[In the following essay, Nevo explains the uniquely Shakespearean approach to tragedy employed in Romeo and Juliet that depends on neither providence nor fate as the source of human suffering.]

The plot of Romeo and Juliet stresses the accidental. The fortuitous meeting of Romeo and Benvolio with Capulet's illiterate messenger bearing the invitations he cannot decipher, the chance encounter between Romeo and Tybalt at a most unpropitious moment, the outbreak of the plague which quarantines Friar John, the meeting of Romeo and Paris at the Capulet tomb are instances which come at once to mind. Shakespeare, so far from mitigating the effect of unfortunate coincidence is evidently concerned to draw our attention to it. Bad luck, misfortune, sheer inexplicable contingency is a far from negligible source of the suffering and calamity in human life which is the subject of tragedy's mimesis; while of all the ancient and deep-seated responses of man to the world which he inhabits the fear of some force beyond his control and indifferent, if not positively inimical, to his desires is one of the most persistent. Accident, therefore, mischance, all that arouses a fearful and rebellious sense of the unintelligible and the non-necessitated, powerfully suggests to human anxiety a spectrum of the darker possibilities, whether these be interpreted as a universe dominated by meaningless, mindless vicissitude—the senseless hurrying of atoms, or as a devil-ridden chaos, the satanic void itself. Lear is the play in which Shakespeare presents the anguish of a mind fully facing the threat of chaos, a mind hovering above the void; in Romeo and Juliet when he sets out to dramatize the vulnerability of young love, he places his young lovers not too great a distance from that terrifying terrain.

Romeo and Juliet opens with the casual ruffianism of the Capulet servants, their idle chatter, their random bawdry, their haphazard impulses of sex and aggression. What is represented is the perennial fret and froth of lust and anger. This is indicated by Gregory's attempt to keep Sampson's eye upon the masculine target of enmity: “The quarrel is between our masters and us their men,” and the nonchalant reply of the omnivorous Sampson:

S:
'Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant. When I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids: I will cut off their heads.
G:
The heads of the maids?
S:
Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maiden-heads; take it in what sense thou wilt.

(I.i.17-23)

The comic-braggart style of these exchanges and of the subsequent thumb-biting denies seriousness or consequentiality to these petty swashbucklers, so that in what follows the masters find themselves in full scale collision as a result of a chance encounter, the most random, casual circumstances. Yet, since the impulses touched off in Sampson and Gregory are human constants, there is an inevitability about it as well. This is the quotidien reality of the street and it is in Shakespeare an image of the unstable, fluctuating, precarious, potentially explosive, potentially even demonic reality in which the protagonists' lives are set. In Julius Caesar and in Coriolanus it erupts in the mob violence of the death of Cinna and the lynching of Coriolanus. In Romeo and Juliet it is less terrifying if only because it is canalized into the conventional form of the feud—it is not therefore utterly anarchic.

In Mercutio's Queen Mab speech the irrational, uncontrollable forces, the intractable and mischievous “other” that thwarts the will, or enters into subversive alliance with the anarchic appetites, is rendered as no more than impish; but at two of the crucial points in the play's chain of events—Mercutio's death and Friar John's incarceration—it is a plague which Mercutio invokes upon “both your houses,” and an outbreak of plague which keeps the Friar a prisoner. And thus the tone and the degree of seriousness accorded to the ever present threat of mischief deepen in consonance with the tragic shaping of events. Evil in Romeo and Juliet is not accorded the diabolic status it has in the great tragedies, never invades experience, nor undermines the possibilities of existence to the same degree. It is nevertheless present in the very fabric of events, in the interplay of the bad luck which dogs the lovers with the bad habits of ingrown pride in the Capulets and the Montagues.

The conventionalized aggressions of Verona's feuding families mask a violent and intractable will. Capulet's “Hang, beg, starve, die in the street” is Lear in little though it is not that particular relation which is pressed to an issue in this play. In King Lear it is pressed to an issue. But in King Lear random events—spontaneous, unplanned, unprepared for—press towards good, for example, the meeting between Edgar and the blinded Gloucester or Edgar and Oswald; the evil of the will is correspondingly thrown into relief. In Romeo and Juliet random events press towards evil while the willed actions of the protagonists are radically innocent.

Romeo and Juliet is less tragic than Lear, not because it is different in kind, a “tragedy of chance” rather than a “tragedy of character.” It is “less” tragic because the vision of evil in it is less deep, less complex, less comprehensive, less profoundly imprinted upon the consciousness of the characters. Its answer to the question all tragedy asks—Unde Malum?—is more hesitant, more eclectic. Here all is at a lower pitch; nearer to the commonplace and ordinary. Such fools, such daughters, such tempests of the soul as there are in Lear we would go far in life to find. But such fathers, such nurses, such young gallants are at all our doorsteps, within everyone's experience; not rare at all, though rarely depicted. This realism is the play's charm, the particular delight of its mimesis; but it is also the measure of its reach. It is all perfectly accomplished, within its comparatively limited scope, its comparatively limited perception.

It is worth noting, too, that of all the experiences of life which heighten sensibility and bestow gifts of the imagination, youthful love is the classic and common instance; while the familial enmity of elders is the classic obstacle of lovers. It is as much as anything this aspect of the natural and the universally available which is rendered by the largely Anglo-Saxon and almost monosyllabic simplicity of so many of the lovers' exchanges, a refinement of common speech which captures its very essence. “I would I were your bird”; “Dry sorrow drinks our blood”; “But to be frank and give it thee again”; “I am content, so thou wilt have it so.”

A dramatization of accident in human life may fail to achieve tragic form in two opposite ways: by way of melodrama in the dramaturgy of the playwright, or by way of intrusive morality in the interpretation of the spectator. With respect to the former way Aristotle's demand for the necessary or the probable, as opposed to the merely possible and hence insignificant, is palpably relevant.

Intelligibility, that which distinguishes form from phenomenon, requires the perception of consequence. Too high a proportion therefore of incidents totally uncaused—of coincidence, sheer, random chance—would be one way to render a plot untragic. Aristotle's dictum—those incidents have the greatest effect on the mind which “occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another—sets us on the right path, though his example (Mitys's statue falling upon Mitys's murderer) strikes us as over-contrived and far inferior to the complex Elizabethan dramaturgy.¹

What is required is an interlocking, an intersection of opposing aspects of reality: the fore-ordained and the fortuitous, the inevitable and the arbitrary, choice and chance, will and the world. Tragedy will properly convey, with varying degrees of rigor, the inextricability in events of the given and the open; but with each knot that is tied, certain avenues are closed, and causes are made, so to speak, to yield up their calamitous consequences. The central knot which is tied in the plot of tragedy, as Aristotle indicates, is to be sought in the reversal, or peripeteia—the point which articulates the recoil of the action. This will characteristically present a nexus of ironies and the paradoxical effect of a coincidence which impresses us as an inevitability.

In the peripeteia of Romeo and Juliet this paradox is powerfully realized. Once again the streets are abrawl, the mad blood stirring, heads as full of quarrels as an egg is of meat. Romeo, aglow from his marriage ceremony, a vessel of good will, happens by the sheerest accident upon the truculent Mercutio and the irate Tybalt, his kinsman of an hour, precisely at the moment when Mercutio's contemptuous dismissal of him—“Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead! stabbed with a white wench's black eye … is he a man to encounter Tybalt?” (II.iv.14-17)—has become true in a sense undreamt of by Mercutio. The good will with which he is filled becomes the cause of the death of his friend and of his own “calm, dishonourable, vile submission” as he then too interprets his behavior. Thus the conventional code of honor vanquishes the good will and Romeo, alone of the participants, suffers the anguish of knowing “what might have been” supplanted by “what must now be,” and of enacting the fatal transformation of the one into the other. Given the circumstances—the companionship of young hotheads acting in ignorant and conventional truculence, given his own character as young man of honor—then what happens as a result of Mercutio's death under his arm must happen, is completely intelligible. Shakespeare's craft has given us a finely turned peripeteia in which the protagonist is responsible for his actions, though he is not accountable for the circumstances in which he must act, and in which these actions recoil ironically upon his own head. His despairing cry “O, I am fortunes fool” richly expresses his sense of the uncalled for, unchosen, outrageous event; of his helplessness in the face of the forces which are ranged against him, which include his own acceptance of the code of honor, and his own grief and self-reproach at the death of his friend “under his arm.”

It is clear that what transforms Aristotle's mere “possibility” in these events into “necessity” is character. And this brings us to the second of the ways in which the dramatization of the accidents of life may fail to achieve tragic effect. It is important to perceive that Romeo's challenge of Tybalt is not merely an instance, as in the stock moralizing interpretation, of a rashness which fatally flaws his character and brings about his doom. If this were so, then the consequences in the play, though certainly possible, would be considerably less moving. The play would be morally exemplary but without tragic significance. Romeo would be too simply to blame, as indeed he has often been held to be, and the great tragic error too simply moralized. And in point of dramatic fact Romeo's action in challenging Tybalt is precisely not rash, though it puts him into great danger. On the contrary it is an action first avoided, then deliberately undertaken, and it is entirely expected of him by his society's code. Indeed by dramatic character properly conceived is meant precisely that propensity in conduct towards the very action imitated by the drama. Some such continuity between action and character is always to be discovered in Shakespearean characterization however richly individualized, diversified, discriminated in the details of idiom or gesture his personages may be. As Fergusson puts it, paraphrasing Aristotle:

The dramatist imitates the action he has in mind, first by means of the plot, then in the characters, and finally in the media of language, music and spectacle. In a well-written play, if we understood it thoroughly, we should perceive that plot, character, and diction, and the rest spring from the same source, or, in other words, realize the same action or motive in the forms appropriate to their various media.²

Thus his tragic heroes are precisely such as will be subject to, or embody, the collision of forces envisioned by the dramatist as the soul of his action.

II

What the play tells us of Romeo throughout Acts I and II is that he is a young Veronese possessed of honor and imagination, high spirit and amorous melancholy. As such he is one among his companions, but he is set apart from them by his capacity, and his readiness, to be fired by a high passion. The orchard scene (II.i—without the artificial break at l. 45) may be taken as emblematic of this relationship: Mercutio's jesting bawdry, in which Romeo joins with a will when he “is sociable”; his separation from his fellows, as he leaps the garden wall; and his consciousness of what separates them as he observes “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

His being one of them in this way and set apart from them in this way is definitive of his tragic role: in his very character is represented a collision between blind conventional uniformity and imaginative specificity. It is a poignant awareness of this collision that Juliet expresses in her anguished question, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” and through her sense of the irrelevance of the mere agreed name to the sweet immediate scent of the rose. It is this collision which defines the relations between the lovers and all Verona, the tragic results of which the drama exhibits. It is this collision which is the soul of the action, determining the form and substance of plot and character alike.

Romeo's sense of social identity and social commitment is greater than Juliet's; his sense therefore of the menace of the powers in whose face he flies, correspondingly greater. He is indeed exposed to the worst blows of Fortune, as any Stoic could have told him, when he makes his happiness dependent upon the unique individuality of another. And this he knows. Johnson wondered why Shakespeare gives Romeo a mood of involuntary cheerfulness immediately before his reception of Balthazar's news:³

I dreamt my lady came and found me dead …
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips
That I revived and was an emperor.

(V.i.6-9)

Apart from the obvious pathos of the dramatic irony, the lines effectively underline by contrast the bondage of dread in which a man lives who has “given hostages to fortune,” so that his deepest dream is of liberation and sovereignty.

At the crisis of the play, as we have seen, he expresses in the despairing cry “O, I am fortune's fool” his sense of his own impotence; and again when he takes the poison the notion of forced obedience to an intractable and hostile power is implicit in his imagery, in the “yoke” of inauspicious stars, and in the legal implications of “dateless bargain to engrossing death.”

                                                                                                              O here
Will I set up my everlasting rest;
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you,
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Come, bitter conduct; come, unsavory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!

(V.iii.109)

Whiter, pioneer of image critics, noted the “strange coincidence … between this last speech of Romeo and a former one in which he anticipates his misfortunes … the ideas drawn from the Stars, the Law, and the Sea succeed each other in both speeches, in the same order, though with a different application.”⁴ The speech Whiter had in mind follows upon Mercutio's “talk of dreams,” and expresses his premonition of disaster together with his hope for the successful weathering of it:

                                                            my mind misgives
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life closed in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death:
But He that hath the steerage of my course,
Direct my sail!

(I.v.106-113)

Whiter is at a loss to discover the “latent association” in this accumulation of images, but the association is easily found when it is remembered that it is not so much the sea as the ship that sails the sea which is the crucial term, and that the sea voyage is an archetypal metaphor for life precisely for the reason that seamanship pits will and skill against that part of nature—the ocean—most challenging, and menacing, to man in its inextricable co-mingling of immutable stellar law and wild waves' chaos. The bark of love, of Tristan, Petrarch, and the sonneteers, and here, is a particular instance of this symbolism, where the great perturbation, the “mindless woe,” has left the boat rudderless, or pilotless, or in some other way endangered its safe passage by rendering it vulnerable.

Romeo's dramatic development is indicated by the invocation, in the first speech, of God's providential guidance, whereas in the last speech he is his own “desperate pilot,” past hope, and therefore resolved to run his seasick weary bark upon the dashing rocks. In Act V he hastens disaster by his very conviction of it. “Then I defy you, stars” expresses a consolidation of his will, a determination to take the one finally free action left, in the Senecan-Stoic view, to a man in extremity. His self-control contrasts with his self-abandonment in the Friar's cell when told of his banishment, but, by a paradox which is only apparent, is the measure of his loss of all hope. Projected dramatically in action, the stubborn intensity of his desire to possess his happiness expresses itself as a sense of an inimical and omnipotent force by which he is doomed. Thus does he register his awareness of his own tragic role, against which he rebels, conjuring up a vision of a contrary role: “all these woes shall serve / For sweet discourses in our time to come” (III.v.54).

It is to be noted that he precisely does not identify his will with Fate as does Ford's Faustian Giovanni. He fights fortune, and defeat is not a foregone conclusion. But his “free” act in defiance of the forces which seem to be conspiring against him or which seem to be condemning his love, brings about an unnecessitated doom more definitively than any other action in the play. The powerful irony of his death scene is that as he swallows his fatal potion he is in fact nearer the fulfillment of his heart's desire than at any other moment in the course of the drama.

The opacity of events, the blindness, or ignorance, or failure to penetrate appearances of the protagonists is, of course, a major tragic theme. It receives its greatest virtuosity of treatment in Hamlet. Here it is announced as early as I.ii when arrives Capulet's illiterate messenger with the invitation which precipitates the entire subsequent action. “I pray you,” he inquires of Romeo, “can you read anything you see?” “Ay,” replies Romeo, “if I know the letters and the language.” In the familiar manner of Elizabethan stagecraft the fool's patter, ostensibly drawing a jest from the discrepancy in wisdom between the learned and the ignorant, actually serves as an ironic commentary upon all human ignorance in knowledge, on all that men do, not knowing what they do. The fool is one of two classic Elizabethan means of dramatizing the limitations of human knowledge. The arras is the other, providing, with its analogues and metaphorical equivalents profound and various images of unawareness. Here, in IV.v. the arras hides the inert body of Juliet from the Nurse's sight as she potters about calling to a slugabed bride, as she believes, to arouse her for her wedding; nor when it is drawn is the truth disclosed.⁵

Against the ebb and flow of Romeo's hope and fear—charted by the sequence of scenes—are juxtaposed the Friar's Christian forebodings and Christian hopes. The Friar fears the lovers' destruction from their very first abandonment, in his view, to unbridled passion, rash impetuosity, and headstrong will. The Friar's strictures are often regarded as having a choric function in the play, of being, that is, indicative of the point of view properly to be taken of events; certainly his words at their marriage are richly prophetic:

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.

(II.vi.9-11)

But it is after all, simply in character, perfectly natural and appropriate to the persona, for the Friar to preach to Romeo upon the disastrous consequences of unbridled passion. It would be a dereliction of his evident Christian duty not to do so. It is similarly the least we could expect of the purveyor of religious instruction to identify the “greater power than we can contradict” with Providence, though he does not presume to know at that point in the play when he is stumbling at graves to what obscure end Providence is thus thwarting his intents; and it is sound Christian doctrine beautifully adapted to the style of reflection of a gentle hermit-apothecary which ascribes to the strange paradoxes of Providence the evil presence of poison in the good herbs of the earth:

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime's by action dignified; …
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs-grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

(II.iii.15-30)

Certainly the Friar's “grace and rude will” speech has a comprehensive, generalizing, and reverberating quality—the generalizing and reverberating quality of Christian doctrine. How much more bitter an irony is it then that the Friar's own benevolent, would-be “providential” and truly Christian interference in the course of events in fact precipitates the catastrophe as much as anything in the play. His drug is, in the outcome, as deathly as that dispensed to Romeo by his dusty and down-at-heel Mantuan counterpart.

The Stoic-Christian conflict runs deep in Shakespeare, as in the entire Renaissance drama. There is no tragedy which is without its variant. Here it takes the relatively simple and obvious form of a confrontation between a humanistically educated young man and his Christian confessor. Nothing could be more perfectly and completely dramatized, more perfectly in character than the terms of their dialogue, the projection of their separate points of view. Both Romeo and the Friar view their acts and enact their views with a marvellous consistency and propriety. But if action is here being imitated, or realized, in the medium of character in truly Shakespearean fashion, the action which is being imitated represents that blindness to the real state of things which is perhaps Shakespeare's profoundest intuition of the origin of pain and evil.

The question at issue between Romeo and the Friar is the question of love, of that heightened excitement of the senses, emotions, and imagination which accompanies, or gives rise to, sexual passion. And love, in the sense of sexual passion, as Shakespeare well knew, has been the object of more scepticism, suspicion, and disapprobation than any other movement of the human spirit and is included as such in the scheme of neither Stoicism nor Christianity.⁶ It is to be noted that the lovers, though they respect and revere their spiritual father, and gladly take his practical advice, are totally impervious to his religious instruction. They do not defy or evade, as do Ford's Giovanni and Annabella; they simply betray no awareness, save for Juliet's single reference to the “god of my idolatry,” of the application of religious-moral evaluation or judgment to themselves at all. Since, in their eyes, love is self-justifying, they and the Friar represent two autonomous and mutually exclusive orders of experience, each reflecting upon the other at their points of intersection.

One such pivotal point of intersection is the pilgrim sonnet: the grave and joyful pas-de-deux which is their discovery of each other. This passage, in its implications, is perfectly ambiguous. From the point of view of Christian Agape it is profanity; from the point of view of romantic Eros, epiphany. The two loves, psychologically and historically interdependent, stand to each other, as they have so often stood, in a relation of antithesis, and challenge. The marriage of the lovers is, similarly, a point of intersection. The junction of their desire to be married as quickly as possible and the Friar's anxiety to have them married as quickly as possible is purely coincidental. They are indifferent to the consecrating aspect of the ceremony. Romeo speaks for both when he says:

Do thou but close our hands with holy words
Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.

(II.vi.6-8)

Whereas to the Friar it is the sacrament and the sacrament alone which can “incorporate two in one” and rescue love from vanity.⁷

If Shakespeare offers no one-dimensional view of the higher possibilities of love it is nevertheless the higher possibilities that he is concerned to bring out. The dramaturgy of multiple reflection brings each of the characters into analogous and contrastive relationship with the lovers. Romeo is flanked by Friar Lawrence who, with all his own resigned tolerance for youth, regards his doting as a regrettable carnality. He is also flanked by the inimitable Mercutio, who regards the same phenomenon as a foolishness which men invent to torment themselves with when they would be better employed wenching—“a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole” (II.iv.89). Juliet, on the other hand, is flanked by Capulet, whose concern is the very proper one, in a dutiful and affectionate paterfamilias, of prudential matchmaking; and by the Nurse, the epitome of the earthy, the base, the material, and the utterly unimaginative. As naturalist as Mercutio though of infinitely less wit, she is one of Shakespeare's finest creations in the mode of contrast between high and low, base and heroic, rare and common; between comedy and dignity. And in this mode she is the apogee of that view of love as simply either sex or matchmaking which is the bedrock contrast to the lovers' affirmation. To them love is an enlightenment of the human condition perfectly fulfilling all needs of flesh and spirit.

III

What emerges from the contrasts and the affirmation is related to the definitive importance of the light imagery in the play—is indeed the reason for the definitive importance of the light imagery. The play's rich profusion and variety of light images, generally taken to be symbolic of the natural beauty of youthful love, and of the play's theme of “brilliance swiftly quenched,”⁸ can be seen to possess a stricter and more cogent relation to the entire dramaturgy of the play. In the steady radiance of the play's imagery there is a progression from the light which is a metaphor for beauty to the light which is a metaphor for knowledge; from that which is a grace of appearance to that which is a gift of insight. Even in “O she doth teach the torches to burn bright,” there is a suggestion of the platonic; while the “feasting presence full of light” is, typologically, a symposium. There is a solemnity about certain of the light images, as opposed to the sensuous delight of others, which allows comparison with the identification of beauty and knowledge through the imagery of light of Marvell or the Milton of the early poems.

What it amounts to is that Romeo and Juliet are possessed of the light. And they alone are possessed of the light, in a Verona to whom the light is beyond comprehension—to whom love is irrelevant. These others, indeed, unrecognizing, unknowing, acting out their natures, bring harm to the light Shakespeare's addition to his source, Rosaline and Paris, are the subtlest reflectors of all. Less clearly modelled, further in the middle distance of the play, attenuated shadows out of courtly love, chaste and devoted respectively, they are cast like a snake's skin by the more robust reality of Romeo and Juliet.

Happy love, observes de Rougemont, has no history.

Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of life, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fact.⁹

Because there is so much truth in de Rougemont's view it is important to make distinctions. Romeo and Juliet do not “suffer love.” They suffer because they love; they are exposed to pain and suffering on account of their love; but they do not “suffer love.” Paradoxically enough it is Shakespeare's comedy heroes who suffer love: Titania, Berowne, even Beatrice and Benedick, Viola, because it is through the frustrations and involvements of love suffered that the comic plot weaves its way to make these odds all even in the end. And bearers. But the two whose significant presence in the play is Troilus, Angelo, Imogen, the young man of the Dark Sonnets,—these all suffer love.

But in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare is as revolutionary as Donne: his lovers too are “interassured of the mind,” a mutual pair. Life does not allow them either “the delight of the senses” nor the “fruitful contentment of the settled couple,” but Juliet's “Gallop apace” is remarkable because it contains the promise of both—it is purely erotic, without trace of the mysticism in which sex is mere symbol. And the chiastic formality, the mock-rhetorical reversals and substitutions of their parting aubade (III.v.), suggest not merely the reciprocity of their feelings but also the perspective of life, of jocund day, from which to take in his playful-serious “Come death, and welcome!” It is a parting of which it can be truly claimed that it is “not yet a breach but an expansion”; and the love which is “an interinanimation of two souls” because it is precisely not the “passion that wants darkness and triumphs in a transfiguring Death.” There is no naked sword between these lovers. Theirs is not a desire to die to the world but a most energetic desire to live in it, to survive crises and to have “all these woes … serve / For sweet discourses in our time to come” (III.v.54). And to this powerful complex of feelings their suffering stands in an almost tangential relation.

Their suffering is powerfully delineated. It is Romeo's despair at Friar Lawrence's cell; it is Juliet's horror as she contemplates the Friar's drug; and her greater horror as she contemplates her betrothal to Paris. It is Romeo's realizing his betrayal of Mercutio; it is Juliet realizing the Nurse's betrayal of her. It is Romeo driven to kill Paris, the “good gentle youth.” It is Juliet facing her father's fury.

Juliet's suffering is finely discriminated from Romeo's as is her suicide and indeed her experience of love. Love has its own devouring exclusiveness, its own ruthless priorities:

That “banished”, that one word “banished”,
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death
Was woe enough, if it had ended there;
Or, if sour woe delights in fellowship
And needly will be ranked with other griefs,
Why followed not, when she said “Tybalt's dead”,
Thy father, or thy mother, nay, or both,
Which modern lamentation might have moved?

(III.ii.119-126)

But what is a frantic probing of new and overwhelming experience in Juliet is a shocking violence of repudiation in Capulet's “hang, beg, starve, die in the street” (III.v.204). Essentially Juliet's suffering is the realization of loneliness and isolation. The nurse's repudiation (“Romeo's a dishclout to him”) of all that she believed understood between them, follows her father's and is the more painful as the relationship of confidante was the more intimate.

I think you are happy in this second match,
For it excels your first; or if it did not,
Your first is dead—or 'twere as good he were
As living here and you no use of him

(III.v.230-238)

undermines her confidence in every seeming friend so that to the fear naturally attending the taking of the drug is added a terrible suspicion of the Friar's motives. The poison speech is masterly in its rendering of horror enacted in imagination; the source of its great strength lies in the imaginative pressing to an issue of her knowledge that “my dismal scene I needs must act alone.” It is not of death or of being dead that she is afraid. She is afraid, of course, of a miscarriage of the plan; but her terror is for that moment when she may find herself imprisoned and alone with the appalling dead. What her imagination projects is an image of the ultimate aloneness, the maximum distance which can be travelled by a human being from the sustaining and comforting presence of his kind. That she is ready for this is a measure of her fidelity, not an indication that death is “the one kind of marriage that Eros was ever able to wish for.”

The height of Romeo's anguish is when he sees himself betrayer of his friend to death, and cries in self-reproach and loss of faith, “Thy beauty has made me effeminate” (III.i.114); and the lowest point of his degradation (as the Friar is quick to define it) is his total abandonment to despair at the news of his banishment. The relation therefore of their suffering to their love is the consequential relation of tragedy—the relation which will produce a catharsis of pity and terror. They are exposed to the evil and ignorance of the world, and involved in the evil and ignorance of the world, by virtue of the very gifts of imagination which mark them out as the vessels of tragic suffering.

From the wreckage tragedy depicts, something that is of the spirit survives to effect our reconciliation to the heart-shaking emotions of pity and terror. The scene of their death is the recognition of that survival. Their love has involved them in misfortune, guilt, deprivation, sorrow, and betrayal but it has survived—survived even Mercutio's death, and Tybalt's. It is affirmed by Romeo: “For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence full of light” (V.iii.85-86) and enacted with the most direct simplicity by Juliet: “O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after?” (V.iii.163-164). It is not true to the facts of the play to say that they are married only in death, for their marriage is consummated before Romeo leaves for Mantua. What one can say is that marriage forms their view of their relations with each other from the very first balcony scene, so that death itself is robbed of its sting, is even made welcome, under this figure. This is the effect of the conjugal and erotic imagery of their final scene. The Elizabethan pun contains manifold possibilities and Juliet's “This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die” (V.iii.175) is without doubt a metaphorical sexual act. But it is an act undertaken because she is in love with Romeo, not because she is in love with death. Nor is their death a sacrifice of love, as certain of the Christianizing critics would have it.¹⁰

Their death is an act of freedom and of fidelity; hence an affirmation of the reality, vitality, and value of their experience. Nor do we reconcile ourselves to their deaths because they have become immortal in literature whereas “they would have become old and worldly in time.”¹¹ We reconcile ourselves to our pity and terror because we have witnessed one complete cadence of the human spirit, enacted to the full, rendered entirely intelligible. What reconciles us is not what could possibly reconcile us in life. Only achieved art can so order and satisfy our appetencies, our perceptions, and our insights. Shakespeare's dramatic reticence in the context of boldly erotic imagery gives the scene the suggestiveness of an analogue: we glimpse something of the resources of tenderness and gaiety, freedom and self-possession, which lie in the power of an idealized sexual relation to discover. It is with precisely these higher possibilities that a romance tragedy will leave us. For the lovers, all losses are restored and sorrows end. The elders must make of it what sense they can.

Notes

1. “Even matters of chance seem most marvellous if there is an appearance of design as it were in them; as for instance the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys's death by falling down on him when a looker-on at a public spectacle”; The Poetics, trans. Bywater (London, 1920), p. 45.

2. F. Fergusson, “Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action,” in The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York, 1957), p. 116-117.

3. Variorum, p. 258.

4. Whiter, Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, 1794, p. 123.

5. Evans, “The Brevity of Friar Lawrence,” PMLA, LXV, 1950, has an interesting study of Romeo and Juliet in which he traces the patterns of unawareness which culminate in the universal bewilderment at the mouth of the tomb in Act V when the bodies of Paris, Romeo, and Juliet, bleeding though dead three days, are discovered.

6. Paul N. Siegel, SH. Q. 12, 1961, has drawn attention to the crude and unreconciled mixture of condemnation and glorification in the Elizabethan novella treatment of passionate love. Brooke's poem, which was Shakespeare's source, is of course a case in point.

7. M. M. Mahood, in her essay on “Word-Play in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare's Word-Play, 1957, confirms the notion of reflection at the points of intersection by finding the most word-play, and the most ambiguous word-play at these points. But the Friar's “O, so light a foot, Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint” (II. v. 16-17) for instance, she finds susceptible through its puns of interpretation in four different and incompatible ways (p. 26). I find it misleading to import into the Friar's attitudes what might at most have been subliminally present to Shakespeare's imagination. It is necessary to distinguish which of the meanings would be probable for the Friar, if we are not to have a new kind of higher-critical disintegration of the dramatis persona. Her view of the kissing sonnet as “social persiflage” to disguise their real feelings seems to suffer from a similar kind of improbability. The essay is reprinted in Shakespeare's Tragedies, ed. Lerner (London, 1963).

8. Caroline Spurgeon, “The Imagery of Romeo and Juliet” from Shakespeare's Imagery, 1935. Reprinted in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Dean (New York, 1961), p. 72.

9. Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (London, 1940), p. 17. There is a natural congruence between the Friar's view and the neo-Christian analysis of romantic passion of de Rougemont, who sees in the lovers' death “the one kind of marriage that Eros was ever able to wish for.” The Liebestod myth, of which, he claims, Romeo and Juliet is an instance:—

   The myth that has been agitating us for 800 years as spell, terror, or ideal is at one and the same time a passion sprung from dark nature, an energy excited by the mind, and a pre-established potentiality in search of the coercion that shall intensify it.

   (p. 23)

   It is interesting to note yet another version of the death-wish interpretation in the nineteenth-century critic Gervinus:

   In him (Romeo) a hidden fire burns with a dangerous flame; his slight forebodings are fulfilled, not because a blind chance causes them to be realised, but because his fatal propensity urges him to rash deeds; … We cannot accuse fate. … It is Romeo's tumultuous nature alone which exercises justice upon itself

   (Commentaries, p. 835)

   Gervinus's emphasis is of course upon moral psychology, but in all three cases, Friar Lawrence, Gervinus, and de Rougemont, there is an urgency of intent to locate the origin of evil in the play in the intensity of passion itself.

10. Notably Vyvyan, Shakespeare and the Rose of Love (London, 1960), and Ribner, “Then I denie you starres,” The English Renaissance Drama, ed. Bennett, Cargill, Hall (London, 1961).

11. Mahood, p. 25.