Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life

The Boundaries of Civic Space

Silvia Bigliazzi, Lisanna Calvi, Silvia Bigliazzi, Lisanna Calvi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138839984
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317556961
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume introduces 'civic Shakespeare' as a new and complex category entailing the dynamic relation between the individual and the community on issues of authority, liberty, and cultural production. It investigates civic Shakespeare through Romeo and Juliet as a case study for an interrogation of the limits and possibilities of theatre and the idea of the civic. The play's focus on civil strife, political challenge, and the rise of a new conception of the individual within society makes it an ideal site to examine how early modern civic topics were received and reconfigured on stage, and how the play has triggered ever new interpretations and civic performances over time. The essays focus on the way the play reflects civic life through the dramatization of issues of crisis and reconciliation when private and public spaces are brought to conflict, but also concentrate on the way the play has subsequently entered the public space of civic life. Set within the fertile context of performance studies and inspired by philosophical and sociological approaches, this book helps clarify the role of theatre within civic space while questioning the relation between citizens as spectators and the community. The wide-ranging chapters cover problems of civil interaction and their onstage representation, dealing with urban and household spaces; the boundaries of social relations and legal, economic, political, and religious regulation; and the public dimension of memory and celebration. This volume articulates civic Romeo and Juliet from the sources of genre to contemporary multicultural performances in political contact-zones and civic 'Shakespaces,' exploring the Bard and this play within the context of communal practices and their relations with institutions and civic interests.

Part I
Dialectics of Private and Public Spaces

1 Classical Paradigms of Tragic Choice in Civic Stories of Love and Death

Guido Avezzù

Classical philologists are normally required to identify the precedents of the modern versions of an archetypal story along a diachronic line. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, they paradoxically tend to concentrate upon the less civic dimensions of the play, although its action starts off in the public space of the streets and its thematic core is rooted in civic feuding. This attitude is shared by Elizabethan theatre scholars such as John J. Munro who, in investigating the “tales of unhappy loves”, pointed out “two main elements” as distinctive features of the ‘separation-’ and ‘potion-romances’: (a) the separation of two lovers by some obstacle, and (b) their ruin brought about by an error (1908, ix–x, xlviii–ix). Thus the ‘potion-plot’ and the subsequent peripeteia escape all dynamic confrontation with the primarily civic dimension of the ‘separation-plot’, represented by Sampson’s and Gregory’s early ruthless exhibition of both symptoms and effects of civic feuding. Conversely, concentrating on the “error” as the triggering element of the tragic dénouement and defining it as a sort of reversed tragic recognition entailed an emphasis on the novelistic components over the civic context, which is nonetheless clearly alluded to by some details of the ‘potion-plot’ (such as Friar John’s mishap, 5.2.5–16) and stressed by the Prince’s final intervention in 5.3. Indeed, this has led critics to focus mainly upon the last two acts, looking for the earliest literary attestations of stories pivoting on the apparent death of a character resulting in the death of her/his lover and in the final suicide of the former. It is well known that this plot closely follows the narrative pattern of Pyramus’s and Thisbe’s story narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The search for antecedents – at least since Douce’s Illustrations of Shakspeare (1807) – has invariably looked at Hellenistic tales and romances, whose dating and intertextual relations remain in the haze. The survival and the dissemination of these texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have not been fully elucidated (see, for instance, Xenophon Ephesius’s Ephesian tales, which has been numbered among Romeo and Juliet’s indirect sources, or even Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe). These intertextual and derivational ramifications have been further complicated by the hypothesis of a direct descent of the Italian novellas (Da Porto, Bandello) from the Ephesian tales. On the one hand, this does not help clarify whether it is a matter of genetic descent or instead of inheritance of a narrative archetype; on the other hand, it shows that other possible and verifiable ascendancies of the dramatic text have been neglected.

As Kenneth Muir pointed out, apart from the obvious reference to epics, other narrative genres should also be explored. Muir distinguished between ascertainable and ascertained “conscious” sources, but also underlined “numerous unconscious sources”, and called for the “need for a full-length study of Shakespeare’s use of multiple sources” (1954, 152–3; my emphasis). It is worth calling attention to yet another aspect – which I will also discuss below – of Muir’s analysis of “Shakespeare’s method”. The same source, Muir argues, may have been available to Shakespeare through several narrative adaptations but also through the concomitant translation/s of the source that was the model for those same adaptations. With regard to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, Ovid’s epyllion (short epic poem) reached Shakespeare through the Italian novellas and Brooke’s eventual poetic translation, but also – as Muir clearly showed – through other kinds of mediation, both ‘high’, such as Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,¹ and ‘low’, such as some Elizabethan Miscellanies, which were probably addressed to a larger and less sophisticated audience (ibid., 142–3). This hypothesis brings forth the idea – to which I will also come back – that the latter sources interacted with the basic narrative paradigm stirring suggestions that found fertile ground in both the author’s and the audience’s expectations.

As regards other ‘sources’, we should especially look at Greek and Roman tragedy, in that not only did it contribute to the shaping of the Ovidian narrative – as has already been remarked – but also exercised this modelling function through other kinds of mediation. “Metamorphic” in itself (Barchiesi 2005, cxliv),² “of its nature anti-generic” and at the same time “an anthology of genres” (Kenney 1986, xviii), Ovid’s poem, “following a dynamics already firmly established in the Hellenistic poetry … offers itself as the final outcome of the entire tradition of Greek and Latin tragedy” in “a sort of global reading”, prompting the reader “to compare the destinies that the single works keep somewhat separated” (Barchiesi 2005, cxliv-vi). Among the many lots narrated in the Metamorphoses, the reader finds those of incestuous pairs such as Byblis and her brother Caunus (Ovid 2004, 9.450–665) or Myrrha and her father Cinyras (ibid., 10.298–502).³ The two stories are united by the precept that girls should love only those they are allowed to (“Byblis in exemplo est ut ament concessa puellae”, 9.454; “Byblis ought / To bee a mirror unto Maydes in lawfull wyse to love”, Golding 1567, 117^v) and by the observation that “nunc opus est leviore lyra … canamus … inconcessisque puellas / ignibus attonitas meruisse libidine poenam” (10.152) (“now I neede a meelder style to tell … of unlawfull joyes / That burned in the brests of Girles, who for theyr wicked lust / According as they did deserve, receyved penance just”, Golding 1567, 124^v). It is likely that the extremity of these stories, pivoting on a love that “res ipsa vetat” (Ovid 2004, 10.354: “the thing itself forbids it”)⁴ and on the subsequent repudiation of one’s familial belonging⁵ that we will find in Romeo and Juliet (2.1.75–8), did not prove suggestive only after a reading of Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Besides, these stories are not merely about incest, but more generally entail an erotic investment so radical as to subvert not only the family institution, but also dynastic convenience, and end up by threatening the existence of the desiring subjects within the city itself. This predicament brings about a tragic finale and, in Ovid especially, a metamorphic sentence. In this regard, the role of Plutarch’s Moralia should not be undervalued since in the sixteenth century their translations became available to the “ordinary cultivated reader” (Gillespie 2004, 426).⁶ The whole corpus was translated into French by Jacques Amyot in 1572, but a few titles had been already individually printed in English from 1528 onwards (the same year in which Thomas Wyatt published his Quiet of Mind, taken from Plutarch’s De tranquillitate animi – a work that would be translated by Queen Elizabeth too). Furthermore, both Plutarch’s Moralia and his Lives (translated by Thomas North in 1579) granted the transmission of the textual fragments of both surviving and lost Greek tragedies, located in textual contexts that used them as witnesses and interpretative paradigms of both approved and disapproved behaviours. However, it is no exaggeration to affirm that the Moralia conveyed a tragic conception, as well as fabulistic patterns, in a more effective way than the still slow dissemination of the extant Greek dramatic texts would allow. In this scenario, the suggestions exercised not only by the contents, but also by the models, were assimilated and sometimes combined: the principle “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (Ovid 2004, 15.165) [“all changes, nothing perishes”] applies also in this regard. A close analysis may not overlook other debts towards Greek tragedy – even though possibly mediated. The extent and pervasiveness of the dissemination of ancient Greek texts in Britain – even in the original – is also witnessed by the fortune of a fragment from Critias’s Sisyphus (second half of the fifth century BC). This forty-line fragment, transmitted by Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus mathematicos, 9.54,⁷ deals with the ‘invention of the gods’, and was adapted by Robert Greene in his 1594 First Part of the Most Tyrannicall Tragedie and Raigne of Selimus (Greene 1898, ll. 312–43). The derivation from Sextus Empiricus is apparent and the fact that his Adversus mathematicos – available at the time only through a Latin translation published in Paris in 1569 – was well known is confirmed by the ‘hellish verses’ supposedly composed by Walter Raleigh.⁸

Some narrative subgenres, such as the condensed form of prose epyllia represented by Parthenius’s Love Romances, also show affinities with the plot in question. I will start by introducing an overview of this kind of literature, and then move on to Greek tragedy. This will mean to look at the narrative and dramatic models of the ‘less civic’ dimension of Romeo and Juliet as a foil to help foreground what I suggest could be considered as a horizon of expectations regarding civic motifs and topoi of classical origin circulating in Renaissance England. While not providing direct sources, they may assist us in mapping out the cultural construction of an idea of the civic based on a widespread dissemination of classical texts and their unexpected oblique effect upon Shakespeare.

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe, narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4.55–166), can be segmented into six phases:⁹

a ll. 55–80: the love between the protagonists is hindered by their parents;

b ll. 81–92: the lovers promise each other to meet at night under the mulberry tree next to Ninus’s grave;

c ll. 93–104: Thisbe temporarily remains alone, and an unforeseen event seems to produce evidence of her death;¹⁰

d ll. 105–27: at his arrival, Pyramus gathers from this evidence that she is dead and kills himself;

e ll. 128–63: she returns, discovers the body of her beloved, and commits suicide;

f ll. 164–6: the gods and the parents are moved by the event; the gods will perpetuate the mulberry metamorphosis: the fruits, which had been white until then, have been turned blood red (ll. 125–7) and finally black (ll. 165–6); the parents will immortalize the memory of the two lovers, whose ashes will be indissolubly mingled together “una … in urna” (l. 166, “in a single urn”): this will be a “monimentum” (l. 161, “memorial shrine”) no less than the mulberries “gemini monimenta cruoris” (l. 161, “memorials of our twinned blood”).¹¹

We can identify here the emergence of the narrative pattern of the apparent death that, long before being valorized by the Hellenistic romance (Kerényi 1973, 24–43), was already well-known in classic Athens. It can be found in Sophocles’s Electra ll. 62–3, in which Orestes, who is planning to fake his own death, says: “Yes, often in the past I have known clever men dead in fiction but not dead” (Lloyd-Jones 1994), thus alluding to renowned shamanic figures and/or to protagonists of myths (Finglass 2007, 111 and Wehrli 1965, 142–3). Yet, not differently from what will happen in Romeo and Juliet, in Pyramus and Thisbe this attitude is not conducive to the stigmatization of popular beliefs, but to the activation of a deductive process similar to the one that in Greek tragedy regulated the anagnorisis (exemplar in this regard is Electra’s traditional recognition of her brother Orestes which Euripides fiercely criticizes in his Electra; see Boitani 2002 and 2014, 133–79). Keeping to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, its linear unfolding encompasses: (a) conflict, (b) intrigue, (c) Pyramus’s departure and Thisbe’s apparent death, (d) his fallacious deduction and ensuing suicide, (e) her return, discovery of his dead body and suicide, (f) the perpetuation of their memory, entrusted to nature and to posthumous legitimation by their parents. This sequence can be applied to the analysis of the mythemic motifs and their several appropriations on their way to Romeo and Juliet.¹²

To date the search for the earliest precedents of the Shakespearean drama has led to the so-called Story of Pamphilus and Eurydike, preserved in a first-century BC Michigan papyrus.¹³ In its scanty twenty-seven lines, this papyrus “presents a prose narrative closely related to the famous episode of Pyramus and Thisbe … whose version appeared until then fairly isolated within the Greek-Latin literary tradition” (Stramaglia 2001, 82). If we compare Pamphilus and Eurydike with the segmentation of the Pyramus and Thisbe storyline presented above, we can detect some common elements (the letters correspond to the ones assigned to the Pyramus and Thisbe plot; literal quotations from the papyrus, essential to the reconstruction of the story, are in italics):

a the presence of openings – although unspecified at least in the readable portion of the papyrus – which are remindful of Ovid’s “tenui[s] rima” (4.65, “little chink”) that allowed the two lovers to communicate secretly;

b Pamphilus being late for the appointment, after having left his beloved alone;

c not finding her and seeing her clothing (which we may presume to be blood-stained) and a circular set of footprints as if she had been chased, Pamphilus presumes that Eurydike has been eaten by a wild beast.

Thanks to the new, more satisfactory dating of the papyrus fragment to the late first century BC,¹⁴ the anonymous and fragmentary Pamphylus and Eurydike should be ascribed at the latest to the epoch in which Parthenius was active, that is, the second half of the first century (possibly between 52 and 26 BC).¹⁵ His very short Love romances (’Eρωτικὰ παθήματα, literally ‘love sufferings’) present various stories that terminate in the suicide either of the male protagonist, who blames himself for having unwillingly caused the death of his beloved (or, in any case, of a girl), or of the female protagonist as a consequence of her lover’s death – of which she is in no way responsible. In this regard it is essential to mention at least the cases of Leucone and Cyanippus, Clite and Cyzicus, Anthippe and Cichyrus, and Arganthone and Rhesus, which are representative of two distinct typologies of masculine and feminine suicide:¹⁶

I. ‘EXPIATORY’ SUICIDE (masculine):

10. Leucone and Cyanippus:¹⁷ Cyanippus kills his jealous wife mistaking her for a wild beast and then kills himself.

32. Anthippe and Cichyrus: Anthippe hides in a bush with an unnamed young boy with whom she has fallen in love. Cichyrus, the king’s son, mistaking her for a wild beast, kills her. As soon he realizes his error, Cychyrus faints, is unhorsed, and dies.¹⁸ Nothing is known of Anthippe’s anonymous lover’s fate.

II. ‘widowed’ suicide (feminine):

28. Clite and Cyzicus: Cyzicus dies fighting the Argonauts and Clite commits suicide.

36. Arganthone and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue: Shakespeare and Verona
• PART I Dialectics of Private and Public Spaces
• PART II Civic Performances and R&Jspaces
• Afterword: “What’s past is prologue”: Civic Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet and Beyond
• Contributors
• Index