ROMEO AND JULIET

Tragedy

Great Suffering

Tragedy is great suffering: great in the sense of tremendous; worthy of admiration; and noble.

Suffering of the sort endured by tragic figures is beyond that of ordinary human beings. Though we recognize their circumstances as plausible and thus empathize with them, there is a sense in which they are above us both in terms of the severity of their suffering and their ability to endure it.

Tragic heroes are great in the way they respond to the circumstances of their suffering. They exhibit extraordinary courage in the face of inevitable defeat, standing defiant against the forces of fate even while knowing that to do so is ultimately futile.

Tragic heroes are also great in the social sense. To be of "great place" in Shakespeare's day was to be of the nobility, and the theater as a rule reinforced the social hierarchy. Because tragedy was widely considered the highest of literary forms, the theatrical doctrine of decorum held that the tragic protagonist in a play or poem must be a character of noble lineage. To be noble, then, was not only or even primarily to behave in a dignified way; it was to descend from the class of individuals we call the nobility—persons who inherited the land, title, wealth, and affluence of society's most prevalent and powerful families.

The Tragic Character

The tragic hero does what he does in large part because of what he is—what Aristotle in the Poetics (c.350 B.C.E.) called the character's ethos. Though the hero's actions can be understood as freely chosen, this freedom is constrained or partially determined by elements of his character. The hero of a tragedy typically acts in a way that leads to his downfall; but while this action is rooted in choice, its outcome is unintended. Aristotle uses the Greek term hamartia to describe this aspect of tragedy. Often translated as "tragic flaw," the term is actually a metaphor connected with spear-throwing contests and means something like "miss the mark." The tragic hero's choice to act in a certain way might seem to others (and to the audience) an error in judgment stemming from a flawed character; but the decision is based on good intentions. To use the spear-throwing metaphor, the hero aims high at some worthy goal, but misses the mark or target and fails miserably as a result. Indeed, the nobler the goal, the greater is the tragedy in failing to obtain it. Romeo and Juliet are tragic figures in this sense. Hoping both to realize their intense desire for each other and to reconcile their feuding families, they aim high, fail, and perish.

Romeo and Juliet: Comedy Turned Tragedy

The story of Romeo and Juliet is contained in a comedy Shakespeare wrote at around the same time, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play performed by Bottom and his crew at the Athenian wedding, Pyramus and Thisbe, closely resembles the plot of Shakespeare's first great tragedy. And whereas Dream closes with a tragic play-within-the-play comically performed, Romeo and Juliet contains unmistakably comic elements that yield inevitably to tragedy.

Comic characters abound. Juliet's Nurse, for example, is a good-intentioned if somewhat dim-witted figure, the target of bawdy jokes by Romeo's companions and a participant in good-natured banter with her young charge. Her monologue recalling Juliet's childhood (1.3.18-49) is both sweet and slightly ridiculous. Friar Laurence, a far more serious character, nevertheless aims repeatedly to bring about a conclusion favorable to all: to allow the young lovers to realize their desires even while reconciling their families and thus putting an end to the civil discord that has so long disrupted the peace in Verona. The would-be engineer of a comic outcome, Laurence fails miserably to make it happen. Indeed, he becomes instrumental, if unintentionally, in bringing about the heroes' destruction.

Perhaps the greatest comic figure in the play is Romeo's friend, Mercutio. Their witty banter in 2.3 exemplifies a typical feature of Shakespearean comedy: rapid-fire dialogue filled with sexual innuendo and double entendre, convoluted metaphor, and an exuberant, percussive music. This same character, however, utters one of the more haunting speeches in the play, the Queen Mab monologue (1.4.55-94). An entertaining jumble of fairy lore, the speech concludes with a dark vision of violent sexuality and madness. His death-scene speech similarly combines Mercutio's comic wit with a darker cynicism and despair. His passing is in a sense the death of comedy in the play, for it not only removes from the stage one of Shakespeare's greatest comic figures, but also sets Romeo on a path toward the inevitable and terrible destruction that follows.

The play is filled with comic scenes. Like Mercutio, however, these scenes more often than not are haunted by darker strains. The play's opening moments, for example, consist of an exchange of verbal wit whose content is simultaneously sexual and violent—not unlike the conclusion of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech mentioned above. A very different scene at the conclusion of Act 4 nonetheless shares this quality of comedy tinged with darker elements. The affectionate exchange among the musicians hired to perform at Juliet's marriage to Paris (4.4.127ff.) is filled with homely language that recalls Juliet's Nurse. At the same time, however, it evokes a melancholy appropriate to the mood that prevails upon discovery of the dead Juliet's body earlier in the same scene.

Romeo and Juliet announces its comic status in other ways. Much of the action points toward that most typical of comic conclusions, a wedding. The ball at the Capulet mansion is more or less Paris' and Juliet's engagement party, yet this is where she meets Romeo and discovers his identity as a Montague, her family's enemy of long standing. And so the play features two weddings: the one for which the Capulets prepare throughout but which is never to be, and that of the heroes enacted at Laurence's cell (2.5) and consummated ultimately in death.

Perhaps the most striking comic feature in the play is the presence of a meddling father figure—or, rather, its conspicuous absence until late in the action. Recall that this figure in Dream, Egeus, appears early in the first scene and establishes the adversity that the lovers Hermia and Lysander must overcome in order to consummate their love. Contrast this situation with the one presented early in Romeo and Juliet. Discussing marriage plans with Paris, Juliet's father avers, "My will to her consent is but a part,/ And, she agreed, within her scope of choice/ Lies my consent and fair-according voice" (1.2.15-17). Unlike Egeus, who is uncompromising in his wish that Hermia marry Demetrius despite her affection for Lysander, Capulet here allows that Juliet has considerable say in her choice of marriage partner. Now, we might wonder about his sincerity given his attitude later upon discovering Juliet's objections to the match (3.5.107ff.). Nevertheless, his apparent respect here for his daughter's will, so un-Egeus-like, is perhaps our first clue that something is not quite right amid the comic mood prevailing early in the play.

Shakespeare seems deliberately to set up Romeo and Juliet as a comedy. The reason is simple: dramatic effect. By provoking comic expectations in his audience, the playwright manipulates their emotional investment in the plot and characters, thereby rendering all the more devastating their experience of the tragedy that gradually overwhelms the most famous couple in Western literature.