Program Essay for "Romeo and Juliet"
Grave Love
by Thomas Canfield
If asked to identify William Shakespeare’s four greatest tragedies, a theatre scholar would invariably answer Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. However, if the same question were put to the average high school student, the reply most likely would include Romeo and Juliet. As a result of its long and widespread study in the educational curriculum, this drama is the best known of the playwright’s ten tragedies. For many people, this is the first–and only–Shakespeare play that they read and study. Yet Romeo and Juliet’s puzzling status within the canon of Shakespeare’s tragedies deserves reevaluation. Written around 1595, this play–composed at least five years prior to any of the four “greatest” tragedies–not only anticipates them but also has its own exceptional merits.
More than any other Shakespearean tragedy, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is about the fiery passion and intense adversity of youth. In one sense, the couple’s head-over-heels attraction for each other–in its initial stages a textbook case of adolescent “love at first sight”–reflects the universal human experience. Yet in its depth and tragic outcome, the love between Romeo and Juliet extends far beyond a mere fickle crush between two spoiled, inexperienced teenagers. Shakespeare portrays their love not as ignorant but innocent; its newly-discovered nature is pure, holy and thus fragile. Love is a religious experience for them, as their first speech demonstrates.
The ultimate tragedy of this couple is so utterly poignant because we know that their love–spiritually untainted by the fleshly experience and responsibilities of adulthood–has a heavenly-transcendent vulnerability that cannot subsist in the time-bound, earthly realm. It eventually must burn out, one way or another, although the sublime final impact can be credited to the mastery of Shakespeare’s powerful portrayal. Essentially, the play ends in a mutual apotheosis. At the climax of their star-crossed adoration, when they are full of passionate intensity, Romeo and Juliet’s love is both consummated and consecrated, and they remain locked in each other’s arms–and in our minds–perpetually.
Romeo and Juliet is as much about the conflict between youth and old age as it is about the transformation from adolescence to adulthood. Who is ultimately to blame for the play’s heart-wrenching outcome? True, the well-meaning, older generation cautiously tries to temper its fickle decisions–either by shifting principles to suit immediate circumstances or by showing an inconsistent tolerance toward transgressions. However, the young have inherited a weightier legacy of festering, ancestral feuds instigated and left unresolved by their stubborn predecessors, a legacy which intermittent meddling cannot remedy. As a result, the fiery passions of youth perpetuate a domino effect of violence in present-day Verona that spins woefully out of control. Shakespeare tells us that Juliet is only thirteen years old–a girl seemingly too young to entertain ideas of marriage. During the course of the play, however, she is transformed into a spiritually mature woman who suffers all the pain of an adult. Given the insurmountable circumstances in which he finds himself, Romeo’s embrace of death also belies his years; in making a choice which he clearly sees as the only avenue to conjugal bliss, he exhibits an entirely adult capacity for fatalism.
As the sole offspring of the Montague and Capulet households respectively, Romeo and Juliet have deeply-rooted, mature insights that their intolerant elders lack. This quality cannot be classified as wisdom, but it is instead driven by an innate notion of personal destiny, a fatal vision that eclipses the senseless grudges of their elders and their untold conflicts. In the world of the play, violence not only begets violence but also ends it. Romeo and Juliet’s mutual sacrifice punctuates the childishly-absurd, earthly broils of their ancestors with a bloody period.
As one of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is perhaps, in a sense, an experimental work. It was composed during the era of his great comedies, placing it in the company of The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. In fact, the classical myth of Pyramus and Thisbe–the subject of the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the players in A Midsummer Night’s Dream– contains striking parallels to Romeo and Juliet. Yet the inclusion of comic elements in Shakespeare’s tragedies has been often recognized as well. We see them, for example, in the gravediggers of Hamlet, the Fool in King Lear and the Porter in Macbeth. Romeo and Juliet, however, contains a greater proportion of comic dialogue and wordplay than any of his other tragedies–and with a definite artistic purpose. Play is an integral component of the innocent world of youth. The playfulness in this work is not only fitting but creates a stark contrast to the ultimate fate of the protagonists, making their tragedy all the more powerful.
It could be argued that Romeo and Juliet fall farther and faster than any of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Our emotional response to the play stems from the fact that, as soon as the flame of their love is sparked, it is hastily extinguished, leading us to wonder what their lives together might have been if circumstances were different. The play depends on an element of rash, youthful impatience to achieve its impact. Although Romeo and Juliet sacrifice a doubtful fate in this realm by choosing an untimely death, their enduring ecstasy in the next is assured. Their tragic suffering is not protracted, and their celestial bliss is eternal.
