fields about the city and even the main arterial roads were continual scenes of upper-class violence. Bloody brawls and even pitched battles occurred in Fleet Street and the Strand, and little protection could be offered by the authorities until hours or days after the affair was over.”³⁰ “The behavior of the propertied classes, like that of the poor, was characterized by the ferocity, childishness and lack of self-control of the Homeric age,” he notes; while the language of “men of high social standing is often so intemperate as to be almost deranged” (p. 108). Aristocratic retainers became little better than thugs, “armed bullies ready to serve their master's turn against his enemies, whether the poor and defenseless” or “a rival magnate,” and were “ready to beat up or even occasionally to kill at a word from their master” (pp. 98, 109). The savagery of the so-called nobility acknowledged no rules. On getting his enemy Thomas Hutchinson to the ground, Sir Germaine Poole, for example, bit off “a good bit of his nose and carried it away in his pocket” (pp. 108-09). To the running brawls of the aristocracy Elizabeth turned a blind eye. Indeed, her occasional protective intervention in the trials of peers arraigned for killing in street fights permitted great courtiers such as the Earl of Oxford and Sir Thomas Knyvett to commit in their feuding “murder after murder with complete impunity” (pp. 112-13).

In so tolerant a climate, it is no surprise that the nobility raised the stakes in civil violence to a new level of deadliness, when in the 1580s they introduced use of the rapier. Previously fighting had been conducted, as Edelman notes, with the heavy standard slashing sword, weighing at least three or four pounds, and a buckler or small shield (pp. 25-26, 35). “These weapons,” comments Stone, “allowed the maximum muscular effort and the most spectacular show of violence with the minimum threat to life or limb. Fighting with them was not much more dangerous than all-in wrestling” (p. 118). The rapier, however, could run a man through the body as fast as lightning. Combined with the code of honor (punctilio) establishing the rules of obligations to challenge even trivial slights, it introduced the duel to England with the inevitable high death toll. Beyond limiting rapier length to “one yarde and halfe a quarter of the blade at the uttermost,”³¹ Elizabeth I took no further measures against swordfighting. Dueling consequently increased during the 1590s, as Levenson notes (pp. 85-86). England thus became, according to a contemporary, a country “wherein a poor man was hanged for stealing food for his necessities and a luxurious courtier … could be pardoned after killing the second or third man.”³²

III

Romeo and Juliet is permeated by such turbulence, class antagonism and passionately contested injustice. Although its political overtones constitute significant dimensions of the drama, summoning powerful cultural reflexes to its allocations of sympathy and antipathy, I am not, of course, denying that the play's central concern is the romance of the young lovers. (By 1598, I suspect, many of the conjunctural overtones of “protest” here would have disappeared, along with the dearth). Nor do I suggest Romeo to be an essentially negative figure. However, Shakespeare's genius for moral complication and abrupt reversals of sympathy or expectation does take on a political dimension in the characterization of Romeo, Capulet, Mercutio and the Prince.

Although the narrative line dramatizes topical popular angers and anxieties that may be relatively straightforward, the play's vision grows more complex through the closeness with which political concerns are woven into the central ambiguities of the exquisite yet lawless romance. In the behavior of Romeo, for instance, Shakespeare establishes resonant contemporary vignettes of both sneering, well-fed patrician and reckless rebellious hero. Associating love with an imagery of violence,³³ the play plunges the feelings of its hero and heroine into amorous riot, “violent delights [that] have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume” (2.6.9-11). The essential narrative pits passionate youthful rebellion against unfeeling authority: (“Romeo … Deny thy father and refuse thy name”; “Call me but love and I'll be new baptis'd” (2.2.34, 50). Romeo himself twins eros and riot—“O, brawling love, O loving hate / … Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms” (1.1.174, 177)—and Juliet would have him safely fettered to her “Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves” (2.2.179). Capulet threatens his daughter, should she refuse to go to Saint Peter's Church to marry Paris, that he will “drag thee on a hurdle thither” (3.5.155), the frame on which condemned traitors were dragged to their execution. A few lines later, he curses her with resonant contemporary terms, “Hang! Beg! Starve! Die in the streets!” (1.192). Romeo and Juliet's love, then, is defiant of authority, figuratively linked with violence, and associated with outcast and criminal status. Like the political riots in the minds of their participants, it transgresses a traditional order in the name of a higher principle. Like the impassioned popular initiatives of moral redress that the authorities called riots, its course of action offers, through a temporary and problematic disruption, the potential of a lasting harmony when all is clearly understood—and in this the play shows it to be successful (“O brother Montague, give me thy hand,” 5.3.295). It is tempting to speculate that Shakespeare, constrained by censorship, has displaced the urgent ethical paradoxes of the riots—the rebellion yet “higher” justification—onto a framework of romance, where political morality can be subject to debate and problematization on the wide public stage.³⁴

Less speculatively, the play is manifestly concerned to address street-violence directly, too, hurling it repeatedly across center stage from the opening cross-class mêlée to a pointedly blood-drenched finale. Just as Elizabeth had notoriously authorized torture as a response to the riots, Shakespeare's Prince Escalus confronts “Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace” with threatened “pain of torture” (1.1.79, 84). In the heated contemporary context, however, such draconian monarchical measures had been directed exclusively against lower-class violence, so that Shakespeare's treatment of violence and punishment assumes the aspect of a populist counter-indictment. Romeo and Juliet lays the blame for “mutiny” and civil bloodshed, even by the lower classes, at the door of the urban nobility, and contrasts a citizen activism of laudable responsibility, rebuking specifically the catastrophic effects of a royal double standard in punishment of bloody disorders.

Shakespeare took his primary characters and events from the 1562 translation from the Italian by Arthur Brooke and evidently knew Brooke's narrative well. In foregrounding peer-led mayhem, however, Shakespeare departed from Brooke, and restructured the entire story with symmetrical clarity through reiterating scenes of aristocratic fighting in public spaces. The opening, closing, and central scenes (the duel between Tybalt and Mercutio) feature patricians incorrigibly bent upon violence, and each involves the active intervention of regal authority itself, in the gathering of an entire community disturbed by “new mutiny,” as “civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (Prol. 3-4). Brooke's version had featured no opening brawl, giving merely a general statement of bloody feuding. Nor had Brooke introduced a belligerent Mercutio intent upon fighting Tybalt, a departure producing two fights in mid-play. Shakespeare likewise invented a closing duel with Paris, for a subsequent finale of slaughter.

There is thus far more to the play's portrayal of violence than that generalized, “patriarchal” definition of masculinity through violence of which critics have written:³⁵ in a context of class-generated violence, of officially allocated class culpability, and of differential class punishment, the play unsurprisingly dramatizes class-differentiation in the character of violence. The accusatory language of Prince Escalus is appropriately dynastic: the “head, spring and true descent” of such “outrage” (5.3.216-17) is to be traced, the play suggests, to the upper classes. “Now by the stock and honour of my kin,” explains Tybalt, in an obligingly pointed couplet, “To strike him dead I hold it not a sin” (1.5.57-58).

The opening riot, with its “neighbour-stained steel” (1.1.80), manifestly underscores the proclivity to violence of the ruling households of Capulet and Montague. Sampson and Gregory are no free-booting scrappers but enthusiastic agents of their masters' wills. Entering dressed in servants' livery, they subserve a traditional feud: “The quarrel is between our masters and us their men” (1.1.19). Sampson's excited brag—“I will show myself a tyrant” (1.1.20)—suggests a glamorized brutalism mediated from the ruling class model: cutting off heads bespeaks seigneurial verve. The opening jokes and display of lower-class snobbery—“We'll not carry coals.” “No, for then we should be colliers” (1.1.1-2)—embodies the sparring superciliousness of retainers of the great, reiterated later in Peter's battle of wits with the musicians (4.5.112-13), and presented elsewhere in the comic snideness of Malvolio and the murderous arrogance of Oswald. Capulet and Montague themselves leave no doubt as to the font of reckless belligerence, when they rush onstage with eager calls for their weaponry.

Shakespeare maximizes the scale and disorder of the fracas, specifying a “washing blow” (1.1.60), stipulating an array of weaponry (swords and bucklers, long sword, rapier, clubs, bills, and partisans), and bringing on a stream of further combatants as more retainers apparently arrive, along with citizens attempting to part them (see line 112). Further, he appears to allocate the most formidable and most implacable violence not to the retainers but to their masters, in the graphic person of “the fiery Tybalt.” “Peace? I hate the word, / As I do hell, all Montagues, and thee” (1.1.67-68). Positioning Tybalt carefully at the center of this mêlée, Shakespeare's treatment of him is notable in three respects. First, it was a conscious departure from Brooke to bring Tybalt onstage so early in the action. Second, Shakespeare's specification that Gregory and Sampson were armed with sword and buckler will here find its point: for Tybalt, as an aristocrat or gentleman, bears a rapier, and probably a dagger. The contrast between the jocular and hesitant retainers with their largely nominal weaponry, old-fashioned and clumsy, and the unappeasable patrician who closes upon Benvolio with lethal rapier, serves not just to escalate the violence but to highlight the greater threat to life posed by the city's most privileged youth. Third, Tybalt “swung about his head and cut the winds” (1.1.109). These blows, as Edelman and others have noted, identify Tybalt as fighting in the Spanish style, with its stylized cuts from the shoulder, elbow and wrist (p. 176). Mercutio's later comments, on Tybalt as fencing “as you sing prick-song” and fighting “by the book of arithmetic” (2.4.20; 3.1.103), confirm the identification. Tybalt's erect back and skipping feet contrast sharply with the Italian crouch of Benvolio, favored by the English. The identification of fighting styles would not have been lost on an audience accustomed to displays of fine swordplay traditionally staged at theaters, both as competitive fencing for prizes and as part of a play's action. Although this contrast in fencing styles appears not to have been politicized by Edelman or others, we need only recall that in 1595 England was awash with rumors of a second Spanish Armada (finally launched but shipwrecked in October 1596) to recognize that to “Spanish” Tybalt is to demonize him—and through him the upper-class violence of which he is the most virulent representative.

Romeo is not exempted from this perspective. We are reminded of his class's propensity, not only by his actions but by his language—“My man's as true as steel” (2.4.194)—and by Juliet's: “Romeo that did spit his body / Upon a rapier point” (4.3.56-57). The killing of Paris, a final outrage introduced by Shakespeare, is particularly bloody, as we may deduce from the triple references it evokes. “What blood is this which stains / The stony entrance of this sepulchre?” asks the Friar. He then speaks of “masterless and gory swords / [That] lie discolour'd.” Entering shortly afterwards, the Watchman notes that “The ground is bloody” (5.3.140-44, 171). The special bloodiness of this “foul murder” (5.3.196) may thus well have warranted use of the contemporary “special effect”³⁶ of concealing a vinegar-soaked or blood-filled bladder under an actor's armpit, to burst and saturate him at the right moment as if skewered.

Moreover, as Alan Dessen has noted, “the contrast between the two lovers of Juliet, one with flowers and sweet water, the other ‘savage-wild’ with mattock and crow of iron, could hardly be more striking.” That contrast would have been further heightened if, as Dessen speculates, the “tomb” into which Romeo forces his way was imaginary, rather than a verisimilar onstage structure. “If Romeo uses verisimilar tools to pantomime an opening of an imagined tomb,” then the action would be emblematic, Dessen perceives. It could become a “highly disturbing” image, of violation and frenzy of smashing one's way inside the jaws of death, “the savage-wild lover using a mattock and a crow of iron to rip open whatever separates him from his beloved.” These may even have been the weapons used to kill Paris.³⁷

The sustained and prominent rebuke of patrician violence structuring the play further includes that excoriation of punctilio as an unworkable code noted by Levenson (pp. 86-88, 92, 94). Ungoverned by the providential agency its proponents posited, its death-toll is catastrophic. As Dessen points out, Q1 makes it clear that even Benvolio dies: “the wiping out of the younger generation is complete.”³⁸ Finally, whereas the rhetoric of Elizabethan authority was demonizing indolent apprentices as the source of affrays, and Brooke had presented but a single pugnacious nobleman (in Tybalt), Shakespeare is at pains to reiterate an ominous scene of idling patrician youths disposed to customary enlivenments of violence.³⁹ Establishing Mercutio as another roving, insatiable belligerent youth (in Brooke he is merely a once-glimpsed, sedentary philanderer at home among “bashfull maydes”), and surrounding both Mercutio and Tybalt with a constant band of unnamed followers,⁴⁰ Shakespeare presents Verona's “rebellious subjects, enemies to peace” (1.1.79) as the warring gangs of the aimless rich. The irony in a 1595 context would be particularly relished. In response to the June riots Lord Burghley had issued an order urging that the City's masters—conceived, of course, as naturally peaceable—should restrain their apprentices: conceived, as usual, as the debased and natural source of public disorder.⁴¹Romeo and Juliet is an extended and graphic refutation of this conveniently one-sided and ideological myth of the genesis of contemporary violence.

The double standard in official punishment of violence, which was triggering anti-injustice riots in 1595, is also hinted within the play. The most obvious instance is the Prince's direct self-castigation for his disastrous Elizabeth-like lenience toward peer rioting. “I, for winking at your discords too, / Have lost a brace of kinsmen” (5.3.293-94). More subtly, the play closes with a threat of underclass punishments to follow: “Some shall be pardon'd, some shall be punished” (5.3.307), concludes the Prince—although just a minute earlier (or less) he had publically declared “All are punish'd” (5.3.294). The contradiction was unlikely to be lost on an audience inescapably aware of the recent food riots and their dramatic aftermath. The Friar, clearly terrified and cringing in his speech, is pardoned. However, Romeo's treacherous incrimination of the Apothecary whom he had bullied into breaking the law—a transaction Romeo had carefully noted down in an explanatory letter and left for discovery upon his person—suggests a grim fate ahead for that desperate victim of patrician hectoring should he prove identifiable. The threatening indeterminacy of the Prince's words that end the play, specifying retribution ahead, though not for whom, nor of what severity, must have recalled to the memories of many in the audience just that state of fearful anticipation of the authorities' reprisals against rioters, familiar from the summer. Brooke, by contrast, had cheerfully and approvingly related the execution of the apothecary: “Thapothecary, high is hanged by the throte, / And for the paynes he tooke with him [torture?], the hangman had his cote” (ll.2993-94). Shakespeare's play, in sharp contrast to Brooke (and to Zeffirelli's influential modern film version), thus closes on a note of suspense: its post-crisis settlement juxtaposes freshly formed beau monde solidarity with overtones of authoritarian menace for members of the serving classes: the apothecary, the nurse, her “man,” and perhaps Romeo's “man,” who had fetched the “cords” by which Romeo reascended to Juliet in “the secret night” (2.4.185).

We should note, finally, the role of Shakespeare's citizenry. Having cast the armigerous class as the essential source of riot, and shown the disastrous lenity accorded their incorrigible violence in contrast to the menace of reprisals hanging over the heads of underclass protagonists, Shakespeare represents the citizenry as a kind of anti-mob: a collective body (the citizens are unnamed) whose spontaneous activism is prompt and responsible. Here again he differs from Brooke, whose narrative pits the feuding families directly against the Prince's troops—“The townes men waxen strong, the prince doth send his force” (l.1039)—and contains no concept of citizen intervention. On the contrary, in Brooke's account of the fray between Tybalt and Romeo, townspeople simply choose sides with the warring families (ll.983-84). Shakespeare chooses to introduce concerned citizens making arrests: “Up, sir, go with me. / I charge thee in the Prince's name obey” (3.1.141-42). His patrician brawlers are nervously aware that the citizens will do so: “Romeo, away, be gone, / The citizens are up” (3.1.134-35). Shakespeare introduces, too, a considerable depth of anger felt by the citizens toward privileged hooligans and their lineage: “Strike! Beat them down! Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!” (1.1.70-72). In the context of official criminalization of, and reprisals against, London citizens for their recent collective actions in spontaneous price regulation, it seems hard to resist the implication that Shakespeare is through this aspect of the drama crafting, once again, an implied and populist counter-definition of the role of the actors in the dusty mêlées of that desperate London summer. Having shown a society violent from the top down, its ruling class fixated on feuding, its endemic brawls glamorizing brutality, its fashionable new weapon disastrously lethal, its sovereign injudiciously lax, Shakespeare presents citizens whose concerted initiative—uncommended by their Prince—serves the good of the commonweal.

IV

“Where shall we dine?” inquires Romeo casually, in the year of a second disastrous harvest and London food riots. Some acts later he goads the starving Apothecary from precisely that vantage of confident, well-fed privilege. “Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, / And fears't to die?” he sneers. “Famine is in thy cheeks, / Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes, / Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back” (1.1.171; 5.1.68-71). Shakespeare's drama consistently places its gangs of disruptive idlers in contexts of abundant consumption, set against a backdrop of citizen dearth and toil. As such, Romeo and Juliet's elements of political protest include not only a counter-indictment of aristocratic lawlessness, but the structural presentation of the ground of popular discontent in extreme economic inequity and unsympathetic class relations.

To appreciate the force of the play's opposition of feasting and hunger, and to preempt the charge from modern literary critics of projecting nineteenth- and twentieth-century social-democratic sentiments back upon an age politically alien, we need to recall that the contemporary social teachings of both church and state enjoined a practical mutual Christian solicitude, insisting that wealth was possessed in public stewardship.⁴² Although “a consideration which secular-minded twentieth century historians are apt to downplay,” the paternalistic medieval ideal of the Commonwealth, with its charitable redistributivist ethos, “was no empty rhetoric,” since as Archer points out, “it provided a set of values to which the disadvantaged could appeal, and because it shaped popular expectations of their rulers” (pp. 57, 54). The speeches of London's aldermen were “suffused in a commonwealth rhetoric”; London civic rituals, such as the Lord Mayor's processions, honored commonwealth ideals of mutual concern and service in placing freshly clothed paupers at the front of processions. The clergy reminded the rich in general that their wealth obliged them to “an active duty to care for the poor, in giving alms … and in showing forbearance to poor debtors” (pp. 52-57). The sharers in Shakespeare's company were likewise obliged by custom, Gurr records, to show “good-neighbourliness” through payments to the poor (p. 69). In times of dearth, while the poor were commanded to patience, the rich were exhorted not only to acts of charity, but to moderation of their feasting. Lord Burghley, described by a contemporary as the “very Cato of the commonwealth,”⁴³ was only acting within this centuries-old tradition when in 1596 he issued through the Privy Council an order for the Restraint of Eating. Power records that a letter of August 8 to the Lord Mayor and aldermen complained of “the custome of greater fare and excessive dyet” in London, and commanded the citizens “to use a more moderate and spare diet, to leave great feastinges and superfluous fare and to be contented with fewer dishes, converting the rest to the releif of the poore” (p. 376). The Lord Mayor accordingly ordered citizens to forego two suppers per week, and to donate what was saved to the poor. The Privy Council order, exhorting “a better abstinence used than hath bin,” was repeatedly reiterated that year and the next, by the Council and by the Queen herself, while the Archbishops of York and Canterbury likewise instructed the clergy to urge the rich again to moderate their consumption, and increase their charity to the poor.⁴⁴

These hallowed traditional teachings became urgent public standards at the forefront of popular consciousness as the continuing food and price crisis inevitably escalated class antagonisms. The Elizabethan elite, as Archer notes, were highly sensitive to “criticism for harsh treatment of the disadvantaged” (p. 55), while the Elizabethan underclasses produced libels such as this one, circulating in London in 1595: “For seven years space they [the rich] have fed on our flesh, on our wives and children … ; oh, who is the better for all the dearth? The rich.”⁴⁵ The original audiences of Romeo and Juliet, wealthy and poor alike, must consequently have been highly sensitized to portrayal of the class relations of wealth.

Capulet is a primary focus here. Shakespeare conferred on Juliet's father intriguingly anti-populist overtones: “Hang! Beg! Starve! Die in the streets!” (3.5.192). As a rich and prominent member of the urban elite, he must have suggested to many in the audience a profile of the London rich in general. Since he is also extravagant, authoritarian and self-absorbed, is it possible that the figure of Capulet suggests London's leadership, the complacent and unpopular aldermen? That in the alienated paternalism of the domestic father is analogized the city father? Aldermen were “invariably the wealthiest members of city society” according to Archer (p. 51); and the traditional precepts on curbing lavish feasting, particularly when freshly urged by clergy and Council, were, as Power reflects, “doubtless unpopular with the aldermen” (p. 385), and presumably often ignored. The aldermen, moreover, were tending to neglect market regulation in the 1590s: Archer notes they were “more ready to discipline marginal groups like fishwives and other hucksters than they were to restrain the wholesaling interests at which much popular anger was directed” (p. 55). During the crisis years of 1594-1597, Power reports, the Court of Aldermen actually levied fewer fines against bakers for producing underweight wheaten loaves; failed to insure city-wide poor relief, leaving this to parish officers; and had in their “complacency” to be “galvanized” by the Parliament of 1597 to assume such a role (pp. 374-78). They instead expended most of their energy during the crisis years demonizing the underclasses as the source of disorder, to the point of introducing in February 1596 street cages in which the disorderly were incarcerated (pp. 374-80)—a circumstance which again lends particular ideological irony to the presentation of those figures of urban nobility, Capulet and Montague, as themselves heading households of belligerent public disruption.⁴⁶

Although foodstuff prices soar in London, Capulets and Montagues and their rank inhabit a virtual Land of Cockayne. “Sirrah,” Capulet orders a serving man, “go hire me twenty cunning cooks” (4.2.2): his only worry, it seems, is for a suitably vast and superior cuisine. Capulet's household is persistently identified with the tantalizing condition of food awaiting. “Madam,” cries a servant to Lady Capulet, “The guests are come, supper served up, you called” (1.4.100). Capulet's two feasts punctuate the action. At the first, where Romeo and Juliet meet, Capulet begs the disguised departing Montagues, with gloating false modesty, “Nay, gentlemen, prepare not to be gone, / We have a trifling foolish banquet towards” (1.5.120-21). This trifling banquet opens appetizingly with a stage direction for servingmen to “come forth with napkins”; and conspicuously involves reference (1.5.6) to a “court cupboard” (used for public display of wine, fruit, and silver plate), that is possibly presented onstage (we hear of the command for its removal with the plate). Busy servingmen enter shouldering baskets of food: “Things for the cook, sir, but I know not what” explains one of them at 4.5.13. The household menials share surreptitiously the patrician plenty: “Save me a piece of marchpane” begs one of another (1.5.8). The second feast, to celebrate the wedding of Juliet and Paris, causes Lady Capulet only one worry: “We shall be short in our provision, / 'Tis now near night” (4.2.38-39). The following morning, nonetheless, presents an imminent embarras de richesse.

LADY Cap.
Hold, take these keys and fetch more spices, Nurse.
NURSE.
They call for dates and quinces in the pastry …
CAP.
Look to the bak'd meats, good Angelica:
Spare not for cost.

(4.4.1-2, 5-6)

The food predictably catches the attention of the musicians, mocked for their low income (“musicians have no gold for sounding”) by Peter: “Hang him, Jack. Come, we'll in here, tarry for the mourners, and stay dinner” (4.5.136, 140-41).

The Capulet household enjoys no monopoly, however, of the theme of well-fed revels. Romeo's insouciant “Where shall we dine?” (1.1.171) is echoed by Mercutio's “Romeo, will you to your father's? We'll to dinner thither” (1.4.139). Jarringly unappreciative of his privilege, Romeo expresses his lovesickness for Rosaline by declaring himself “Shut up in prison, kept without my food, / Whipp'd and tormented (1.2.55-56). These are the same conditions that befell the butter rioters: motivated by hunger, then imprisoned after the “torments” of whipping and the pillory. It is at just this moment, as if social perspectives were called for, that Romeo is interrupted by an illiterate member of the lower classes. “God gi' good e'en; I pray, sir, can you read?” (1.2.57). “Ay, mine own fortune in my misery,” responds Romeo, unbudged from self-pity. Such contrasts haunt the play; and they probably helped target Romeo for some audience derision or antipathy, as reflected in the thematic “effeminating” of Romeo remarked by many critics.⁴⁷ “Like a mishaved and a sullen wench / Thou pouts,” the Friar comments (3.3.142-43). Romeo, perhaps infuriatingly, is associated with feasting. “I have been feasting with mine enemy,” he relates to the Friar. Conversely, approaching Juliet's tomb, he threatens Balthasar, should he follow, that “I will tear thee joint by joint, / And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs.” The tomb is a “detestable maw,” “gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth” (5.3.35-36, 45-46). Breaking into its “jaws,” he declares, “I'll cram thee with more food.” Juliet's body, he feels, makes the vault “a feasting presence” (1.3.45; 5.3.48, 86). Shakespeare, it seems, will not leave the theme of food alone. (In fact he will return to it, in the context of food riots once again, in Coriolanus, in whose background, as critics have noted, is the Midlands Rising of 1607.)⁴⁸ In the light of such imagery, Juliet seems to function as a further, if “sublime,” appetite of the self-indulging Romeo: “dearest morsel” (5.3.46) of a leading scion of the banqueting class. Certainly, it is in the context of a recurrent concern with food and hunger that Romeo's climactic encounter with the famine-haunted Apothecary takes place.

The contrast with Brooke's treatment of this incident, so charged in Shakespeare's version, is again instructive. Both narratives explain the Apothecary's motivation in breaking the law to be the bite of poverty. “For nedy lacke is lyke the poore to compell / To sell that which the cities law forbiddeth him to sell” notes Brooke laconically (ll. 2573-74). Brooke's Romeo, however, does not indulge in pauper-bullying, but simply asks for poison. His Romeo has no recourse to taunting, for Brooke presents the Apothecary as eager to break the law, immediately “inflamed” by the sight of “glittring gold.” “The wretch by covetise [not, we note, by reluctant desperation] is wonne” (ll. 2576, 2581), glosses the censorious (and self-contradictory) Brooke. His Apothecary becomes a somewhat sinister figure, prompt to sell poison, who whispers conspiratorially in Romeo's ear (l.2584). He appears to believe the “poyson stronge” is for murder, since Romeo gives no hint of suicide as the intention. By contrast, Shakespeare's Apothecary had been asked for a dram that would kill “the life-weary taker” (5.1.62). Moreover, he initially resists the illegal request; and even as he caves in before Romeo's persuasions, he registers his moral disapproval of the transaction: “My poverty, but not my will consents” (5.1.75).

Although Shakespeare's Apothecary becomes a figure for whom any audience, especially famine-fearing commoners in 1595, may feel sympathy,⁴⁹ Shakespeare's Romeo becomes more problematic. Defined in terms of haughty class superiority even as he seeks the means of final self-sacrifice to love, Romeo—whose loudness of voice surprises the Apothecary (5.1.57)—commands his lowly instrument with peremptory authority: “Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor.” Twenty lines of preceding meditation (5.1.35-55) on the Apothecary's penury—“Sharp misery had worn him to the bones”—have evoked in Romeo not pity, but merely a sense of the man's fitness as a tool in shady dealings, an assessment tinged by contempt. “Beggar” (l.56), “beggarly account” (l.45), and “caitiff wretch” (l.52) convey the tone of indiscriminate class condescension somewhat similarly to the way that the Elizabethan authorities classified a range of lower-class ranks and occupations with the vague and disparaging term “apprentice.”⁵⁰ The callous instrumentality here may even carry echoes of those contemporary libels circulating in London that accused aldermen and magistrates of turning the commons' hunger to personal interest through forming pactes de famine.⁵¹ Certainly, the conclusion of their business touches one more time the nerve of contemporary anxiety: “Farewell, buy food, and get thyself in flesh,” bids a sardonic Romeo (l.84).

Nothing in the drama, however, has prepared us for the breathtaking radicalism of Romeo's well-chosen line of persuasion:

The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.”

(5.1.72-75)

In simple monosyllables, with patronizing plainness, Romeo spells out, as though to a child, the brutal catechism of class-consciousness. Perhaps nowhere else in the Shakespearean canon is there a more candid instance of ideological subversion. The very essence of the spirit behind the London riots, and behind dozens of others across England in the two closing decades of the sixteenth century, seems summed up here: the nation's laws are inimical to the interests of the poor, and quietism only leaves the poor clamped in their hopeless condition. The case seems yet sharper coming from one for whom the Prince himself recently “hath rush'd aside the law,” as Friar Lawrence remarked (3.3.26). Having digested this recognition that his class privilege extends to the law itself, Romeo turns it witheringly upon the apothecary. Moreover, Romeo's demystification of law as repressive social control is diagrammed to incite immediate lawbreaking. In the political context of the riots and their aftermath, it is remarkable that Shakespeare dared to do this, and even more remarkable that he got away with it.

Perhaps one factor in his success here was the strategic impact of the gloss that he cunningly allocates Romeo as soon as the Apothecary has capitulated: “There is thy gold—worse poison to mens' souls, / Doing more murder in this loathsome world / Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell. / I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none” (5.1.80-84). These sentiments would prove immediately reassuring to authority and its censors, for in disparaging wealth as injurious to its possessor, they paradoxically articulated an article of dominant ideology, and thus closed the scene on the safe note of orthodoxy. The dispraise of riches and privilege as a burden unappreciated by the vulgar was a favorite courtly trope in the sixteenth century, enunciated in Castiglione for instance, and reiterated in Elyot's Book of the Governor.⁵² Shakespeare similarly presents the transfiguration of wealth into oppression elsewhere: in Henry V's self-pitying dismissiveness of “the intertissued robe of gold and pearl” and “thrice-gorgeous ceremony,” for instance, which disallows him the contented sleep of the peasant, and in Richard II's readiness to exchange riches for simplicity (“I'll give my jewels for a set of beads; / My gorgeous palace for a hermitage; / My gay apparel for an almsman's gown”). Elizabeth herself was to remark to Parliament in 1601 that “To be a king and wear a crown is more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant to them that bear it.”⁵³ Romeo's words thus enunciate an established aristocratic piety and provide his dangerous earlier perspective with a kind of ideological alibi: the law may deny the poor opportunity for enrichment, but they are in fact better off without it.

Further extenuation lay in Brooke. Introducing Brooke's Romeus and Juliet long ago in the first volume of his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Bullough accurately terms it “a leaden work,” and remarks that “The surprising thing is that Shakespeare preserved so much of his source in vitalizing its dead stuff.”⁵⁴ Shakespeare's unusually close dependence on his source may thus have been a conscious tactic, securing himself an easy line of defense of a content only now rendered dangerously “political” by current events. For although Shakespeare modified Brooke to suit his own purposes, the playwright had shrewdly found a tale in which reckless upper-class violence, a self-accusing lenient prince, and poverty-driven crime (the Apothecary) all lay innocuously to hand.

V

The opposition of feasting and hunger that Shakespeare has woven through his play is but one element in its sustained populist sensitization to social inequity. The exotic high fashions that the wealthy can parade are not only mocked by Mercutio but exhibited by Romeo, who apparently sports a “slop,” the wide, loose breeches of the French style (“There's a French salutation to your French slop,” snorts Mercutio, at 2.4.45). Further, Jean MacIntyre has noted that “the play may well have strained the wardrobe resources” of the company, given its requirements for costuming forty-one speaking parts, many of which require “best apparel.” Such costuming demands must have furthered the class-polarization emphatic in the play; for as MacIntyre interestingly observes (without politicizing the perception), “By parsimony with some characters' costumes, Shakespeare may have been compensating (or over-compensating) for the lavishness of apparel at the Capulet feast late in Act one.”⁵⁵

Privileged idleness allows Romeo a perverse and highly fashionable nocturnalism, wandering abroad before dawn, then locking himself up during daylight to “make himself an artificial night” (1.1.138), so that he loses his sense of time (1.1.158-59), just as Capulet and Paris can spend all night together in celebrating the betrothal to Juliet. “Get you to bed. Faith, you'll be sick tomorrow / For this night's watching” the Nurse scolds Capulet (4.4.7-8). Their wealth is repeatedly displayed in an effortless tipping and procuring. Romeo dispenses coins to the Nurse for bringing Juliet's message, to Balthasar in the churchyard, and of course to the Apothecary for his poison, while Juliet sends a ring to her “true knight” (3.2.142; 3.3.162). Capulet dispatches first a servant for “twenty cunning cooks,” then the Nurse for baked meats (“Spare not for cost”). At the play's conclusion the bereaved parents pledge themselves to erect statues of the lovers, astoundingly, “in pure gold.” The contemporary context is again suggestive. In 1595 the hated Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Spencer, against whom death-threats were made, whose home was threatened with arson, and outside whose door the rioters had erected a gallows, was bitterly nicknamed, for his great wealth, simply “Rich” Spencer.⁵⁶

In sustained contrast to the conspicuous wealth and tantalizing feasting is the insistently scripted presence of toiling underclasses. In another notable departure from Brooke the drama counterpoints gangs of idle patrician youths to knots of busy servants, who bustle in repeatedly to service their superiors' demands. 1.3 closes with a frantic servingman who emerges from hall and pantry to announce supper served, “everything in extremity,” his own need to dash away and wait at table, and the plea that Lady Capulet “follow straight.” Capulet's feast (1.5) opens with the entry of at least three servants who bear the napkins and prepare the table while Romeo's exuberant masquers “march about,” then bundle away joint-stools and cupboard, turn the tables up (a complex operation, as an Arden note suggests, requiring removal of pegs, lifting of table tops, and stacking of these with their trestles against a wall) and supply more light. Stage directions decree that 4.2. begin with “two or three servingmen” taking orders for guests and cooks. Again, at 4.4.13 “three or four servingmen” enter “with spits and logs and baskets,” to be peremptorily ordered by Capulet, “Make haste, make haste!” and “Sirrah, fetch drier logs!” All major characters have their personal servants. The Nurse, her bones (she claims) aching, sums up the point of so much intrusive stagecraft: “I am the drudge, and toil in your delight” (2.5.76).

The contrast of indolent privilege and toiling subaltern is not thus a mere empiric “reflection” of a class-stratified social formation, but a representation calculated, in a time of heightened and bloody class friction, to appeal to populist sentiments. Romeo is perhaps the principal figure of such political targeting, his self-pitying aristocratic self-absorption several times juxtaposed directly to underclass disadvantage or misery in such a way as to highlight his enviable social privilege.

One final example may serve to illustrate how much of the play's original meaning has been lost through the combination of a traditional scholarly exegesis which pays little attention to the plays as plays, and the depoliticized interpretation of the play as essentially honoring a “transcendent” love. In 1.5 we have, in Romeo's first sight of Juliet, some of the most celebrated lyric lines in the English language. “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright,” gasps a Romeo forever transfigured. “Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear” (1.5.43, 46). The original feeling generated, however, appears to have been rather more complex and problematic than the uplift of the exquisite. Bustling near Romeo are servants harried by Capulet's repeated commands to produce more light: “More light, you knaves,” “More light! More light!” and “More torches here” (ll.27, 86, 124). In the midst of such activity, Romeo's words, directed to a servant failing to produce better light—

ROMEO
What lady's that … ?
SERVANT
I know not, sir.
ROMEO
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright” [italics mine]—

acquire overtones of rebuke or mockery. His line on Juliet's beauty as “too rich for use” may resonate likewise with the disparaging, privileged values of work-free leisure. This dimension to his transports would not be missed by a popular audience, with its vocal component of maids and servingmen, porters and mechanics, apprentices and laborers. In the midst of sublime ecstasy, Romeo is also in the midst of the frictions of class. In 1595 in particular, how could he not be?

The players and their playwright know where in this contrast of life-styles and dignities they themselves are sited. If in the “two-hours' traffic of our stage” anything should “miss,” apologizes the Prologue, “our toil shall strive to mend” [italics mine]. The unusual term “traffic” (rare, notes the OED, before 1600), normally signified trade or commerce; and allied to the Nurse's emphatic word (“toil”), the players mark—perhaps announce—discrete awareness of their own class-position. Technically classified as retainers, laboring in an intensely precarious new profession, and often poorly paid, it is no surprise that Elizabethan dramatists and licensed players could be sympathetic at a time of crisis to the perspectives of the subordinate classes. The fortunes of the two groups in fact were frequently linked: following the 1595 riots the Lord Mayor urged the Privy Council in September to suppress the theaters, as having helped “infect” “the late stirr & mutinous attempt of those few apprentices.”⁵⁷ Such circumstances lent direct economic incentive to the theater to become, in diplomatic degree, spokesman and defender of a commons demonized by authority.

VI

In the light of the sensitivity to class tension and populist sentiments traced above, certain moments of the play reveal lost political valences. When, for instance, the discovery of Juliet's “corpse” by her heartbroken parents is suddenly “capped” by a series of jests among Peter, the Nurse, and the musicians, the comedy would seem to function not as a lapse of “taste” or as abrupt comic relief, but as supplying a form of audience “retaliation” against the banquet-happy and authoritarian Capulets. By involving the audience in a burst of merriment that actively contradicts the Capulets' suffering, the sharp juxtaposition constitutes another “populist” refusal of sympathy for the grief of the elite that we have seen structuring the presentation of Romeo. The pointedly visible onstage contrast between the doomed bustle of the Capulet household and Juliet's “deathbed”—apparently unremoved and in plain view from 4.2 to 4.5—may likewise have afforded the audience (since they know what Capulet does not) a kind of “conspiratorial” gratification as they anticipated an imminent counterstrike against the domineering will of the sybaritic master of the house.

At two points in the play, thinly veiled political language takes on new bite. Gregory's line in the opening minutes of the play, for example, “the quarrel is between our masters and us their men” (1.1.17), can project the meaning “the quarrel is that of the masters against us their servants,” rather than “the quarrel is between two masters, and involves their respective servants.”⁵⁸ If spoken as an admonition, with a clear break after the word “us,” the line is at once disambiguated: “the quarrel is between our masters and us, their men,” Witty and skeptical Gregory, who has been puncturing the bragging of Sampson, thus establishes a note of contemporary political resonance from the play's opening minutes, with the exasperated retort to a fellow serving man to get his priorities straight and remember what class he belongs to. Shakespeare's ingenuity in producing ambiguous, politically charged sentences was one of a number of his tactics for outflanking Elizabethan censorship.

The disagreement between Gregory and Sampson proves highly topical. Its suggestion that the kind of class-solidarity manifested in the Apprentices' Riot was emergent and contingent is borne out, I suggest, by a contemporary tract. The Student's Lamentation,⁵⁹ circulating within a few weeks of the Apprentices Riot, remarks just such divisions among apprentices, claiming that the riot had failed to draw greater numbers precisely because many apprentices had felt their primary duty to be to their masters and had reported the imminent mass gathering to them.

Another instance of veiled political suggestion is Friar Lawrence's disquisition upon “nature.” Curiously extended across eighteen lines, the passage achieves relevance to the body of the play if recognized to be an oblique commentary on class relations.

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good that, strain'd from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime's by action dignified [my italics].

(2.3.13-18)

Construed as social symbolism, the first couplet is innocuous enough, implying the value and social contribution of even the lowest classes. The next couplet regrets the “revolt” of those of “true birth”: a sentiment applicable to Romeo and his class, whose “abuse” of violence the play dramatizes. The final couplet packs a sting, for if the “vice” to which “virtue turns” is violent disorder—as the play seems to suggest—then the last line implies that this violent disorder may be sometimes “dignified,” as in riots over food prices or injustice, for instance. Interpreted as veiled political allegory, the passage becomes one more expression of an indignant popular perspective in the year of the mass riots.

There will be readers, perhaps many, who will view the kind of interpretation of Shakespeare set forth here as hopelessly tendentious. Shakespeare, they will affirm (as has Alvin Kernan in his latest book),⁶⁰ was a thoroughly conservative playwright; and his interests were largely apolitical. Romeo, moreover, is essentially a romantic hero, and the play dwells upon love, not politics. I would argue that presentation of Romeo and Juliet's love does not preclude focus on its enabling political conditions; and that Shakespeare reveled in irreducible complication, thematic, moral and political. The love between Romeo and Juliet certainly possesses rare sensitivity, beauty, and sanctity. Yet their love is deeply shadowed—as traditionalist criticism has long acknowledged—by the obtrusive Roman Catholic imagery that articulates its inception (“shrine,” “pilgrim,” “palmer” and “saint” at 1.5.92-104), by the “feminization” of Romeo which it effects, and by the Renaissance horror of suicide which terminated it. Why, then, should we rule out the political as a further dimension of such sustained artistic ambiguity? At the climax of Romeo's apotheosis, as he eternalizes his passion and presses into “death's dateless night,” we are propelled, yet again, and by his penultimate sentence, into memory of others' physical pains—those of the victims of poverty: “O true apothecary,” he cries, “Thy drugs are quick!” (5.3.119-20; italics mine).

The overtones of political protest projected in their cultural moment an intriguingly ambiguous relation toward authority. They were not “radical” in any modern political understanding of that word, but rather “medieval populist”; and as such they embodied the paradox of a loyal disaffection or licensed indictment. For the play's demystifying criticism of the city's ruling classes could claim to be a dutiful echo of higher authority, since its barbs echoed the ancient civil ideal of Commonweal paternalism shared by monarch, church, and Privy Council. Romeo and Juliet takes advantage of the contemporary conflict between levels and traditions of authority to establish its skeptical portrayal of the urban rich, since 1594-97 saw considerable friction between city leaders and the Crown.⁶¹ Capitalizing on the tension between ruling-class blocs, Shakespeare was able to critique the lower authority from the protective shelter of the higher. It was a pattern, after all, often repeated in the period, as the court protected the public theaters against the wrath of city fathers who would close them. Such “legitimated” subversion resembled the popular seizures of grain and price-fixing actions that continued to break out around the country until the successful harvest of 1598. Shakespearean drama, it seems, was mindful of “unaccommodated man” long before the dark climactic explosions of King Lear.

Notes

1. All references to and citations of Romeo and Juliet are from the Arden edition, ed. Brian Gibbons (London, 1980). Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Toward a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 1981), p. 126.

2. Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford, 1989); Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (New York, 1998).

3. Eagleton, Benjamin, p. 126.

4. See Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988).

5. Jill Levenson, “‘Alla stoccado carries it away’: Codes of Violence in Romeo and Juliet” in Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet,” ed. Jay L. Halio (Newark, 1995), p. 86.

6. Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances 1509-1640 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 200, 208.

7. Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, England, 1991), pp. 3-4.

8. Charles Edelman, Brawl Ridiculous: Swordfighting in Shakespeare's Plays (Manchester, 1992), pp. 35, 173.

9. Manning, p. 191.

10. Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit, 1993), pp. 34-39.

11. Manning, pp. 208-09. On hatred of Mayor Spencer, see also Archer, p. 56.

12. C. S. L. Davies, “Popular Disorder,” in The European Crisis of the 1590s, ed. Peter Clark (London, 1985), p. 244; M. J. Power, “London and the Control of the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s” in History 70 (1985), 371.

13. Archer, pp. 10, 13.

14. Manning, p. 187.

15. Joyce Youings, Sixteenth Century England (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 270. Wheat prices rose from 17.61 to 36.56 shillings per quarter between 1592-1594, and thence to 40.34 in 1595, and 47.61 in 1596, as R. B. Outhwaite, “Dearth, the English Crown and the Crisis of the 1590s” in The European Crisis, ed. Peter Clark, shows in his table on p. 28. In Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, 1978), Andrew Appleby details the price increases during these years of cereals eaten by the poor: rye, for instance, had risen by 1596 to 5.68 times its price in 1593 (p. 6).

16. Quoted in Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth 1529-1559 (London, 1970), p. 53.

17. Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York, 1996), p. 232.

18. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (Wokingham, 1980), p. 21.

19. Manning, pp. 204, 315.

20. George Abbot, An Exposition unto the Prophet Jonah (1600), p. 204; in Appleby, Famine, p. 141.

21. Outhwaite, p. 28.

22. Manning, p. 205; Archer, p. 6. On food riots elsewhere in England in 1595-96 see Appleby, p. 142.

23. Manning, p. 205.

24. Archer, p. 6.

25. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (Feb. 1971) 76-136; Archer, pp. 6-7; Buchanan Sharp, “Popular Protest in Seventeenth Century England” in Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Barry Reay (New York, 1985), pp. 271-88.

26. Manning, pp. 204-05, 209, 314.

27. Manning, p. 202.

28. Manning, pp. 209-10; see also Breight, p. 88.

29. Manning, pp. 178-85; Power, p. 380.

30. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965, rpt. 1967), p. 112.

31. In Edelman, p. 174.

32. In Stone, p. 120.

33. Levenson, pp. 84-85.

34. The dramatization of a right of popular intervention is not unique to this play. Richard Strier demonstrates that King Lear endorses political resistance theory of the most radical type, in “Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience” in The Historical Renaissance (Chicago, 1988), pp. 104-33.

35. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 82-103; Marianne Novy, “Violence, Love and Gender in Romeo and Juliet” in Romeo and Juliet, Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews (New York, 1993), pp. 359-71. Most recently, Robert Appelbaum in “‘Standing to the Wall’: The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (Fall 1997), has sought, in ahistorical and depoliticized terms, to link the play's representation of violence to “masculinity” as a fixed if contradictory “regime of gender performance” (p. 254), and can thus write of “citizens harmoniously toiling under the prince's law” “within a town where history seems to have temporarily come to an end” (p. 271).

36. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, third edition (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 182-84.

37. Alan Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), pp. 191, 194-95.

38. Alan Dessen, “Q1, Romeo and Juliet and Elizabethan Theatrical Vocabulary,” in Halio, p. 113.

39. It may also be that the marching, drumming and masquing activities of the Montague youths, so prominent in 1.4 and 1.5, were designed and performed to suggest patrician counterparts to the rituals and parades of the apprentices.

40. The stage direction for 1.4 specifies, in addition to Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio, “five or six other masquers and torchbearers,” while that for 3.1 stipulates “Mercutio, Benvolio and Men,” with line 34 introducing “Tybalt, Petruchio and Others.”

41. Power, p. 379.

42. For traditional Christian teachings on stewardship, see Charles Avila, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching (Maryknoll, 1983); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth, 1922, rpt. 1980), chapter 1. On state and church ideals and implementation of charitable relief of the poor, see Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1986).

43. British Library, Lansdowne MS 74/42; in Archer, p. 38.

44. Appleby, pp. 144-45; Power, pp. 376, 385. Bishop Gervase Babington was similarly to urge in 1604 the application in times of dearth and plague of the biblical redistributivist principle of Jubilee, by which debtors were to be released, and lands sold through pressure of poverty returned to their original owners (Leviticus 25.9-55). The theme recurs throughout the seventeenth century among radicals and the distressed, yet there remains, as Hill comments, “much research to be done on the underground flowing of this tradition.” The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1993, rpt. 1994), pp. 164-67.

45. Libel at Norwich, 1595, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury MSS, vol. 13, pp. 168-69; in Clark, p. 44.

46. The precise social rank of Capulet (and of Montague) appears impossible to pin down. Some editors such as Brian Gibbons in the Arden assume Capulet to be a nobleman, and give his wife as “Lady Capulet.” Other editions deny them aristocratic status. The indeterminacy I suggest to be deliberate, permitting the characters to evoke both the feuding nobility (in the play's presentation of violence) and the wealthy city fathers (in the feasting theme).

47. See Francois Laroque's summary of the gender transposition of Romeo and Juliet in “Tradition and Subversion in Romeo and Juliet” in Halio, pp. 29-31.

48. See chapter 6 of Annabel Patterson's Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120-53.

49. Shakespeare himself was particularly well placed to appreciate the pathos of an independent business man humbled in his workshop by the advent of penury, the wares of his “needy shop” now “thinly scatter'd to make up a show” (5.1.42, 48). Eight years earlier, following years of apparent financial precariousness, his father had been finally expelled from the borough council, and sued, too, for his brother Henry's debts. The sadness of the vulnerability of his father would not have been lost on the son.

50. Manning, p. 193.

51. Archer, p. 55.

52. The theme is briefly discussed without reference to Shakespeare by Frank Whigham in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 112-116, under the heading “The concealment of exploitation” (pp. 112-16).

53. Henry V (4.1.265-74); Richard II (3.3.146-54); Elizabeth is quoted by Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (1983; rpt. New York, 1997), p. 399.

54. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London, 1957), I, 277-78.

55. Jean MacIntyre, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres (Alberta, 1992), pp. 141-44.

56. Manning, pp. 208-09.

57. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, (Oxford, 1923) IV, 318.

58. Just before going to print, I discovered that Kirby Farrell has recorded a similar observation on the opening scene, recognizing a “volatile ambivalence” toward masters in the Capulet servants, and noting that the feud provided “a safety valve for aggressive feelings against masters.” See Farrell, chapter 8, “Love, Death, and Patriarchy in Romeo and Juliet” in Play, Death, and Heroism in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), pp. 133, 135. However, his essay exposits the drama's concerns with power on the psychoanalytic rather than the political level, focusing “patriarchy” rather than class relations, and characterizing the former as “a system of beliefs evolved to control poisonous anxiety about death” (p. 145). Consequently, “the quarrel is between our masters and us their men” constitutes for the servants “an ambiguity too dangerous to be consciously faced” (p. 133).

59. Archer, p. 7.

60. Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright (New Haven and London, 1995), postulates a Shakespeare assiduously propagandist in the monarchical cause, “the leading apologist for kings in his or any other time” (p. 95).

61. Archer, pp. 35-37; Manning, p. 207.