to hear Romeo speak and see him die; and then, instead of using his dagger against herself, she dies of a broken heart; whereas the French orders this matter the same as we have it in the play. The earliest English version of the tale known to us is a poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562. This purports to be from the Italian of Bandello, but agrees with the French in making Juliet's trance continue till after the death of Romeo. In some respects, however, the poem has the character of an original work; the author not tying himself strictly to any known authority, but drawing somewhat on his own invention. I say known authority, because in his introduction to the poem the author informs us that the tale had already been put to work on the English stage. As the play to which he refers has not survived, we have no means of knowing how the matter was there handled. There was also a prose version of the tale, published by William Paynter in his Palace of Pleasure in 1567. Whether Shakespeare availed himself of any earlier drama on the subject is not known. Nor, in fact, can we trace a connection between the tragedy and any other work except Brooke's poem. That he made considerable use of this, is certain from divers verbal resemblances as well as from a general likeness in the matter and ordering of the incidents. As regards the incidents of the play, the Poet's invention is confined to the duel of Mercutio and Tybalt, and the meeting of Romeo and Paris at the tomb. I must add, that in the older versions of the tale Paris shows a cold and selfish policy in his lovesuit, which dishonours both himself and the object of it. Shakespeare elevates him with the breath of nobler sentiment; and the character of the heroine is proportionably raised through the pathos shed round her second lover from the circumstances of his death. Moreover, the incidents, throughout, are managed with the utmost skill for dramatic effect; so that what was before a lazy and lymphatic narrative is made redundant of animation and interest. In respect of character, also, the play has little of formal originality beyond Mercutio and the Nurse; who are as different as can well be conceived from any thing that was done to the Poet's hand. And all the other characters, though the forms of them are partly borrowed, are set forth with an idiomatic sharpness and vitality of delineation to which the older versions of the tale make no approach. But what is most worthy of remark on this point is, that Shakespeare just inverts the relation of things; before, the persons served but as a sort of framework to support the story; here the story is used but as canvas for the portraiture of character and life. A great deal has been written, and written well, in praise of this tragedy; yet I can by no means rank it so high as some of the Poet's critics have done. Coleridge has a passage which it would hardly be right to leave unquoted. "The stage," says he, "in Shakespeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by Shakespeare in his plays. Read Romeo and Juliet: all is youth and Spring,youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies, Spring with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of Spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden_marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth; whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh, like the last breeze of an Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakespeare." Schlegel, also, discourses the theme in a strain of very noble eloquence; but, to my mind, the fairest and most judicious statement of its merits as a whole, is Hallam's, as follows: "Madame de Staël has truly remarked that in Romeo and Juliet we have, more than in any other tragedy, the mere passion of love; love in all its vernal promise, full of hope and innocence, ardent beyond all restraint of reason, but tender as it is warm. The contrast between this impetuosity of delirious joy, in which the youthful lovers are first displayed, and the horrors of the last scene, throws a charm of deep melancholy over the whole. Once alone, each of them, in these earlier moments, is touched by a presaging fear: it passes quickly away from them, but is not lost on the reader. To him there is a sound of despair in the wild effusions of their hope, and the madness of grief is mingled with the intoxication of their joy. And hence it is that, notwithstanding its many blemishes, we all read and witness this tragedy with delight. It is a symbolic mirror of the fearful realities of life, where the course of true love' has so often not run smooth;' and moments of as fond illusion as beguiled the lovers of Verona have been exchanged, perhaps as rapidly, not indeed for the dagger and the bowl, but for the many-headed sorrows and sufferings of humanity. "The character of Romeo is one of excessive tenderness. His first passion for Rosaline, which no vulgar poet would have brought forward, serves to display a constitutional susceptibility. There is indeed so much of this in his deportment and language, that we might be in some danger of mistaking it for effeminacy, if the loss of his friend had not roused his courage. It seems to have been necessary to keep down a little the other characters, that they might not overpower the principal one; and though we can by no means agree with Dryden that, if Shakespeare had not killed Mercutio, Mercutio would have killed him, there might have been some danger of his killing Romeo. His brilliant vivacity shows the softness of the other a little to a disadvantage. Juliet is a child whose intoxication in loving and being loved whirls away the little reason she may have possessed. It is however impossible, in my opinion, to place her among the great female characters of Shakespeare's creation. "Of the language of this tragedy what shall we say? It contains passages that every one remembers, that are among the nobler efforts of Shakespeare's poetry, and many short and beautiful touches of his proverbial sweetness. Yet, on the other hand, the faults are in prodigious number. The conceits, the phrases that jar on the mind's ear, if I may use such an expression, and interfere with the very emotion the Poet would excite, occur at least in the first three Acts without intermission. It seems to have formed part of his conception of this youthful and ardent pair, that they should talk irrationally. The extravagance of their fancy, however, not only forgets reason, but wastes itself in frigid metaphors and incongruous conceptions: the tone of Romeo is that of the most bombastic commonplace of gallantry, and the young lady differs only in being one degree more mad. The voice of virgin love has been counterfeited by the authors of many fictions: I know none who have thought the style of Juliet would represent it. Nor is this confined to the happier moments of their intercourse. False thoughts and misplaced phrases deform the whole of the third Act. It may be added that, if not dramatic propriety, at least the interest of the character is affected by some of Juliet's allusions. She seems indeed to have profited by the lessons and language of her venerable guardian; and those who adopt the edifying principle of deducing a moral from all they read may sup pose that Shakespeare intended covertly to warn parents against the contaminating influence of such domestics. These censures apply chiefly to the first three Acts: as the shadows deepen over the scene, the language assumes a tone more proportionate to the interest: many speeches are exquisitely beautiful; yet the tendency to quibbles is never wholly eradicated." I cannot indeed quite subscribe to all that Hallam says about the heroine in the foregoing quotation. I have to confess, however, that Juliet appears something better as a heroine than as a woman, the reverse of which commonly holds in the Poet's delineations. But then she is a real heroine, in the best sense of the term; her womanhood being developed through her heroism, not eclipsed nor obscured by it. Wherein she differs from the general run of tragic heroines, who act as if they knew not how to be heroic without becoming something mannish or viraginous; the trouble with them being, that they set out with a special purpose to be heroines, and to approve themselves such: whereas Juliet is surprised into heroism, and acts the heroine without knowing it, simply because it is in her to do so, and, when the occasion comes, she cannot do otherwise. Much fault has been found with the winding-up of this play, that it does not stop with the death of Juliet. Looking merely to the uses of the stage, it might indeed be better so; but Shakespeare wrote for humanity as well as, yea, rather than, for the stage. And as the evil fate of the lovers springs from the bitter feud of their Houses, and from a general stifling of nature under a hard crust of artificial manners, he wisely represents their fate as reacting upon and removing the cause. We are thus given to see and feel that they have not suffered in vain; and the heart has something to mitigate and humanize its over-pressure of grief. The absorbing, devouring selfishness of society generates the fiercest rancour between the leading families, and that rancour issues in the death of the very members through whom they had thought most to advance their rival pretensions ; earth's best and noblest creatures are snatched away, because, by reason of their virtue, they can best afford to die, and because, for the same reason, their death will be most bitterly deplored. The good old Friar indeed thought that by the marriage of the lovers the rancour of their Houses would be healed. But a Wiser than he knew that the deepest touch of sorrow was required, to awe and melt their proud, selfish hearts; that nothing short of the most afflicting bereavement, together with the feeling that themselves had both caused it and deserved it, could teach them rightly to "prize the breath they share with human kind," and remand them to the impassioned attachments of nature. Accordingly the hatred that seemed immortal is buried in the tomb of the faithful lovers; families are reconciled, society renovated, by the storm that has passed upon them; the tyranny of selfish custom is rebuked and broken up by the insurrection of nature which itself has provoked; tears flow, hearts are softened, hands joined, truth, tenderness, and piety inspired, by the noble example of devotion and self-sacrifice which stands before them. Such is the sad but wholesome lesson to be gathered from the story of "Juliet and her Romeo." Citizens of Verona; male and female Relations to both Houses; Maskers, Guards, Watchmen, and Attendants. SCENE, during the greater part of the Play, in Verona; once, in the fifth Act, at Mantua. PROLOGUE.1 Chorus. Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona where we lay our scene, Which, but their children's end, nought could remove, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. [Exit. 1 This Prologue is in all the quartos, though with considerable variations in that of 1597. It was omitted in the folio, for reasons unknown. The old copies represent it as spoken by Chorus. 2 Fatal for fated; the active form with the passive sense. Many such instances of the interchangeable or undifferentiated use of those forms are noted in the foregoing plays. This is the exceptive but, as it is called; formed from be out, somewhat as if was from give. |