Mixed Up Lovers—And Mixed Up Critics

No, Shakespeare never romanticized two suicidal, sex-driven Italian kids

Argument

Contrary to what you’ve heard, there are many reasons to think Romeo & Juliet is a satire, and a full-fledged one. In fact, Shakespeare names his target: the 14th-c. Italian poet, Petrarch. Shakespeare v. Petrarch: it’s the battle of the Renaissance, and the story’s never been told. [1500 words/8mins]

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Our next love story is Romeo & Juliet, a 500-year-old tale about horny preteens that society somehow decided is classy and not perverted even though two middle schoolers bang in it.

—Family Guy

Do you have any idea just how unlikely it is that Shakespeare would romanticize the short-lived love affair of a pair of impetuous, suicidal, homicidal Italian teenagers from troubled families?

Or how utterly ill-founded that interpretation actually is?

I’m here to tell you that Shakespeare thought of the lovers just what you the non-expert think. Romeo reckless. Juliet naive. Their love shallow. Their suicides damnable. Mercutio clear-sighted. Romeo indiscriminately after sex. Juliet easy. And so on. (Did I say the last two aloud?)

My premise is twofold. Not just that Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare’s most misunderstood play. That it’s his most understudied play.

Everything Shakespearean’s been analyzed to death, right? Not at all. Quite the opposite here.

Books on Hamlet might be countless. Books on Romeo can be counted on one hand. And only one or two is worth reading.

There are skeptics but they’re few. And ignored. Open a recent critical edition and you won’t hear of their work. Won’t find them discussed. Won’t find them cited. The very idea of a skeptical much less a satirical reading—you won’t find the concept.

Fundamental questions remain not so much unanswered as unasked. 

Here are some crucial issues you’ve probably heard nothing about.

The role of Cupid

At Juliet’s window, Romeo attributes his leap of the Capulet wall to Cupid: “With Love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls” (2.2.71). Yet no one ever discusses the allusion or its significance. The god of violent, indiscriminate affection—the god responsible for Titania’s “love” for Bottom, Armado’s “love” for Jaquenetta, and Tarquin’s “love” for Lucrece, among others—Cupid has a massive presence in Shakespeare’s works from the period, a presence that’s been largely overlooked. The fact that Romeo is one more Cupid-led lover changes everything you thought you knew about the type and quality of his affection as well as the supposed beauty and originality of his speech.

Romeo’s resemblance to some of Shakespeare’s most dubious “lovers”

Right now, Romeo is considered peerless. In fact, he has peers aplenty—and his peers say everything about him. They include a rapist (Tarquin), a narcissist (Venus), a sophist (Berowne), a fantasist (Armado), a madman (Lysander) and an ass (Bottom as Pyramus). The similarities are many. They’re precise. They’re illuminating—like nothing else. And they’ve received almost no attention, the critical tradition having systematically neglected to consider Romeo & Juliet’s significance in relation to Shakespeare’s other poems and plays from the mid 1590s. Studying Romeo & Juliet in a largely non-Shakespearean vacuum, it’s as if critics knew that as soon as Romeo got compared to, say, Tarquin, their principal suppositions about the play would be shattered.

The nautical motif

What’s one such parallel between Romeo and Tarquin? Both are doomed seafarers. Both share premonitions of their watery demise—and venture forth regardless. Both have Cupid as their helmsman—a god who can’t see! And both end their figurative journeys in violent, self-inflicted shipwreck. All this according to a central and defining motif. Sound important? It’s decisive. It is the story. Why didn’t Prof Greenblatt tell you about the nautical imagery and its parallel in Lucrece in your Harvard seminar? He himself’s just hearing of it for the first time. (Coming soon: “The Meaning of Star-Crossed,” which will argue that the epithet is about seafaring, not astrology!).

Spiritual warfare—and the fate of the soul

What but love could Romeo and Juliet possibly be about? Improbable as it may sound, this: the fight between good and evil on the plane of the human heart. The triumph of the latter over the former. And all the attendant consequences, for both this world and the next. Sound unlikely? Abstract? Actually, it’s conspicuous. You have to try to miss it. The basis for this view is the first soliloquy of Friar Laurence, a 30-line speech where he suggests that, inside of Romeo, there’s a battle taking place between “grace” and “rude will.” That “rude will” is going to prove “predominant.” And that the result will be his “death”… Wish to see for yourself? Turn to the beginning of Act 2, Scene 3. Then to lines 23-30—the final eight of the Friar’s speech. Note how these are separated off by a stage direction, “Enter Romeo.” Note the obvious symbolism, the young plant standing for the young man. And how the Friar stops talking about human beings in general—and starts talking about this one human in particular. Could the possibility be plainer? In the critical literature, there ought to be hundreds of pages discussing the extent to which Romeo’s self-murder does indeed represent a moral struggle fought, and lost, on an interior battleground, his premature, self-inflicted death the outward consequence of an inward capitulation.

The satirizing of Petrarch

You may not have heard anyone propose that Romeo & Juliet is a satire. Yet the possibility of satire—plus the target—is right there in the text. “Now is [Romeo] for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in,” says Mercutio, comparing his friend to the Italian poet and biggest name in English literature at the time—and doing so just after uttering one of his dirtiest jokes in the play, comparing Romeo, or one part of Romeo, to a stranded fish (a “dried herring”). Some years from now, scholars will recognize this for what it is: one of the most important allusions in Shakespeare. Why does it matter so much? Because Shakespeare wrote at least three other satires of Petrarch at the same time: Venus & Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labor’s Lost. Extraordinarily, this pattern of satire has been overlooked. As a consequence, the key question hasn’t been asked: is Romeo and Juliet a satire of the same? Overwhelmingly, the evidence says yes—Shakespeare’s subtlest and greatest. Shakespeare v. Petrarch: it’s the battle of the Renaissance, and the story’s never been told.

The work’s sheer difficulty

Romeo & Juliet has rightly been called “one of Shakespeare’s most punning plays.” It’s filled throughout with word-play. Not just on every page. In almost every line. It has multiple combats-of-wit, where multivalence is the norm, and featuring some utterances so abstruse no one has a clue what they mean. It is not an easy work. And the fact that it’s usually taught by secondary school teachers to secondary school students is itself some kind of joke. Just what kind of work is it? Shakespeare wrote Romeo & Juliet at the same time as his narrative poems, Venus & Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. These are substantial, intricate poems, each the length of a short play (1200 and 1800 lines, respectively). Together, they’ve been called “the most carefully patterned and structured works in [Shakespeare’s] canon, as well as the most explicitly literary.” Here’s the thing about Romeo & Juliet: it was written in the same manner! You’ve been told to go and see the play in order to understand it. I can’t think of worse advice. It’s actually pernicious. This isn’t the place to defend the eminently literary nature of the play, the need to study it closely—more closely than anything else you’ve encountered. But there’s a reason why you haven’t thought about or read about the issues raised here.

A teacher friend of mine has never wanted to teach the play, feeling she just didn’t understand it. There were too many speeches she couldn’t decipher. Too many dialogues she couldn’t follow. Too many puns, too many word-games, too many wit-combats. Just too much going on both semantically and thematically.

If only Harold Bloomers had been as humble.

Our impatient ears

Shakespeare tells us how to read his play, and it isn’t how most of us have read it. Patiently. And attentively. The Prologue gives a preview of the action. It then states,

The which if you with patient ears attend, 
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

“Attend” to the play’s meaning with “patient ears,” urges the Chorus, inherently the most objective, authorial voice in the play. Suggesting that the work requires close, careful scrutiny. That it may not mean what you, in your hurriedness, think it means. And more—that in studying it you may be surprised by what you discover.

Listen as you would to a parable, appears to be the challenge. A Shakespearean version of “If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.”

“Our toil,” says Shakespeare, by proxy. Meaning mine in writing it. And yours in interpreting it. And that that second effort will be no less labor-intensive. No less great.

Judge before you’ve heard, decide before you’ve listened, fail to notice or reflect on what’s actually said here, and you’re liable to “miss” the point altogether, conveys the wordplay involving that term.

Four and a quarter centuries later, I think Shakespeare would be disappointed but not shocked by his play’s modern-day reputation.