The love of Romeo and Juliet is in short condemned by its unmeasured intensity. 'Shakespeare on his eagle flight above all the heights and depths of human being and feeling, assuredly did not overlook these romantic abysses of the supreme passion.'1 But we have to do not with the Olympian Shakespeare of The Tempest, but with a Shakespeare who, if we may trust the Sonnets, was not 'flying above' but plunging strenuously through the heights and depths of human feeling, and to this Shakespeare the matter was hardly so clear. He can never, it is true, have shared the modern Romantic's scorn for the world that lies outside love. He who almost from the outset grasped so profoundly the meaning of national life and the potency of law, could never have complete sympathy for lyric emotion, however entrancing, which defies them. But that he saw an ethical problem in the case is plain from the pathos which gathers, under his handling, about the lyric rebel to law, Richard II. That History presents suggestive analogies to our Tragedy. But Romeo and Juliet's passion, sovran and uncontrolled as it is, has a bearing upon public interests quite other than that of Richard's lyric self-love. His measureless caprice disorganises a great and ordered State; their passion breaks like a purifying flame upon one rotten with disease. For the lovers themselves the price of that purification is death; but our pity for them is blended with wonder and even envy. Juliet's glorious womanhood is the creation of her love; Romeo, a weaker nature, retains more infirmity,2 yet he too stands out in heroic stature 1 Kreyssig, Vorlesungen über Shakespeare, ii. 40. 2 Juliet's clear vision never leaves her. Cf. the waking in the vault. Brooke's Juliet is at first much amazed to see in tomb so great a light She wist not if she saw a dream or O comfortable friar! where is my lord? against the suitor par convenance, Paris, and the quondam wooer of Rosalinde. It is easy to dwell upon his despair at banishment, his fatal errors of judgment, as when he fails to suspect life in Juliet's still warm and rosy form.1 But to suppose that he is unmanned by his love of Juliet contradicts the whole tenour of Shakespeare's implicit teaching. Passion for a Cressida or a Cleopatra saps the nerve of Troilus and Antony; but nowhere does Shakespeare represent a man as made less manly by absolute soul-service of a true woman: rather, this was a condition of that 'marriage of true minds' to which, in his loftiest sonnet, he refused to ‘admit impediments.' 1 Cf. Bulthaupt, Dramaturgie des Schauspiels, ii. 189 f. ROMEO AND JULIET PROLOGUE. Enter Chorus. Chor. Two households, both alike in dignity, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. A pair of star-cross d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, And the continuance of their parents' rage, Which, but their children's end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. Prologue. Omitted in Ff. In the Qq (except Q1) the speaker of the Prologue is described as ΤΟ 'Chorus,' the same person no doubt delivering the chorus' at the end of Act I. |