Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet

Word, Music, and Dance

Jonas Kellermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032028590
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000437829
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together current intermedial discourses on Shakespeare, music, and dance with the affective turn in the humanities, Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet offers a unique and highly innovative transdisciplinary discussion of "unspeakable" love in one of the most famous love stories in literary history: the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet. Through in-depth case studies and historical contextualisation, this book showcases how the "woes that no words can sound" of Shakespeare's iconic lovers nevertheless have found expression not only in his verbal poetry, but also in non-verbal adaptations of the play in 19th-century symphonic music and 20th- and 21st-century theatre dance. Combining methodological approaches from diverse disciplines, including affect theory, musicology, and dance studies, this study opens up a new perspective onto the artistic representation of love, defining amorous emotion as a generically transformative constellation of dialogic performativity. To explore how this constellation has become manifest across the arts, this book analyses and compares dramatic, musical, and choreographic dramatisations of love in William Shakespeare's early modern tragedy, French composer Hector Berlioz's dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the staging of Berlioz's symphony by German contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz for the Paris Opera Ballet (2007).

Chapters 1 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

“A Rapture So Pure That Its Words Are Tears”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003185536-1

1.1. Dramatising and Theorising Affect

Daniel Kramer’s 2017 production of Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe premiered in the middle of Emma Rice’s short-lived artistic directorship of the theatre. Though not directed by Rice herself – whose controversial departure following the 2017/2018 season was announced by the board of the Globe in autumn 2016 – Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet featured many of the same elements that had sparked the initial debate about “authentic” artistic practices at the theatre: the use of modern lighting and sound technology, a heavily edited play text, and an overtly (and in some eyes) excessively sexualised directorial tone (Morgan). Yet at its end, Kramer’s production, which had all of its characters wear variations of clown make-up, still achieved an effect that other contemporary productions of the play often fail to convey: the unspeakable desperation of two isolated individuals whose only escapism is their togetherness with one another, even to the ultimate point of undoing themselves for the sake of the other.

As Juliet stabs herself, holding the dead Romeo in her arms on her death bed, she lets out a high-pitched, vociferous scream which quickly turns into manic laughter. Tragic suffering blends into comic mania, reflecting the late medieval and early modern connotation of the madman’s laughter as a manifestation of the nihilistic nothingness of death (Foucault 16). The vacuity and purposelessness of death become the vacuity and purposelessness of life, just as the ironic purposelessness of Romeo’s death becomes the subjective purposelessness of Juliet’s life without him – a purposelessness that goes beyond the expressive capacity of words. As Foucault suggests, the emergence of madness as an ontological perspective marked a gradual division between image and language which grew into a hallmark of Western conceptions of madness: “Between word and image, between what is depicted by language and what is uttered by plastic form, the unity begins to dissolve” (18). Juliet’s primal scream/laughter, like the laughter of the madman in the 15th century, bespeaks a similar rupture between image and word, expressing that the profoundness of her last affective experience in life cannot be articulated in Shakespeare’s sophisticated poetry. Notably, the notion of madness as “desperate passion” (Foucault 30) was one of the main modes with which literary artists, including Shakespeare, responded to the “dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance” (Foucault 18):

Love disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it pursues itself in the void of delirium.

(Foucault 30)

Kramer’s staging blurs the lines between void and fulfilment, tragedy and comedy, sanity and insanity, crying and laughter, as well as seriousness and clownery, revealing an affective truth to the protagonists which – like the ontological truth of the madman’s laughter – no one but they themselves could comprehend. Thus, at the very end of the performance, the focus rests solely on the protagonist’s amorous union. The lighting fades from blue to black, leaving all characters but the lovers, who are illuminated by halo-like light poles at the head of the platform on which they lie, in darkness. The platform – first Juliet’s bed, now the lovers’ shared death bed – transforms into a lone and insular altar of light and love in the darkness of the Globe, while the lone voice of Golda Rosheuvel (Mercutio) wistfully intones the final verse of Sinead O’Connor’s ballad “In this heart” a cappella:

I will have you with me

In my arms only

For you are only

My love, my love, my love.

The outside world beyond the lovers is finally and irrevocably blocked out, leaving them with nothing but themselves silently and luminously together in each other’s arms as Juliet rocks herself and her beloved to everlasting sleep, “a death in which the lovers will never be separated again” (Foucault 30).

The powerful final image of the dead lovers illuminating an otherwise darkened Globe Theatre embodies the iconicity that the play and its protagonists have reached as the quintessential Western dramatisation of romantic love, even beyond the Shakespearean canon. Romeo and Juliet has been called “the normative love story of our time” (Garber, Modern Culture 34), “the absolute embodiment, the tragic paradigm, of romantic love” (McMullan xvi) and “the most famous story of doomed young love ever written” (Weis 1), a reputation demonstrated not only in critical readings of the play but also in its pop-cultural legacy. John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love exemplarily posits Romeo and Juliet as the answer to the underlying question of the film’s plot: “Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?” (59:12–23 min) Shakespeare in Love in no uncertain terms suggests that “Yes, Romeo and Juliet is the play that can”. The young and struggling playwright Will Shakespeare falls head over heels in love with the beautiful noble lady (and part-time actress) Viola de Lesseps. Their secret affair hence inspires him to write his romantic masterpiece Romeo and Juliet, an original rather than adapted work, contrary to literary history. In its premiere performance at the climax of the film, the play – against all odds – proves so affectively powerful that even Judi Dench’s steely Elizabeth I deems it a convincing representation of true love. The performance of emotion by Will and Viola in the title roles, the film suggests, is so genuine and heart-felt that spectators, both on- and off-screen, cannot help but be affected by it themselves. What is it, then, that makes the dramatisation of love in Romeo and Juliet so affectively captivating even 400 years after its creation? If the love between Shakespeare’s protagonists is so ungraspable that “no words can that woe sound” (3.2.126),¹ why do these woes nevertheless hold such a powerful emotional grasp over us four centuries later?

To answer this question, this book reassesses the play and its representation of affect and emotion, particularly love, in light of a recent critical development that has pushed affectivity and its semiotic intelligibility to the discursive forefront of the Humanities: the so-called turn to affect, or “affective turn”. Starting in the mid-1990s, the affective turn has caused a renewed and ongoing interest in diverse notions of affectivity as non-cognitive, embodied phenomena (Gregg and Seigworth 1–25). According to Patricia Clough, “the turn to affect and emotion extended discussions about culture, subjectivity, identities, and bodies begun in critical theory under the influence of post-structuralism and deconstruction” (206). It particularly constituted a “move from a strictly constructivist account of the body as a material substratum of ensuing social inscription to a more refined exploration of the ‘mattering’ of the body whereby agency emerges as a dynamic force” (Athanasiou et al. 8). Rather than continuing the psychologised sense of emotion as an internal experience that took hold at the beginning of the 19th century, this critical development emphasised affective phenomena as inter-relational constellations of bodily intensities that blur epistemological distinctions between outwardness and inwardness and challenge conventional thinking about emotional intentionalism.

One of the fundamental paradigms of the affective turn – and also one of its most fiercely contested premises since – has been what Ruth Leys calls “the belief that affect is independent of signification and meaning” (315). Many affect theorists, including figureheads like Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Adam Frank, whose writings marked “watershed moment[s]” (Gregg and Seigworth 5–6) in the rise of affect theory, have argued for a categorical distinction between affect and emotion, variously proclaiming affects to be virtual, pre-personal intensities (Massumi 96) or evolutionarily conditioned, non-intentional hardwires (Gregg and Seigworth 6) that differ from emotions as actualised and semiotically fixated entities. Others have vigorously rejected this premise, arguing that theorists who place affect outside of social meaning-making not only misconstrue scientific data (Papoulias and Calllard 47) but also effectively reinforce the very dichotomies that they self-professedly intend to deconstruct, especially the Cartesian dualism between body and mind (Leys 341, see also Hemmings 563–565). As Benedict Robinson remarks,

[t]he irony of a theory that seeks to undermine mind/body dualism by embracing a radically embodied concept of affect is that this radically embodied concept is the product of mind/body dualism, not an alternative to it.

(123)

This issue pertains not only to the discussion of “real-life” affective phenomena within Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, however, but also to the representation of affective experiences in artistic works, including literature, which has gained increasing traction in both Literary Studies at large and Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies in particular.² As Eu-genie Brinkema cautions in her aptly titled study The Forms of the Affects:

Affect is not the place where something immediate and automatic and resistant takes place outside of language. The turning to affect in the humanities does not obliterate the problem of form and representation. Affect is not where reading is no longer needed.

(xiv)

The question in what ways the seeming ineffability of affect takes aesthetic form lies at the very heart of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Not only is it a play which, as Jill Levenson observes in the Oxford Shakespeare, “was, and still is, famous for its affect” (“Introduction” 15), but also a play which thoroughly examines the expressibility of affect from the perspective of two lovers whose connection to the world in which they live lessens as their amorous connection to one another strengthens. In that regard, Shakespeare’s 16th-century play strikingly anticipates the 20th- and 21st-century debate on affect as a (pre-)discursive phenomenon. This book follows Brinkema in conceiving affective experiences, especially love, not as being outside of or beyond artistic form, but rather as being performatively constructed in and brought forth by various artistic forms. The alleged unspeakability of love in Romeo and Juliet thereby moves to the centre of my critical attention. Is the passionate love between Shakespeare’s young protagonists truly a rapture so pure that its seemingly only words are tears – “si pure extase que ses paroles sont des pleurs” – as the libretto to Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette so poignantly suggests (Roméo 43)?³ Or is it rather an affective relation which despite all its ineffability nevertheless has found articulate expression in different artistic “languages”, like drama, music, and dance? To answer this overarching question, I do not seek to simply re-state the acclaimed affectivity of Romeo and Juliet. Instead, I take cues from affect theory to formulate a transmedial model of love that specifically adheres to the story of the star-crossed lovers from Verona. This model, I argue, becomes manifest as a constitutive structure in Shakespeare’s use of poetic language especially when we read the text “preposterously” with and through the perspective of non-verbal adaptations of the play: since “art works from the past will be perceived and interpreted differently if they are seen through the lens of their later recyclings and refigurations” (Bronfen 7), in what ways has the chronologically posterior afterlife of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in music and dance inscribed itself into our understanding of the anterior early modern play?

This book therefore analyses and compares both verbal and non-verbal renditions of the famous story to explore the extent to which the love of Romeo and Juliet is in fact bound by or “beyond” verbal language, as the characters proclaim. I interrogate Levenson’s notion that the play is still “famous for its affect” from the literary perspective of Shakespeare’s text – itself an adaptation of earlier narrative material – as well as from the perspective of non-literary adaptations of that very text. Instead of ascribing to Shakespeare’s lovers a pre-discursive interiority which is then externalised expressively – a prominent idea in the romantic reception of Shakespeare – this book seeks to enquire how the idea of such “boundless” (2.1.176) and unspeakable interiority is artistically constructed in the first place. As David Schalkwyk has recently noted, “Early modern and classical writers … offer no united front on the relation of love to desire or on the nature of love as passion” (Language 215), and neither is there a “single theory or view of love in his [Shakespeare’s] plays and poems” (Language 11). This book reads Shakespeare’s play and a selection of its adaptations in light of affect theory in order to derive a concept of love from these works, rather than enforcing any pre-conceived notion of love onto them. Such a concept marks a first important step on the way towards a still-lacking transmedial theory of “Shakespearean love”, in Romeo and Juliet and beyond.

1.2. Affective Movements and Practices

As appealing as affect theory has proven to cultural critics over the last 25 years, as much does it still lack conceptual and methodological consensus, particularly concerning the questions of how to define affect in itself and how to theorise its relation to the affiliated term “emotion”:

There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be. If anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect.

(Gregg and Seigworth 4; see also Thrift 175)

The term “affect theory” does not denote a unified, cohesive string of theory, but rather an umbrella term that encompasses various, at times highly contradictory ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: “A Rapture So Pure That Its Words Are Tears”
• 2. Discoursing Love: Amorous Community in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
• 3. Composing Love: Topical Fields and Gestures in Hector Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette
• 4. Choreographing Love: Balletic Contact in Sasha Waltz’s Roméo et Juliette
• 5. “A Story of More Woe”: Romeo and Juliet Beyond Hector Berlioz and Sasha Waltz
• 6. Conclusion: Towards a Transmedial Theory of Love
• Bibliography
• Index