Child’s Play. Irony in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Tragic Form/Comic Substance. What if they had lived?

Child’s Play.

Irony in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Tragic Form/Comic Substance.

What if they had lived?

Burton Weltman

Preliminary Question: What are we to think of the marriage of Romeo and Juliet?

What are we expected to make of the marriage of Romeo and Juliet?  Are we supposed to assume that their marriage would have survived and thrived if they had lived?  I think the answer to that question is a key to interpreting the play.  And I think most interpreters of the play assume an answer of “Yes,” whereas I think the better answer is “No.”

Prologue: Should we see Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy or a comedy?

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s most popular play and it is most popularly played in a way that I think is inconsistent with Shakespeare’s words and with Shakespeare’s intentions as they can be construed from his words.  The play is usually treated as a tragedy – as a story of heroes brought down by their own heroism – in which Romeo and Juliet go too far too fast in their relationship.  This view regards their marriage as a serious long-term commitment that would have stood the test of time if the young couple had lived.  Their marriage is doomed, however, by the heroic intensity of a love that would brook no caution, and by the heroic actions they took in trying to fulfill that love, actions that backfired on them.  It is, in this view, a beautiful tale and a heartfelt tragedy. But I think it is a misconception of the play. 

I think the play is better seen as a comedy – as a story of fools caught up in foolishness – in which two immature adolescents develop a crush on each other and then rashly rush off to get married without any realistic idea of how they might live thereafter.  Their folly is compounded by the foolishness of their feuding parents who cannot properly supervise them and, especially, by their inept priest who repeatedly gives them bad advice.  In this view, the marriage would not have survived even if they did, which is, I propose, the better reading of Shakespeare’s script. 

The play is ironic, I think, in that it fits the form of a tragedy but is best performed as a comedy.  The sentiments of the lovers are sincere, as is often the case with adolescents, and the language in which they are expressed is beautiful.  But I think that we, the audience, are expected not to be fooled by the wonderful words that gloss over an immature and unsustainable relationship.

Questioning Romeo and Juliet: Defining our terms. 

A thirteen-year-old girl who is prone to childish enthusiasms and is still in the care of a nurse-maid.  A teenage boy who is girl-crazy and flits so quickly from one infatuation to the next that his friends can’t keep up with who is his latest flame.  These two adolescents, after one brief meeting that resulted in mutual love at first sight, plighted their troth and got married the next day.  Three days later, they were dead.  Both of them suicides.  Their short-lived marriage is the central focus of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.[1]  What are we to think of it?

Are we to think that it was a good marriage, a realistic long-term commitment of the two young people, and that it would have been a happily-ever-after union if the lovers had lived?  I think this is a key question that we should ask ourselves when we are thinking about the play.  And I think the way we answer that question largely determines for us the meaning of the play, the moral of the story, and the way we think it should be performed.

As the play is popularly produced, the answer is “Yes.” That is, the marriage is portrayed as a realistic long-term commitment that was cut short by tragic circumstances.  Tragedy has been characterized as a story of too much of a good thing that then goes bad.  It presents characters who pursue a too narrowly prescribed good too far until it turns on itself and precipitates a disaster.  Tragedy is, thereby, a story of hubris versus humility, and the failure of characters to recognize limits to the good they are pursuing. [2]   In the popular view, Romeo and Juliet should be performed as a tragedy.   

 In this view, the tragedy arises from Romeo and Juliet pursuing their romance too far too fast without sufficiently considering circumstances, especially their families’ feud, that might wreck their marriage.  Passionate in their feelings for each other and heroic in their actions, they thought they could overcome any countervailing circumstances, but, instead, brought about their own demise.  Extremism in the pursuit of true love brought on tragedy.  In this view, however, the marriage was in-and-of-itself a good thing, and the two lovers could seemingly have lived happily ever after if it weren’t for the tragedy.  I don’t agree. 

I think the better answer is “No,” that the marriage was unsustainable irrespective of the circumstances, and that the youthfulness of Romeo and Juliet, and their unchecked adolescent impetuousness, were at the root of their demise.  In turn, although the action in Romeo and Juliet superficially fits the form of a tragedy, I think that the play is better performed as a comedy.  Not a “ha, ha” light comedy, but an “Oh, my” scratch-your-head dark comedy.  Going too far too fast, their rashness reflected immaturity, the stuff of comedy, not heroism, the stuff of tragedy.

Comedy has been described as a story of wisdom versus folly, foolish people doing foolish things and suffering the consequences.  In comedy, the problem is created by someone acting out of stupidity or ignorance, “the intervention of fools.”[3]  In Romeo and Juliet, almost everyone, adults and children alike, behaves foolishly, needlessly feuding, heedlessly fighting, and impetuously acting.  The result is that there are no responsible people to help curb the adolescent enthusiasm of Romeo and Juliet for each other and to advise against their precipitous marriage. 

Romeo and Juliet turn instead for help to an irresponsible priest who encourages the marriage and secretly performs the ceremony.  In my view, it is this lack of responsible advisors and restraining adults that dooms the lovers.  It is not just that they go too far too fast, which is human nature for adolescents, but that there is no one to slow them down.

Romeo and Juliet should be seen, I think, as a story of children playing at being grownups and, in the absence of adult supervision, taking the game too seriously.  They were just teenagers without a clue as to what they were really doing.  As a result, an adolescent crush led to deadly consequences.  In sum, despite the power of their passion, the sincerity of their sentiments and the poetry of their language, the romance of Romeo and Juliet was folly from beginning to end.  And, while their deaths were sad, their lives would likely have been sordid if they had survived.    

Young love and young lovers: How should we see Romeo and Juliet?

Performances of Romeo and Juliet often underplay the youthfulness of the couple.  Although Shakespeare’s text describes them as very young – Juliet is thirteen years old and Romeo is around sixteen[4] – directors often either ignore or omit references to their age, and the lovers are generally played as mature beyond their years.  They speak, move and appear like adults.

Compounding this impression, Juliet is often played by a mature young lady who looks and acts nothing like a thirteen-year-old girl, while Romeo is played by a mature young man who looks and acts nothing like a feckless sixteen-year-old.  Given this casting, it becomes easy to think of their marriage as a mature long-term commitment.  I think that is wrong. 

Romeo and Juliet should be played by actors who look and behave like young people of their tender ages.  They are teenagers and, as such, are caught up in all kinds of age-related physical and emotional changes.  In playing their parts, I think we should be presented with a contrast between their beautiful sentiments, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the physical awkwardness of growing teenagers, the self-conscious preening of insecure young people, the edginess of unsure adolescents, and the assertive swaggering (Romeo) and swaying (Juliet) of immature young adults.  All of these being characteristics of people their age. 

I think we should be able to see that they are not of an age to be making life-long commitments that we should take seriously.  They are brilliant but they are still immature and impetuous adolescents.  And their love at first sight should be played in the context of their recent romantic experiences.  Shortly before he meets Juliet, Romeo has been scorned by an older woman, Rosaline.  He is clearly miffed and has suffered a severe blow to his ego. When his friend Benvolio advises Romeo to get over his loss and find a new girl, Romeo says he never will.  He is totally and eternally devoted to Rosaline.[5]  

No sooner, however, does Romeo say this, than he meets and falls for Juliet.  Later, Romeo uses much of the same flowery language in his description and wooing of Juliet that he used to describe and woo Rosaline.[6]  All of this reflects on Romeo’s constancy and on whether his commitment to Juliet would have lasted.  In this same vein, Romeo’s choice of Juliet may reflect on the damage Rosaline did to his ego and his need to recover his self-esteem.  Romeo meets Juliet when he was on the rebound from Rosaline and it may have been that, at least unconsciously, he saw a pretty little girl, such as Juliet, as better game.  Having succeeded in that game, would he have remained satisfied?    

At the same time Romeo was unraveling from Rosaline, Juliet was being courted by an eminent and eminently eligible older man, Paris.  This is her first experience of courtship, and she is for the first time seeing herself as a desirable woman.  I think when she first meets Romeo, Juliet should be played as testing her newfound powers on him and, at least unconsciously, experimenting with him.  This is not to say that Romeo and Juliet aren’t sincere in their feelings as they develop, but that the lovers are essentially impressionable and changeable kids.

I think that we should see Romeo and Juliet as playing a game.  A game of young love, full of beautiful sentiments, and intensely sincere in the way of many adolescent enthusiasms.  But, like most adolescent enthusiasms, it was likely to be transient.  It was a game that in the normal course of things would probably have run its course and come to a safe and sound end.  But, because of the feud between their families, things were not normal.  And because of the feud, they were forbidden to play together, which is not something that two star-struck and love-sick adolescents were likely to accept.  To the contrary, opposition from elders is generally an incentive for teenagers to keep doing whatever it is their elders oppose.  Which is what happened in this case, much to everybody’s detriment.

If Romeo and Juliet had survived, how would have fared their marriage?

Juliet is thirteen years old, barely past the minimum marriageable age for a girl of that time and essentially still a child in thoughts, words and deeds.  Romeo is in his mid to late teens which is young for a man of his social class to be considering marriage.  While girls of that time generally married young, albeit not usually as young as thirteen, men generally married older, after they had established their financial and social status, and were able to support a family in the style to which they were accustomed.  Romeo was anything but financially or socially established.

If they had survived, Romeo and Juliet were supposed to escape from Verona to Mantua.[7]  They would have had few prospects and little on which to live in Mantua.  Romeo does not have any profession, trade or property upon which to live.  Romeo’s adviser, Friar Laurance, does not seem to have considered this at all, let alone considered it a problem. According to the friar’s plan, Romeo and Juliet were supposed to wait in Mantua for their parents to renounce their families’ feud.  He expected that the marriage between Romeo and Juliet would be a means of reconciling the feud between the families.  The parents would, the friar predicted, welcome the married couple back to Verona and into the bosom of their generosity[8].

Among the problems with this plan is that Romeo had been banned from Verona by the Duke.  Romeo would be executed if he came back.  In addition, it is likely that the couple’s respective parents would have renounced their offspring instead of their feud if the lovers had returned.  Juliet’s father was ready to disown her when she merely said she wanted to wait a little longer before marrying Paris, the suitor that he has chosen for her.[9]  He would not have been happy when he found out that she was lying to him when she indicated she would marry Paris, that she had already been married to Romeo when she made that promise, and that she had tricked her parents into thinking she was dead in order to run off with Romeo.  He was not likely to have generously welcomed Romeo as a son-in-law.

Although the marriage of Romeo and Juliet is often treated as having been made in heaven, it is not likely that it could have survived a trial on earth.  Romeo and Juliet got married after less than a day together and did not know each other at all.  Even if they seemed perfect for each other at first sight, they had very different temperaments and, in any case, were just teenagers who were still developing their mature characters and personalities.  It is likely that, like most young people, they would have become over time very different persons than they were at that moment.  What is the likelihood they would like each other when they got to know each other better, or fit together when they had changed?  And how would their romantic idyll have survived the likely arrival of squalling babies and dirty diapers?  All very doubtful.   

In addition, Romeo was a Romeo, that is, a womanizer.  When he met Juliet, he had just been mooning and moaning over being jilted by his previous love interest whom he claimed he would love forever and whom he described in the same sort of mellifluous terms that he later described Juliet.  Given his track record, isn’t it likely that Romeo would fall in love or in lust with another beautiful young lady in the future?

In sum, I believe Shakespeare expects us to think that the marriage of Romeo and Juliet was doomed from the start by their immaturity. Their deaths were sad but if they had lived, their lives would likely have been a disaster. Their romance was beautiful, but it was wrong.  And the fault lay not in the stars, but in their immaturity and in their advisers.

Shakespeare’s Catholic priests: Father knows best?  Not.

An underlying problem in Romeo and Juliet can, I think, be seen as a failure of socialization and social institutions.  In the ordinary course of things, young people such as Romeo and Juliet would be counseled and trained by their parents, other adults in the community, and the social institutions and structure of the community to find their proper places and make their appropriate ways in the world.  But things in Verona, the home city of Romeo and Juliet, were not normal.

Verona was in disarray.  Law and order were being disregarded.  Respect for authority was being undermined   Civility was dead.  Egged on by the example of their elders, young men were brawling and dueling in the streets, and they were not merely rough-housing like adolescents but fighting to kill.  All of this because of a foolish feud between the heads of the two leading households, the Capulets and the Montagues.  As a result, instead of being taught civility and sociability by their elders, young people were being tutored in disobedience, hostility and anti-social aggression.  The Duke who ruled over the city, and who is a voice of reason in the play, was distraught and unable to curb the disorder.

In the midst of this mess, Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet meet and sparks fly between them and love scenes ensue.  Given the turbulent context of their romance, I think that love scenes between Romeo and Juliet should be played against a contrasting background of Capulets and Montagues arguing and fighting in pantomime, and the Duke trying to separate them and pleading with them in pantomime to desist.

Because of the feud between their families, Romeo and Juliet are in a bind as to whom to turn for advice and assistance.  Given that their families are at odds, they would not be allowed by their parents to court each other.  As such, theirs is a relationship they have to keep secret from their families and friends, and they can’t confide in them or seek advice from them.  So, Juliet turns to her old nursemaid and Romeo turns to their local priest, Friar Laurance, for help.  And, therein lie the decisions that took their lives.      

Juliet’s nurse is conventionally played as a sympathetic and caring person, someone who really wants Juliet to be happy.  This is, I think, a gross mischaracterization.  She is, instead, a lascivious old lady who seems to get vicarious enjoyment from others’ romantic ventures. Instead of counseling caution, the nurse encouraged Juliet to run off and secretly marry Romeo.  This was bad advice, and she thereby violated the trust she owed to Juliet’s parents.  The nurse not only didn’t tell her long-time employers about the affair, she encouraged and facilitated it.[10]  And she later cynically counseled Juliet to marry Paris even though Juliet was already married to Romeo and it would have been bigamy.[11]  The nurse should be played as a clever, coldly calculating conniver.

Friar Laurance is conventionally played as sympathetic and dignified priest – “so noble a character” – who does his best for Romeo and Juliet.[12]  I don’t agree.  In the first place, Romeo’s seeking romantic advice from a celibate Catholic priest would seem to be folly on the face of it.  In Shakespeare’s plays, Catholic clergy are almost invariably knaves or fools.  In this case, while the friar is generally well-intentioned, he is terribly inept as an adviser and should be played as a doddering idiot.  And his blundering is the proximate cause of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.

Friar Laurance seems more concerned with religious proprieties than with the long-term well-being of Romeo and Juliet.  After initially giving Romeo the sound advice to go slow in his relations with Juliet, the friar agrees to marry them because he can see that they intend to sleep with each other and he does not want them to have sex without being married.  “You shall not stay alone til holy church incorporates two into one,” he insists.[13]  In his narrow-minded obsession with sexual propriety, he overlooks the likely problems that the marriage might cause and that the married couple might face.  And in failing to tell their parents about the young couple’s plans, he violates the trust that community members have placed in him as their priest.  

Finally, Friar Laurance’s advice and behavior after he has married the couple is fantastically foolish and is the proximate cause of their deaths.  He conceives the ridiculous ruse of pretending Juliet is dead so that she can avoid marrying Paris and flee with Romeo to Mantua.  Then, he misconceives and misdirects messages to and from himself and the lovers, which leave them in the dark as to what is happening.  He then leaves Juliet alone while she is pretending to be dead so that when Romeo arrives, he thinks she is dead and kills himself.  Finally, he again leaves Juliet alone after she wakes up so that she sees Romeo dead and kills herself.  As the saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

The Moral of the Story: Whom do you trust?

It has been said that the most important question in life is “Whom do you trust?”  All of us rely on other people for almost all of our information and ideas.  We get very little of our factual knowledge and very few of our ideas from ourselves.  For the overwhelming majority of our information and ideas, we rely on other people.  On people whom we trust. 

If we trust unreliable people, we will get unreliable information and ideas.  That is dangerous for us as individuals but also for our society.  We put ourselves and our society at risk if we fail to find the right people to trust.  That danger is one of the themes in Romeo and Juliet.  Romeo and Juliet suffered fools gladly and suffered the consequences therefrom.  As did their society. 

At the end of the play, their parents call off their feud.  At the same time, the Duke reasserts his authority over the community.  He says that he regrets not having previously been harsher with the feuding parties, and he warns that some of them will pay a penalty.  “Some shall be pardoned, and some punished,” he says as he closes the play.  Enough of foolishness.[14] 

The Duke seemingly hopes, in the wake of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, to regain some of his lost authority.  He was the voice of reason in the play and he kept telling the feuding parties to cool it, but they wouldn’t heed his advice.  They had to suffer a grievous loss before they would listen to him.  Is that what it takes before people will wean themselves from foolishness?

If you play Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy, the moral of the story might be a warning against strong emotions or strong emotional attachments, emotional overloads that might induce you to go too far too fast in some sort of relationship or other commitment.  I don’t think that is a very helpful lesson.  If you play Romeo and Juliet as a comedy, the moral might be a warning against falling for fools or falling into foolishness.  It might also be an admonition to be careful whom you trust and upon whom you rely for information and ideas.  That, I think, is a more helpful lesson, and one that is timely for our world today.

I am writing this essay in early April, 2022 at a time when knaves and fools are spreading all sorts of blatant lies and horrendous conspiracy theories in our country, stirring up feuds and prejudices, and undermining the civility and democracy of our society.  All too many foolish Americans are falling prey to these scoundrels, putting their trust in woefully wrong people and places.  As a result, we are suffering grievous losses as a society and worse may be on the way.  Finding a way to encourage more people to place their trust more wisely is an urgent task for our society.                                                                                                                           

BW 4/22

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[1]Citations to the play are from William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet. New York: Penguin Books. 1983.

[2] Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. Pp. 61, 81-86. Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Pp.37, 39.  Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1954. Pp.35, 172.

[3]Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. P.59. Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press. 1961. P. 41. Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1954. Pp.82-100.

[4]  I.2.9-10; II.2.70-75.

[5] I.5.45-55.   

[6] I.5.200 et seq.

[7] IV.1.115.

[8] II.3.85-88; III.3.140-160.

[9] II.5.193-195.

[10] II.5.68-70

[11] II.5.68-80.

[12] Harrold Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, 1951, P.138.

[13] II.6.38-40.

[14] V.3.308