The action of the story covers a period of five days: The opening street fight occurs on a Sunday morning and by early Thursday morning the lovers have died and the feuding families are united. The plot revolves entirely around the lovers. We see them before they meet each other. We witness their first meeting. We follow them through their declarations of love and up to the crucial moment when Romeo slays Tybalt and all is lost. We sense them fighting against time as the wedding between Juliet and Paris is brought forward and Friar Lawrence hatches a desperate scheme to save them. Inevitably events move so quickly, mistakes are made. The vital message fails to reach Romeo before Balthazar, Juliet rouses from her unconscious state to find that she is fractionally too late to save Romeo or herself.
The combination of time and action adds to the power of the story, the lovers are impelled unstoppably through a sequence of events, this adds to the feeling that they are caught in a train of circumstances, completely beyond their control. It is the pace and urgency that makes the drama so compelling; the plot is a complicated one because we have to take so many factors into consideration to understand the complexities of the web in which Romeo and Juliet are entrapped. The absence of sub-plots ensures that throughout the “two hours traffic” our attention is firmly fixed on the fates of the young lovers.
The play’s enduring popularity stems from the fact that its subject matter is love and, for good measure, we are given at least four variations on this major theme. Our first meeting with Romeo shows us a stylized conventional view of love, sometimes called courtly love. This is what grips Romeo in the opening scenes of the play: his postures and sighs; he understands that Rosaline will not be “…hit with Cupid’s arrow.” yet neither is he able to forget her nor, despite the teasing of his friends, Benvolio and Mercutio, is he prepared to try and do so. It is appropriate that his feelings, however ill-directed, should be so strong. He is adamant that no-one but Rosaline will suit him, and it supplies a natural motive to attend the Capulet’s masked ball. On the way to the ball, Act I Scene IV, we are reminded of the power of his love for Rosaline, and the misery it brings with it. He is confused by its illogical effect on him: “Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude to boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” Moreover, he still has to endure Mercutio’s gibes before he reaches his evening destination.
Yet, once at the ball, Romeo’s first words: “What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?” reveal the immediate impact that seeing Juliet has upon him. The effect Juliet has upon him is even more astounding given his previous strength of feeling for Rosaline. However to call the latter emotion love is misleading, infatuation is surely a more apt description. Another approach to love is presented in the opening scene, and throughout they play references are made to it. This might be called sexual love. We first encounter it in the course humour of the servants in Act I Scene I. it crops up again in our first meeting with the nurse, when she jokes that: “women grow by men” and moments later is encouraging Juliet to view Paris sympathetically and “seek happy nights to happy days.” Mercutio’s conversations frequently employ lewd references that indicate a broad view of the relations between the sexes, though it has to be said that the use of puns adds a little delicacy to the humour.
A third expression can be seen in Paris with his relationship, such as it is, with Juliet. This is characterized by the dutifulness of affection that attends an arranged marriage. It is interesting to note the Capulets’ differing views of Paris. Initially, Capulet is keen to protect his daughter and assures Paris that Juliet’s decision is to be final in the matter. Lady Capulet, by contrast, is intent on the marriage right from the start: we can be quite sure that she herself was married young and quickly pregnant: “I was your mother much upon these years” (Juliet, as near as we can guess, was around 14). The nurse also approves of arranged marriages. What is more, in the moment of Juliet’s deepest despair, the nurse counsels the expedient solution of arranged marriage with Paris as a way out of the dilemma. Although you might naturally resent the threat to Romeo and Juliet’s happiness which is represented by Paris, you end up quite admiring the man for his constancy. He eventually perishes in the graveyard, fighting mistakenly to protect the dead Juliet from some sort of vengeful attack by Romeo. His love is rewarded by earning him a place beside Juliet.
The popularity of the play does not reside in the different definitions of love, but in its triumphant description of one definition of love. The true love of Romeo and Juliet shines out against all the other types of love. In the opening prologue they are described as “star-cross’d lovers” and, on one level, this suggests that their love is fated. On another level, the choice of “star-cross’d…” is appropriate to capture the luminous quality of their love, a metaphor for the stars (lovers) illuminating the dark night sky (the divided society and the warring families). Romeo’s first reaction to Juliet is that “she doth teach the torches to burn bright.” When he catches sight of her in the orchard, she is the “light [breaking] through yonder window.” Juliet shares this view of their love. Initially, she is suspicious of the suddenness of the feeling, fearing it is like lightning which doth cease to be ere one can say 'It lightens.'” Yet, by the wedding night, she is making a comparison to the luminescent quality of Romeo’s love:
“…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 the night”
The tragic end of their love is a direct consequence of the other main theme in the play: a society at war with itself that makes their love, at once, so tragic and so beautiful. It is love against the odds. Romeo, we know from the start of the play, had no business even to meet Juliet, a Capulet, let alone fall in love with her. The masked ball is designed to cement an entirely different kind of love affair, yet it comes into an interloper, whose magical encounter with a beautiful young woman totally rewrites the script. We are aware of all the dangers: the opening brawl, the bitterness of Tybalt, the perils of a Montague being discovered in the Capulet orchard, the street fighting. But against this background, a beautiful love forms, blossoms and achieves immortality. It is the innocence and truth of this illicit love that has given the story its popularity across time. Each generation redefines its Shakespeare. Each generation suffers its own conflicts but, despite them, love, the finest expression of the human spirit, survives and thrives. Love is used as the central theme in four of Shakespeare’s tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. It is tempting to see them in this order as describing love at four different ages, from the passion of the youngest lovers, to the final search for love by Antony and Cleopatra, lovers who are torn between two worlds. Romeo and Juliet are, however, powerless in a world not of their making and one which they are unable to influence, until they die.
Romeo and Juliet die as a direct consequence of the hatreds and the system of the society in which the find themselves. Their deaths make a permanent symbol of the power of love, which triumphs through all adversity, one that is destined to forever to symbolize the waste in all divided societies.
At the beginning of the play, Romeo is conspicuously absent. We discover that he is suffering from lovesickness, the object of his unrequited devotions being Rosaline. He is adamant that there is no other woman for him, yet he is equally certain that Rosaline is not to be won by him. This accounts for the confusion that we see in his first conversation with Benvolio. His speech is characterized by oxymoron and contradictions as he struggles to make sense of his predicament. His depression persists even when he is making his way to the ball to see Rosaline, and he is a soft target for Mercutio’s wit though he feels that his low spirits proceed in some measure from a feeling that something dreadful will “Bitterly begin his fearful date” at the ball, something dreadful will end with his “untimely death.”
His confusion and self doubt are immediately banished when he first sees Juliet and notices how she appears in the dance like a “snowy white dove trooping with crows” There is some irony in that this should be his reaction, since he denied to Benvolio that he could possibly forget Rosaline in such a way. Within seconds, he takes Juliet’s hand and their first few moments are celebrated with a sonnet.
Juliet’s youth is the key factor in forming her character. She is innocent and young, not quite fourteen years old. Her father is keen to protect her since she is his only surviving child. When her mother broaches the question of marriage, Juliet avoids a direct answer: “It is an honour that I dream not of.” She consents to considering Paris but promises to make no commitment without her mother’s approval.
When she meets Romeo, She is no longer passive. At first she allows Romeo to kiss her but she encourages him to kiss her again and compliments him into the bargain: “You kiss by the book.” By the end of the scene as she endeavours to discover the identity of the stranger, we note the charming indirectness of the manner as she includes Romeo as one of the three men whose name she wants. Her next response to the nurse shows how she is beginning to hide her feelings as she describes her dismay at realising Romeo’s family connections as “a rhyme I learnt.” There is a grim truth in Juliet’s view that her “grave is like to be [her] wedding bed.” Juliet’s indirectness in telling the nurse which man interests her also displays her youth and shyness.
Harry Roper 10SR
