SOURCE: “‘We were born to die’: Romeo and Juliet,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1981, pp. 54-71.

[In the following essay, Carroll argues that the ending of Romeo and Juliet is announced at the beginning, and is repeatedly articulated in succeeding scenes. Pointing out significant deviations between the final scene of Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare's principal source—The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet—Carroll proposes that Shakespeare wanted to emphasize there is no escape from the tomb for the young lovers and that the only satisfactory means of memorializing their love is through dramatic representation.]

While Romeo and Juliet consummate their marriage offstage, their one night in the sheets of love is shaded by the ghostly presence of winding sheets. Tybalt's death hangs over Verona, as old Capulet says to Paris:

Look you, she lov'd her kinsman Tybalt dearly,
And so did I. Well, we were born to die.
’Tis very late, she'll not come down to-night.(1)

(III.iv.3-5)

Indeed she won't, for she is dying sexually above even as her father pronounces his platitudes and arranges her hasty marriage to Paris. Juliet governs her own comings and dyings to the end.

Capulet's sententious wisdom, bracketed between a bow to a dead loved one and transactions with a new suitor, reminds us of Romeo and Juliet's constant association of birth, love, and death, from the Nurse's proleptic obituary of Juliet's parallel, Susan (I.iii.18), through the image clusters of wombs, tombs, sex, and death, to the brittle beauty of Liebestod in the final scene. The ending of the play represents the consummation, in all senses, of Romeo and Juliet's love, and its inescapable location in the tomb powerfully focuses our attention on their claustrophobic isolation and triumph. The only “problem” the ending seems to have caused modern readers is whether or not it is “ironic” and, if so, to what extent. Perhaps the most extreme prosecutorial revision of the ending was quoted in Richard Levin's New Readings vs. Old Plays, in which the unnamed critic reported that his background reading left him “with one overriding impression: that the average audience of Romeo and Juliet would have regarded the behavior of the young lovers as deserving everything they got,”² including, presumably, a double suicide. Other ironic readings focus on the alleged inadequacy or “materialism” of the golden statues raised by the dead lovers' parents. In general, though, the ending of Romeo and Juliet has not provoked the kind of controversy that marks the ending of King Lear, for example. It seems, from one point of view, to be perfectly conventional and appropriate, and so it is, but I do not think we have yet fully understood why it is so.

I return for a moment to Capulet's commonplace that “we were born to die.” Similar sentiments are to be heard in other of the tragedies, but in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare goes to great lengths to stress the inevitability of Capulet's vision. Specifically, as many readers have pointed out, Romeo and Juliet contains allusions to, even as it embodies, a journey.³ Feste's song assures us that “journeys end in lovers meeting” (TN, II.iii.4), as they certainly do for Romeo and Juliet (with the suggestive pun meeting = mating), yet we are never allowed to forget that all journeys must end, and that the ending, both goal and foreclosure, determines the shape of the journey itself. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare investigates this teleological puzzle in which the lovers' foreknown end colors the nature of their journey, continually darkening our belief in their potential and actual happiness.

The very existence of the Prologue begins the shadowing, especially with its look toward a “fearful passage” (1. 9) and the eerie double grammar in which the “pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life” (1. 6), the journey and the suicide collapsed into the simultaneously transitive / intransitive verb. Nowhere but in Shakespeare could we find the journey and its end so economically and chillingly packaged. Romeo, as has often been pointed out, senses this fatality and frequently expresses it in similar terms:

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

(I.iv.106-13)

Thus the end or “consequence” ironically begins with the beginning (which is why it is “bitter”), the first breath initiating the expiration of the last. Romeo bravely urges on the seajourney of his fate, asking only that someone (“He”) at least direct his course, but he has yet to learn that there is no such thing as an “untimely death.”

Throughout the play we will be reminded of journeys and endings. Romeo will tell Juliet that “love” prompted his journey to her, a journey dangerous but potentially rewarding—like Drake's, for example:

I am no pilot, yet, wert thou as far
As that vast shore wash'd with the farthest sea,
I should adventure for such merchandise.

(II.ii.82-84)

The actual journey Romeo makes—to “sojourn in Mantua” (III.iii.169)—is not as far as the farthest sea, but might as well be, since he will never see Juliet alive (or awake) again. In a conceit as tedious as its speaker, Capulet takes Juliet's tears as the occasion on which to launch her metaphorical journey:

                                        In one little body
Thou counterfeits a bark, a sea, a wind:
For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,
Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is,
Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs,
Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,
Without a sudden calm, will overset
Thy tempest-tossed body.

(III.v.130-37)

The irony of Capulet's fatuous prophecy becomes more evident when Juliet launches herself on an even riskier course of action by taking both the Friar's advice and his potion, intending to join Romeo later in Mantua. When Juliet's “dead” body is discovered, her mother's lament borrows a now familiar trope: “Most miserable hour that e'er time saw / In lasting labor of his pilgrimage!” (IV.v.44-45). The pilgrimage of time ought never to be a surprise, but it always is. Capulet recapitulates the play's paradox of beginnings and endings when he tells Paris that Death has “lain with thy wife. There she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowered by him” (IV.v.36-37). Youth, defloration, death: they turn out to be the same thing, even verbally, as a single pun compresses the beginning, fulfillment, and end of life into a single sour irony. Perhaps the lovers are not entirely pretending when, after their one night together, they cannot agree on whether it is day or night, nightingale or lark, “more light and light” or “more dark and dark” (III.v.36). In fact, the play continually suggests that such distinctions are really identities.

“In lasting labor of his pilgrimage”—Lady Capulet's allusion—deepens the idea of the journey by suggesting the longest journey, the pilgrimage of earthly life. Shakespeare has hinted at this more resonant metaphor earlier, in the famous sonnet of Romeo and Juliet's first meeting:

Romeo.
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet.
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this:
For saints have hands that pilgrims'
hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

(I.v.93-100)

This is kissing by the book, to be sure, but even the audience can scarcely anticipate the rough touch of death these young pilgrims will finally experience in the ultimate shrine of love. However innocently the pilgrimage is invoked here, Shakespeare clearly knew the word's root and medieval meaning.⁴

Something more than image-clusters and iterated verbal signs points to a pilgrimage in Romeo and Juliet, however. In their brief moment on the stage, Romeo and Juliet recapitulate the emblematic moments of all human life—beginning, middle, and end—making the structure and movement of the play seem to follow the main lines of the ultimate pilgrimage plot, Everyman, or even more to the point, Lusty Juvėntus. I am not suggesting that Shakespeare was consciously imitating either of these plays, though the evidence for his knowledge of the Morality tradition has long been documented, and several other plays have been shown to have a “deep structure” derived from the typical Morality plot.⁵ What I want to suggest here, instead, is that Romeo and Juliet becomes far more powerful when we recognize the deepest analogy it offers.

Romeo and Juliet are rarely alone on the stage, as many readers have noted. They are almost always entangled in family webs of one sort or another, the feud being the largest one, surrounded by well-meaning but interfering authority figures who guide and misguide their lives. On three well-chosen occasions, however, Shakespeare isolates his lovers to focus our understanding of their life. The first of these moments, in the balcony scene, locates us in familiar emblematic geography—in the hortus conclusus of Capulet's walled orchard.⁶ As Rosalie Colie has noted about this moment, “The virgin is, and is in, a walled garden: the walls of that garden are to be breached by a true lover, as Romeo leaps into the orchard.”⁷ As is usual for the lovers, though, the outside world intrudes soon enough, this time in the form of the Nurse's persistent voice offstage. Their physical positions on the stage are also significant: Romeo below, Juliet above.

The second scene of isolation is predictable—the bedroom, or the balcony just outside it, after the night of consummation. Moreover, in contrast to his source Arthur Brooke, Shakespeare gives the lovers only this single night together, heightening the pathos and incidentally isolating the moment even further. Physically, this seems to be the same “upper station” at which Juliet appeared earlier.⁸ But even this lovely aubade is darkened by death, and Romeo leaves with the kind of line that he might speak in the final scene in the tomb: “Farewell, farewell! One kiss, and I'll descend” (III.v.42). The lovers' physical positions—first both above, then one descending—seem emblematic again. Juliet follows Romeo's descent in a fearful imagining:

O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.

(III.v.54-56)

Romeo later relates an ironic inversion of this vision, just before he hears of Juliet's “death”:

… all this day an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead—
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!—
And breath'd such life with kisses in my lips
That I reviv'd and was an emperor.

(V.i.4-9)

This romance fantasy of exaltation and rebirth is not only youthful wishing but also the fairy-tale fulfillment which the play is designed to counteract. The audience should know, even if Romeo does not, that what goes up must come down. Romeo's descent from the momentary elevation of Act III, Scene v is permanent. Once again, too, it is the Nurse who has interrupted the lovers' idyll.

The third moment in which Romeo and Juliet are alone together on stage is of course the final scene in the tomb. Much has been written about this scene as the inevitable completion of the tomb-womb theme, the logical result of the blood feud in Verona, and as a powerfully dramatic moment in its own right. I will examine the scene in more detail shortly. I would like now to observe its place in a line of images: from garden through bedroom to tomb, from courtship through sexual completion to death. These are the Three Ages of Man, as it were, the major emblematic moments in the pilgrimage of earthly life. Even the stage blocking reflects this movement: the lovers separated, one below and one above; the lovers united above, till one descends; and the lovers united below, forever.

These three moments provide a linear and irreversible chronological sequence, finally emblematic of the earthly pilgrimage. They are also all the same moment. Each scene takes place at night, each contains similar language and double-entendres, each emphasizes the isolation of the lovers. Moreover, each scene represents a dream displacement of female sexuality, from the walled garden and the actual marital bed to Romeo's explicit references at the tomb to the “womb of death” (V.iii.45) and the “palace of dim night” (V.iii.107) where “Death is amorous” (V.iii.103) and has become Romeo's rival. For once, the lovers will not be interrupted before they can complete their making of love and death: Romeo: “Thus with a kiss I die” (V.iii.120); and Juliet: “O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (V.iii.170).

Several other incidents in the final act increase this momentum towards mortality. In “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” Brooke alludes to an apothecary, for example, from whom Romeus can buy poison, but Shakespeare gives his apothecary a most unusual appearance and inventory:⁹

                    meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones;
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff'd, and other skins
Of ill-shap'd fishes, and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses
Were thinly scattered, to make up a show.

(V.i.40-48)

Clearly the agent of dismemberment and death, the cadaverous apothecary anticipates later merchants of mortality like the gravedigger in Hamlet or the country clown in Antony and Cleopatra.¹⁰ The random assortment of corpses, skins, and musty seeds reminds us also of the tomb itself, both as Juliet imagines it (in IV.iii) and as Romeo finds it (in V.iii). Thus the cause and effect of death are linked together, as they also are in the Apothecary's report to Romeo that the penalty of selling death is in fact death (ll. 66-67).

In this speech, the iconography of death is heard but not seen. As we move toward the death-embrace in the tomb, Shakespeare similarly works to displace the visual, to remove part of the play from a strictly dramatic focus, and direct us towards other kinds of understanding. This process withdraws Romeo and Juliet from the temporal confinement of the drama proper and lifts the lovers toward other realms. Romeo's description of the Apothecary and his shop, not present in Brooke, begins the process. The stuffed animals, finally, also anticipate the lovers' memorialization in the form of statues.

Shakespeare also deletes from Brooke the few intimations of Romeo's vanity, as when he fantasizes “that if nere unto her he offered up his breath, / That then an hundred thousand parts more glorious were his death” (ll. 2553-54), or when he admires his own actions:

What Epitaph more worth, or halfe so excellent,
To consecrate my memorye, could any man invente,
As this, our mutuell, and our piteous sacrifice
Of lyfe, set light for love.

(ll. 2649-52)

Shakespeare has none of this, but dramatizes instead a single-minded drive in Romeo to rejoin Juliet with a minimum of meditation, just as Antony seeks Cleopatra once he has heard of her “death.” Romeo's rhetoric itself changes with the anticipation of death: he expects that the poison will work so “that the life-weary taker may fall dead” (V.i.62). This phrasal tmesis, of the weary life-taker, shows that the taker of the poison knows the sort of gap he will soon have to leap. The poison, he continues, will work as quickly as “hasty powder fir'd” hurries from the “fatal cannon's womb” (ll. 64, 65). All three phrases once again compress cause and effect, beginning and ending. Everything in the play, it seems, works to isolate the lovers in both love and death.

The abandonment at the edge of death makes the suicides almost unbearably pathetic. But the loss of all worldly advisors at the lip of the grave ought also to seem a familiar dramatic moment. Just as Everyman, for example, is abandoned by Fellowship, Kindred, Goods, Beauty, Discretion, and so on, and accompanied into the grave only by Good-Deeds, so Romeo and Juliet are progressively and cruelly abandoned by their worldly advisors, those meddling adults who tell them how to live but cannot help them die. These young lovers' lives may end in tragedy unless they receive proper counsel, as Montague says about Romeo's initial melancholy: “Black and portendous must this humor prove, / Unless good counsel may the cause remove” (I.i.141-42). For now, he continues, Romeo is “his own affections' counsellor” (I.i.147), but his affections cannot be easily governed, as we see. Both Romeo and Juliet seek desperately for counsel throughout the play, for a worldly guide on the vast pilgrimage.¹¹ Mother, father, friends, nurse, priest—all will fail and abandon them.

The play makes us believe a contradiction, that the lovers are self-sufficient but that they also need guidance and advice. The self-sufficiency is suggested in those few scenes where they exist alone on the stage and together seem all in all, their own affections' counselors. In the balcony scene, Juliet wonders who has spoken to her: “What man art thou that thus bescreen'd in night / So stumblest on my counsel?” (II.ii.52-53). Her counsel is with herself now, though she will soon seek the aid of the Friar, ironically already present in the verb “stumblest.” As the lovers thrill to their first discoveries of love, their rhetoric suggests the fulfillment of a fragile fantasy. Romeo has arrived in the walled garden, he tells us: “With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls, / For stony limits cannot hold love out” (II.ii.66-67). Still, the stony limits of the world, not to mention the tomb, soon require them to find worldly advice. For now, hermetically sealed off, they guide their own destinies:

Juliet.
By whose direction foundst thou out this place?
Romeo.
By love, that first did prompt me to inquire;
He lent me counsel, and I lent him eyes.
I am no pilot, yet, wert thou as far
As that vast shore wash'd with the farthest sea,
I should adventure for such merchandise.

(II.ii.79-84)

Every parent eventually seems a senex iratus, no doubt. Certainly the Capulets and Montagues vary little from the stereotypical blocking figures of New Comedy. The young lovers turn instead to the equally sexless but more sympathetic Nurse and Friar for help. Even Lady Capulet bids the Nurse stay and “hear our counsel” (I.iii.9). These usages of the word merely prepare for the far more urgent and dangerous counsel required after Tybalt's death. When the Friar proposes that Romeo journey to Mantua, the Nurse is thrilled, in a speech hedged with irony: “O Lord, I could have stay'd here all the night / To hear good counsel. O, what learning is!” (III.iii.159-60). But the Nurse fails signally when Juliet asks her how she can avoid the calamity of marrying Paris: “Comfort me, counsel me! … Some comfort, nurse” (III.v.208, 212). Worldly Wisdom, as it usually does, errs badly, for the Nurse recommends that Juliet marry Paris, incidentally committing bigamy, because all is lost and besides “Romeo's a dishclout to him” (III.v.219). Juliet is stunned, as we all are—“Speak'st thou from thy heart?” (1. 226)—and sarcastically thanks her: “Well, thou hast comforted me marvelous much” (1. 230). Morally, the Nurse has abandoned Juliet, and they can never be intimate again. As the Nurse leaves the stage, Juliet emotionally turns from her forever:

Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!
Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn,
Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue
Which she hath prais'd him with above compare
So many thousand times? Go, counselor,
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain.
I'll to the friar to know his remedy;
If all else fail, myself have power to die.

(III.v.235-42)

Turning from the Nurse's too-worldly wisdom to the Friar's religious perspective will not make any ultimate difference, but the lovers are too young to go it alone. We hear in the ominous rhyme remedy-die the logical outcome of worldly counsel in this play, and we hear again the paradox of circular identity in which beginnings are endings and solutions are dissolutions.

Juliet will find in the Friar guidance more moral but also more dangerous. The terminology of Juliet's supplication remains the same:

Therefore, out of thy long-experienc'd time,
Give me some present counsel, or, behold,
’Twixt my extremes and me this bloody knife
Shall play the umpeer. …

(IV.i.60-63)

Her petition ends with the ominously recurrent pun, “I long to die, / If what thou speak'st speak not of remedy” (IV.i.66-67). The Friar's advice is well-meant but desperate, “a thing like death” (IV.i.74). Juliet must begin to enact her fate alone, for with Romeo banished, she sends her mother and the Nurse away before she drinks the potion—“Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again” (IV.iii.14)—though she once tries to call the Nurse back “to comfort me” (1. 17). But “My dismal scene I needs must act alone” (1. 19). Among the most terrible things she imagines, as she takes the potion, is her isolation in the womb of death, “stifled in the vault,” before Romeo comes “to redeem me” (1. 32). Redemption from the tomb represents everyone's deepest desire, but it won't come to pass here. As with Everyman, the imagination of death constitutes the final isolation.

The portents and emblems around the final scene, then, are inevitable and severe. All earthly life has been an ironic rehearsal of this moment. The lovers, it seems, have always slept in “this palace of dim night.” The message sent to Romeo has failed because of the plague; Romeo has killed his rival and sent away his servant; Friar Lawrence stumbles over graves. What more could happen? It is the end of the road, the consummation of the pilgrimage, and Romeo knows it:

                                        O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

(V.iii.109-12)

Romeo lives a lifetime in a few days. Like a beast of burden after a long day, this abandoned child, who has presciently told us “I am no pilot” (II.ii.82), now crosses the bar and brings his journey to an end:

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!
Here's to my love! [Drinks.]

(V.iii. 116-19)

The bravery these children reveal as they seal “a dateless bargain to engrossing death” (1. 115) thrills even the most jaded among us, in part because Shakespeare contrives to isolate them so completely. At the very last moment, the scene spectrally illuminating “grubs and eyeless skulls” (1. 126), Juliet awakens, still looking towards the “comfortable friar” (1. 148) for counsel and help. But this last worldly advisor, after offering to “dispose” of Juliet in a nunnery, inexplicably abandons her (“I dare no longer stay”—1. 159), and Juliet's dismissal of him echoes her earlier farewell to the Nurse: “Go get thee hence, for I will not away” (1. 160). Now they are alone, together, forever. Death is a relief.

The sense of closure at the end of Romeo and Juliet overwhelms us. Everything—theme, image, and structure—has led to this point in the tomb. Moreover, because the play has insisted on the identity of beginnings and endings, we are under a severe obligation to attend to the play's own ending as closely as possible. Here I particularly want to invoke the ways in which Shakespeare's ending deviates from that of Brooke's poem, for the deviations become quite frequent and significant in the final act. We have already seen Shakespeare's addition to the apothecary; even more strikingly, Brooke's Paris does not appear to be killed in the final scene, as he does in Shakespeare. But most significantly, Shakespeare rejects Brooke's religious orthodoxy altogether. This is most surprising, considering the language Brooke employs. Of course, Shakespeare frequently seems to avoid explicit religious declarations, while Brooke's Romeus, when he feels the poison working, makes a speech that seems perfectly in keeping with the iterative imagery of womb-tomb and descent-ascent we have seen in Romeo and Juliet:

Lord Christ, that so to raunsome me descendedst long agoe
Out of thy fathers bosome, and in the virgins
wombe
Didst put on flesh, Oh let my plaint out of this hollow toombe,
Perce through the ayre. …

(ll. 2674-77)

This spiritual analogy, with its intimations of redemption, suggests the survival of Romeus in another time. But Shakespeare prefers to work for pathos in the final scene, and wants to emphasize loss rather than redemption. Therefore he does not reach for the spiritual analogy, just as he also passes up another clenching image in Juliet's last words:

O welcome death (quoth she) end of unhappines,
That also art beginning of assured happines;
.....… our parted sprites, from light that we see here,
In place of endlesse light and blisse, may ever live yfere.

(ll. 2773-74, 2787-88)

The end that is a beginning that is in fact endless—the play insists on this point elsewhere, but Shakespeare here rejects the too-easy final connection, the promise of a spiritual “endlesse light,” and he makes his young lovers (by contrast with Brooke's) unreflective. Indeed, Juliet has no time to think, while Romeo's speech is studded with images of linear completion and closure: the “doors of breath” will be sealed, the journey completed (or shipwrecked), the everlasting rest achieved. No beginnings here, no final emblem of hope.

No final emblem of hope, in fact, is necessary or even possible. As we have seen, the play everywhere demonstrates that this last stage has always been present, that the love of Romeo and Juliet already contains its own beginning and end. Since death is a necessary part of their love, then it is an end that is endless. The lovers do not need any final hope, and the audience is denied a visibly convincing one—not out of a cynical or ironic motive, I think, but because Shakespeare is working towards something far more difficult, something literally un-thinkable: Romeo and Juliet are absolutely dead, but they have achieved the endless end.

The Friar's speech of self-defense is longer in Brooke (77 lines, with yet further paraphrases) than in Shakespeare (40 lines), but the real difference is in where the speech is delivered. In Shakespeare, the Friar and the corpses remain in the tomb for the rest of the play. But in Brooke,

The prince did straight ordaine, the corses that wer founde
Should be set forth upon a stage, hye raysed from the grounde,
Right in the selfe same fourme, (shewde forth to all mens sight)
That in the hollow valt they had been found that other night.

(ll. 2817-20)

The Friar must join them, and justify himself:

The holy fryer now, and reverent by his age,
In great reproche set to the shew upon the open stage,
(A thing that ill beseemde a man of silver heares).

(ll. 2825-27)

“Upon a stage”? How could Shakespeare have resisted it, especially when we see the heroes and heroines of later tragedies so frequently associated with a stage? The theatrical metaphor, as many readers have noted, almost comes to be expected at or near the end of the tragedies: Hamlet speaks to the “audience to this act” (V.ii.335) and his corpse is to be borne “like a soldier to the stage” (V.ii.396); and rather than allowing rude mechanicals to stage her story, Cleopatra acts her own death—“perform'd the dreaded act” (V.ii.331), as Dolabella says. The theatrical metaphor is not inevitable, of course, but it is so available here. Why not use it?

The staging of Brooke's ending would have become openly emblematic, moreover, as the lovers ascend once more, and to a stage at that. But this seems to be precisely why Shakespeare did not adopt the idea, for he wants to keep the lovers in the tomb. There is no escape, not through pious orthodoxy, not through some convenient eternizing self-consciousness, and certainly not through a play. In fact, the play becomes steadily less “dramatic,” less obviously a play. Perhaps the most important thing about the Friar's speech is not what it says, for we have all seen what it recounts, but the fact that it is spoken at all. It translates the dramatic action of the play into another form—into narrative, into oratory.¹² The speech is conspicuously unnecessary in terms of the plot; though the Friar must exonerate himself, he is under much greater suspicion in Brooke. No, Shakespeare turns down the clenching allusions to new beginnings and the inevitable stage metaphor so that there may be no hint, no suggestion of a rebirth, religious or dramatic. He insists on the lovers' end. And Shakespeare further removes us from the lovers by retaining the Friar's long speech. Yet even here, Shakespeare deviates radically from Brooke. Brooke's Friar is unremittingly pious, marking his own guilt, looking forward to his own end, invoking the pilgrimage motif, anticipating his “great accompt, which no man else for me shall undertake … before the judgement seate of everlasting powre” (ll. 2852, 2854). Naturally, Brooke's Friar invokes Christ and his pity as well, while Shakespeare's Friar makes none of these gestures. Instead, he tells us the plot again, a “tedious tale” (V.iii.230) for the audience if not the characters. To tell us what we have seen is not only necessarily to misrepresent what we have seen, but to alter its very nature. Shakespeare eliminates the piety of Brooke's Friar, eliminates the more elaborate self-justification, takes him off the stage, and simply makes him tell the plot. Since we have seen the play, we can judge how well the Friar tells it, and we find his story accurate but not the truth. His version of this story is no doubt more faithful to fact than Horatio's condensation of Hamlet's story, but it fails in all sorts of ways. Shakespeare's Friar removes the story of Romeo and Juliet from the life of drama, in short, but we remain in the tomb, with Romeo and Juliet, their bodies lying before us in an embrace. The lovers are being transfigured, all right, but from drama into myth, from action into stasis. We shall finally see their petrifaction, as statues, to complete the movement.

The presence of an “inquest” after the protagonists' death recurs in many of the tragedies—the explanation of Cleopatra's suicide, the entrance and declaration of Fortinbras. The process of explanation begins to “withdraw” us from the tragic world. We meet the surviving figure of “order,” and we sense the inadequacy of the world that survives.¹³ In Romeo and Juliet, the inquest begins very early in the final scene, and has somewhat different aims, I think. We withdraw not only from the lovers, but from drama itself. Shakespeare's final deviation from Brooke reemphasizes this point. Brooke's narrator, not the characters, reports the memorialization of the lovers:

And lest that length of time might from our myndes remove
The memory of so perfect, sound, and so approved love,
The bodies dead removed from vaulte where they did dye,
In stately tombe, on pillers great, of marble rayse they hye.
On every syde above, were set and eke beneath,
Great store of cunning Epitaphes, in honor of theyr death.

(ll. 3011-16)

Thus the actual bodies are elevated and memorialized, and written inscriptions offered, while in Shakespeare a far more controversial proposal is made:

Montague.
But I can give thee more,
For I will raise her statue in pure gold,
That whiles Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.
Capulet.
As rich shall Romeo's by his lady's lie,
Poor sacrifices of our enmity!

(V.iii.298-304)

Of the actual bodies, which still lie before us on the stage (along with those of Paris and Tybalt), there is no mention. They have already ceased to exist, dramatically speaking, because they cannot move. They have become icons, a complex emblematic tableau which is being framed and distanced by the minute. Their story has been transmuted into an incomplete and passionless narrative, their bodies ignored while representations of their bodies are measured and discussed. This ending shows Shakespeare uncannily aware of the possibilities and limitations of representation itself.

Rosalie Colie argues that in the statues the “lovers are preserved in a nearly Ovidian way, not as plants, but in an ecphrasis, as memorial statues exemplifying a specific lesson to future generations.”¹⁴ This is a useful observation, but it elides the real difference: in Ovid's version of Pyramus and Thisby, the plants live on, forever, stained with and therefore bearing the lovers' blood. But statues cannot breathe, not until The Winter's Tale in any case. Shakespeare insists on the gap between bodies and statues, rather than an Ovidian continuity. James L. Calderwood offers by far the most elaborate explanation of the statues. For him, they embody the play's chief values, public and private:

If the lovers' nominalistic conception of speech implies a verbal purity bordering on nonspeech, here in the silence of the statues is that stillness; and if their love has aspired to a lyric stasis, here too in the fixity of plastic form is that stillness. But by being publicly available—representing the lovers and their value but representing them for the Veronese audience—the statues surpass the aspirations and expressive aims of the lovers. The communicative gap between the private secret love and the social order oblivious to the existence of that love is bridged—and this seems the major significance of the statues—by artistic form.¹⁵

This is very good, but perhaps it is too good. It expands upon a slender reference and pictures something we don't even see. The statue scene in The Winter's Tale, or even the songs at the end of Love's Labour's Lost, sum up their plays more convincingly. Nor am I certain that “stillness” and “stasis” are virtues quite so unmixed.

Both Colie and Calderwood strain for a “positive” reading of the end, which is in fact a welcome gesture after so many recent ironic readings.¹⁶ I also find in the statues, and especially their golden nature, an eternizing gesture. But what do the statues actually eternize? Certainly not the love of Romeo and Juliet. Colie sees the statues representing “a specific lesson to future generations,” though it is hard to imagine what that “lesson” could be; and Calderwood believes that some “communicative gap” between the secret love and the social order will be bridged. But this is exactly what will not happen: the gap is in fact established by the statues. The characters in the play offer their own “positive” ending, and for them, it is sufficient, or as much as they can manage: an eternal memory to the resolution of their feud and to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but not to their love. One can move beyond this “positive” reading of the end without embracing an entirely “ironic” revisionist reading. For nothing could memorialize their love. It achieves its own perfection. While the others talk and statues are promised, the lovers' bodies continue to lie before us on the stage, locked in an embrace of permanence. The bodies render everything else unnecessary, and impossible.

In the final scenes of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare alters the very nature of the theatrical experience to produce quite a different kind of experience. The reference to the statues comes at the end of a sequence of representations, and therefore withdrawals—moments in which the lovers' vital nature fades away as they are transfigured and slowly petrified. From life to death, from drama to icon, from flesh to metal—the ending of the play not only confirms Capulet's maxim that “we were born to die,” but also suggests that no representation of their love, other than drama, could satisfy. The statues can represent the lovers not as a single identity—their love—but only as separate entities—their bodies, hence their deaths. The play ends with the bodies still before us, the sun refusing to rise (for the final descent has been final), the drama of their love left even further behind; they end as they began, the subjects of a rhyming epigram, a final closed representation of their “story,” a last attempt to represent the endless end: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

Notes

1. All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Hereafter cited in the text.

2. Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 152. In The Music of the Close (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1978), Walter C. Foreman, Jr., says very little about the end of Romeo and Juliet.

3. The motif of the journey has frequently been discussed, beginning I believe with Moody Prior, The Language of Tragedy (1947; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 69-70. See also the remarks of James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), pp. 109-10. The best comment on the journey as an element of tragic structure is by Maynard Mack, “The Jacobean Shakespeare,” Jacobean Theater, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (1960; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1967), pp. 35-38.

4. Cf. AYL: “how brief the life of man / Runs his erring pilgrimage” (III.ii.129-30); Lr: “and from first to last / Told him our pilgrimage” (V.iii.196-97); and 1H4: “pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings” (I.ii.126).

5. For a famous example, see Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958); also Edmund Creeth, Mankynde in Shakespeare (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976). Alan C. Dessen has recently reviewed the issue in “Homilies and Anomalies: The Legacy of the Morality Play to the Age of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 243-58. For a recent dissenting view, see John Wasson, “The Morality Play: Ancestor of Elizabethan Drama?” Comparative Drama, 13 (1979), 210-21. Wasson argues that folk plays and miracle plays are more likely ancestors.

6. In Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), Harley Granville-Barker, describes the probable staging of this scene (II, 306).

7. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 145.

8. In “The Use of the Upper Stage in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 5 (1954), Richard Hosley describes these moments. He shows as well that only those scenes require the upper station; thus the final tomb scene would have been below, on the main stage with perhaps some use of the discovery space.

9. In Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), 278-83, Geoffrey Bullough summarizes the major points of comparison. Quotations from Brooke, hereafter cited in the text, are from this edition.

10. Perhaps Dickens was recalling the apothecary in his description of Mr. Venus' shop in Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), where we find “human warious” as well as “Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird” (I, vii).

11. As one of its definitions of “counsel,” the OED records: “One of the Advisory declarations of Christ and the apostles, in mediaeval theology reckoned as twelve, which are considered not to be universally binding, but to be given as a means of attaining greater moral perfection.” The word recurs through many Morality plays, especially The Interlude of Youth and Tide Tarrieth No Man. In Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Worldly Man admits, “By my truth, me thinks I begin to war sick. / In sending away my counsellor I was somewhat too quick” (ll. 1219-20) (English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes, ed. Edgar T. Schell and J. D. Shuchter [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969]). In several plays, such as Horestes and Cambises, one of the allegorical figures is actually named Counsel. In Lusty Juventus, the central figure of virtue is Good Counsaill, and the prologue explains “in this interlude by youth you shall see plain, / From his lust by Good Counsel brought to godly conversation” ( The Dramatic Writings of Richard Wever and Thomas Ingelend, ed. John S. Farmer [1905; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966], p. 3.)

12. Granville-Barker justifies the Friar's story “because the play's true end is less in the death of the star-crossed lovers than in the burying of their parents' strife” (II, 323), a reading which seems to me quite wrong. Clifford Leech, however, says that the speech “is surely an indication of an ultimate withdrawal from the tragic: the speech is too much like a preacher's resumé of the events on which a moral lesson will be based,” in “The Moral Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,” English Renaissance Drama, ed. Standish Henning et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976), p. 70.

13. Cf. Mack and Foreman, passim.

14. Colie, p. 146.

15. Calderwood, p. 117.

16. Leech finds it “difficult for us to get interested in these statues, or to take much joy in the feud's ending” (p. 71), and also points out the “curious ambivalence in the fact that the statues are golden” (p. 172, n. 15), since Romeo equates gold with poison earlier (V.i.80). I am greatly indebted to my colleague Stuart H. Johnson for helping me with this final section.