SOURCE: “Shakespeare, Hypnos, and Thanatos: Romeo and Juliet in the Space of Myth,” in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, edited by Jay Halio, University of Delaware Press, 1995, pp. 37-48.

[In the essay below, Maguin calls attention to parallels between Romeo and Juliet and the classical legend of Psyche and Cupid, which, like the play, conflates sleep, death, and the allure of love and suicide.]

Proverbial wisdom records that sleep is the image of his brother—or, as the Elizabethans put it, his “cousin”—death. Such utterances hark back to classical myth and folklore that make Hypnos, or Sleep, and Thanatos, or Death, two fatherless sons of that primitive, complex, and awesome divinity Nyx, or Night. Let me first emphasize the dynamics of the proverbial phrase. The model is Death, not Sleep. Sleep is a younger sibling, patterned on Death, like him in looks. A dictionary of proverbs is a wonderful storehouse of dominant associations and a measurement of significant imbalances in polar associations. It takes more than a popular mind—the instinctive intelligence of a majority of people, irrespective of class and culture—to try and correct the proverbially stated imbalance in the Sleep-Death association; rather, it takes a rhetorically trained mind used to a strategy of subversion of the norm, inclined to poetic difference, and above all guided by hope, desirous of assuaging major existential fears.

Such a mind is ready to cast back in the teeth of well-established proverbs that it is death which is like sleep rather than the opposite. Sleep becomes through wishful thinking the elder and the model. Death is nothing but the ultimate form of sleep, a sleep eternal. In that utopia against anguish, The Tempest, which Shakespeare produced, unwittingly no doubt, as a supreme fruit of his occupation as playwright general and chief enchanter of the English kingdom, Prospero describes the dissolution of his magic theater, actors and set alike, after the fashion of fleeting clouds and establishes the parallel with our own experience:

                                                                                          We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(4.1.156-58)

Such an attitude is coherent with the magician's epicurean leanings and the play's pagan context. Some eleven or twelve years earlier, in terms of the chronology of Shakespeare's dramatic composition, Hamlet, who has studied at Wittenburg, tries to philosophize on the same lines with markedly different results:

                                                                                                    To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
.....… who would fardels bear,
.....But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

(3.1.61 … 81)

In a justly celebrated article entitled “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem,”¹ C. S. Lewis calls attention to the fact that one should distinguish between the fear of dying and the fear of being dead. These two feelings are usually amalgamated into that ambiguous phrasing: “the fear of death.” This could justly be said to cover all fearful human reactions to the daunting allegorical figure wielding the hour glass and the scythe and compelling the cohorts of humanity from pope and emperor as well as the perkiest lover and lass, down to the last beggar to join its dance. Everybody can call to mind the gruesome frescoes on the walls of the great European churchyards or Ingmar Bergman's haunting shot of the skeletal figure dragging the human characters after it against the skyline at the end of The Seventh Seal.² Yet the fear of dying focuses upon the moment of the passage from life towards a new condition of being or nonbeing, while the fear of being dead begs forms of survival and awareness in conditions either unknown or conjecturally hideous.

The latter have often to do with the most radical nightmare of all, which is the dread of premature burial. The living experience of the world of the dead runs the whole gamut from momentary visions of dead friends or relatives—like Achilles' dream of Patroclus (Iliad 23.1-107; ninth-century b.c.) to Orpheus's or Aeneas's descent into Hades (Aeneid 6.236-901; first-century b.c.) or again Dante's in The Divine Comedy (“Inferno”; early fourteenth-century) to Graham Greene's story “The Second Death” (1929) marking his conversion to Roman Catholicism to Edgar Allan Poe's tale “The Premature Burial” (1844) and to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), together with a whole train of printed fiction and films on the theme of the undead like Plague of the Zombies (1965)³ or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978),⁴ those classics of the fantastic genre in cinema.

Hamlet's statement that death is a country “from whose bourn / No traveller returns” is but seemingly contradictory with one event of the dramatic action, namely his meeting with the ghost of his father at the end of the first act. Here is one traveler who did return to tell the story of his death, but he did desist from any detailed portrait of Purgatory where his soul sojourns.⁵ The ghost's preterition, however, is vivid enough to discourage anybody from tasting the like of the tortures he glosses over. Also the ghost's return is but a brief nocturnal visitation. He is in no acceptable sense of the phrase restored to the world of the living.

Composed some four or five years before Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet (1595-96) contains a striking account by Juliet of the fear of the grave. Friar Laurence, who has married her in secret to Romeo, has prepared a drug to save her from the sin of bigamy. The drug will make her appear dead in the eyes of her family on the day of her officially arranged wedding with Count Paris:

What if it be a poison which the Friar
Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is. And yet methinks it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
How if, when I am laid in the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? There's a fearful point!
Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night
Together with the terror of the place,
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle
Where for this many hundred years the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd,
Where bloody Tybalt yet but green in earth
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort—
Alack, alack! Is it not like that I
So early waking, what with the loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad—
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environèd with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefathers' joints,
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,
And in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone
As with a club dash out my desperate brains?
O look, methinks I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point! Stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, here's drink! I drink to thee!

(4.3.24-58)

Here is a perfect tableau of the conversion from an artificially induced sleep to a waking state and then to death. Juliet's fantasies are, sensorially speaking, aural and olfactory. The smell of rotting carcasses is no longer an everyday experience in Western societies. It was very much part of the scene in an age when bodies were still being buried within churches or hastily buried in common graves in times of epidemics. For those who have known it, this experience of the smell of death is comparable to an insidious contamination. Juliet's monstrous imaginings of what she might do in the grave if her reason turned have undertones of cannibalism with the emphasis on the “foul mouth” of the grave and the deadly play with human bones. They are also colored with necrophilia as she sees herself embracing the festering body of Tybalt. Later in the play, when Romeo breaks into Juliet's tomb, the cannibalistic imagery will reappear in his address to the monument:

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

(5.3.45-48)

The successive apostrophes equate the destructive digestive organ with the life-giving one, the stomach with the uterus, the latter being deviated from its natural function to the opposite, according to the grim, mysogynist deconstruction of the woman's function by the medieval theologians who asserted that far from giving life she merely passed death on to her children as the inherited penalty for her original sin.⁶ Being dead is likened to “a progress through the guts of a beggar”—here beggarly death himself—as Hamlet tells King Claudius in his fable of the king eaten by the worm eaten by the fish eaten by the beggar.⁷

In the pas de deux danced by Hypnos and Thanatos in Shakespeare's drama, Romeo and Juliet plays a singular part inasmuch as the plot comes tantalizingly close to that of the greatest classical myths on sleep, death, and love—the myth of Endymion⁸ and the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Psyche, the name in Greek for the soul, is also the name of the protagonist of a tale reported by Apuleius in The Golden Ass or Metamorphose (books 4 to 6).⁹ She is the youngest daughter of a king and her beauty is exceptional, yet, unlike her two sisters, she cannot find a husband. Her beauty frightens men away. She becomes the object of a cult and people desert for her sake the altars of Aphrodite, who grows jealous of her. Psyche's father asks advice from the oracle, who answers that the girl should be abandoned on top of a rocky mountain where a dreadful monster will come to take her away. The father complies with the oracle's demand, and Psyche, alone and heartbroken on the rock, suddenly feels a gentle wind lifting her down the mountain face. She reaches a deep grassy valley and falls asleep, exhausted. Upon waking she finds herself in the garden of a beautiful palace, where the voices of invisible servants guide her about. At night she feels a presence close to her. It is her husband, who warns her that she may not see him. She lives for some time in this fashion—alone in the day, joined at night by her husband, who does not feel monstrous at all. Against her husband's wish, Psyche obtains permission to be visited by her sisters. They become immediately jealous of Psyche's wealth and happiness and do their best to make her suspicious of the supposedly monstrous husband whom she has never seen. They prevail at last, and following their advice she conceals a light in the chamber. She lights it when her husband is asleep and discovers that he is none other than Cupid, the god of love. In her amazement she allows a drop of boiling oil to fall and burn the sleeper. Cupid wakes up, and as he had threatened, deserts Psyche, leaving her heartbroken. She wanders, pursued by the wrath of Aphrodite, who subjects her to ordeals that tax her patience and strength and endanger her life. The last of these consists in bringing back from Hades a small bottle of precious spring water, and on no account is Psyche to open the bottle; she is to hand it over intact to Aphrodite. Psyche disobeys and upon opening the vial she is immediately overcome by a deathlike Stygian sleep. Meanwhile, Cupid, who is also heartbroken, obtains permission from Zeus to marry Psyche. He wakes her up by pricking her with one of his arrows. She is reconciled with Aphrodite, drinks ambrosia, and becomes immortal. She and Cupid have a daughter named Pleasure.¹⁰

Many broad features and several details of thought or phrasing make this legend an interesting parallel with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.¹¹ On several occasions, the heroine of Apuleius undergoes the temptation to commit suicide. When she discovers the identity of her husband, she becomes fascinated by the weapons he has laid close to the bed. She tries, Apuleius says, to “hide” the arrow she handles in her bosom. Juliet's dying words as she borrows Romeo's dagger are a mannerist expansion and variation of this theme: “O happy dagger. / This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die” (5.3.168-69). Psyche again attempts to commit suicide when Cupid forsakes her, and is later inclined to throw herself from the top of a tower during the period when she is subjected to ordeals by the goddess of love. Her initial gentle sail down from the mountain top may easily be perceived as a sublimated or idealized form of suicide. After Psyche's betrayal, Cupid will be revenged on her sisters by inducing them to commit themselves to Zephyrus in order to join Psyche in the magic valley. They will in fact jump to their deaths.

Sleep, death, and the fascination of love and suicide (perceived as imbricated) form an ominous triangle in both Apuleius's and Shakespeare's stories. In Shakespeare, both mortal lovers find in death a solution and an escape. The possession of the husband at night alone and his flight before daylight are concentrated by Shakespeare into the single poignant aube of 3.5. Such is the beauty of Cupid that when Psyche discovers him the flame of her light leaps up, appears “to burn brighter and merrily.” Shakespeare transfers this magic power of beauty over light to Juliet. As Romeo first perceives Juliet in the ball scene he exclaims: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright” (1.5.43). Finally, the allegorical vision of a marriage with death is forcefully imposed by Capulet's lament upon discovering Juliet lifeless (“O son, the night before thy wedding day / Hath death lain with thy wife … All things that we ordained festival / Turn from their office to black funeral,” 4.5.35-36, 84-85). Again in the dying speeches of both Romeo and Juliet in the tomb at 5.3.91ff. it is strongly present, as at the beginning of Apuleius's tale when the oracle of Apollo mentions the “funereal hymen” to which Psyche is destined.

Already the unfortunate girl is fitted for the procession of her funereal wedding; already the torch gutters under a coating of black soot, and the music of the nuptial flute turns into a plaintive lydian melody, the merry song of hymen changes into a mourner's howl and the bride wipes her tears with her own veil.

(Apuleius Metamorphose 4.33)

Naturally, too, the forbidden liquid that “flows darkly from a black fountain” (Apuleius Metamorphose 6.13) and that Psyche must not touch (it probably is an elixir of youth and beauty reserved for immortals) reminds us of Friar Laurence's alchemical preparation. The difference is that Juliet is urged to drink it, but the consequence is similar and forecast in Shakespeare's play: it will induce a death-like condition.

The main difference between the story of Cupid and Psyche and that of Romeo and Juliet is that the first ends well, thanks to a twist at the end, whereas the second ends tragically. Commenting on the different impacts of the happy ending version and of the sad ending version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Joseph Campbell wisely observes: “The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their own incredibility.”¹² It is clear, though, that the success of Friar John's embassy to Mantua and Juliet's timely rescue by Friar Laurence are not intrinsically more incredible than their failure. It is not on the level of such technicalities that Joseph Campbell situates credibility but from a general or philosophical point of view that more often than not privileges dark harmonies between life and its representation. It is from a symbolical and cosmological point of view that Friar Laurence's failure is more credible than his success would have been. He is an overreacher. His knowledge of plants and chemical preparations has led him to discover a drug that not only induces sleep but literally apes death:

Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilling liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest,
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To wanny ashes, thy eyes' windows fall
Like death when he shuts up the day of life.
Each part depriv'd of supple government
Shall stiff and stark and cold appear, like death,
And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.

(4.1.93-106)

The Friar's great work is actually an imposture, a scandal against nature. The substance he has prepared is neither a poison that kills, like that administered through the ear by Claudius to Hamlet's father, nor is it an ordinary sleeping draught. The state induced subsumes death and sleep. The rival brothers Hypnos and Thanatos are now confronted with a new impure sibling: Hypthanatos. The Friar's failure is not at all technical—the drug works perfectly—the failure is a poetic one. One should follow nature in art rather than go against it and thus create new hybrid forms. Fortune and her wheel arbitrate the situation, and, yes, it is quite credible that the Friar should lose.

Beside and beyond Romeo and Juliet, sleep and death often rub shoulders. In Richard II, a play contemporary with Romeo and Juliet and sharing many of its features, King Richard sits down upon the ground to “tell sad stories of the death of kings: / How some have been depos'd, some slain in war, / Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, / Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd, / All murthered …” (3.2.156-60). In the red and white world of history the “sleeping kill'd” category is abundantly illustrated. Hypnos may well betray those he possesses into the hands of Thanatos. Troy fell not just because of Ulysses' cunning and the Horse but because the nightwatch, dead drunk, had fallen asleep. Thus fall civilizations. The little princes are smothered on Richard III's orders as they lie asleep in the Tower.¹³ Hamlet's father slept in his orchard when his brother poured the poison in his ear to rob him of crown and wife. On this occasion Shakespeare associates a great symbol to this fatal deceiving of the sleeper, the serpent that is officially blamed for King Hamlet's demise.¹⁴ The ghost will restore the truth in emblematic terms: “The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown.” The Elizabethans appeared to have had a veritable phobia of what snakes might do to a man asleep. They could bite him, strangle him, choke him by penetrating his body through the mouth. Some of these fears are recognizable sexual fantasies. The beast even crawls into the dreams and symbolic situations of such comedies as A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It.¹⁵ Macbeth, urged by his wife to “look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't” (1.5.65-66), perpetrates the crucially symbolic act in the poetic chain we are examining. By killing the grooms (drugged to sleep by Lady Macbeth) who guard his guest, King Duncan, and by killing his king to usurp the throne of Scotland, he kills Sleep and consigns himself to sleeplessness and anguish for the rest of his life. He is not the only sleepless king of Shakespearean drama. Henry IV, troubled by his usurpation, cannot find nightly rest, unlike the poorest of his subjects,¹⁶ but Macbeth is the one who raises his assassination to the plane of allegorical murder. In killing Duncan he has killed a universal, compassionate, and necessary force:

Macbeth
Methought, I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

(2.2.32-37)

The food metaphor applied to sleep is most revealing of a transformation natural enough in the Christian context of this violent crisis. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Give us this day our nightly sleep. The features of Hypnos are discreetly Christianized.

The symbolical “Play of Hypnos and Thanatos” reaches, like so many other great symbols or values, an absolute, critical climax in Macbeth, dominated as it is by Evil. A relaxation of tension is visible in the plays that follow, where we find a reversal of the dynamics. Sleep no longer slips into death, but rather, through a tender and hopeful process of euphemization, death melts into sleep. The chosen operator for this great reversal is Cleopatra in the staging of her suicide. She nurses the snake that kills her or rather that puts her to sleep. Shakespeare invents neither the facts—they are historical—nor does he invent the metaphor. Some five or six years before¹⁷ Robert Chester in Love's Martyr (1601) wrote about “… the snake that Cleopatra used, / The Egyptian queene belov'd of Anthony, / That with her breasts deare bloud was nourished.” As always, though, Shakespeare's poetry is more striking, and the episode more striking in the context of an evolution of his imaginary of sleep and death. His Cleopatra brushes aside the recrimination of her servant, horrified to see her press the asp to her bosom:

                                                                                                    Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?

(5.2.308-10)

Interestingly this play is structurally identical with Romeo and Juliet in that the tragedy of the female protagonist is made to follow that of the male protagonist, and follow it more distinctly. Cleopatra has the poison that Juliet missed; symbolically, she has the child that she never had with Antony (in Shakespeare's play).

Threats subsist in the last plays but a beneficent hand wards them off in time. In Cymbeline (1609-10), the wicked queen wants to administer “strange ling'ring poisons” to her stepdaughter Imogen but good doctor Cornelius palms her off with a replica of Friar Laurence's miracle drug. This time the move does not seem to go against Neoplatonic precepts concerning the relationship between art and nature. Imogen will be believed dead and formally laid to rest but will eventually wake up and be restored to her husband. When she does wake up it is to discover a headless corpse beside her (4.2.295ff.). Hypnos could hardly be closer to Thanatos, yet there is no slippage. In The Tempest (1611-12) Caliban is no more allowed to kill the sleeping Prospero—as Claudius had killed his brother—than Sebastian to kill the sleeping Alonso. In The Winter's Tale (1610-11) the disappearance of the slandered Hermione for a period of sixteen years is a transformation of Juliet's deathlike condition. Hermione will be awakened from her petrified sleep by a repenting husband, a willing if aging Sleeping Beauty to this unreliable and tardy Prince Charming, Leontes. The same trick had been performed over a short period of time in Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99) by that successful colleague of Friar Laurence, Friar Francis, who is better at rescuing ladies in distress insofar as he does not meddle with drugs.

I have just used the analogy of Sleeping Beauty for The Winter's Tale. This is bound to happen if one situates a work in the space of myth where time and place do not matter, where anachronism is meaningless and harmless. The same stories are being told over and over again, each new version measuring up to the others, synchronous with them in terms of their impact on our mind. Let us return briefly to Romeo and Juliet to show Romeo as a failed version of Prince Charming and Juliet as a failed version of Sleeping Beauty. In Shakespeare the one arrives too early and the other wakes up too late. Seen in the genetics of dramatic situations involving Hypnos and Thanatos, practically as well as symbolically, what happens in Romeo and Juliet is of considerable importance. Shakespeare has chosen to frame his first tragedy by violating the end of story line followed by Apuleius in his telling of the Cupid and Psyche tale. This decision no doubt reveals some deep personal psychological stress and in turn develops more stress and anguish. From 1598 or 1599 onwards (Much Ado About Nothing) a series of critical betrayals of sleep into the hands of death runs parallel to an effort to assuage what amounts to an obsessional fear anchored in our culture or in our species and reflected by the dramatist. The end of Shakespeare's own story of anguish appears to point to a victory of the sleeper over his fear.

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, 1942. Reprinted in Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Laurence Lerner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 65-77. Quite possibly Lewis's only critical offering to the study of drama and a major contribution to the discussion of Hamlet.

2. Der Sjunde Inseglet (1956).

3. British film directed by John Gilling.

4. American film directed by Philip Kaufman.

5.                                                                                 But that I am forbid
   To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
   I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
   Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
   Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
   Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
   And each particular hair to stand an end
   Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

   (1.5.13-20)

6. Hamlet's question to Ophelia as he vituperates women in general is of this fashion: “Get thee to a nunnery. Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (3.1.120-21).

7. Hamlet 4.3.26-31.

8. He was granted immortality by Zeus on condition that he would sleep eternally. In this condition the Moon fell in love with him and bore him fifty daughters. A few years before Romeo and Juliet, in 1588, John Lyly wrote a play called Endimion. It was played at court by the Children of Paul's.

9. Second-century a.d.

10. This summary is mostly based on Pierre Grimal's account in Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine (Paris, 1951).

11. Shakespeare could have read Apuleius in the Latin original or in the good prose translation published in 1566 by William Adlington (University College, Oxford) and dedicated to the Earl of Sussex. This was reprinted in 1571, 1582, and 1596. The 1596 reprint is by Valentine Simmes, who was currently engaged in preparing the quarto volumes of Richard II (1597), printed from the foul papers, and Richard III. At a date so close to what we feel is the right guess for the composition of Romeo and Juliet, would business dealings between the dramatic company and their printer have yielded Shakespeare an opportunity to pick up the text of the Golden Ass? The title puts forth the gem of the work, namely the story of Cupid and Psyche. It runs so: The XI bookes of the Golden Asse, with the mariage of Cupido a. Psiches.

12. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 206-7.

13. See Richard III 4.3.

14. I have studied this in more detail in “Holding Forth and Holding Back: Operation Modes of the Dramatist's Imagination,” in Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988).

15. Hermia dreams that a serpent is crawling on her breast and eats her heart away. Unknown to her then, Lysander (under the influence of Oberon's magic) has deserted her. Is he, symbolically speaking, the serpent, or is it Oberon? or Puck? (A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.2.144-49). In As You Like It (4.3.104-13), the villainous Oliver lies asleep under a tree after entering the redeeming green world of the forest. His life is successively threatened by a snake, which tries to invade his mouth, and by a hungry lioness. He is rescued by his forgiving brother, Orlando.

16. See King Henry IV, Part 2 3.1.1-31.

17. Antony and Cleopatra was probably written in 1606 or 1607.