An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet

It is principally by means of the incandescent brilliance of its language that Romeo and Juliet has earned its place as one of the greatest love stories in world literature. Shakespeare makes linguistic power figure thematically in the play by insisting on the crucial importance of naming and, more generally, by repeatedly calling attention to the force of verbal actions.

What are some of the things that characters do with words? For a start, they insult each other, a dangerous pastime of both servants and masters. They also invite one another (Capulet’s favorite pastime); they confess (formally, to a priest; informally, to friends); they conjure; they curse; they make contracts; they vow; and, if they have the power of the prince, they banish. And through all of these verbal actions, no matter how serious or even deadly they may be, they constantly play with language.

Romeo and Juliet is saturated with language games: paradoxes, oxymorons, double entendres, rhyming tricks, verbal echoings, multiple puns. The obvious question is, why? One possible answer, proposed as early as the eighteenth century, is that Shakespeare could not resist: verbal wit was an addiction, an obsession, the object of an irrational passion. He could indulge this passion because a display of wit would appeal to those segments of the audience most attuned to rhetorical acrobatics. Another answer is that puns are a clarifying challenge, an assault on sentiments to test whether they are genuine or merely forced and empty. Hence Mercutio attempts to mock Romeo’s passion with a set of ribald jests, jests that are reiterated unconsciously by the Nurse in such exclamations as “Stand up, stand up, stand an you be a man” (3.3.88). To survive the corrosive effect of such mockery is a measure of true love and a sign of authenticity: “He jests at scars that never felt a wound” (2.1.43).

But this explanation for the tragedy’s pervasive wordplay is not wholly adequate, since at the height of both their love and their despair, Romeo and Juliet also pun. Romeo on the verge of suicide plays with the word “engrossing” (death as wholesaler; monopolist; lawyer); Juliet plays with the word “restorative” (the kiss as medicine; poison; death; resurrection); and both play with the Elizabethan “to die” as a term for “to have an orgasm.” Here wordplay functions not to deflate but to cram into brief utterances more meanings than language would ordinarily hold and to force us to confront both unresolvable contradictions and hidden connections. That is, puns work to juxtapose or hold open possibilities that normally are viewed as mutually exclusive.

For Mercutio, by contrast, words are fantastic trifles in a world fit only for satire, sexual teasing, and make-believe. He is a young man in love with masks; indeed, as he readies himself for the masked ball, he seems to regard his own face as a mask: “Give me a case to put my visage in, / A visor for a visor” (1.4.29–30). The moment Romeo and Juliet meet, all masks seem to fall away, all prior emotions fade into nothingness, and all games become earnest. “Did my heart love till now?” asks Romeo, and Juliet, sending the Nurse to find out Romeo’s name, declares, “If he be marrièd, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed” (1.5.131–32).

At some moments in Romeo and Juliet, then, wordplay reveals the arbitrariness of language; at other moments, it seems to reveal a hidden reality, even a sacred truth. These contradictory revelations are explored in the famous balcony scene in Act 2. Mercutio’s mockery gives way, after Romeo’s abrupt, one-line dismissal, to incantatory language so intense as to create a new heaven and a new earth. A bare, day-lit stage (as it would have been in the Elizabethan playhouse) becomes a dark garden above which Juliet appears like the sun. Visibility is canceled and then restored, by means of metaphor, to the “white upturnèd wond’ring eyes / Of mortals” (2.1.71–72). Romeo’s ecstatic words are the poetic record of a revelation, a vision of a creature unique, perfect, and infinitely beautiful.

The visionary moment turns into a moment of auditory revelation as well, as Romeo, in an intense, eroticized version of what audiences routinely do, overhears Juliet’s soliloquy. He has entered into her most intimate thoughts and longings and has an overpowering proof of their authenticity, since she speaks with no awareness of his presence. The inner world his lyrical utterance has conjured up is miraculously united with her own. But her words at once offer a complete fulfillment of this union and a shattering of fulfillment: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (2.1.75). Only if Romeo’s name is an arbitrary sign, to be stripped away, discarded, and replaced, can her love be realized. But in a world in which words are divorced from reality, what would be the status of a love made by language? In a world in which names are mere empty signs, how could language create a new reality?

If words are arbitrary, then Romeo and Juliet’s love, woven of words, is wedded to nothingness. If they are not arbitrary, if they cannot float free of the body and society, then their love will be destroyed by the rage of feuding parents—the parents who have bestowed proper names on their offspring—and by the whole daylight world of social exchange that gives ordinary language its normal meanings.

Few readers or spectators come away from Romeo and Juliet with the conviction that it would be better to love moderately. The intensity of the lovers’ passion seems to have its own compelling, self-justifying force, which quietly brushes away all social obstacles and moralizing warnings: “Think true love acted simple modesty” (3.2.16). And the play’s incantatory language of love—braiding together the wildly fanciful and the exquisitely simple—has after four hundred years an unforgettable freshness:

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3.2.20 – 25)

If the society of the play will not tolerate such ecstatic desire, if the contingencies of the ordinary world manage to destroy it, Romeo and Juliet offers us the consoling realization that the lovers themselves have all along been in love with night.

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

Photo

Emilia Suárez and Rudy Pankow in Romeo and Juliet: Nile Scott Studios and Maggie Hall.