Sinful, Idolatrous and Damned?

The Elizabethan Judgement of Romeo & Juliet

Argument

“Sinful, idolatrous, and eventually to be damned:” such is what Shakespeare’s audience would almost certainly have thought of Romeo and Juliet, one scholar concluded reluctantly—so reluctantly he hid his findings and abandoned his project on the topic.

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It’s the single most interesting critical remark I’ve seen in many years of studying Romeo & Juliet, and comes from a rather unexpected place—a book review published in 1975.

In it, Roland Frye, a scholar with a reputation for serious, dispassionate work, describes how he started but then stopped a research project investigating what Shakespeare’s contemporary audience was likely to have thought of his young Italian couple.

“In the early 1950’s when I was principally concerned with the relations between Elizabethan literature and Elizabethan theology and ethics,” writes Frye,

I assembled a mass of evidence to show how Elizabethan Englishmen might have regarded young lovers who behaved and spoke as do Romeo and Juliet. The postulated judgment was highly unfavorable, from the perspective of the then-established standards of conduct: Romeo and Juliet were not only imprudent, rash, passionate, but even sinful, idolatrous, and eventually to be damned. Everything pointed in that direction—everything, that is, except Shakespeare’s play. Having puzzled over that problem and being unable to reconcile my evidence from the history of ideas with the play itself, I decided to follow the play, and never published the evidence.

A mass of evidence.

Romeo and Juliet imprudent, rash, sinful, idolatrous—and damned.

Everything—everything!—pointed in that direction.

Now.

Is that incredible or what?

The statement’s compelling both for its reluctance. Frye didn’t want to find what he found.

And its reticence. He then didn’t want to share it.

Frye researched the ethical norms of Elizabethan society—and concluded that Shakespeare’s audience would not conceivably have romanticized his lovers. That Shakespeare himself would not conceivably have meant for them to be romanticized.

Concluded this reluctantly. So reluctantly he kept quiet about it.

Do you hear just what this researcher’s saying? What acknowledging? Three things, at least.

1. The romantic conception of Shakespeare’s play isn’t just unlikely. From a historical point of view, it’s unlikely in the extreme.

2. Robert Burton’s response, in which he classifies the play as a tale of “destructive passion” and “burning lust”? It’s probably representative. Probably exactly how Shakespeare’s audience understood the work.

3. What’s truly radical, what’s truly hard to defend is not the non-romantic but the romantic interpretation of the play.

Wish to argue for the latter? Great. Begin by acknowledging the inherent unlikeliness of your case. Then we’ll know we’re hearing a properly scholarly contention.

Quote English Renaissance sources on clandestine marriage. On adolescent child marriage. On Italians. On love-melancholy. On vigilante justice. On homicide. On suicide. On a dozen other issues…

Then demonstrate that Shakespeare thought utterly differently about each. That he was an absolute social radical. Best of luck.

Wait. Tell me again… Shakespeare tells retells a tale about two “children” from violent families who meet one night, sleep together the next, who lie, pay go-betweens, commit murder, commit suicide—all in a few days.

They’re Italian.

He’s English.

And it’s the skeptical take that’s not just improbable but unthinkable?

Following the play

Frye was on to something. On to something big. And went nowhere with it. Not a single step.

He didn’t publish his research—why? He decided to “follow the play.”

Which is one remarkable thing to say. To assume.

The play offers no basis whatever for a less-than-romantic interpretation of its action?

Contains no suggestion, no hint of a suggestion that Shakespeare’s ethical values might actually have lined up with his contemporaries?

Can be read only as an endorsement of romantic love as the all-else-annulling value or aim of human life?

Are we even talking about the same work?

The one where the Chorus, the most objective commentator in the play, likens Romeo to a “fearful” fishhook catching Juliet with his “sweet bait” (2.0.8)?

Where Romeo abjectly surrenders himself to Cupid, the god of violent, arbitrary passion (1.4.119-20), like the men of both Love’s Labor’s Lost and Lucrece?

Where even Benvolio calls Romeo’s love “blind” in the sense of indiscriminate (2.2.35)?

Where the Friar condemns his suicide as both damnable and a double murder, crying,

Wilt thou slay thyself,
And slay thy lady that in thy life lives,
By doing damned hate upon thyself? (3.3.126-8)

It’s such a powerful phrase. The lady “that in thy life lives.”

So lives. And so dies. And all too suddenly.

Where Mercutio calls the Nurse a “bawd,” Romeo, implicitly, a john (2.4.132)—right before Romeo slips her gold in order to arrange a surreptitious nighttime encounter with the girl entrusted to her care (186).

The 13-year-old girl.

(To cite but a few of literally hundreds of textual bases for skepticism.)

You.

didn’t.

publish.

the.

evidence?!

Would Frye’s book have influenced our conception of the play? It’s hard to say. And my aim here isn’t to disparage him.

But there’s something representative about this scholar’s inability to fathom an alternative reading of the play—even when that alternative is hinted at, nay found, on every page of the text.

See why I’m addressing myself to a non-academic audience?