Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare (second study)

The NATO phonetic alphabet was devised so that words could be spelled out over radio or telephone, to avoid mistakes in communication through interference of any kind. The fact that the word  selected for the letter J is Juliet, and for R is Romeo confirms the universal recognition of those two names. The story of the star-crossed lovers had been told several times before Shakespeare’s play, but it is this – his second tragedy – that brought the story undying fame.

Romeo and Juliet was written around 1595-6 and shares these dates and broad themes with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The opening scenes of both plays include stern edicts: in Romeo and Juliet Prince Escalus of Verona, tired of the public disturbances caused by the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, warns the two families ‘If ever you disturb our streets again, Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.’ In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus, father to Hermia, asks Duke Theseus to condemn her to death if she will not agree to marry the groom he has chosen for her.

Either play could end in tragedy, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a journey through the woods and the intervention of spirits leads to a happy resolution and the farcical performance by ‘rude mechanicals’ of Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play which reflects the plot of Romeo and Juliet. In contrast, Romeo and Juliet have no such luck, the series of errors and accidents that befall them, from the death of Mercutio to the failure of the Mantua postal service, leads to the tomb rather than the wedding feast.

The language of the play is wonderfully varied and intricate. It begins with a chorus speech – a sonnet very much in the Petrarchan mode – and goes straight from there to a prose scene between servants that begins with jokes but  rapidly leads to a street  fight and the entrance of Prince Escalus. Our first sight of Romeo, entering after the fight is over and sighing over Rosaline, is of the doting lover, seemingly more in love with love than with a flesh and blood creature:

‘O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.’

His first encounter with Juliet is a conversation contained within a sonnet. The language they use has none of the fashionable oxymorons, it takes one simple image – that of a pilgrim – and gives it the intensity and all-consuming passion of first love. They understand each other completely.

Shakespeare’s only other tragedy at this point was Titus Andronicus, firmly placed in ancient Rome and, although nominally  set in the Renaissance of the 1300’s, Romeo and Juliet feels much closer  in time to the contemporary audience than the usual classical settings. The play is culturally ubiquitous, it has reached beyond theatre to film, song, meme and even the NATO phonetic alphabet! It dramatises the conflicts – between love and hate, social structure and individual desire, tradition, fate and free will – that every generation reinvents in its own terms.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Jane Wymark
• Tuesdays, 20 October – 8 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• Recommended edition: Romeo and Juliet (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series) edited by Rene Weis, ISBN: 978-1903436912
• £280.00 for eight two-hour meetings, to include background notes and resources.