The Scandal of "Tender Juliet"

Originally, Juliet was a teen or young adult. Shakespeare alone makes her a child

Argument

In a striking departure from his sources, Shakespeare makes Juliet not 18 or 16 but a mere 13 year old. He also draws attention to her age repeatedly, including in an overlooked epithet, “tender Juliet.”

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Scarce saw she yet full sixteen years: too young to be a bride!
—Arthur Brooke, Romeus and Juliet (1562)

In Shakespeare’s principal source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, Juliet is nearly sixteen years old—and called “too young to be a bride” (l. 1861).

In another Elizabethan version of the story (William Painter’s “Romeo and Julietta”), Juliet is practically an adult—eighteen years old.

How about in Shakespeare’s retelling?

Not eighteen. Not sixteen. Not fourteen. Thirteen.

Thirt.

Freaking.

Teen!

“Too young” to start with. Then made two years younger still…

And Shakespeare doesn’t just make this change. He draws attention to it repeatedly.

For example, in Act 1, Scene 2, Capulet tells Paris that his daughter “hath not yet seen the change of fourteen years.” That is: is thirteen—and looks it, acts it.

Then urges Paris to wait a couple more years before pursuing her, calling her unripe: “Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride” (1.2.9-11).

Then changes his mind an instant later, bizarrely urging the count to go ahead and woo her anyway.

In the next scene, the fact that Juliet is “not fourteen” is referred to four times in eleven lines:

LADY CAPULET She’s not fourteen.

NURSE I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth… she’s not fourteen.
How long is it now to Lammastide? 

LADY CAPULET A fortnight and odd days. 

NURSE Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen. (1.3.13–23)

The Nurse then draws further attention to Juliet’s age, telling a story about her as an infant and saying twice it’s been a mere “eleven years” since she was weaned (25, 37).

She also mentions how she lost her own virginity at thirteen: “Now, by my maidenhead at twelve year old” (1.3.2). Twelve evidently being the last year it was intact. Thirteen and not a day older, it seems, though one can only speculate.

And then there’s how Juliet is characterized by the Chorus, the most authorial voice in the play. At the start of Act 2, the Chorus defines Juliet with a single adjective, attaching an epithet to her name.

And how does it define her? In terms of her beauty, say? Or her virtue?

No. Her age. Her absurdly young age. It calls her, get this, “tender Juliet” (2.0.4).

Tender.

Tender!

As in: small. As in: weak. As in: immature. As in: naive.

As in: undeveloped—in every way.

As in: newly graduated! From elementary school.

As in: your friend or relative’s daughter you could have sworn was still a toddler.

This epithet, which I’ve never seen discussed, is striking for so many reasons.

At the beginning, the Chorus had called the lovers “children” (11). Now, the Chorus identifies Juliet as a true, literal child.

“Tender Juliet” also makes the Capulet the equivalent of the “tender boy,” Adonis—in a parallel that also appears to have been overlooked.

How young and small is Adonis? Small enough that that Venus can pluck him from his horse—with one arm.

“Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein,” reads the poem’s sixth stanza, as Venus takes control of horse and boy at once,

Under her other was the tender boy (31-2).

A “tender” boy. And a “tender” girl. Shakespeare’s terms. Not mine.

And that’s just one parallel. There are more. For example, Adonis and Juliet are also both “unripe” (Cf. 128 and 1.2.11).

Shakespeare wrote Romeo & Juliet and Venus & Adonis at about the same time. Therefore, it’s difficult to suppose he was unaware of this parallel.

In all, Juliet’s exact age is mentioned over half a dozen times.

Romeo’s? Not once. (He too is young, but probably more like sixteen.)

Teenage boy secretly weds and beds thirteen-year-old girl he met the day before.

It’d be newsworthy even today! But back then?!

Which isn’t to say no one had ever heard of a thirteen-year-old bride. But people did not commonly marry so young. Here’s what you may assume. I know I did at one point.

In Shakespeare’s age, people often married in their teens. They died younger, and so married younger. Romeo and Juliet might be somewhat younger than most, but their youthful marriage doesn’t represent a significant deviation from the marital practices of the time.

Except it does. Big time.

The reality’s this. Things weren’t in fact that different from today. The numbers will surprise you—with their familiarness.

Men married in their mid to late twenties. Women in their early to mid twenties.

This according to the play’s skeptics? No. According to the “patient work of demographers,” as Anne Jennalie Cook writes in her book, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton, 1991).

“Because Juliet marries just before her fourteenth birthday, many have assumed that such early alliances were quite common in Shakespeare’s England,” writes Cook. “As a result,” she continues,

only with the patient work of demographers in recent years have the period’s normative practices been established with any reliability. And those practices differ markedly from the situation presented in Romeo and Juliet. From the top to the bottom of the social scale, the vast majority of English couples conformed to the northwest European pattern, in which marriage was deferred, sometimes for ten years or more beyond puberty (my bolding; 17).

A ten-years difference. Ten! A double digit discrepancy.

Not with the onset of puberty. Not with the first rush of hormones. Not with the first boy who comes a-wooing. In the middle of the night. After breaking on to your family’s property. After jumping a high-walled, keep-predators-out property barrier.

A decade later. Or more.

Cook’s conclusion? That Romeo and Juliet’s teen + near pre-teen wedding “directly contradicts” Elizabethan social norms (29).

Want to throw out a guess? Who do you think is the radical here? The person with zero, absolutely zero common sense? Shakespeare himself? Or his modern-day interpreter occupying University Blvd?

Which seems more likely? That Shakespeare is romanticizing the wedding and bedding of a “tender,” “unripe” girl—and a non-English one at that?

Or that he’s up to something else altogether? Something ironic. Something sarcastic. Something satirical. Deeply and essentially satirical.

If you wanted to romanticize the love of foreigners, isn’t that the first thing you’d do—get their ages right?

Is my question your question? Doesn’t the extreme fewness of Juliet’s years preclude and preclude unconditionally both her romanticization and the couple’s?

As has been said, some ideas are so senseless and unaccountable only a tenure case could believe them.