mistress, the remorseless Rosaline, though without her name; Friar Lawrence addicted to study. ... the Nurse, greedy, garrulous, gross, and faithless, just as we find her in the play; the Apothecary, whom by 'his heavy countenance' Romeo 'gessed to be poore,' Tibalt, 'best exercised in feates of armes'; and even Friar John, who, seeking to be 'accompanide by one of his profession,' enters a house whence, to carry his brother Lawrence's letter to Romeo, he might not issue out agayne, For that a brother of the house a day before or twayne Dyed of the plague.' And not only have such minor characters and incidents of the play their germs or counterparts in the old story, but even such incidental passages as the soliloquy uttered by Juliet, terror-stricken at her imagination of what might await her in her kinsmen's vault if she should take the friar's potion, and that other soliloquy, in which she passionately calls on Night and Romeo to come to her. In brief, Romeo and Juliet owes to Shakespeare only its dramatic form and its poetic decoration. But what an exception is the latter! It is to say that the earth owes to the sun only its verdure and its flowers, the air only its perfume and its balm, the heavens only their azure and their glow. Yet this must not lead us to forget that the original tale is one of the most truthful and touching among the few that have entranced the ear and stirred the heart of the world for ages, or that in Shakespeare's transfiguration of it his fancy and his youthful fire had a much larger share than his philosophy or his imagination. The only variations from the story in the play are the three which have just been alluded to. The compression of the action, which in

Outline of the play with remarks upon the characters.

the story occupies four or five months, to within as
many days, thus adding impetuosity to a passion which
had only depth, and enhancing dramatic effect by quick-
ening truth to vividness;—the conversion of Mercutio
from a
mere 'courtier,' 'bold emong the bashfull
maydes,' 'courteous of his speech and pleasant of devise,'
into that splendid union of the knight and the fine
gentleman, in portraying which Shakespeare, with pro-
phetic eye piercing a century, shows us the fire of faded
chivalry expiring in a flash of wit;—and the bringing in
of Paris (forgotten in the story after his bridal disap-
pointment) to die at Juliet's bier by the hand of Romeo,
thus gathering together all the threads of this love
entanglement to be cut at once by Fate."

Throughout this tragedy it is to be borne in mind that the scene is Italy, and the actors the passionate children of the South, passionate alike in love and in hatred. "The mid-July heat," as Dowden says, "broods over the five tragic days of the story. The mad blood is stirring in men's veins during these hot summer days," the veins of a race wearing "the shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun." Material for fateful issues is ready in the long-standing blood-feud of the families of the Montagues and the Capulets. Tragedy is, so to speak, in the air, and it needs but little that the electric current should discharge itself. The protagonists of the drama are in the hey-day of life; the hero handsome, of sprightly wit, trained in all manly accomplishments, brave, and gentle in the security of true courage, but, partly from his surroundings, as yet without a sufficient purpose in life, greatly the slave of emotion, his soul questing about for love and fancying that it has found

its desire; the heroine of but fourteen summers, yet of an age at which in those sunny climes love blossoms with a splendour unknown to maidens of the frozen North, impulsive but fancy-free, of incomparable loveliness but a stranger to the might with which such guerdon dowers her, capable of boundless devotion, delicate of mind as of person, trustful, while at the same time instinct with the sensitiveness of whitest purity. In such an atmosphere of blended romance and passion the curtain rises upon a bloody encounter between the servants of the rival houses ever glad of an opportunity to renew the ancient quarrel. While the riot is at its height, the heads of the two houses themselves appear upon the scene, no less eager than their servants to join in the fray. On the entry of Escalus, Prince of Verona, and his train, the combatants are parted, Capulet accompanying the Prince to his palace, and Montague being ordered to attend him in the afternoon to learn his pleasure regarding the affray. Montague, Lady Montague, and their nephew Benvolio remain, and Lady Montague now inquires of Benvolio as to her son, Romeo. From the conversation we learn that for some time past he has given way to a deep melancholy, the cause of which his parents have in vain sought to discover. While his conduct is still under discussion Romeo enters, and Benvolio having promised to worm his secret from him, the father and mother leave the cousins together. As might be anticipated, Romeo's secret is love, or what he takes to be love, for a certain irresponsive Rosaline. That his passion is but a faint shadow of the reality is soon evident. For when persuaded by Benvolio to unbosom himself, he does so in a string of wire-drawn

conceits, bares his wounds in flimsy tropes, languishes in clear-cut epigram, disputes in stilted antithesis, plays the mincing sonneteer ;--parades, in a word, all the plague-tokens of love's green-sickness, all the emotions that if genuine would have been jealously guarded from closest gaze. His protestations of undying constancy are, however, soon to be tested. For the same night, at a ball given by the Capulets, to which in the hopes of seeing Rosaline he, though unbidden, repairs, he meets Juliet. The result is instantaneous. Rosaline had been

"The summer pilot of an empty heart

Unto the shores of nothing";

To him

with the sight of Juliet, love finds acknowledged 'empire for life." Nor is conviction less swift in hers. A few brief looks, the interchange of less than a dozen sentences, and she owns to herself the mastery of the same power. Romeo departs; but for him there can be no rest that night. He has come face to face with realities that demand exercise of will, contempt of danger, action. An hour or so later he finds his way to the garden of his hereditary foe, and by love's. instinct to the very spot overlooked by Juliet's chamber. At the window stands the maiden in converse with herself upon the events of the evening, and, all unconscious of any neighbouring ear, pouring forth her heart's confession. Such confession overheard by Romeo puts an end to any hesitancy that might still linger in his mind. Discovering himself, he claims fulfilment of those vows by which in her innocent outpouring Juliet had bound herself, and now the unspoken contract of looks is

ratified by words. Yet it is not Romeo but Juliet who sees things in their practical light. For a brief space she has had her trepidations at the suddenness of her bliss; "although," she says, "I joy in thee,"

"I have no joy of this contract to-night:

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
Ere one can say 'It lightens "";

but in spite of this, and though the confession of her
love which in fancied security she has made to herself,
and which when surprised she has no power to retract,
may cause "a maiden blush bepaint " her "cheek," yet
in the purity of her heart and the utter surrender of
herself which she is importunate to complete, she recog-
nizes that if Romeo's love resembles hers there is but
one issue possible, and that placed as they are by the
implacable hatred of their parents all scruples as to
form and show must yield to more imperative demands
and the sanction of marriage put its seal upon their
love.*
If to Romeo there comes no such swift recogni-

* Of this perfect scene it is noticeable that the beauty of thought and language is matched by the beauty of versification. "In two scenes," observes Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, pp. 35, 6, "we may say that the whole heart or spirit of Romeo and Juliet is summed up and distilled into perfect and pure expression; and these two are written in blank verse of equable and blameless melody. Outside the garden scene in the second act and the balcony scene in the third, there is much that is fanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic passion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of wordy melody, which flows and foams hither and thither into something of extravagance and excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no outbreak, no superflux, and no failure."