The enduring life of memory, against the flash of violence
Or, why Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” is a love story in name only
I’m reading through Shakespeare’s plays in an attempt to make sense of the world today. Today I’m writing about “Romeo and Juliet”. For a quick reference to posts on previous plays, click here. Next week: “Richard II.”
However long the planning for 9/11, it would be infinitesimal compared to the life of its memory in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. This is, after all, terrorism’s primary weapon: its horror wields even more power after the fact than the attack itself. Although the anger arising from the flames of the attacks has since died to embers, recent events bear witness to how quickly those embers can be sparked to flame anew.
Memoria longa, vita brevis.
Shakespeare calls us to consider the haste of irrevocable acts compared to the long lives of memories created from them. Emotion takes control in the moment, while regret has all the time in the world.
Synopsis
This may be the best-known play of Shakespeare’s; chances are you know the story even if you’ve never read it or seen it performed. Shakespeare based his version on a long history of plays with the same basic plot (two tragic lovers whose families are at war with each other), just as modern story telling has built on Shakespeare’s. These efforts range from the musical “West Side Story” to “Lion King 2.” Popeye and Olive Oyl got in on the trend with the short film “Shakespearean Spinach.” Although the plot of the lovers is familiar, my summary of the play below fills in details that are specific to this play, and which are necessary to understanding this play on its own merits.
The play centers on two opposing families, the Capulets and Montagues. Their long-held grievances are never recounted, and may not even be known to the current generation: their conflict is based on mutual hate. A street brawl erupts as the play begins. The Prince of Verona quells the fighting and warns the families from future violence against each other, declaring it a capital offense.
Each family has a single child. Juliet is the almost 14-year old daughter of the Capulets (two conversations specify her age, underlining her state of innocence), and Romeo is the lovestruck son of the Montagues.
The County Paris (that’s a title, not a place), a kinsman of the Prince, asks Capulet if he can marry Juliet. Capulet, busy preparing for a party, says he’ll leave the decision to his daughter. Being so young in years, Juliet isn’t eager to marry and has no interest in Paris, but says she’ll be open to the idea if the sight of him moves her.
Romeo is introduced to us when he meets up with his friends Benvolio (his cousin) and Mercutio (who’s related to the Prince and therefore not in a warring family). Romeo’s pining for a young woman, Rosaline, who has vowed to enter a convent. To cheer him up, the friends suggest they go to Capulet’s party. Mercutio has received an invitation to the party (due to his connection to the Prince), and he thinks it will be a lark to crash the party in masks.
At the party, Juliet and Romeo meet and fall in love. Afterwards, he’s under her window when he hears her declare her love for him, and he, in the words of Dire Straits, ‘…steps out of the shade / Says something like, “You and me, babe, how ‘bout it?”’. They make plans to marry secretly the next day.
Friar Laurence marries them the next day, and although the two lovers must return to their separate lives for the rest of the day, they make plans to consummate their marriage that night. Romeo promises to have someone deliver Juliet a rope ladder, which he can use to ascend to her room at night.
After being married, Romeo meets up with his friends, who are being threatened by Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin. Mercutio has returned Tybalt’s taunts and is squaring off against him. When Romeo arrives, Tybalt switches his attention to Romeo. Since he’s now related to him by marriage, Romeo feels a kinship with Tybalt to which he can only allude, given the secrecy of his marriage. But in the face of Tybalt’s aggression, Mercutio cannot back down, and the two of them begin to fight with swords. Romeo attempts to break up the fighting, physically inserting himself between them, but Tybalt manages to thrust his sword under Romeo’s arm into Mercutio, who dies. Tybalt leaves the scene. Romeo, realizing that his failure to confront Tybalt put Mercutio at risk, decides that the only honorable thing he can do is to engage Tybalt himself. He finds Tybalt, the two of them fight, and Romeo kills Tybalt. He flees.
The Prince arrives to find his kinsman Mercutio and Tybalt dead. He exiles Romeo as punishment.
News of Tybalt’s death reaches the Capulet house. Paris presses Capulet to give him Juliet in marriage, and Capulet concedes. He orders his daughter to marry Paris.
Juliet is distraught by her predicament: she can’t legally marry Paris, being newly wed to Romeo, however she can’t make public her marriage to Romeo. She goes to Friar Laurence with her dilemma, and he comes up with a solution. He hands her a vial containing a drug that will make her appear to be dead; these effects will last only a couple of days. If she takes the drug the night before her proposed wedding to Paris, her burial in the family crypt will occur while she’s still under the influence of the drug. The Friar promises to send a message to Romeo in Mantua, so that he’ll be at her side when she wakes. The two of them can then leave Verona together.
Almost everything goes to plan. Juliet takes the drug, is found ‘dead’, and placed in the vault. However, the messenger sent with the note to Romeo isn’t able to deliver the message: he’s put into quarantine from a plague that’s afflicting Mantua. When he’s released, he returns with the undelivered message to Romeo still in hand. Romeo meanwhile has heard of Juliet’s demise, and he leaves to visit her tomb. En route, he stops at an apothecary’s and purchases a vial of poison.
At the tomb, Paris and his page are outside when they hear voices; they hide. Romeo arrives and enters the tomb, leaving Benvolio outside with strict orders not to intervene no matter what he sees or hears. After Romeo enters the tomb, he sees the seemingly dead Juliet. Paris enters, they fight, and Romeo kills him. Romeo then takes his own life with the poison. Juliet awakens to find his dead body, still warm, with no poison left for her. She stabs herself with the knife.
When the survivors arrive, they find the three dead bodies, all still warm. Although puzzled by the state of Juliet’s body, which they thought had been dead for a couple days, the remaining characters mourn the loss of all three families (the Prince’s included). Montague mentions that his wife has died of her grief over her son’s exile.
The Prince declares that everyone has lost in this longstanding conflict and that it needs to end here. Montague vows to honor Juliet with a pure gold statue, and Capulet commits to do the same in honor of Romeo. The Prince vows to mete out justice, and brings the play to its tragic close.
Thoughts
Studying Shakespeare in my late teens, I discovered that one way to enter his plays is to note recurring motifs—repeated words or imagery used throughout the play. Since the plays have some terms that pop up reliably in almost every play (e.g., ‘dog’ or its synonym ‘cur’), I’d look for extended use of a term, or a curious use, to determine whether it could be a motif. Inevitably, the term would have multiple meanings, since Shakespeare is a jester with words. Finding a thread that could be a motif always made me curious, which is the best way I know to approach a work of art.
The contagion of violence
The play features plagues in several instances: Friar Laurence’s messenger is denied entry to Mantua due to a plague and Mercutio repeats the word multiple times in his death scene.
As Romeo attempts to cool Tybalt to prevent a fight, Mercutio is egging Tybalt on:
MERCUTIO [Drawing] O calm, dishonourable, vile submission! Alla stoccata carries it away. Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk? TYBALT What wouldst thou have with me? MERCUTIO Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives. That I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight. Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out. TYBALT [Drawing] I am for you. -Act 3 Scene 1
The insult ‘rat-catcher’, which Mercutio extends with the cat metaphor, demeans Tybalt’s status and also implies vermin and the diseases they carry. This starts the theme that Mercutio’s last verses bring home.
MERCUTIO I am hurt. A plague o’ both your houses. I am sped. Is he gone, and hath nothing? BENVOLIO What, art thou hurt? MERCUTIO Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry, ‘tis enough. Where is my page? Go, villain, fetch a surgeon. [Exit page] ROMEO Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much. MERCUTIO No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ‘tis enough. ‘Twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. ROMEO I thought all for the best. MERCUTIO Help me into some house, Benvolio, Or I shall faint. A plague o’ both your houses. They have made worms’ meat of me. I have it, and soundly too. Your houses! [Exeunt all but Romeo] -Act 3 Scene 1
With Mercutio’s death, the contagion of violence has spread beyond the two families. A seeming scratch has infected him, as the vermin who carry plague through a population. While the city of Mantua fights a viral plague, the city of Verona is infected with the hostilities carried by just two families.
Rosemary is for remembrance
Reading “Romeo and Juliet” again this week, I paused over the several uses of the term ‘rosemary.’ In Elizabethan England, plants and flowers were used as a glossary of human emotions and activities. Rosemary means both ‘fidelity’ and ‘remembrance,’ and so it came to be associated with both love and death. Fitting, obviously, for use in this play. And then I started tugging on the thread.
Quebec license plates bear the motto “Je me souviens,” exhorting its citizens to remember the past and learn from it, sharing the impulse of many movements to remember past trauma so that it’s not repeated. In “Romeo and Juliet”, long-held grievances live on in the memories of the two families. What those grievances are may be long forgotten, but the enmity between them is passed along generationally.
The play begins with two youths in the Capulet family playing at fighting the other family. It quickly degenerates from masculine posturing to visions of rape and murder.
SAMSON Gregory, on my word, we’ll not carry coals.
GREGORY No, for then we should be colliers.
SAMSON I mean an we be in choler, we’ll draw.
GREGORY Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.
SAMSON I strike quickly, being moved.
GREGORY But thou art not quickly moved to strike.
SAMSON A dog of the house of Montague moves me.
GREGORY To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand,
therefore if thou art moved, thou runn’st away.
SAMSON A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I
will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.
GREGORY That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest
goes to the wall.
SAMSON ‘Tis true, and therefore women, being the weaker
vessels, are ever thrust to the wall; therefore I will
push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his
maids to the wall.
GREGORY The quarrel is between our masters and us their
men.
SAMSON ‘Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men I will be civil with the
maids—I will cut off their heads.
GREGORY The heads of the maids?
SAMSON Ay , the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads,
take it in what sense thou wilt.
-Act 1 Scene 1
Soon enough, a few Montagues show up, and Samson’s bravado decays into cowardice. But having stoked their anger by imagination, it quickly blazes when the fuse is lit. The trigger for the fight is a schoolyard taunt—a thumb of the nose, which is also disputed—but facts are immaterial in the moment.
Hasty decisions
This pattern arises throughout the play. Romeo, luxuriating in his feelings of unrequited love, is primed to fall in love immediately as he meets Juliet. Before the party, Juliet’s mother and nurse urge her to think of marrying Paris. She’s just a child; she hasn’t even thought of love, but she’s urged to make a decision now, not just to be courted, but to marry. In this frame of mind, she goes to the party and falls in love with the first boy she meets, Romeo.
Romeo and Juliet seek counsel from elders at every turn, but those elders are as impetuous as they with their solutions. Juliet’s nurse aids and abets her schemes to marry Romeo. Friar Laurence not only marries the two, but comes up with the ill-fated plot of the potion to feign death and getting a message to Romeo. What could go wrong?
Mercutio, his name highlighting his mercurial nature, matches Tybalt with insults and his sword in the street, the two of them turning a chance encounter into a violent flashpoint. Romeo quickly decides to avenge Mercutio’s death, and takes Tybalt’s life.
At the vault, Romeo takes Paris’ and his own life in haste, and Juliet follows his example.
All the time in the world to understand and commemorate
Following several of these violent events are long speeches in which the facts of the play are explained, giving the Prince the information necessary to pass judgement.
They’re also occasions for contemplating the ‘if only’ that marks the drama of tragedy: if only Tybalt had paid attention to Romeo when he extended brotherly love to him; if only Juliet had disclosed her wedding; if only the letter-bearer hadn’t been quarantined, so that he could deliver the letter to Romeo…. Tragedy perhaps requires this sense of ‘it could have been different.’ Tragedy averted isn’t tragedy, after all.
Closing the play with the image of two statues to be erected by the families, commemorating their losses arising from their long-held hostilities, brings to mind the many statutory tributes to the fallen that mark histories that survivors want the future to remember.
Do they signify lessons learned? Does ‘Never Again’ effectively serve as a reminder of the tragic consequences of not remembering? Or do these reminders, forged in the flames of tragedy, cool over time and turn into the quotidian and unremarkable, markers of identity and nothing more. “Je me souviens » morphs into a subliminal « Je suis Québécois(e).» And identity markers too easily translate into fighting words.
Thanks for reading,
