For the last nine or ten years, I’ve been giving a lecture on Romeo & Juliet to students at Howell High School in Michigan. In a couple of days, I’ll be doing it again, six hours straight of repeating a fun but exhausting run-through of all the important bits of R&J that I wish someone had pointed out to me as a teen.
(The students aren’t there for six hours – they’ve got, like, 42 minutes per class period. It’s about two hundred kids each time, which keeps things lively for me)
The high points that I’ll be hitting:
Romeo & Juliet is not a Tragedy. A Shakespearean Tragedy (or Aristotilean, if you’re being picky) is the tale of a single strong central male figure who is the best at everything a man can be – lover, poet, politician, warrior, philosopher – but who has one tragic flaw that leads to his ultimate destruction. With Macbeth it’s Ambition, with Othello it’s Jealousy, and so on.
That definition doesn’t apply to R&J. Romeo is a prat. At the start of the show he locks himself in a dark room during the day, then wanders the edge of the forest at night, thinking about his love, Rosaline, who he’s never really spoken to, and who is going to become a nun! He’s an idiot!
No, Romeo is much more an Orlando, a Claudio, an Orsino. He’s a Comedic lover.
With that in mind, look at the elements of a Shakespearean Comedy: a young lovesick fool, a smart and capable young girl, clowns, disguises, musicians, and mistimings, secret weddings. Then run down the list for R&J : lovesick fool – Romeo; capable girl – Juliet; clowns – Mercutio, Nurse, Peter, Potpan, etc.; disguises – masked ball (though it’s only the boys who are crashing who show up in masks!); musicians – the often cut, but truly funny (if played right) musicians when they discover Juliet "dead"; mistimings – Friar Lawrence’s message misses Romeo, Romeo kills himself just before Juliet wakes, Tybalt kills Mercutio by accident, yadda yadda yadda; and a secret wedding to boot! The only thing it’s missing is shipwrecks and Juliet dressing as a man!
So, think about R&J in that light. The first half of the show is a Shakespearean Comedy, complete with sex jokes and idiot lovers. Only, at that point where in, say, Shrew, everything is revealed, people start to die. That leaves these Comedic characters trapped in an awful situation, trying to find the Comedic solution. It’s not a mistake that the Friar’s plan is the exact same one that Frair Francis uses in Much Ado.
Romeo and Juliet is not a Tragedy. It is something much worse. Because first it makes you laugh.
DB
