Negotiating Shakespeare's Language in Romeo and Juliet

Reading Strategies from Criticism, Editing and the Theatre

Lynette Hunter, Peter Lichtenfels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317089285
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through exciting and unconventional approaches, including critical/historical, printing/publishing and performance studies, this study mines Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to produce new insights into the early modern family, the individual, and society in the context of early modern capitalism. Inspired by recent work in cultural materialism and the material book, it also foregrounds the ways in which the contexts and the text itself become available to the reader today. The opening material on critical/historical approaches focuses on the way that readers have frequently read and played the text to explore issues that cluster around the family, marriage, gender and sexuality. Chapter two, on the ways that actors today inhabit character and create behaviour, provides intertextual comment on acting in the early modern period, and the connections between acting and social behaviour that inform self-image and the performance of identity both then and now. The third chapter on printing/publishing approaches to the text offers a detective story about the differences between Quarto One and Quarto Two, that focuses on the curious appearance in Quarto Two of material related to the law at word, phrase, line and scene level. The next three chapters integrate a close study of the language of the play to negotiate its potential significance for the present in the areas of: Family, Marriage, Gender and Sexuality; Identity, Individualism and Humanism; and the Law, Religion and Medicine. Among the startling aspects of this book are that it: - takes the part of Juliet far more seriously than other criticism has tended to do, attributing to her agency and aspects of character that develop the part suddenly from girl to woman; - recognizes the way the play explores early modern identity, becoming a handbook for individualism and humanism in the private domestic setting of early capitalism; and - brings to light the least recognized element in the play at the moment, its demonstration of the emerging structures of state power, governance by law, the introduction of surveillance, detection and witness, and the formation of what we now call the 'subject'. The volume includes on DVD a scholarly edition with commentary of the text of Romeo & Juliet, which re-instates many of the original early modern versions of the play.

PART 1
Reading, Acting and Editing

Chapter 1
The Reader and the Text

When readers read Romeo and Juliet, whether for their own pleasure, for a stage production or for an engaged critical reading, they make the play into their own personal text. they emphasize the elements they want to focus on; they interact with aspects of the text they have been trained to recognize. the history of readings and stagings of the play, especially the accounts of its public performances over the past 400 years, displays people continually making the text their own. They read from particular historical and social perspectives, they read within a community of other readers and performers, they read from training and experience, and they are highly skilled at reading what is not there. With performance there is always the doubled reading: the first by those people engaged in the production, and the second by the audience of the performance. And with both theatre and written performance, there are the readings of readings undertaken by critics and historians of later times. None of these readings are ahistorical, nor can they find an absolute authentic interpretation. rather, as this chapter will explore, the readings engage from the moment of their present time and context, with the play and any other available documents from the past.

The story of Juliet and romeo is so recognisable to readers that it has become a cliché in Western societies. Yet of all the many versions of the story, it is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that has put down strong roots over 400 years in country after country, being adapted into ballet, opera, musical, romance novel, orchestral arrangement, popular song, comicbook, and being rewritten into new scripts for stage, television and film. The text is dense and complex enough to generate sustained interest and many variations, at the same time as it seems so popular as to have become completely predictable. Not only does the theatre-going audience recognize this tension, but the critical audience does as well, and for many years the modern critical world has rather unselfconsciously neglected the play. There are of course thought-provoking exceptions,¹ but for many Romeo and Juliet as a cliché of thwarted young love has also become the cliché of heterosexual stability and patriarchy, and this apparent conservatism seems to have prevented detailed inquiry into the play’s philosophical and socio-cultural scope.

The history of adaptations, revisions and rewritings also demonstrates that most people take it as a tragedy, but the play is often comic, ranging from wry recognition to belly laugh, from punning wordplay to slapstick. From full-blown adaptation to intelligently shortened stage version, productions usually cut much of this comedy, except the part of the Nurse, which means that they also cut much of the wordplay among the young men, the rude jokes among the servants and the teasing among the women. They also tend to get rid of much of the dialogue involving the Friar, the prince and Capulet Mother and to shorten or excise the narrative material provided by many of the characters throughout. The effect is to reduce the social complexity of the play and to rid it of a vital component of retelling and renarration, and often of humour. The focus of the plot becomes skewed, looking almost entirely at the young people’s world, especially that of Romeo.

In a curious turn that we discuss in Chapter 3, ‘The Editor and the Book’, this pattern renders a text that is closer to the first published edition of the play, Quarto 1 (Q1, 1597), than to Quarto 2 (Q2, 1599), the latter being the edition on which most subsequent editions, including that on the accompanying DVD, are based. But Q1 was probably not acted as it stands. There is growing evidence that comic actors were allowed considerable freeplay, and it is likely that the actors playing the Nurse, peter and the servants, and probably Mercutio as well, improvised extensively.² In contrast, Q2, which is usually the basis for the stage productions before they are cut, is a play in which the intensity and focus of the young people’s world is set alongside the self-contained world of the older people, these two perspectives being multiplied many times by the re-told and fore-told narrative material. To make the point, the play opens with a prologue in sonnet form that tells the entire story – gives away the ending before the action starts – and balances the young people’s fate with the actions of their parents and the civic society around them. This pre-emptive move changes the emphasis of audience concern from ‘what happens next’ to ‘how it all happens’.³

Reading contexts for the writing of ‘Romeo and Juliet’

But Shakespeare’s audiences, just like those of today who are aware of parallel versions such as West Side Story or Shakespeare in Love, probably knew the plot very well, even though they had different background knowledge than we do. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were also avid readers and tellers of stories. Awareness of the sources that Shakespeare may have used in order to write his play helps us to understand how Romeo and Juliet recontextualizes issues for the period within which, and the audience for whom, it was written. There are also many texts that offer analogues which may not have been used as sources but which nevertheless place Romeo and Juliet within a context that can enrich our understanding of the play within a cultural materiality of late-sixteenth-century England. Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) appears to have been used extensively in the writing of Romeo and Juliet,⁴ and W. Painter’s ‘The goodly hystory of the true, and constant Love between Rhomeo and Iulietta’, in volume two of The Palace of Pleasure (1567), may also have contributed a number of elements.⁵ The plot of the play has a long history in western European narrative, and echoes with similar tales of doomed love such as those of Hero and Leander, Tristan and Iseult, Troilus and Cressida, Floris and Blanchefleur, and – of particular interest, as we will discuss – Pyramus and Thisbe. But in each time and place the makers of the tale recontextualize it for their own needs and desires, just as Shakespeare does.

The plot becomes recognisably that of Juliet and Romeo with the Italian novella of the late fifteenth century, changing from Masuccio Salernitano’s tale of Mariotta and Ganozza (Novellino, 1476) to Luigi da Porto’s Historia … (c. 1530), which names the two Romeus and Guilietta, to Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554) and Pierre Boaistuau’s translation of Bandello, Histoires tragiques (1559).⁶ Jill Levenson comments on the cultural background that comes to dominate each retelling, noting that Bandello, for example, presents the men as concerned to curb disruption while Juliet loses control and threatens their economic order.⁷ This suggestive analysis also notes that Boaistuau recounts a tale set in a time of social unrest, where even the family comes under pressure, but where the lovers provide the perfect alternative to the evil disorder resulting from disregard for prudence and counsel found in the parents.⁸ Levenson goes on to aigue that Brooke, the ‘gentleman poet’, rationalizes the story to make social disorder more controllable and that Painter, the ‘civil servant’, brings out the elements of romance and adventure.

Da Porto sets out 12 narrative components of the story in its novella form, but Brooke adds two more: the marriage, and the burial of the heroine in the sepulchre.⁹ Shakespeare retains all the main components, as well as several pieces of plotting introduced by Brooke, such as the Friar being serious and knowledgeable. There are many small inflections, like the Friar’s fear that Juliet will not take the potion and will give him away, or Juliet’s concern with bigamy (2020), which are explicit in Brooke and implicit in Shakespeare, as may be Juliet’s concern about pregnancy, which is entirely likely in Brooke, given that Romeo visits her nightly for more than two months, and although less likely, still possible in Romeo and Juliet (4.1.65). Yet on the whole Shakespeare reshapes Brooke substantially. For example, Mercutio is not involved in the fight between the feuding families, and there is no open taunt by Tybalt of Romeo. That said, the major changes are in structure. Romeo and Juliet foregrounds the civil unrest from the start, adding a public scene (1.1) that is progressively balanced by the public scenes of 3.1 and 5.3. The description of the Apothecary’s shop (5.3) is added possibly to contrast with the description of the Friar’s herb gathering (2.3). Because the text reduces the time Brooke allows between the wedding and Romeo’s departure for Mantua to a few hours, the window scene in 2.2 neatly pivots with the window scene in 3.5, over the wedding itself at 2.6.¹⁰ And Romeo and Juliet builds in an entire series of overhearings and overseeings¹¹ that contribute to the sense of surveillance that runs throughout the play.

Just as interesting are the subtle relocations of words and phrases from one character’s part to another. Being alert to these shifts underlines issues of language and sexuality that the text is exploring. For example, in Brooke, during the Capulets’ feast, Juliet dances and holds hands with both Mercutio and Romeo: the former presents a markedly ‘cold’ hand, while the latter is speechless. Shakespeare, however, finds other ways of dramatising Mercutio’s affection for Romeo and dislike of women, and clearly decides that language is necessary to the intimacy between Juliet and Romeo. When Romeo leaves Juliet in the Brooke poem, he promises to return ‘till Fortune list to sauce his sweet with sour’ (932), an image Shakespeare transfers to wordplay between Romeo and Mercutio (2.4.78–80). When Juliet threatens death, the Nurse replies, ‘Let it suffice to thee, fair dame, that Romeus doth live’ (1353), a comment that is given to the Friar – ‘What, rouse thee man! thy Juliet is alive’ (3.3.135) – when he chastizes Romeo for behaving like a ‘sullen wench’ (3.3.143). Slightly differently, although Brooke’s Juliet does get a speech (2365–76) that echoes the threats to kill herself (4.1.77–88), she does not get the gothic apostrophe delivered just before she takes the poison (4.3.30–57); instead she gets a line reminiscent of Romeo’s just before death (5.3.109) in which she speaks of becoming the ‘dainty food of greedy worms’ (2746). The exchange of verbal detail among Romeo, Juliet and Mercutio (and no doubt others) suggests a fluctuation of significance that either does not worry about gender conventions or is self-consciously attempting to loosen their constraint.

But if the text pays particular attention to Brooke and the narrative components of the story, it also plays with a wide variety of generic sources which become implicated in the breakdown of literary devices demonstrated by the play. Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis is central to many figures in the play, with Shakespeare drawing on the myth of phoebus and phaeton as well as on the stories of Cupid and Psyche and Pyramus and Thisbe. Cupid and Psyche weave through the young men’s wordplay in the early scenes,¹² while in Q2 Phoebus and Phaeton, driving the chariot of the sun, infuse Romeo’s speech at the end of 2.2 and the Friar’s at the start of 2.3.¹³ Cupid and Phoebus combine in Juliet’s waiting for Romeo (2.5.4–11), and Phaeton becomes the central motif of Juliet’s prothalamium (3.2.1–25). Brian Gibbons notes that the ‘glooming’ day that concludes the play (5.3.305) is an echo of ‘A day did pass without the sun’, which marks the fall of Phaeton in Golding’s translation, yet the other Ovidian allusions fade abruptly from the play after Romeo’s banishment becomes known.

Shakespeare may have picked up the echoes with Golding from other sources such as Marlowe or Lyly, but he uses similar references in Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Rape of Lucrece,¹⁴ also from the early 1590s, and elsewhere and may have been directly familiar with the translation.¹⁵ Just so, it is impossible to know whether the elements drawn from Roman tragedy are directly from sources such as Thomas Newton’s collection of translations from the Latin plays¹⁶ or from his contemporaries’ knowledge of the texts. However, the Nurse’s repetitive patter is similar to that of the Nutrix in John Studeley’s Hippolytus, which is found in Newton; Juliet’s threats use vocabulary recalling Phaedra’s, also in Hippolytus; and certain unusual words such as ‘wanny’ (4.1.100) are apparently unique to plays written by Studelely. The lamentation that occurs in 4.5 is reminiscent of those in Newton’s Thebais or Oedipus. But there are lamentations in other plays of the period as well, and in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which the text recalls in other ways.¹⁷ The use of the chorus in Romeo and Juliet may well have been taken from the Senecan choruses in Newton, but it may just as well have been from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589), where it is also used to tell the audience the story in advance.

The tragic elements in Romeo and Juliet are in constant tension with the comedic, and the mos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• DVD Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Romeo and Juliet: The Accompanying Critical Edition on DVD
• Introduction
• Part 1 Reading, Acting and Editing
• Part 2 Transdisciplinary Work
• Coda: Future readings
• List of Abbreviations and References
• Index