“A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.”
Shakespeare never uses either this chorus figure or a sonnet to introduce any of his other tragedies. My opinion is that Shakespeare wanted to make sure that the audience knew that this play – despite being about love – is a tragedy. The key word in the sonnet is ‘star-crossed’. This Elizabethan word underlines their strong belief in the influence of the stars and astrology. It tells the audience that the pair of lovers are doomed by the influence of the stars, in other words by circumstances that are beyond their control.
What happens straight after the chorus figure leaves the stage is also important. Two comic characters called Sampson and Gregory run out of one of the side entrances. Again you can see how Shakespeare uses the particular stage structure of the globe in his stagecraft. The play immediately starts to look like a comedy with their fighting and their speaking in prose. The Elizabethan audience would immediately recognise prose as the language of clowns and obscene jokes.
“Sampson:My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I
will back thee.”
Already in just the first scene there are four or even five comic characters on stage: Sampson, Gregory, Abraham and Balthasar and sometimes Benvolio. A feature of Romeo & Juliet is that there is a lot of humour, either slapstick or witty obscene remarks. Although there are a lot of comic characters in the play, there are two main ones which I want to discuss in more detail. The first is Mercutio, the second is the nurse.
When we first see Mercutio in act one, scene four, he speaks in verse, but in his main scene with the Nurse and Peter (Peter was originally played by the famous Shakespearean clown called Kemp), he speaks prose. A lot of what he says is sexual and is included because Romeo & Juliet is meant to be a play about love and this provides a relevant under-current to the rather fairy-tale affair between the two main characters. For instance, Shakespeare took the story for his play from a poem by Arthur Brooke called The Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet, which in turn was based on an Italian poem by Bandello. Romeo comes across as a typical literary lovesick poet – the sort of character that would appear in Italian poetry - which is how we first hear about him in Sycamore Grove where he pines for Roseline. Mercutio provides a bit of energy and life which we can see in this quotation from act two, scene four, where he is encouraging Romeo to be a bit more of a lover and less of a poet
“Mercutio: Why, is not this better now than groaning for
love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo.
Now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by
nature for this drivelling love is like a great
natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his
bauble in a hole.
Benvolio: Stop there, stop there.”
Personally I believe that Shakespeare killed off Mercutio because he was beginning to overshadow Romeo. He’s a lot more fun, more human and interesting, a more entertaining character, especially on stage. His death does contribute to the idea of fate in the play. Mercutio is killed by Tybalt in vengeance for which he is exiled. In my view, I think that when Mercutio dies, the comedy dies with him and the play is no more a tragicomedy and is just a pure tragedy.
Just as Romeo had Mercutio, so Juliet has the nurse. The problem with Juliet is that she is very young and immature. Perhaps this was because all Shakespearean female actors were young boys. The only time we see her acting mature is when she defies her mother and father, which isn’t exactly the same as Macbeth! Shakespeare attaches the nurse to Juliet because there is a bit more depth to the nurse and she is older and wiser, also he probably got an older man to play her, who could carry off the jokes. Shakespeare therefore gives the nurse more and more to say and the first time we see her in act 1, scene 3 where Lady Capulet actually tells her not to talk so much
“Lady Capulet: Enough of this, I prithee,
hold thy peace”
Her longest scene is with Mercutio and Peter (two other comic characters) which doesn’t really play any part at all in the plot of the play.
In conclusion, I think that the real question for this essay should be “Why does Shakespeare give so much space to comedy when it’s meant to be a tragedy?” I think there are two probable answers. The first is that Romeo and Juliet are such weak characters and they need ‘shadows’ to give them more depth and to encourage interest. The nurse and Mercutio are human beings, whereas Romeo in particular is like a literary invention, an artificial poet. The second reason is to do with the kind of tragedy it is. I’ve already made the point that the main tragedies Shakespeare wrote depend on character flaws: ambition, jealousy, etc. Because Romeo and Juliet is not like this, the storyline cannot rely on simple psychology. The clue lies in the phrase ‘star-crossed lovers’. The tragedy in Romeo and Juliet comes from various mistakes, letters not arriving, misunderstandings, miss-timings, etc. This sort of thing relies on having lots of minor characters acting as go-betweens, and in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has decided to make a lot of these minor characters comic.