Three Plays On Love and Rule: I) Romeo and Juliet [Draft]

Three Plays on Love and Rule:

Commentaries on Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest

Mark A. McDonald

Introduction  

   These three plays together will allow a concise study of love, and provide an introduction to the archetypes pertaining to rule and the cultivation of practical wisdom. The apprehension of a pattern regarding the nature of love allows Shakespeare to join both tragedy and his new sort of high comedy, resolving the Italian tragedy with something found in ancient Athens. What Shakespeare found in ancient Athens is the principle of wise rule, or the virtue of the practical faculty. And so, as is proper, the study of love leads into the study of wisdom or the philosopher, thought to be the highest happiness. If so, this would be the health of the soul,[1] to which every other condition would have reference.

   In the new study of Shakespeare’s politics,[2] Harry Jaffa introduces the principle of the conjunction of tragedy and comedy and the division of the plays according to the nations. Wisdom or wise rule is the principle which brings comedy from tragedy in Shakespeare’s new kind of comedy. The story begins about 416 B.C., when at the dawn of the long night of the Symposium Socrates is reported to have persuaded Aristophanes, that the same man might be capable of writing both tragedy and comedy.[3] The great Greek dramatists wrote one or the other, but not both (Republic, 395a), and none have much succeeded with either since. Great tragedy is written at only two points in human history. As Henry Meyers indicates, the first example of this ability to write both tragedy and comedy did not occur for nearly two thousand years, when early in his career, in the 1590’s, by 1594, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That is, Two thousand years went by before the argument, thought impossible, found fulfillment not only in Socratic speeches, but in action. Both Shakespearean tragedy and Shakespearean comedy have notable differences from ancient tragedy. The tragedy is more closely related to history, and, unlike Greek tragedy, is able to consider villains, such as The Tragedy of Richard III and Macbeth. As Harry Jaffa states, “The typical Shakespearean comedy is a tragedy that does not happen, a tragedy prevented from happening by the improbable presence within the play of a wise man, or wise woman.”[4] Jaffa (Ibid, p. 282).states:

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as in Romeo and Juliet, there is a plot in which the lovers seem to be doomed. But the enchanted forest and the magic of Oberon prevent the tragic circumstances from having their tragic effect.

The principle answering the riddle of the Symposium may come from the very center of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates tells Glaucon and Adeimantus that there is no rest from ills for the cities in human life until philosophers rule as kings (Republic, 473d). The philosopher king would unite the virtues Aristotle calls sophia and phronesis, theoretical and practical wisdom– both, surprisingly, guided by the sight of nous or intellect (Ethics VI, VII, X). In Romeo and Juliet, a quarrel between the families to which the lovers belong leads to the death of the lovers in an accidental double suicide similar to that in Pyramus and Thisbe, the story from Ovid which Shakespeare satires in the play performed by Bottom and the Athenian craftsmen for the wedding of Theseus in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The imprudent friar fails to prevent the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, while in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the combined action of Oberon and Theseus brings a happy ending from a love set up for tragedy. The Tempest, at the other end of Shakespeare’s career, is also the best example of the wise man bringing comedy from tragedy, in the re-arranging of the Italian regime by Prospero, the philosopher-duke. In the words of Alan Bloom:

Critics, notably Coleridge, have remarked that Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest are very much like Romeo and Juliet. The suddenness and intensity of their love, as well as their innocence and good character are alike. They are also from families at war…Their love has exactly the same potential for tragedy as does that of Romeo and Juliet. But that potential is prevented from being realized by the presence, per impossible, of a genuinely wise man, the sort that would never be present in any real situation…In a sense, Romeo and Juliet, as well as several other plays, can be seen to pose problems or conflicts that cannot be resolved in practice but with which a Prospero could in principle deal.

Love and Friendship, p. 283-4

   The usual division of the works of Shakespeare is into comedies, histories, and tragedies, as in the first Folio. Some of these, especially among the late plays, do not quite fit as either, and then there are the poems. Harry Jaffa also introduces the second great principle of this school of Shakespeare readers, dividing the plays according to the nations of their settings.[5] There are Roman, English, Greek and Italian series of Shakespearean plays. Attaining a comprehensive view, Jaffa argues that these fit into a study of the history of the West.[6] The English and Roman histories and tragedies are called by Jaffa the “axis upon which Shakespeare’s account of political things turns.” But for political in the highest sense, political philosophy or poetry in addition to political history, the same claim, to be an axis, might be made for the Greek and Italian plays. Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest are Italian plays, set in modern Italy, as opposed to ancient Rome. These two plays are at the beginning and the end of both Shakespeare’s Italian plays and his career. Other Italian plays are Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, set in Messina, in Sicily. The play performed in Warwickshire for Christopher Sly, The Taming of the Shrew, is set in “Padua, near Verona,” and the Venetian plays are Othello and the Merchant of Venice. As You Like It takes place in and around Arden forest. A Winters Tale, set in Sicily and Bohemia, might also be considered an Italian play, as would be quite significant, if for example jealousy is by analogy related to the assumption or desire for certainty. The Greek plays are A Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by Troilus and Cressida, The Comedy of Errors, Timon of Athens and Pericles. As Howard White and Leo Paul de Alvarez note,[7] only the Greek play considers a founding of a city. The founding of the Roman Republic is considered in a poem, The Rape of Lucrece. There is no Romulus. Pericles is pan-Hellenic, set in the Aegean and at Tyre and Antioch, in Syria and what was Phoenicia.  Twelfth Night is in Illyria, and Measure for Measure in Austria. Alls Well that Ends Well is French, and Love’s Labors Lost is set in Navarre, now in the north of Spain. Lear, Cymbeline and Macbeth are both history and tragedy, or mythic history, as is the Danish play Hamlet. Jaffa writes:

Shakespeare’s work, taken as a whole, comprehends what today would be called a history of western civilization. Only in light of this “history” can Shakespeare’s deepest intention– to be the poet-philosopher of the English speaking peoples, the teacher of its citizens and statesmen and legislators– be comprehended.

   The Tempest, presented first in the Folio edition of 1623, is like a comprehensive overview of what he calls his “project.”[8] The Epilogue is often considered to be a farewell to the theater, and Shakespeare’s Tempest considered to be autobiographical, addressing the powers and project of the wise duke as analogous to the drama of Shakespeare. As Paul Cantor writes, The Tempest works something of a sea change upon the tragic material, transmuting it to “something rich and strange.” Cantor, Howard B. White and Barbara Tovey present readings of The Tempest in relation to Plato’s Republic. In The Tempest, the most fundamental orders of the West are addressed, and it is highly significant that this, often considered the most autobiographical of plays, is an Italian rather than an English play. The Italian and English plays in general, together with single Danish and Viennese plays, are the especially Christian plays, with especially Christian themes, or the themes of modern religion or the Christian West. In these, Shakespeare often speaks in pagan terms, of Diana and Ceres for example. It may have been forbidden to do otherwise in drama, but it is not clear that the dramas are Christian in the medieval sense. Religion was then a dangerous topic, and Shakespeare survived by not addressing Christianity directly, though he never shrinks from addressing politics or Christian characters. Romeo and Juliet, as will be shown, is a tragedy based on the image of God in the soul reflected even in romantic love. It is an especially Christian tragedy, including the failure of the Friar. The contrasting Greek and Italian plays might function like the contrast of Athens and Jerusalem, to consider the Biblical and philosophic roots of western civilization. The Tempest is a “comedy” or action that works out well, and so shows how the things of love and Italian politics might be governed so as to avoid tragedy, or, here, the tragic death of innocent lovers.

   Shakespearean drama is set in a context of something modern that is yet most like classical natural right. The classical natural right teaching is not a body of law or natural law, but is articulated by the construction in speech of the best regime, as shown in Plato’s Republic or, Politea. The politea is the source of all laws, but no constitution can be the fundamental political fact, because all laws depend upon human beings (Natural Right and History, p. 136). The kinds of regime are based upon the kinds of souls, and their dominance in any community. What Shakespeare shows in drama is not the best regime, but the household of the wise man. Together with his political action, this functions as an articulation of natural right in both the soul and the regime (Republic, 368c-369a).[9] By tending his private interests, Prospero sets aright the whole of Italian politics. Because of Prospero, if we receive him, the world has a place for the liberal arts and love.

   Plato and Shakespeare are the two who address the things of man not in treatises, by speeches alone, but by showing the body speaking, in drama. Speech is embedded in a circumstance, and drama is especially able to show analogies through actions. These two writers, with about 36 plays and dialogues each respectively, are the two writers to resign, or to stop their work when it was completed. All others, as ourselves, seem to write until death stops them. Drama, if one includes the Platonic dialogue, is, as Aristotle indicates in his Poetics, the highest art form or the highest made thing, the highest imitation. Treatises can present the arguments or speeches of a man, but drama presents us with the man speaking as well as the speech, set in a context from which speeches prove inseparable. And sculptor or painter may present the appearance of a man, but only the dramatist can present living, speaking and acting persons. One is reminded of the sculptures that come to life, in A Winter’s Tale. Word and action together are read in interpreting these. For as Chaucer (Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 741-2)[10]writes:

As Plato saith, whoso can him rede,The words must be cousin to the dede.”

   There are three tiers identifiable in the Shakespearean study of the soul: wisdom, or the virtue of the mind; love, or the things of the heart, governed by the noble; and then the three or so sorts governed by the worldly ends. Various three tired arrangements appear throughout Shakespearean drama, as will appear momentarily in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. The account of the three parts of the soul in Plato’s Republic develops, in Books V and VI, into the account of the two, the male and female guardians, and then the one, the philosopher, and the philosopher kings. Having considered, in our psychology, the shadow and the things of the “personal” unconscious, we proceed to the things of love, and through these toward the wisdom governing in the Shakespearean universe.

   Romeo and Juliet is the one book of any age– now over 400 years– that is a part of American education. Many High School students are given this to read or to perform, whereas no other book could be said to be read universally, or nationwide. If one were to ask the superintendents of curriculum the reason for this, the answers would be interesting to collect. We seem to want to introduce the students also to love. Yet it is rather difficult to say things about the play that might help us in reading. For this reason too, it may be most helpful and welcome to us, and to the teachers, to read and consider the play and what it shows about love.

On Romeo and Juliet

Preface

   The mystery of romantic love provides what is like a crystal ball or a mandala, a mantra for the mind’s eye to focus, and a window through which we can look to into the entire human drama. The Sufi poet Rumi writes: “Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.” To regard romantic love as a mystery which has a purpose in the health of the human psyche is also to regard the psyche and reality as a mystery the bounds of which are more than what is immediately apparent. Common sense takes love to be simply and obviously real, yet once we ask what its nature and purpose is, the obviousness vanishes.  If love does indeed have a purpose– beyond sexual or biological reproduction– the entire scientific view of man and the nature man inhabits is in some sense inadequate for understanding human nature. Our science of course admits the animal desire for sex, but cannot deal even with the biological contradictions of adultery, let alone the emotions involved. To even come close to a purpose of love, our science would perhaps have to consider the binding of the family into a unity. Birds too have this, and other mammals in different sorts, have families and rudimentary emotions related to the family. Yet love is still considered to be specifically human. How much of what Jung calls the “persona,” and again all the strange pursuits and exploits of men, are based upon this “self esteem,” and all its intricacies? In one sweep, the majority of modern psychology falls away as inadequate for inquiry into the whole of man, an inadequate view which seems indeed to be due not to any “empirical” observation, but to the longing of psychology to be a science. Nor does the question disappear once neuronal activity is found corresponding. Hence the scientific textbooks on psychology do not even mention love, and cannot give anything like an adequate description of the place of love, for example in “abnormal” psychology. The attachment of love is sometimes, according to the fashions of our psychology, peculiar to the present half century, considered to be a “mental illness.” This same fashion once considered homosexuality to be a mental illness, and then, without the slightest change in science, but only a change in the fashions of opinion, came to consider the criticism of homosexuality to be a “phobia.” Nothing can be done for that sort of “science.” Much of the complexity of love of course comes from the fact that the one loved is both a part of one’s own heart and, obviously, a separate person. In the study of love, it is commonplace to say that the lover loves an image they themselves make or project onto the beloved. It is less commonplace to consider that the image and the beloved are in a sense one, or that there is a sense in which love does see the objective reality or even the “angel” of the beloved. If our inquiry, then, is even to begin, these contexts of modern science and modern common sense must come into question. But mysteries have a tendency to do that– to make us question.

   In fact if we would try to see anything about love, we must call into service the symbols and imagery of poetry. The symbols do seem to embody some sort of knowledge, if a veiled sort which we can work to unveil by reflection. With this sort of knowledge, the epistemological status of what appears before the eye of the mind is as much a mystery as what it is that the symbols point toward. Perhaps, too, we must find ourselves to have a psychological need to see something of the mysteries, a need which is urgent enough to overleap the desire for the kind of certainty or assurance that the poetic symbols cannot bring. We must be willing to put up with obscurity in notions which are not immediately entirely clear. We must trust the symbols to some extent, though we do not know what they mean or where they lead. For example, if it is said in poetry that the soul is an “image of God,” as considered too by Jung, we must be willing to wonder for a long time what this might mean. Perhaps we must settle for what insight we can find, and even be willing to be changed by it. This is because the notion is a symbol, only partly clear, and not at all like 1=1+2 or 3+1=4. The symbols embody a different kind of knowledge. If our goal is to finalize our quest by possessing a rational or propositional content, or gaining some certainty as an instrument to master and possess nature, we perhaps might as well close the book of the symbols, since this book may consistently elude that desire. The symbols are our gateway to the mysteries. They activate and connect our minds to the knowledge we do not possess but that is recollect-able. We must be daring enough to be consistently baffled along with any increase in clarity.

   William Shakespeare and Carl Jung are two thinkers who are not willing to close the book of the mysteries of the book of love, the human psyche and reality. Instead they seem to have devoted their lives to an articulation of the natures involved. Their works provide gateways for the genuine student of human nature which most will leave unopened. Jung is excluded from the mainstream of modern psychology and academia because he did not entirely hide the fact that he labored in the mysteries. All we can do is repeat, as said many times, one cannot know the soul or have a genuine scientific psychology in that way, and in fact may do a great deal of harm. Yet if there are such realms of inquiry, and man cannot be comprehended without taking these into account, then the work of Jung makes up a most significant chapter of modern psychology. Shakespeare may have seen himself as giving body to the shapes of things unknown, through plays which show human nature in the concrete way of particulars. which can sometimes be done through history, but usually can be done only through a literary form. Shakespeare’s plays are like solidified visions which are simultaneously tailored especially for psychological inquiry. Jung sought to unlock the understanding embodied in this sort of symbolic articulation. Together, the two bring both depth and a welcome connection to purpose without which the study of man might remain fruitless. The plays provide particulars to give body to our study, providing examples that are rarefied to show the intelligible things about the soul. Without this showing of the speeches with the bodies that is the character of dialogues and drama, our study of psychology might remain a mere abstraction from the normal, which may well never demonstrate the essential ideas such as the health of the soul.

   Romeo and Juliet is the first great tragedy of Shakespeare, and probably about the ninth play that he produced, completed about 1594. It is the first of the very great works for which he is remembered. That is, Shakespeare does not really become Shakespeare, the Shakespeare we know, until he writes and produces Romeo and Juliet. Together with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he gets at the principle joining tragedy and this new sort of high, or serious comedy. Romeo and Juliet is an Italian tragedy often said to show the nature of love more clearly than any other portrait.[11] The love of Romeo and Juliet is somehow the truest ever shown, and the truth of every true love. The play is considered imperfect as tragedy, and it is something different from classical tragedy. As an Italian tragedy, it is paired with the Italian “comedy” of The Tempest, at the beginning and the end the very precise career of Shakespeare. That the nature of love is shown in a story that does not go well but disastrously touches on an important question about divine things when these appear in the world. Jesus and Socrates too are killed, by mankind and by the city, somewhat as these young lovers are killed, by the city and the family, in stories that are not quite, and even less, tragedies. What we mean is not that these are the same, but that these three show a common pattern, in different analogous levels or sizes (Republic 377d; 379a). It may be that something divine appears among men in the family, the city and for mankind, in love, philosophy and the Christ. Yet it is as though whenever the divine appears among mankind, in the world, we, mankind, the audience of the plays, manage to kill it. The event then leaves a lesson, and in memory the divine is admitted, or, in this case, the world learns to make way for love. It is said that the stories of Jesus and Socrates are not tragedies. There is not a flaw in the sense of tragedy, and the death of Socrates is serene, the Christ, perhaps, victorious. Dante presents the journey of the soul as a divine comedy. But in the cases of Jesus and Socrates, on two different levels, the law is seized and used to put something divine to death, as a thing too much in contrast with the world, or humanity as we find humanity, dominated by violence and appetite. Romeo is not charged and convicted, as is Claudius in Vienna, in Measure for Measure, but the world works to cause the death of love in much the same tragic way. In Romeo and Juliet, the dark background of the family quarrel works by paternal will, error and accident. Romeo and Juliet may also be the peak event of the movement called Romanticism, the flowering of a development that presents an argument about love in the context of the medieval world, or the Biblical tradition of the Western world, from Italy. We will try to show here, amid a reading of the text of the play, that as the Apology presents an argument for the acceptance of philosophy by the city, so Romeo and Juliet presents an argument for the acceptance of romantic love by an English-led Western Civilization, and by analogy, for a reconciliation of factions.[12]

   The event of Romeo and Juliet actually occurred, about 1302-3,[13] in Verona, and was related in an Italian history translated by Arthur Brooke, used by Shakespeare as a source of the play. The action of a few months is famously telescoped or encapsulated into as many days[14] by Shakespeare, where the haste and rapidity of the tragic events imitates the intensity and haste of love, and emphasizes the fated or un-opposable wave of the events. The five days of Romeo and Juliet are about as long as the four days of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rather than look for an earthquake about the 1590’s, as has been done in considering the date of the production of the play, one wonders if there were not an earthquake in Italy there 11 years before this plague. The great plague comes with Boccaccio about 1315, when one third of all the people in Europe died. 1291-3 would be 11 years prior to 1302-3). Plague prevents the delivery of the crucial letter of Friar Lawrence to Romeo in Mantua. The original Italian sources are Bandello (1554) da Porto (1525) and Salernitano (1476), according to Hankins in the Signet edition (p. 586; Arden ed., pp. 33-37). Da Porta, writing war memoirs, said he heard the story from an archer named Pellegrino da Verona. It is likely that there were prior sources, a century and a half after the event would have torn the conscience of Verona. One might, as with the Saints, examine the local histories. According to one,[15] Verona was governed by the Scaliger family from 1277-1387, prior to the Visconti, and then the transfer of Verona to the Venetian Republic in 1405. Alberto della Scala tried in vain to appease the internal struggles due to the family hatreds of Verona, which became a part of the division in Italy between Guelphs, supporters of the Pope, and Ghibellines, supporters of the emperor. Incidentally, the reference to the Holy Roman Emperor is the best explanation for the almost playful use of the word emperor by Romeo and in the play Two Gentlemen of Verona. Dante Allighieri was hospitably received, at Verona by Bartolemmeo della Scala (Paradise XVII). The date was 1304, very close to the date of Romeo and Juliet. The quarreling Montecchi and Cappelletti families are referenced in Canto VI of Dante’s Purgatory.[17]  A note confirms that Montagues were Ghibellines, Capulets Guelph. The forgotten origin is the attempt, about 1045, of the emperor Henry to remove the Pope, and the excommunication of the emperor, followed by the besieging of the Pope, the retreat of Henry back to Germany and the relief of the Pope by Robert the founder of the Kingdom of Naples.[16] Just after he meets the philosophers Plato and Socrates in Hell, Dante sees the romantic suicides- the same question that led to the obscuring of the grave of Juliet. Justin Martyr, the first of the Christians known to have read the works of Plato, considers these to be saved, or Christian, in a sense of the word not used since (First Apology, XLVI). A different understanding of nature and convention and what Christian is, may be involved. Some interesting monuments remain, including the houses of Capulet and Montague and the tomb of Juliet. A Capelletto family gave the house to the city of Verona, and the house is from the thirteenth century. Archduke Giovanni seems to have taken the cover of the tomb in the Nineteenth Century, and chips of the red marble were taken as souvenirs. The tomb was converted to a horse watering pool to disguise it, because the convent at the site of the church was embarrassed by the scandal of having buried a suicide, a question familiar from Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As usual in reading Shakespeare, the Shakespearean additions are an important indication of the purpose of the dramatist. The principal characters and events are all there in the story, while scenes like the palm dance, upon the meeting of the lovers, and events like the killing of Paris on the porch of the tomb, are Shakespearean additions, along with almost all the words. But Romeo and Juliet, in Shakespeare’s play, are about 13 or 14 and 16 or 17, and theirs, we think, is true love.  They are rich kids, and beautiful, though they are not a prince and princess. Rank is apparently not essential to true love. Hankins states: “In Biandello’s story Juliet is eighteen years old, in Brooke’s poem she is sixteen, and in Shakespeare’s play she is nearing her fourteenth birthday” (p. 856). The reason for this is a good question. It increases or emphasizes the innocence of the lovers, but also does something very interesting, in light of a comment of Bloom in the introduction to his edition of Rousseau’s Emile (p. 17): There is disjunction between the natural and conventional age of marriage, between puberty and the age when people are expected to marry. This difference, of course, causes all sorts of interesting circumstances in what are now recognized as the teen years of life, often a very difficult time in many ways. Shakespeare makes the two coincide in the play, and even in the world of Juliet, as her mother also was a bride at fourteen, though of a much older man. But Romeo and Juliet is then in a way an Italian history play.

   In the context of the Italian plays, it is possible that the family quarrel in Verona is allegorical of the division in Christendom which would become that between Catholic and Protestant. The latter division grew out of that between Ghibbelines and Guelphs, or the Papacy in Rome and the “Holy Roman” “Emperor” over rule in Italy. This quarrel was, in Shakespeare’s time, about to lead to the hundred years war, and as we have argued has something to do with the tragedy of the Prince from Wittenberg, Hamlet. Against this background, Shakespeare shows love as a natural image, the principle of the Bible that is the tradition of the West through Italy. Romeo and Juliet is different from these tragedies of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello in that the defect of the protagonist may be only maturity. And so their love is more an innocent sacrifice, like that of Jesus and Socrates. The tragedy, though, often and at many points seems avoidable, lacking the necessity sought in classic tragedy theory.[18] Though it is due to crossed stars, fortune seems to go wrong wherever it might. The family quarrel would then be a comment upon Christendom, though this cannot be spoken, and the cause of the feud is forgotten. But this question will prove fundamental to the project of Prospero and the resolution of the Italian factions in that play.

   Loretta Wasserman, in her Shakespeare class at Grand Valley (1982) identifies four views of love presented in the play. To the servants in the opening scene, and the Nurse, love is understood “at its most physical,” the bawdy, physical aspect. Romeo at the opening of play, “in love with love” is a different view. Then there is the “gamester” understanding of love, of Mercutio, as a sophisticated sport. Fourth, there is the social or parental view of love as a matter for the elders to manage. Opposed to all these four there is a special world that Romeo and Juliet create, where love is self-justifying, transcendent, and speaks in the language of eternity. Love is for always, defiant of time itself, a lasting and timeless unity that does not have to answer to anything else. Mrs. Wasserman notes that at the end of the play, no one knows about this world. As Bloom notes, no one else loves in the play nor believes in love, even at the end. Even the Friar does not suspect, but believes he is using erratic teen love for his own purposes. While there are precursors in the love of Petrarch for his Lauretta,[19] or Dante, where Beatrice assists the ascent of the poet to paradise, it is “not impossible to say that romantic love was discovered in 1550 in Italy.” There then arose with the romantics “almost a cult of love.” Mercutio teases Romeo, “Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in…” (II,iv, 41). Love is “a clue to what is most worthwhile in life and best in human nature.” Winifred Nowottny writes: “The kind of love Petrarch celebrated was often regarded as an experience which lifted a man above himself, as an exaltation of the spirit so spectacular that only religious experience could compete with it for intensity.”[20] The lover transcends the passions and is elevated from the passions to reason and sensitivity. In the Western world, there is the “doctrine of the ladder of love,” where love between two or love at first sight is a sort of first step on the ladder of a spiritual ascent (Symposium, 210-212). So, she asks, “are they Petrarchan lovers? Are they made better? Are they ennobled?”

   One of the intelligible things about love is the condition of being suddenly alive, inspired to become worthy of the love, and so inspired to virtue. And this is an indication of the true presence of love, and there are other indications we will consider below. This is a genuine en-thusiasm, a fact that everyone acknowledges, but none can explain. It is not necessarily irrational, but can be a great inspiration to reason, though it is fair to call it a kind of divine madness, as discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus (249d-e; 244b). Indeed, in order to begin a study of madness, it would be necessary to know love, and to distinguish the genuine from the apparent forms of love and madness. The lover is to some extent ruled not by his own reason but by love. A measure of genuine love, though, is this inspiration to virtue and the awakening of the mind. Hence the lover calls the beloved his inspiration.

   The euphoria of love may be its best known characteristic, though the least of the things for which we require explanation. We say that the nature of the soul is contemplative, and again the falling into love of the lover is the first concrete experience of the divine things for those who first fall in love. It is then like an introduction to the pleasures of contemplation. Socrates tells Phaedrus that of all the intelligibles, the beautiful is the only one allowed visible form (250b,d). If we were to see wisdom in the visible, we would go out of our wits. This section of the Phaedrus, all in symbols, is the highest study of love anywhere written, surpassing every other theoretical attempt, including Plato’s own Symposium, at least until these three plays of Shakespeare. The point for the present discussion is that romantic love is especially for the young lover, the first genuine experience of anything intelligible. A second way of explaining the euphoria of love is that it is the entrance into the harmony of Eden, temporarily, though love provides this sip of the immortal nectar of paradise right at the beginning of our adult lives.

   When Mercutio is teasing Romeo, he lists the great loves in poetry, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero and Thisbe. Romeo and Juliet have now surpassed all these as the example of love or true love, while the others, even the other Shakespearean lovers, are barely remembered. Antony and Cleopatra are ugly by comparison. Our suggestion is that Shakespeare knows this, and that this is what it means when Romeo slays Paris at the tomb. Paris is the other name of Alexandros, the son of Priam of Troy, who stole Helen, causing the Trojan war.

   The play itself is a masterpiece of order and simplicity, interwoven and ascending, a candidate for the best play ever written. While notoriously confounding traditional assumptions about tragedy, the recognition or anagorisis of Romeo coincides with the peripeti or turning point, about the exact center, where Romeo says that love has made him effeminate (III,i, 116; Aristotle, Poetics, XI). In reading, we will try to observe this excellence and this order, and to see what Shakespeare and his lovers show about love. Bloom writes:

…Shakespeare is a middle ground between the ancient poets whose tragedies hardly spoke of love and the Romantic poets whose sad tales concerned only love. Serious writers in antiquity, with the strange exception of Plato, did not present men and women in love as the most serious of beings with the most serious problems…

   Hence, Sophocles and Aeschylus, and even Plautus, and Aristophanes, are less colorful than the Shakespearean portrayal of humanity. Ascending from the middle ages, Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare restore something of the imagination and the soul based on the reflection of love. Part of the definition of tragedy is that it is “serious,” with characters of a high or noble type, while comedy is not serious. Comedy “has no history, because it was not at first taken seriously” (Poetics, V). This means that the story where the hero gets the girl is not the fundamental dramatic pattern for the ancient poets. But it is this principle of love and rule that allows Shakespeare to join the writing of both great tragedy and high comedy. In Romeo and Juliet, the villain is slain and the hero gets the girl in the center of the tragedy, and death, rather than marriage, is the consummation. His comedies end in marriages, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure in a triple marriage. A quadruple marriage occurs in Arden forest.

   The story or action of this integration is cast in the image of the higher heroic drama, so that the noble things are such, at least in one aspect if not in essence, because they are an image or in the image of the intellectual things. Jung states,

Every real love relationship consists ultimately in the woman finding her hero, and the hero his soul, not in dreams, but in palpable reality.[21]

   This pattern is an image of the story of the cosmic hero, even as it is said that the soul is an image of God. The pattern is most apparent in Romeo and Juliet, because the story occurs in the literal and visible. We will try to show that this occurs because the soul is an image of God, and this is an Italian play. As Bloom notes, the 42 hours during which Juliet is to sleep are the same as the 42 hours between the crucifixion and the resurrection (Love and Friendship, p. 295). Romeo was to “redeem” Juliet from her feigned death (IV, iii, 32). In the vault of the Capulets, Romeo drinks the poison the mother of Juliet wished to give him for slaying their wicked cousin and nephew Tybalt (III, v, 88-103). Juliet awakens to find her redeemer dead. Dagger in hand, without question or hesitation she sacrifices her life and follows him in death, leaving a world in Verona which had no place for such love. The same or similar pattern occurs between Christ and the Bride (Revelation 19:7), to whom He is wed outside of time. This “bride,” distinct from those invited to the marriage feast, is a mystery, but is something like a collective soul which consists of individual souls who have by faith followed the Christ through death, and quite possibly most of the angels. Romeo and Juliet manifest an image of this cosmic sacrifice of hero and soul, the truth of true love. This is why the play holds the minds of all generations in such fascination. It is difficult to tell whether Romeo and Juliet are like two halves of one religious pilgrim (I,v, 95-112)[22] or are themselves, by one another, each pilgrims across the sea of death to what is always. But we think the former rather than the latter. Yet it seems too as though the drama of romantic love calls out of latency that in the soul which is an image of the cosmic drama, and follows through the sacrifice to the emergence of that in the soul which is an image of God.

   Such a theory of true love may seem to assume Christianity or the truth of the Christian Bible, but, as will be seen, the image of God is both a Greek and a Biblical thought (Republic, 501b), if this is central to our peculiar Christian Platonism. We also try to demonstrate that this perspective is especially able to understand the plays. And it may be so, if the human things are indeed, as Leo Strauss writes, “the key to understanding all things,”[23] that the truth of true love demonstrates or suggests the truth of the divine things inductively, providing a natural scaffold for ascent, whereby the things said grow “to something of great constancy,…strange and admirable (MSND, V,i,25-27).

   Romeo and Juliet is less a tragedy of character and more a tragedy of fate than other tragedies. If there is a flaw in Romeo, it may be shown where the peripeti and recognition coincide, and Romeo sees that the beauty of Juliet (III,i 116) has made him “effeminate.” Love itself, rather than the individuals, is perhaps the sacrificial tragic character. Finally these warring influences balance each other out. We will argue that, due to the adverse circumstances, and lacking good government, the fate and/ or fortune of Romeo and Juliet forces the sacrifice at the root of the truth of true love into the visible and literal, taking place tragically as a suicide. Combined with the limitation of love to appearance, Romeo and Juliet shows that love overcomes the fear of death, though this be as true in happier circumstances. It also shows that the noble is an image of the image of God in man, though Juliet does not rise to escape with her redeemer, nor are lovers the same as saints. As at the death of Cordelia, the hope of immortal life does not prevent showing the mortal truth, the death of beautiful young women when human providence fails. The lovers are taken by death, and as a result of their blood spilt on the city, reconciliation comes to the families of Montague and Capulet. By the sacrificial death of their children, the disease of their hatred is revealed and healed, and civil bloodshed expiated.

The Prologue

   The Chorus is fourteen lines, like a sonnet. The first words are not “two lovers,” but “two households,”” of Verona, as the city is the scene. The two households are amid a new outbreak of an ancient quarrel, as we too had family feuds in Appalachia and elsewhere in the early American West. There is no reference to the original cause of the feud, which seems to have been forgotten, while the feud lasts longer than the memory. The civil bloodshed is called “unclean,” that is, it is spoke of as a religious pollution. Twice then, in eight lines, the chorus states and restates the plot, how two star-crossed children of these families fall in love and take their own life singular, the only way to resolve the families hatred. That the singular, life is written indicates an argument about both love and life, as will be addressed with the palm dance, when the two first meet. That the love is “star crossed” is a famous and interesting statement, and we will wonder what this might mean. Can terrible results be fated? And is the cosmology seriously astrological? The audience is to attend with patient ears, while they, the troop, will with their toil strive to mend what is missed by what is presented on the stage.

   The Prologue tells the audience ahead of time that the lovers die in suicide, rather than leaving the audience in suspense. Readers of Shakespeare do not mind the telling of the end of a tale. Bottom the Weaver will make such a prologue (MSND III,i,16; 9-46), which protects the audience from shock, and gives them a perspective above the action. Here in the tragedy, the method of Bottom to prevent scarring the ladies with the lion and the death of the lovers is undertaken quite seriously. The fate of the grave of Juliet, perhaps classed as a suicide, demonstrates a part of the difficulty.

   The Chorus enters only one more time, at the start of Act II, and there also speaks fourteen lines, on the change of the affection of Romeo and the predicament of the lovers due to the feud. It says that Romeo in love with Juliet, is “alike bewitched by charm of looks,” and the chorus does not seem to notice the beauty and truth of the love, making this Chorus a bit like a Gower in Perikles, presenting a more conservative, more medieval view than that of the playwright.

Act I, Scene i

   The first word in this dialogue of love and death is had by the villain. A battle breaks out in the streets of Verona between the servants of the feuding Capulets and Montagues. The dark cloud of hatred pervades both families even down to the strata of the servants. The imagery in the talk of the servants, especially concerning the sword, shows the connection between the fighting and lust. The servants have Biblical names, first Samson,  an Old Testament hero, famously weakened and betrayed when Delila cut his hair, and Gregory, the name of three especially famous Popes, Gregory I, who instituted the Gregorian chant and sent Augustine to convert England, Gregory VII, who opposed Henry IV and may have originated the quarrel of Ghibbeline and Guelph, when this Henry claimed the authority to appoint church offices, Gregory XIII, the Pope when Shakespeare was young, the pope who corrected the Julian calendar. Then, the Montague servants are Abram, the name of Abraham in Babylon (or Ur) and before the promise, and Balthasar, which is similar to the name Daniel was given in Babylon (Daniel 1:7). “Abraham Cupid” strangely appears in the speech of Mercutio (II,i, 10) There is a character of the same name in Much Ado About Nothing. Balthasar is the servant of Romeo in Act V, connecting Romeo with apocalyptic things. A later servant of Capulet is named Peter. But these are, here in the first scene, the names of the feuding servants, whose speech in terms of lust and violence sets the dark background against which the love of Romeo and Juliet will appear. Sampson, like Bottom the Weaver only half-serious, says that he will show himself a tyrant, killing the males and raping the females of the Montagues. Amid war, that is how inter-faction dating will appear, and why Tybalt takes offense. It is possible that the Biblical names suggest an analogy, in the context of Italian politics, to the civil bloodshed between religious factions.

   As Aristotle writes, every difference can be a cause of faction (Politics, V,iii, 1303b 15, 20). From what did the quarrel of the Guelph and Ghibbeline originate? This seems to have been the tension between Church and State, and specifically an attempt of the Holy Roman” emperor” to determine the appointment of Bishops, as these had become lucrative political positions. But since the Montagues are the more just, the family quarrel in Verona might be described as one between aristocracy and oligarchy. Escalus seems to do a tolerably good job at quelling potential stasis or revolution, according to Aristotle.

   The first words pick up a quarrel in the middle. What might have been said just before the scene opens? The Montagues are not yet there, so it is Sampson saying, “Gregory, on my word, we’ll not carry coals.” One possibility is the classic answer of Paul, that in loving and forgiving our enemies, we “heap burning coals” upon them, repaying evil with good, shaming it (Romans 12:20; Proverbs 25:21-22). Has Sampson then just said they do reject forgiveness? And this would be the Guelph faction, implacable, while the Ghibbelines or Montagues are more civil. The Italian plays would then open with this allusion to fundamental question of Christian humanity in dealing with faction and evil.

   The fire begun by the servants spreads quickly up to the level of the noblemen. The nobles have Italian names, Benvolio meaning good will (Gibbons, p. 39). When Benvolio enters, the servants have just said …”as good a man”…”No better,” then there is Bon-volio. “Bene” might mean better, “Bon,” good. –Volio is the same root as volition. Benvolio, the cousin of Romeo, draws his sword to stop the fight, and the cousin of Juliet, the hot blooded, arrogant Tybalt jumps in. Benvolio tries to get Tybalt to help stop the fight, but Tybalt replies, “What, draw and talk of peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee” (I,i, 72-73). The friends of Romeo are the good guys, with justice on their side throughout, and Benvolio is the main difference between the three tiers of the two families. Soon, following rather than leading the servants and noblemen, the heads of the houses Capulet and Montague are reaching for their swords. Finally, the prince, Escalus, comes to put an end to the brawl. [’16] The disorder of the households is evident in the leading of the action by the servants, who are followed by the nobles and then the heads of the households.

   There is a connection between “coals” in the first line of the first scene and the diabolic speech of Tybalt: “As I hate hell…” means that his family hatred is colored by Christianity. He hates peace, and hates the word not because he is an adherent of hell, but as he hates hell, so that religion is a part of evil or the colors of villainy. Christianity has become subordinated to tribalism, custom, faction, and hence salvation a matter of being born a fan of the right football team.

   The contrast between Lady Montague and Capulet is apparent and interesting. Lady Montague is glad Romeo was not at the fight, and orders her misbehaving husband, “thou shall not stir one foot to seek a foe.” Lady Capulet rather tells her husband to call for a crutch rather than a sword, alike opposing his rumbling, but for the reason of his impotence. The Montagues are more just than the Capulets.

   The Prince is Escalus of Verona, possibly derived from de Scalia. He orders Montague and Capulet to the county seat at “Freetown,” no doubt his Monticello in the suburbs of Verona.

    The fight ended, Montague and his wife talk with Benvolio of their concern for Romeo. Benvolio describes seeing Romeo at dawn wandering all night, and closing daylight out of his room  each morning. According to note 22 of his edition of the Rhyme Sparse of Petrarch, Robert Darling writes: According to Virgil’s account of the underworld (Aeneid VI, 595-628), those who die for love are assigned to wander in a dark wood. Of the fields of mourning,” Virgil writes:

…Since here are those whom pitiless love consumed

With cruel wasting, hidden on paths apart

By Myrtle woodland growing overheadIn death itself, pain will not let them be……

Among them, with fated wound still fresh

Phoenecian Dido wandered the deep wood…

Why the grove is sycamore rather than myrtle will require explanation. But “Stars,” too, as strangely spoke of in the play, seems to come from Petrarch. And so it seems a possible hypothesis that Romeo is a study of the lover or the soul of the poet. It is even possible that Petrarch is the type from which the character of Romeo is drawn.

   The moment the name of Romeo enters the play, the poetry bursts into images of great beauty. Montague describes Romeo’s wandering all night, and closing daylight out of his room each morning. Many have tried to talk to him,

          “But to himself so secret and so close,         

So far from sounding and discovery,         

As is the bud bit with an envious worm         

Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air         

Or dedicate his beauty to the sun                                                              (I,i,152-6).

   One wonders if the poetic soul is genetic, or, a type by nature. Benvolio sets out to discover the cause of the melancholy of Romeo. Romeo tells Benvolio that he has love unanswered. This is the bud bitten that will unfold in the love of Romeo and Juliet. Seeing the result of this affliction, Benvolio comments: Alas, that love, so gentle in his view, should be so tyrannous in proof! Romeo, hinting at the mystery of these things, answers, ” Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still, should without eyes see pathways to his will.” (I,i, 172-176). This is the first of a series of theoretical points in the explanation of love by Romeo, who, despite being deceived about the particular, ought know. There is no science to explain the travail of love. The answer of Romeo, the proponent of love, is that while proverbially blind, love sees the way to his will, the intention of love. The travail of love is a part of the function of love in the nature of the soul. In love, too, all are poets

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   Romeo then notices the wound of Benvolio from the fight. With the opposites of love and hatred before his mind, Romeo breaks into a poetic account of the whole tragic senselessness of the creation:

         Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.

Why then, O brawling love,

O loving hate

Oh anything of nothing first created

O, heavy lightness, serious vanity

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,

Still waking sleep, that is not what it is!

This love feel I, that feels no love in this.(I,i, 178-185)

    The vision of the blindness of Romeo is repulsed by worldly matters such as those that led to the brawl, and pronounces on it’s senselessness, lack of wakefulness, and the falsity of it’s appearance. The statement takes on a whole new depth of meaning when it is remembered that the Christian factions are behind the theoretical question of the play, for the principle of Christianity is Love. Away from this, he follows his “madness most discrete.” [’16] He speaks in what Jung calls the “coincidence of opposites,” a form of poetic reason transcending the normally opposed categories, also known to Petrarch. Rosaline is a Capulet, and this may be part of why he says the brawl has more to do with love. Is the attraction of Romeo to Capulet women not like a constellation in the unconscious of Verona, or even Christendom? Is this not a part of the crossed stars of the family hate? The family or appetites leads the families to fight. But the contradiction between hate and the love he feels leads him to comment in philosophic terms. That anything could come from nothing is denied by natural philosophy, in rejecting the religious doctrine of creation out of nothing, as is prominent in King Lear (I,i, 89; I,ii, 31, etc.). But if the paradox is oblivious of Epicurus, it applies equally to the Platonic account of the creation from the Timeus. Shakespeare may have used some of his small Latin to read the Timeus, though it seems not to have yet been translated into English. Between these two is the statement of the unity of tragedy and comedy, in the lightness of joking in a tragedy and the serious purpose of beautiful art, as Prospero calls his wedding Masque some “vanity of my art.” Can either the Bible or philosophy account for the irrational convergence of good and evil in our world? Or is the answer to be found in love and poetry? Is the story or tragedy of Romeo related to such an attempt? The irrationality of the world and Romeo’s world is related to the fundamental question of natural philosophy, and the love of Romeo to philosophy. The unity of tragedy and comedy is also, by its position between the Biblical and Greek accounts, related to philosophy, or the tragi-comic view of specifically Shakespearean philosophy. We will have occasion to return to this topic when the character of the opposites becomes more clear. To describe the irrational world as a “Still waking sleep that is not what it is” is also Platonic, taking terms from the Republic. Waking dream, familiar from Keats and de Alvarez, is simply profound. Prospero describes the world as being something like a dream, but the truth is that there are various sorts of waking dream, states in which the conscious and unconscious mind are in conjunction, and love is one of these. Hence love is described as a kind of “divine madness.” There are other forms of divine madness as well, as may be poetry, philosophic action, royal action and experiences related to inspiration. It is a waking dream because the unconscious or dream and conscious or waking worlds are one. Love, involves the unconscious or nascent faculty that is the “rib of Adam,” the place in the heart where the beloved fits, or the part of our souls projected in love onto the beloved, and so the root of the phantom or eidolon, the image loved. Romeo will say, “It is my soul,” and this, as we will see, is exactly what Jung means by Anima.

   Benvolio gets Romeo to tell him more about his predicament. The problem is not that Romeo has fallen in love with a Capulet, but that Romeo has fallen in love with a woman vowed to chastity:

      She’ll not be hit

With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dianne’s wit

And, in strong proof of chastity well armed

From love’s weak, childish bow she lives uncharmed

She will not stay the siege of loving terms,

Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes,

Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold…

For beauty starved with her severity

Cuts beauty off from all posterity…

She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow

Do I live dead to tell it now.(I,i, 112-113)

   The sorrow of Romeo is an aporia or “stuck-edness, a position without an apparent escape) due to the futility of loving one dedicated to celibacy. Love cannot imagine another beloved, nor would it even be right to persist in trying to court Rosaline It is highly significant that Romeo’s first love is of this sort. The chastity of Rosalind shows first the purity of his heart by the purity of its object. Second, it shows that Romantic love seeks a kind of procreancy that is between the “brawling love” of the earthly and the angelic simplicity of the heavenly, which is a fifth view of love in the play and the most significant alternative to the love of Romeo. This theme from the Sonnets, of the persuasion of the beloved from a life of chastity, will re-appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and is related to the question of Athens and Italy. Petrarch’s Laura is devoted to chastity, and Dante’s Beatrice too is angelic. Shakespeare attempts to rob the convent, at least of those not suited by nature for the singular life. The romantic Shakespeare argues against the life of chastity on the grounds that this prevents the beauty of the woman from perpetuating itself, and from its own posterity.

   The similarity of some of the poetry in Romeo and Juliet to the Shakespearean sonnets indicates that there is a Shakespearean argument that opens the study that is the Italian plays, an argument about love that sharply distinguishes the Shakespearean understanding of the soul from the medieval, and indeed from anything before. The first 17 sonnets too take up the attempt to persuade one like Romeo’s Rosaline from the chaste to the fertile life. The Sonnets are distinct from the plays in that here, the poet speaks in his own voice. The meeting of Romeo and Juliet is a sonnet of fourteen lines, and it seems clear elsewhere too that Shakespeare may be drawing from an old poem book of his own, or even that Romeo may be taken from a young Shakespeare. Poems like these do not arise at once when one sits to write a drama, but come from a personal poem book of which the sonnets are the extract. These are a development of the Petrarchan sonnets, so one might imagine a young Shakespeare reading Petrarch and pursuing love. The Shakespearean development of Petrarch regarding love is also, we will show, a development of the Biblical tradition.

I,ii

    Having come from the conference with the Prince at Freetown, Capulet is resolved to keep the peace. He is shown receiving the suit of Paris to marry Juliet. Here, Capulet tells him, “My will to her consent is but a part.” Strangely, after the death of Tybalt and the turn of the play toward tragedy, Capulet insists that Juliet marry according to his will, becoming a father like Egeus in MSND. While this requires further explanation, it is a part of the crossed stars which involve the family matters.

   The second scene includes the unbelievable coincidence of the servant of Capulet finding Romeo to read the invitation to the ball at the house of Capulet. Romeo and Benvolio are continuing their conversation from the first scene, as Benvolio tries to persuade Romeo to cure love by looking at other beauties. This advice proves to be exactly right, but the lover cannot imagine following the advice on purpose, because love implies fidelity. Suggesting a leaf as remedy for Benvolio’s shin (sin?), Romeo is asked “are you mad”? Distinguishing love from madness, he answers, “Not mad, but bound more than a madman is, kept without my food, / Whipped and tormented.” About comparing other beauties, Romeo answers Benvolio in the religious analogy:

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When the devout religion of mine eye

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;

And these, who, often drowned, could never die,

Transparent heretics be burned for liars!

One fairer than my love? The all seeing sun

Na’er saw her match since first the world begun.

Lysander too, in the Dream, describes faith in love in terms of orthodoxy and heresy. It is both playful and serious, and in a few ways. Here, Romeo agrees to go along, but to see Rosaline, or, “rejoice in splendor of mine own.” Heresy and orthodoxy are defined by what is ones own, quite apart from what is correct- as though Juliet were heresy. Does the power of orthoxy prevent the mind from discovering true love? In the religious analogy of Romeo as a pilgrim on a quest to a shrine, the attachment of Romantic love to the particular one loved is compared to the fidelity to doctrine, and both are called fidelity for this reason. Notice too that Romeo’s heresy and orthodoxy are different from the usual opposition of Capulet and Montague. Is the attachment to opinion and imagination in faith similar to the attachment to the beloved? Are love and faith, together, contrasted with reason? And does Benvolio and Mercutio, good will and Mercury-ous spirit, represent reason, each in a different way?

   Shakespeare’s use of the pagan images is very interesting, especially here, since the love of Romeo bears some relation to the faith of Christianity. In an introduction to a collected edition somewhere, it was suggested that there was a prohibition against the name of the Deity in drama. Though this is not the case, Shakespeare writes poetically in pagan terms, as do Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer. The older generation all speak in explicitly Christian language, while by contrast, none of younger generation do. The sun is, as in Dante and Plato, an image of the Good or the Most High, and the poets, such as Dante and Chaucer, take up the pagan images playfully. But it is as though Shakespeare deliberately avoids the use of the very images an Italian Romeo would use, even while expressing a Biblical thought. It is as if these poets wish, by foreign images, to call attention to what is the same in human experience regardless of convention or tradition. Romeo’s language simultaneously alludes to the terms of the origin and Genesis, and the reference to the beginning here would be the second reference of Romeo to the Book of Genesis, not to mention Benvolio’s shin.

I, iii 

   The first appearance of Juliet is a picture of innocence. Her mother and her nurse speak to her about a “man,” Paris, who seeks her hand in marriage. This Paris will be at a customary dance to be held in the house of Capulet that evening. Lady Capulet asks Juliet what she thinks of marriage. Juliet replies: “It is an honor that I dream not of” (I,iii, 66). She promises her mother: “No more deeply will I endart mine eye / Than your consent gives strength to make it fly” (I,iii, 99). Prior to love, Juliet is like Cordelia, willing to love according to the consent her parents. Egeus and Hermia discuss this, Theseus telling her she must see according to her father’s will. Human love has triggers or more accurately conditions for its attachment from the beginning. Here Juliet is a child, her love governed by the authority of her parents, though the moment she sees Romeo, her childhood is gone.

   The scene with the nurse is the only recognition of childbirth in the play, when the nurse tells Juliet, “women grow by men.” The nurse herself is a portrait of rare art, and her picture of Juliet as a child, at weaning during the earthquake, is quite beautiful. Lovers like to see pictures of the one they love as a child. Shakespeare has the tedious nurse twice tell the story of Juliet falling on her face, and being told she will fall backward when she has more sense, with marvelous triple meanings, the practical truth and the truth possibly about fortune and the world for women. Childbirth as the goal of nature is ignored by lovers, though it is assumed in the courtesy of noble love, that the woman must trust the man not to leave her. Childbirth may similarly be ignored by the play about love, though the fact is significant, for example in the action of the Friar in the tomb, because Juliet may well be pregnant and die with the unborn child of Romeo.

As John Hankins notes, Lady Capulet is about 28 years old, while rich Capulet’s last Masque was about thirty years previous (Penguine ed., p. 856). Juliet will be matched more seasonably.

   The reference to Lammas-tide, August 1, sets the calendar time of the play as some seven to ten days still in July, the time of flowering, and just before harvest. The five days of the play are Sunday through Thursday, about July 20-25. The birthday of Juliet would be July 31, “Lammastide eve at night” (I,iii. 17).

I, iv-

   While Romeo and Benvolio were on the street, they saw an invitation to this dance at the house of Capulet with Rosaline’s name on the list. Benvolio persuades Romeo to go to the dance in order to compare the beauty of Rosaline with the others. The whole tragedy is allowed to occur by this attempt of the man of good will to cure love. So, Romeo, Benvolio, Mercutio and other of their masked friends make their way through the night.

   Mercutio, whose name is related to Mercury, is arguably one of the greatest characters in all the plays. The tradition is that Shakespeare himself took this role (  ). Johnson famously relates that Shakespeare was obliged to kill him in the third act, lest he be killed by him (Signet ed, p. 171).[32] J. A Bryant writes that what was needed was a combination of the virtues of the Friar and the Prince found only in Mercutio. Had Romeo not intervened, Tybalt would have been slain, but since Mercutio is of the family of the Prince, and not a part of the feud, “the feud would have died with Tybalt” (Signet Introduction, p. xxxvi). On the invitation, he is paired with his brother Valentine. Capulet may have considered viewing Mercutio as a prospective husband for Juliet, as he is central to the list of those invited. Anselmo and Placentio, and possibly Lucio, are the only other bachelors eligible for Juliet, whom Capulet does seem ready to have married off. Paris is not even invited until petitioning Capulet for Juliet (I.ii), though after Mercutio is dead, Capulet suddenly is decided upon a forced marriage to Paris.

   Mercutio the friend is like the spirited part of Romeo, which in love has become atrophied. Romeo is half a whole, and while in love the other half is Juliet, in character or friendship, the complementary opposite is Mercutio. That Shakespeare himself would play the role of Mercutio may indicate a Shakespearean comment upon the character of Romeo, and of the male lover himself.

   Romeo is hesitant to go on because of a dream he has had that night. He tells Mercutio this, and Mercutio then breaks into his famous “Queen Mab” speech: “O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you / She is the fairies’ midwife…” (I,iv, 54-55). She is very similar, though not quite the same as the Fairy Queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She would be a maternal aspect of the unconscious,  distinct from anima, the feminine aspect of the more personal unconscious. The midwife of the fairies is the source of the dream of Romeo, which is prophetic.

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   Had Romeo turned here and gone home, he might have awakened in love with Rosaline, and an interesting snapshot skit would be to show Romeo asking Benvolio about the dance he missed the night before, and Mercutio Seeking Juliet.

   The Queen Mab speech of Mercutio reads like a summary of the twentieth century psychology of the unconscious, perhaps as Jung would present the psychology of Freud, made all the more interesting by the skepticism of Mercutio. Like Theseus, he comments above his own conscious skepticism to the profound truth of the cause of love, dream and imagination. Romeo is not in the least embarrassed of his love among his friends, and is the equal of Mercutio in wit, setting up a dialogue of love and skepticism. Romeo says that he has dreamed a dream, and Mercutio jokes that it was “that dreamers often lie.” Romeo, matching the wit, answers “in bed while they dream things true, and Mercutio finds, “Oh then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.” She is the midwife of the fairies and the cause of dreams. As lovers dream of love, Mercutio has a long list of wish fulfillment dreams pertaining to each sort of person, the courtier, lawyers, ladies, the parson, and the soldier, who each dream of the things for which they hope, or the base objects of their desire. As Mercutio becomes manic, he tells of how Queen Mab blisters the lips of ladies whose breaths are tainted, and elfs the lock of horses and sluttish women. She is the folk cause related to the natural knowledge of childbirth. Told to stop, since he talks of nothing, Mercutio answers,

True, I talk of dreams,which are the children of an idle brain

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy

Which is as thin as the substance of the air….

Have you ever wondered from where the mind draws the very strange particulars of dreams? These are almost always things that have never been experienced before, even while these almost always address the circumstance of the soul of the dreamer. This curious  fact is especially evident in repeating theme dreams,  where the particulars are  almost always different,  while the circumstance is similar or the same. We may have occasion to consider dreams below, if our psychology should chance to reach its ninth chapter. But here, the “nothing, already mentioned once, is not nothing, since the shapes of “vain fantasy” must have a cause. Bloom (Shakespeare’s Politics, p. 8) states that “the nothing” is not indeterminate, or, “the void” is determinate, intended to receive the natural articulation of things and this deep and difficult topic accounts for the shapes of tyranny and evil, said to be caused by “nothing,” which is of course impossible, if half-true. But even while he is denying the significance of dreams, Mercutio speaks what is like a snapshot of the unconscious,” or the fairy world:

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…And more inconstant than the wind, who woos

Even now the frozen bosom of the North

And, being angered, puffs away from thence,

Turning his side to the dew-dropping South.

That may in truth be what is occurring, as Romeo turns from the infertile to the fertile object of his love. Neither Romeo nor Mercutio could possibly know consciously that Romeo is about to fall in love with Juliet and forget about Rosaline, though Benvolio had some suspicion. Without choosing, Romeo will take the advice of Benvolio, if this does make matters worse. Continuing on, Romeo tells not his dream, but its interpretation:

….My mind misgives

Some consequence yet hanging in the stars

Shall bitterly begin this fearful date

With this night’s revels and expire the term

Of a despised life, closed in my breast,By some vile forfeit of untimely death.

   Like the psychology of Freud, the Queen Mab speech of Mercutio is significant for the ways in which it is correct, but especially for the ways in which it, or Mercutio, is limited, or wrong.  At issue between Freud and Mercutio on one hand and Romeo and Jung on the other is the character of the object of wish. One might wish, for example, that the noble completion of virtue be theirs forever. In the Freudian understanding of the soul, this object would be a sublimation, created out of an appetite that is being diverted. Jung, rather, writes of a natural gradient along which eros, or as they call it, “libido,” ascends. The higher things cannot be simply assumed, in their natures, to arise out of the lower things. The high things of culture, the plays of Shakespeare or the songs of Mozart, are not created out of nothing, but there must be a higher nature of the soul. Hence, the marriage at the beginning of the human family might be natural, and this, we say, is the simple aim of the human eros in love. If man is by nature political and filial, the object of wish might be even more natural for man than the object of appetite. There is a relation between the maternal and the beloved, but what this is proves deeply mysterious, and not at all obvious by some animal principle. The image that attaches the lovers at the origin of the family is related more fundamentally to the human mind and its ascending contemplation of and participation in the whole. Prophetic dreams, true dreams, do occur, and these cannot be explained in terms some partial theory such as wish fulfillment. But here Romeo does not take the advise of his premonition and his safety and go home, but courageously, if not wisely, continues, saying “he that hath the steerage of my course direct my sail.”

   There are numerous prophetic fore-shadowing in the play, to be collected and considered. These occur both in dreams and in waking speech, such as when Lady Capulet wishes to poison Romeo, and knows an apothecary in Mantua able to do it, or when, looking down from the balcony, Juliet sees Romeo as one in a grave. Romeo too has another dream in Mantua that seems symbolically similar to the conclusion. Another example is the dream of Hermia in the woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where when Lysander has fallen out of love with her, she dreams simultaneously that a serpent eats her heart. Prophesy is a surprising characteristic of love, well known and believed by lovers. Jung attempts to address this sort of cause in his theory of “synchronicity,” an “a-causal” connecting principle. But it is much simpler to consider that there are causes other than the material and efficient, assumed in modernity to be  the only kinds of cause admissible. One moves a pen across the page, or any tool, at the same time that the tool moves, because one’s hand and one’s pen are parts of a larger hierarchic order. Hence, cause and effect are simultaneous regarding parts of a whole. The simultaneity experienced in love, too, is a mystery, but has something to do with the two participating in one soul, and the character of this soul as yet unconscious mind (nous).[33] But the profundity of the play is that Mercutio, and the profound bawdy spirited skepticism regarding love, is wrong, and the lover is right about certain things that are eternal and more important than the things about which the skepticism is correct, if the crude materialism of Mercutio is a remedy for the Romantic delusion of Romeo.

   Dreams, poetry, love and prophetic foreshadowing, then, all have something to do with the Fairy Queen, who we will see directly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Theseus says, the poet, the lover and the madman are of an imagination all compact. This amounts to a very Jungian theory on the part of Shakespeare regarding what the psychologists call the unconscious, and it seems quite clear that Shakespeare knows these things in a scientific or philosophic manner. For surely the Fairies in some sense do not exist, as bodily beings that have weight and take up space. Yet surely in another sense, most relevant for the human world, they do exist. Aristotle, in his Poetics (IX), writes:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when at the same time they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves of by accident, for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at the festival; and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.

As it turns out, it was this dream of his own death that had Romeo out walking before dawn. Like his dream at Mantua, it is prophetic.

I, v                              

Inside the hall of Capulet, Romeo first sees Juliet. We forget, as he too forgets, that Rosaline is even there. He knows instantly that it is she he has sought, and the “consequence yet hanging in the stars” begins:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright

It seems she doth hang upon the cheek of night

As a rich Jewel in an Ethiope’s ear–…(I,v, 46-49)

   Romeo is also immediately seen by Tybalt, who would duel with him on the spot, except that Capulet forbids it, and rebukes Tybalt. Capulet even admires Romeo, who is drawn to Juliet and speaks with her.

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   How does one show love at first sight? The Sonnet here spoken at the meeting of the lovers occurs in the image of the religious quest, which quest is the meaning of pilgrim and pilgrimage. In the image, the lovers are two halves of the soul in prayer, the two hands of a praying saint. Juliet identifies Romeo to the nurse as one who would not dance, but through the movement of what is like a mime or dance in speech, the most amazing beauty the meaning of the movement of love is symbolized in the purging of sin with kisses:

Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest handThis holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready standTo smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss

Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too muchWhich mannerly devotion shows in thisFor saints have hands that pilgrim’s hands do touchAnd palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.

Romeo: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take(kisses her)

Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took?

Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!Give me my sin again.

Juliet: You kiss by the book.(I,v, 95-113)

The two together are a prayer, or like the two hands of a praying saint. “The Book” is also the Bible, and, again, these are the Italian plays. Romeo has discovered a Biblical eroticism that is between the earthly and the heavenly, a most fruitful middle way that is romantic love. It is perhaps a Christian version of the principle of the Song of Solomon. Romeo is like a religious pilgrim, and Juliet a holy temple. The Durants write of the journeys to Jerusalem prior to 1070, “Everywhere in Europe one met “palmers who, as a sign of pilgrimage accomplished, wore crosses palm leaves from Palestine” (IV, p. 585). Juliet, in a graceful humbleness, tells Romeo that he wrongs his hand, rather than profane hers, “For saints have hands that pilgrims hands do touch,” and these saints or “holy palmers” kiss by praying. Do they not pray instead of running about kissing girls? Perhaps not yet. Do they pray instead of kissing girls, when they are about sixteen? Palm Sunday began when the pilgrims carried palm branches as Jesus entered Jerusalem. Romeo asks, “have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? “Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer” is her answer.  Romeo aces his exam, so to speak, responding: “O, then dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.” At their first kiss the two are one prayer, or like the two hands of a praying saint. showing the reflection of the image of God in man, one level lower, in the passions and the noble characters. Juliet is as the stillness of a saint mediating prayer, as “saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.” Romeo again hits the target, “Then move not, while my prayers effect I take. / Thus, from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.” In Jungian terms, the personal shadow, the unrecognized parts of our character, inhibits love, which, as on the way to baptism, tries to clear a way for itself. Now she is like a saint receiving the pilgrim at confession, an image of the purging of original sin. The emergence of such a union is a return to the womb in partnership, and an image of the restoration of the grace which Adam and Eve would have been in before the fall, in Eden. Love may be this temporary return to the harmony, and such a thought begins to account for the amazing qualities of love. Sin purged restores a unity to the soul split by sin, and to be forgiven is this healing. Love, at least in Italy, is an image of the life of the highest part of the soul, manifesting in two the things manifest also in the singular praying saint, of the same form by participation, and nobility is in this way set in an analogy with the things of the “intellect,” or what the Greeks call nous. The healing of forgiveness is similar to the emergence of love.[34] Romeo then purges the sin Juliet has taken with another kiss. Shakespeare means seriously to suggest that this middle way is a healing of the passionate part of the soul which would be compelled to chastity if the image of the saints were applied directly to the wrong part of the soul, trying to dress the passions up to look like monks. This is a great point to be considered in Christian education, which may be more of an oxy-moron than the practitioners of Christian education suspect. The attempt to dress mankind directly in the mirror of the saints, for example, produces something artificial in the place of nobility, and prevents the Song of Solomon from taking place. Christianity is related to the formation of the passions rather by analogy.

   The pattern and movement of this purging of sin follows the same pattern as the sacrifice in the vault of Capulet at the conclusion of the play. There Romeo drinks the poison, and Juliet tries to take some from his lips. Their deaths are a purging of the family sin at the root of the quarrel, and so this is resolved through their deaths and the conscience of the community.

   Again, in love between man and woman, there is a purging of sin as love clears a way for itself, and the two may enter into a partnership of self-knowledge. The two are complementary participants in the love that is the crown of the family. In marriage, they correct one another’s deficiencies, and function as complementary opposites, as is well known. One might say, in Jungian terms, that there occurs a recognition of the personal shadow in order for the anima/ animus to be clearly projected. Such a thing is evident in the humility of the lovers toward one another in both Romeo and Juliet and the Tempest. From the beginning of love, the lover is confronted with his shadow, and whether he knows it or not, the course of love will never be inseparable from how he deals with the shadow. If he does not attain self knowledge and learn to govern himself, the household will be just another private despotism. In Freudian terms, the repressed appetites arise, but in truth as the natural ape, ready for the sacrifice. But the paternal complex is also transcended, as though both “super ego” and “id” were transformed by their encounter with one another, and love takes over as the pilot of the soul. It is surely an experience like fate, of being swept along a course that is yet invisible. But in the vault, Romeo will shake off the yoke of inauspicious stars, leaving the creation, literally (V,iii, 111). In the poetic imagery as well as the symbolic story of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare reveals in romantic love a natural image of the religious quest.

   The basis is a Biblical teaching which begins from the sixth day of the creation of the earth, when God made man in his image, male and female. “Let us make man in our image” is the enigmatic plural statement, leaving the reader to wonder who is “us.” Male and female only adds to the enigma, as there is only one God. Jesus refers to this teaching when answering a question about divorce, and St. Paul famously teaches:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of the word, that he might present the Church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies…”For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church…..                                              Ephesians, 5:25-32; 2 Cor. 11:2 Genesis 2:24

Paradoxically, the things of marriage might be intelligible only to the solitary soul. The principle is the same as the reason for the inclusion of the Song of Solomon in the scripture. The human wedding is an image of the divine wedding, and what is right in marriage patterned not in any and every way, but in a certain way, upon the divine marriage. The marriage occurs at the revelation, in Revelation 19, after the description of the fall of Babylon in chapters 17 and 18:

…for the marriage of the bride and Lamb has come,,And his bride has made herself ready;For it was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure”-The fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.And the angel said to me,” write this: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”

There follows the scene where John attempts to bow, prostrate himself before the angel, and the angel tells him not to do that, since the angels are fellow servants. And this perhaps solves the mystery of the “us” in Genesis, or at least suggests a possible solution, as both the angels and men may be a part of the bride. The creation of the heavens was set aside, as the account proceeded to describe the creation with reference to the earth (Genesis 1:2). Those invited to the marriage supper may refer to those blessed but not members of the bride, or it may refer to those who feast on the flesh of the armies of the beast (Rev. 19:18), and this seems to be the same as the great winepress of God 14:19 and Armageddon (Rev. 16:16).

   After they meet and kiss, Juliet asks the Nurse to ask his name. “What’s he that follows here, and would not dance? She adds, half-prophetically: “If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed.” The Nurse tells that he is Romeo and a Montague, and Juliet famously swoons:

My only love, sprung from my only hate!

Too early seen unknown, and known too late!Prodigious birth of love it is to me

That I must love a loathed enemy.

Questioned by the Nurse, she lies, perhaps for the first time, saying she spoke a “Rhyme.”