Purple Fountains: The Bloodiness of Romeo & Juliet

Argument

In a striking departure from his source, Shakespeare makes the ending of Romeo & Juliet bloody and gory several times over. Tybalt, Paris, Juliet—all lie there “bloody” or “bleeding.” And this isn’t just any alteration, but one with the power to undo the romantic conception, permanently and irreversibly.

---

What ho! You men, you beasts, 
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins.
—Prince Escalus, Romeo & Juliet

In Shakespeare’s source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus & Juliet (1562), there are various references to bloodshed over the course of the story.

Early on, for example, the narrator describes how the participants in the feud “bathe in blood of smarting wounds” (38).

Later, after another outbreak of fighting, Romeus and his friends are appalled to see so much carnage:

They pity much to see the slaughter made so great,

That wetshod they might stand in blood on either side the street. (997-8)

Other such references include Juliet threatening to use a “bloody knife” on herself if the Friar can’t rescue her from marriage to Paris (1916).

But do you know where there’s no blood at all?

At the end.

Juliet may stab herself with Romeus’s dagger. But there’s no blood. Not one drop—to judge by the references in the text, which are nil.

Nor is her cousin Tybalt bloody. He’s there in the tomb, and Romeus addresses him. Earlier, Romeus had “thrust him through the throat” (988). But no mention is made of the condition of his corpse.

If not the bloodshed, what does Brooke’s tale emphasize? How the lovers are going to reunite in heaven. As Juliet tells Romeus, she leaves this world to be with him in the next:

That so our parted sprites from light that we see here,

In place of endless light and bliss may ever live y-fere. (2787-8)

Endless light. Endless bliss. Endless companionship. (Y-fere means “in companionship.”)

Thus, the ending may be violent, but the text doesn’t draw attention to this. The opposite: avoids any reference to anything off-putting.

And there’s no mystery why. If the gore were made explicit? This would change everything.

If there were other bodies in the tomb, say, and they were “bloody” and “festering.”

If Romeo’s murder weapon was “gory.”

Romeo “slaughtered.”

Juliet “bleeding.”

If Juliet lay there with a knife in her chest—and someone said so aloud.

Details like these would make it difficult or impossible to romanticize the lovers in the same way.

Or.

So you’d think.

“Blood and weapons”

Shakespeare might have followed his source and kept the ending clean and white. He might even have found some way to turn down the violence a notch.

He went in the opposite direction.

Here, character after character, arriving at the Capulet tomb, comment on all the blood they see.

On the outside of the sepulcher.

On the inside.

On the persons of the lovers.

Seemingly all around them.

A stage direction about the Friar from the First Quarto tells you about everything you need to know. According to the direction,

Friar [Laurence] stoops and looks on the blood and weapons (20.94).

Blood. And weapons.

Two things that weren’t present in Brooke.

That feature very prominently in Shakespeare.

Paris “steeped in blood”

One of Shakespeare’s most striking departures from his source is in having Romeo kill Juliet’s official suitor, Count Paris, right before he kills himself. In itself, this is a highly significant departure, one that hasn’t received sufficient critical attention.

In Brooke, Romeus arrives at the Capulet tomb—and enters to be with Juliet.

In Shakespeare, Romeo arrives at the tomb—and finds Paris there mourning Juliet’s death. Romeo tells him to leave. When he doesn’t, Romeo threatens him. In fact, he threatens to spill his blood, at least in the First Quarto. He cries,

Heap not another sin upon my head

By shedding of thy blood. (20.47-8)

Romeo then makes good on his threat, skewering him with his sword—and heaping indeed another sin on his head (another topic for another essay).

Subsequently, multiple characters notice and comment on the resulting bloodstains, which appear on both the ground and tomb itself.

For example, upon arriving at the monument, Friar Laurence exclaims,

Alack, alack, what blood is this which stains

The stony entrance of this sepulchre? (5.3.145-6)

What blood? The blood of Paris, now spattered over the entranceway.

The Friar asks next,

What mean these masterless and gory swords

To lie discolored by this place of peace?

Romeo! O, pale! Who else? What, Paris too?

And steeped in blood? (147-50)

Swords that haven’t just lost their color, aren’t just red rather than silver.

That are explicitly—

Gory.

Gory!

Gory with the blood of the second young man Romeo has killed—in about as many days.

Paris lies there “steeped” in blood, an adjective suggesting a large, unmistakable quantity of the vital fluid. Suggesting a hemorrhage.

Subsequently, two more characters will call Paris “slain” (180, 202), a term that conveys not just any murder but a brutally violent one.

But there’s something else Shakespeare makes explicit here. Happen to notice?

Not just the bloodiness of the murder. The sanctity of the site itself. The sanctity—and the serenity.

The place is what?

A “place of peace.”

And so it was.

Until Romeo got there.

Pulled a dagger.

And started killing people.

You know, the Montague who’s different, who’s unlike his kin, who’s in this world but of the next.

Whose very role in the tragedy is to help end the blood feud, not participate in or prolong it.

Um.

Okay.

Paris treats the place that way, performing burial rites for Juliet and strewing flowers on her grave.

Paris covers the tomb with flower blossoms. Romeo? With Paris’ lifeblood.

Nor is that the last such reference. Rather, when the first watchman arrives, he observes,

The ground is bloody. (178)

This brings the total number of references to the bloodiness of Paris’ killing to more than half a dozen.

Therefore, Shakespeare doesn’t just add a new, never-before-seen murder. Doesn’t just add new, never-before-seen blood.

He compels us to see and resee the slaying in all its horrificness.

“Bloody Tybalt”

If Romeo’s second murder victim is in bad shape, his first is even worse, his body mutilated and putrefying.

Shortly after entering the tomb, Romeo addresses him directly. “Tybalt,” he asks,

liest thou there in thy bloody sheet? (97)

He then mentions how he “cut [his] youth in twain” (99).

With these words, Romeo may not intend to remind us of the state of Tybalt’s corpse, but that’s precisely the effect of his words, his description recalling several other descriptions from earlier in the play.

For example, right after Tybalt’s murder, the Nurse describes his body as

A piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse,
Pale, pale as ashes, all bedaubed in blood,
All in gore blood. I swooned at the sight. (3.2.60-2)

There’s that word again. Did you catch it?

Not just blood.

Gore.

Or rather, the two together: gore blood, a compound term that, like both “bedaubed” and “steeped,” conveys “all besmeared or covered with blood” (OED 2).

Therefore, with Tybalt there in the tomb, the ending is doubly gory.

Did you know? Have you ever heard? The ending of Romeo & Juliet isn’t implicitly gory.

It’s explicitly so.

And twice over.

Subsequently, when Juliet fears waking up prematurely in the tomb, she calls it a place

Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud. (4.3.44-5)

Here Juliet uses the same verb, “lies,” and adjective, “bloody,” as Romeo at the end. In addition, “shroud” anticipates Romeo’s “sheet.”

Thus, when Romeo speaks of Tybalt “lying there in [his] bloody sheet,” he unwittingly draws attention to both the ruddiness of his burial garment and putrefaction of his remains.

With that, the stage is set for the suicides. Set with—the bodies of Romeo’s homicides.

“Juliet bleeding”

And now for one of the most stunning details in the entire play, one I’ve never seen critics discuss: the final state of Juliet’s body.

Right after he notices blood on the ground, the Watchman cries,

Pitiful sight! Here lies the County slain,

And Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead,

Who here hath lain this two days buried. (180-2)

Juliet—what?

Bleeding.

Bleeding!

Not bloody, which would be bad enough.

Actively, presently losing blood.

Juliet’s own parents then arrive—and see the same.

“O heavens! O wife,” cries Capulet to Lady Capulet,

look how our daughter bleeds! (210)

Again not the adjective.

The verb.

The unthinkable verb.

Nor does the vividness stop there, for Juliet’s dad then observes both the weapon she used—and its present location. “This dagger hath mistaken,” he cries,

for, lo, his house
Is empty on the back of Montague,
And it mis-sheathed in my daughter’s bosom. (210-3)

So.

Lying there.

Bleeding openly, bleeding profusely (presumably).

The knife still in her chest. Her scabbard of a chest.

The Friar had seen blood and weapons on the ground. The Capulets see blood and weapons—on the very person of their daughter.

Blood. And weapons. Those symbols of true love.

“Put not a sword in the hand of a child,” says an Elizabethan proverb.

A picture of Romeo and Juliet right next to it.

Purple fountains

Blood, blood, everywhere.

This is the final scene as written—as rewritten—by Shakespeare.

At the beginning of the play, after the latest outbreak of violence, Prince Escalus condemns the families for quenching the fire of their rage

With purple fountains issuing from [their] veins. (1.1.75-6).

But here’s something interesting. Between the first scene and the last, there’s no comparison: the second is far deadlier and bloodier.

The first scene includes a few references to bloodshed—but not a single death.

The second includes at least five deaths, three of whom die by stabbing.

Therefore, it’s at the end when the vermilion fountains really seem to open up, spraying everyone and everything.

Discolored daggers. Blood-soaked burial cloths. Bloodstained sepulchers. Still-bleeding bodies.

Shakespeare’s done what? The unthinkable.

Saved the bloodiest scene for last.

Conclusion

As such, the question we’re left with is: Why?

Why would Shakespeare do this?

And.

Why haven’t you heard about it before? Why does the above probably hit you as a complete revelation?

The reasons are many, but the top one’s this: the excising of the blood and gore in the two most popular film versions of the play, the 1968 version directed by Franco Zeffirelli and the 1996 by Baz Luhrmann.

In Zeffirelli, not one drop of blood is visible at the end. The director does have Romeo address “bloody Tybalt.” But his burial cloth isn’t noticeably red. Nor is Paris covered in blood. In fact, Paris isn’t there at all, Zeffirelli cutting the murder outright. As a result, the Capulet tomb isn’t blood-stained, either outside or in. Nor does his Juliet bleed.

Luhrmann strays still farther from the text. After Juliet shoots herself, there’s a bit of blood on the lovers’ faces—an “artful trickle,” as it’s rightly been called (Woods 156). But Baz too cuts any reference to or image of Romeo’s murder victims, Tybalt and Paris. In fact, he cuts the tomb itself, relocating the final scene to a big, beautiful, candlelit church.

So, Shakespeare takes the final scene and pours a bucket of blood over it.

Then the directors take bleach to the same, performing a top-to-bottom cleanup job.

Change Shakespeare’s changes. And not just change them. Reverse them. In effect, restore the original.

This, even as they claim fidelity to Shakespeare’s text! In Luhrmann’s case, as he calls his film “Shakespeare’s” own.

Does the following seem fair? You just don’t know Romeo & Juliet. Not Shakespeare’s retelling. Few of us do. We know the much more palatable pre-Shakespearean version of the story.

Still, there’s the question, Why?

Why would Shakespeare add to the violence? Why stack up the bodies still higher? Why call them bloody, maimed and festering? Why involve the lovers so directly in all of this? Why make Romeo the primary perpetrator of the bloodshed? Why make the last image of the titular girl so utterly unsightly?

I know the answer. You know the answer. Directors know the answer, which is why they sanitize the text. Critics know the answer, which is why they never discuss the blood.

To preclude their romanticization.

To do what you do when writing satire: intensify or amplify for effect. A point to which I’ll return. The fundamental one.

Romeo & Juliet—A Satire?

To compel us—to invite us—to wonder about what’s actually going on in the play. What story it truly tells, and what the true point is.

Where does Shakespeare hint at some such deeper meaning? In several places, including the play-concluding words of Prince Escalus. “Go hence,” the Prince tells his people,

to have more talk of these sad things. (5.3.318)

Go reflect on what’s happened here in your city, in other words. Think about the sudden, premature deaths of all these young people. Five of them, in total (the four above plus Mercutio). (Six in the First Quarto, where Benvolio dies too). Think about the violence you’ve witnessed, or been part of. And—maybe derive a lesson or two from it.

Like maybe don’t act on every passionate impulse that appears inside you.

And maybe. Just maybe.

Don’t teach your kids to do the same.