Hey Juliet? I think you're fine. You really blow my mind...
Blame an old friend on facebook for this one. For good or for ill, it's entirely her fault. I originally replied to a status of hers regarding opinions on Romeo and Juliet, writing a short paragraph. The mistake I made was going back and reading it afterwards.
It isn't that it was a bad paragraph, mind you. Especially since I was really only half-awake when I wrote it. I got some points across, I think I sounded marginally intelligent, and I even got a coveted 'like' on it. Still. Looking back was a mistake, because I feel like I didn't quite express those thoughts as clearly as I could have, and got to Thinking About Things.
It's not a good idea for me to Think About Things, generally. This would be due to my being a full-time teacher and the end of the year and the lack of time and the whatnot. However, I'm done my report cards. I've got all my record keeping up to date. Awards day has come and gone. Grad is finished. I have a few weeks until I start work on my Master's program. In short, I have time.
Thus, I am going (as they have started putting it in the dark corners of the internet I've been dipping my toe in to) to explain you a thing:
Romeo and Juliet is not a romance.
I am aware that you are probably gasping in shock and awe here. The very term 'Romeo and Juliet' is almost synonymous with romance. It's flipping archetypal. How on earth can it not be a romance?
Now, even back in university, I would have disagreed with me. I would have told you that it was a romance, and a bad one at that. Lately though, in my free time, I've been watching various film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet (there's a modern Quebecois adaptation that's currently holding most of my interest) and listening to radio plays of it (the BBC has done a couple great ones, one in particular featuring David Tennant as the Prince). This got me to start viewing the story in a way that I'd never considered before.
Let me put it like this: Romeo and Juliet is not a romance. It is a tragedy with a romance in it. It seems like such a small detail, or even an obvious one, but it changes everything.
It makes sense to begin with the two titular characters. Allow me to try and shed some light on them.
Romeo's parents don't appear to want to take responsibility for him. They tell Benvolio at the beginning that they've tried to talk to them, they've gotten their friends -- and it's safe to say these are all adults -- to try, but have gotten nothing out of him. The good counsel they hoped for, it turns out, ends up coming from Benvolio. The reason why this is the case, I would posit, is that the two of them are closer than Romeo is with any adult in his life, with the exception of the Friar. We'll get to him later though. Benvolio, out of everyone who has ever spoken with Romeo in his melancholy, is the one person who manages to suss out the truth. After many a morning spent augmenting the fresh morning's dew with his tears, Romeo spills his guts to Benvolio. To the Friar, yes (we'll get there, I swear), but not to his parents' friends, and not to his parents.
Speaking of them, I find it intriguing that Romeo is never seen interacting with his parents. He is closer to Benvolio and Mercutio than anyone else (excluding the Friar, but again, I'll get there). Remember, in spite of everything you might see in a production of this play, these three boys are kids. Based on the apparent lack of adult presence in their lives (once more, save the Friar in Romeo's case), they've probably grown up hanging out on the streets of Verona, raising themselves. Mercutio's the enabler and the clown, Benvolio is the attempted voice of reason, and Romeo is somewhere in between. His friends, arguably, are more parents to him than his parents, or even the Friar, and we see no adults in their lives either save for when we see Romeo's parents tapping Benvolio as a resource.
So Romeo is distinctly separated from his family. Juliet, conversely, is intimately tied to hers.
She isn't even a daughter, really. She's being auctioned off in a political marriage, no matter what her father tells Paris about waiting. When her mother talks about how a marriage to Paris will result in Juliet having all the rich County possesses while making herself no less, and her father eventually throws caution to the wind and arranges for a quick and dirty marriage after Tybalt's death, you cannot say it is anything but political. When her father originally says that Juliet's will is part of the deal when it comes to a marriage to Paris, and in the end tells her that either she marries the man, or she's disowned, how can you see that as anything but a shift from her being a person to a tool? Paris is a kinsman to the Prince, after all. House Capulet is manoeuvring. Juliet is their bargaining chip. Her eventual 'okay' is just a perk.
Her 'okay' is hardly okay, of course. She's long since lost her parents. With the recommendation she give in and marry Paris, she's even lost her nurse: the one adult she thought she could trust. One of the things I love about Baz Luhrmann's 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" is the scene where Juliet storms in to the Friar's home, and puts a gun to her head screaming the line "Be not so long to speak, I long to die!" Claire Danes' delivery of that line remains the iconic one for me. She's desperate, she has no support system, and lacks a family, friends (there's no equivalent of Benvolio or Mercutio for her), and her husband. She has nothing left to lose.
That's the couple apart though. Them together though? The Friar is right. Violent passions have violent ends, but do you honestly think two teenagers in love are going to pay attention to that? When you are a teenager, everything is everything. I'm sure we're all familiar with the eye-rolling we adults indulge in when we think about teenage couples. They don't know what love is, we sigh. It's just a phase; this will never last. Teenagers don't care. If you're happy, you're ecstatic. If you're upset, it's the end of the world. If you're in love, nothing else matters. Who are we as adults to say what love really is or what it looks like? Who are we to judge? Can we tell a teenage couple that they don't really love each other? No. They can, and they do, regardless of what we may think or say. Romeo and Juliet loved each other, irrationally or not. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks. It was love, and was real, and it honestly doesn't matter if it would have lasted given the chance. They fell hard and they fell fast, yes, and it may not have been the wisest or healthiest thing, but at that point, they are in love, and that is what matters.
And now, as promised, the Friar. The man is by turns a part of the problem, and an ineffectual attempt to fix it. He's Romeo's one adult confidant. How good a confidant is up for debate. He chided Romeo oft for doting on Rosaline, but from what we as an audience see, not much else. When Romeo tells him about Juliet though, he acts. He sees an opportunity for good in it, and marries the couple even though Romeo has known Juliet for far less time than Rosaline. The Friar, later on, aims to help Juliet. This involves him coming up with the brilliant idea of using simulated death as a solution to Romeo and Juliet's plight, giving a thirteen year old girl -- who, before you argue otherwise, is described as being young even by the standards of the day, so please don't pull out any argument about age here -- a powerful narcotic. When Juliet wakes up in the tomb and he tries to get her out of there, he allows himself to be overcome by the resistance of a thirteen year old girl. What happened to the man who hoped to unite the Capulets and the Montagues through their children's marriage? He's scared enough by the oncoming watch to leave a girl alone in a tomb with the dead body of her husband. This man may have had good intentions, but his follow-through is terrible.
Juliet's nurse is very similar. She helps arrange the wedding, and sneaks Romeo in to Juliet's bedroom. Then when things get rocky what with the Paris situation, her best advice is for Juliet to abandon Romeo for this second match. The woman who praised Romeo after first meeting him now tells Juliet to wash her hands of the man because they won't be able to see each other. No more plans, no more underhanded acts, no more assistance. Just the statement, from her heart, that Juliet would be happier with Paris and so should marry him.
As such, the only adults that Romeo and Juliet trust end up being useless at best, and destructive at worst. The lovers are really and truly alone.
We haven't even talked about what's possibly the most important part of this all. A discussion of Romeo and Juliet is incomplete without a look at Verona itself.
Start with the prologue of the play. Note how much of it is devoted to describing Verona and the situation there compared to how much is spent describing Romeo and Juliet:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
44 words to tell about Verona, what life is like there, and the situation as it relates to the Montagues and Capulets. 28 directly talking about Romeo and Juliet themselves. Shakespeare cares about the situation in Romeo and Juliet as much as, or more than, he does the lovers. Why would he write his prologue this way if he didn't want to draw our attention to it? Romeo and Juliet are described only as star crossed lovers (interesting fact: the crossing of stars can and should be read as a distinctly negative thing; the heavens have ruled against the lovers, having crossed their plans) whose death ends up a cog in the machine of their parents' rage. This is about Verona, and how Romeo and Juliet's story impacts the story of the city itself.
Verona is a battlefield. The prologue tells us so, and makes it clear that it's nothing new. The first scene is a fight, and we find out right away that there's been more fights recently. Death is a fact of life throughout this. Over the course of these two hours traffic, we lose Mercutio. Tybalt's next, and from there Paris, Lady Montague, and our young husband and wife shuffle off this mortal coil. Who knows how many deaths before this? It is an ancient grudge, after all. Verona's streets are not just a long-standing combat zone, they are a well established abattoir.
Romeo and Juliet live in this world. By virtue of only their names, their sides in the conflict were chosen the moment they took their first breaths. Their first cries were those of the newest soldiers born in to this battle, whatever role their work as warriors will be. It's how their parents were raised, and so on and so forth, who knows precisely how far back. This city is not for the faint of heart, and hardly a place for children. Civil blood is spilt. Hands are unclean. The biting of a thumb is enough to set an all out brawl in motion.
So no wonder Romeo and Juliet kill themselves. They're rash because their world is rash. There's no room for love in Verona, so when they do fall in love, it plays out the way hate (what they have been raised around and therefore know) does: quickly, deeply, and above all, violently. The loss they suffer when they lose one another is painful beyond their own understanding. They kill themselves because they know no other way to deal with this other than death. It's what's ended so much around them this far, after all, and they are at their wits end when they make their respective decisions to die.
"Romeo and Juliet" is not fully about them. It's about how the world around them drove them to this. It's about this broken society that produces broken children. The world around them is at fault. All are punished, as the Prince observes, albeit too late. No-one goes untouched by this. No-one gets away scot-free. Nobody has won. Everything in this ancient grudge has finally come to a terrifying crescendo before crumbling down, and the olive branches extended by Lord Montague and Lord Capulet at the very end is the first attempt to try and build the world of Verona back up. They still start from a broken base that's of their making, and that of the generations before them. This is not a romance. This is not romantic. Shakespeare tells us as much when he gives us a final couplet categorizing this as a tale of woe. All. Are. Punished. Nobody of any House, nobody in all of Verona, walks away clean.
There. That's it. I have explained you a thing.
Agree with me or not, I at least hope I have managed to bring up a point of view you may not have considered before. If I've even managed to go so far as to change your mind about the play and the characters, all the better. All I ask is that you take a moment to think.
...and, because I cannot leave well enough alone, a recommended viewing list:
1) "Romeo + Juliet" (1996, directed by Baz Luhrmann) -- a beautiful modernization that despite being 17 years old, holds up well. Over the top, violent, and absolutely mad/madcap. It's perfect for this story. Baz gets how broken this world of Verona is, and the flux of human emotion, particularly in younger generations. You've all probably seen it, I know, but it's totally worth a rewatch.
2) "Romeo et Juliette" (2007, directed by Yves Desgagnes) -- another modern take, Canadian made and set in Quebec with Romeo as the son of a gangster and Juliette the daughter of a Supreme Court judge. A little on the twisted and strange side, but that's Quebec for you. If you don't mind that, it's worth getting your hands on if you can find it with English subtitles or speak French.
3) "Romeo X Juliet" (2011, TV show) -- this one's an anime series. If you don't mind having the plot of the story turned inside out, set in a fantasy realm, some crossdressing, and touches of Shakespearean meta to boot, watch this. It's silly at points, even ridiculous, but a fun watch and a neat take on the story that shifts characters and plots around like crazy. Plus, Tybalt is kind of awesome in this one.
4) "Roméo et Juliette: de la Haine à l'Amour" (Year unknown, stage musical) -- I've mentioned this one before. It's another French adaptation, but a fascinating one. Literally titled 'of hate and love', it gives every character a moment to shine. The Prince sets everything up in a number called "Verone". The Montague boys have their own number about being young and awesome. Tybalt gets a song that fleshes out his character and mindset. Benvolio, in a twist, ends up being the one who has to tell Romeo about Juliet's 'death' and has a song about it, the title being "How Do I Tell Him?" that's heart wrenching. I've provided links to this one before, but I finally have a link to the entire thing with subtitles, if anyone feels so inclined.
And NOW I'm done. Swear. I have explained you a thing. Now go hence, to have more talk of these sad things. I'm out.