The Meaning of Star-Crossed

Shakespeare wasn’t calling Romeo and Juliet victims of Fate. He was calling them blind, reckless seafarers—and that changes everything

Argument

“Star-crossed”—one of the most iconic and oft-cited epithets in English—isn’t astrological but nautical in significance, conveying navigationally mixed up and thus doomed to shipwreck, which is precisely the lovers’ fate. In a major departure from his source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus & Juliet (1562), Shakespeare locates the cause of the tragedy not somewhere out in the inscrutable zodiac but in the unskilled and incautious decision-making of the lovers themselves. [2800 words/13mins]

[Builds on my Piloted by Desire: The Nautical Theme in Romeo and Juliet (English Studies 2014)]

Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize;
Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

It’s the most iconic epithet in Shakespeare. But have we correctly understood its meaning?

“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,” reads Romeo and Juliet’s opening Prologue,

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.

Right now, everyone assumes Shakespeare is talking astrology: that the stars are Fate or Destiny, the lovers crossed by them in that their fate is predetermined, their decisions not their own, the course of their lives outside their own control.

Open any critical edition of the play, including the most recent and prestigious, and this is the one (and only) interpretation you’ll find.

According to the Oxford edition, star-crossed means “thwarted by a malign star.” The Cambridge: “Thwarted by the influence of a malignant star.” The Arden: “Thwarted by the influence of malign stars.”

Spiteful stars. Helpless adolescents.

And then there’s the Folger. “The prologue of Romeo and Juliet calls the title characters star-crossed lovers,” say the Folger editors,

and the stars do seem to conspire against these young lovers.

(What’s the Folger? The top Shakespeare research library in the world.)

The West’s greatest writer. In his best-known work. And that’s the message? The stars did it?

Romeo and Juliet make one reckless decision after another. Still, they’re not responsible. And the same goes for you, dear reader, reading the play for your eighth grade English class. Not your bad decisions but the spiteful lights in the nighttime sky determine your life’s trajectory. Forget character. Constellation is destiny.

Shakespeare the astrologist. That’s the prevailing view.

And it’s not just mistaken. It’s embarrassing. And gets the epithet exactly backward, or rather upside-down.

Think about it for a second… Is this star-crossed’s only possible significance?

What else might the stars signify? And how else might they relate to a person—or a person to them?

Say, for example, you’re a ship’s pilot traversing the treacherous sea. What then are the stars? And what then does it mean to have them crossed?

This question isn’t abstract or theoretical. It gets at a sense of star-crossed that, unlike the astrological one, is actually supported by the text and plot of the play.

The point isn’t predestination. It’s navigation. Not birth charts. Nautical charts. Not life-dictating astrology. Course-setting astronomy.

A seafaring epithet, star-crossed connotes seagoing and its perils. Connotes mistaken courses. Connotes journeying blind. Connotes a sea-voyage that’s ill-advised—and doomed.

Connotes rocks. Connotes shipwrecks.

And in this, the Prologue is looking ahead to something very specific and concrete. It’s looking ahead to Romeo and Juliet’s suicides.

Their shipwreck-like suicides.

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It’s at once the most prominent motif in Romeo & Juliet—and most neglected. As we’ll see just below, Romeo likens himself throughout to a merchant-adventurer, precipitously setting “sail” in Act 1, just prior to the Capulet masque, and ultimately taking his wave-tossed vessel and driving it full-speed into the “rocks,” in an explicit shipwreck.

And yet you wouldn’t know it from the secondary literature, where this body of imagery remains almost entirely unexamined. As we’ll see, the nautical motif isn’t just important. It has the power to revolutionize our understanding of the action, locating the cause of the tragedy not somewhere out in the inscrutable zodiac but in the unskilled and incautious decision-making of the lovers themselves.

The motif begins with Romeo surrendering “steerage” of his “course” to Cupid, a deity whose despotism he complains of throughout Act 1:

He that hath the steerage of my course

Direct my sail. (1.4.119-20)

Gets developed at his lady’s window, where Romeo tells Juliet,

I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far

As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea,

I should adventure for such merchandise. (2.2.87-9)

Gets further developed as Romeo, anticipating his first night with Juliet, likens himself to one scaling a topgallant mast. In particular, Romeo tells the Nurse how his man will bring her

cords made like a tackled stair,

Which to the high topgallant of my joy

Must be my convoy in the secret night. (2.3.176–8).

A “tackled stair” is a cord-ladder used to climb a ship’s mast, “topgallant” the highest part of a ship, “convoy” a group of ships.

Finally, right before Juliet wakes up, Romeo takes his boat and knowingly, willfully smashes it to a thousand pieces.

It’s amazing how many scholars describe Romeo and Juliet’s deaths in either triumphant or transcendent terms. Amazing because the simple fact is that Romeo likens his life’s end to a ship run aground—and obliterated.

In his final words, an instant before he downs poison, Romeo cries,

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on

The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark! (5.3.116–8)

A bark crashed ashore and smashed to bits. A bark driven into rocks called “dashing,” that is, pulverizing, devastating.

A self-sunk ship, destroyed beyond recognition.

A total, unsalvageable wreckage.

In today’s terms? A plane deliberately nosedived into the ground. A steep descent, a big fireball, and nothing left but a hole in the ground.

Romeo’s fate as described by—Romeo himself.

Which may make you wonder: what do scholars say about this all-important, death-defining imagery? And more particularly: How do so many maintain a romantic notion of the play in the face of destruction that’s so vivid and so total and so obviously voluntary as opposed to compelled? How has this imagery been explained?

And the answer: it hasn’t. Scholars don’t explain it. Don’t discuss it. They seem to pretend it isn’t there. They just. don’t. mention. it.

That’s my conclusion after scouring the secondary literature, where Romeo’s play-concluding shipwreck—the most important figurative event in the play—has received hardly more than a word of commentary.

Is it denial? Is it ignorance? Is it having a preconceived or long-held idea of the play and not wanting to question it?

Whatever the answer, and as incredible as it may sound, to read the critical literature as it exists today is to remain almost totally in the dark about the fact that Romeo, in the final scene of the final act, in the actual event of his self-murder, in the last words he utters, last breath he takes, likens his suicide to a self-inflicted shipwreck.

Presumably because to acknowledge it is to admit the obvious.

It ends here. It lasted days. Really, hours. Romeo and Juliet are over. Finished. Obliterated by Romeo.

What else is there to say? Some images are complex. Some aren’t. A shipwreck? Not a test of hermeneutics. Less a metaphor than a statement.

But, before moving on, there’s one detail crucial not to forget. Juliet is right then waking up!

The potion’s wearing off. Magically, miraculously, the Capulet girl is returning to life, her face regaining its color, her lips and cheeks turning red (5.3.91-6, 101-2), about to be reunited with her love.

When, crash! Her two-day old husband runs himself on the rocks. With supreme obliviousness. Supreme precipitousness.

Abandoning her for the next world. And not the one you were told…

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But it isn’t just Romeo whose suicide is a shipwreck. Juliet’s is too!

Toward the end of Act 3, Juliet continues to mourn the death of her cousin, Tybalt. (At least, that’s what her parents assume, knowing nothing of Romeo or Romeo’s exile). Her father, finding her crying, asks,

How now, a conduit, girl? What, still in tears?

Evermore show’ring?

Then warns her about the danger of unchecked sorrow—and does so by means of an elaborate nautical conceit. “In one little body,” Capulet tells Juliet,

Thou counterfeits a bark, a sea, a wind:

For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,

Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is,

Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs,

Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,

Without a sudden calm will overset

Thy tempest-tossed body. (3.5.129–36)

Juliet’s raging, wind-like sighs and raging, rain-like tears are creating a storm that threatens to “overset”—that is, capsize and sink—her bark-like body.

In The First Quarto, Shakespeare actually uses the word shipwreck. “Thy body,” says Capulet,

will without succor shipwreck presently (14.103).

In plainer terms: unless Juliet can check her runaway emotions, she is bound to precipitate her own demise.

Well, subsequently, Juliet receives no “succor.” Finds no “sudden calm.” In no way recovers herself. Rather, in the very next scene, with Friar Laurence, she’ll pull a knife on herself and threaten to commit suicide right there in his cell! And the next day she’ll pull a knife once again. This time with no one to restrain her…

The implication is unambiguous. According to the foreshadowing, Juliet’s suicide too is a self-inflicted shipwreck.

Above, we had one wreck that was no accident. Here we have another. In both instances, adversity of the external kind is precisely not what the imagery symbolizes. Juliet’s bark may sink as a result of the combined forces of wind and wave, but, remarkably, the tempest that swallows her up originates not from her environment but from her own person, from the orifices of her own face.

For 400+ years, we’ve thought of the lovers as helpless victims of outside powers. But according to the nautical motif, the real threat isn’t outside but in. These two are a danger—to themselves.

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Shakespeare is doing something radically new and different in having his play conclude this way—with maritime disaster.

In the pre-Shakespearean versions of the story, Romeo faces imminent shipwreck—and successfully, heroically avoids it!

In particular, in Shakespeare’s source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562), Romeus is a pilot doing all he can to avoid ending up on the rocks. After Romeus is banished from Verona, he goes to Friar Laurence for help. The Friar gives him counsel on how to endure adversity. In particular, he likens Romeus to a ship’s pilot assailed by a winter storm and doing everything in his power to survive:

As when the winter flaws with dreadful noise arise,

And heave the foamy swelling waves up to the starry skies,

So that the bruised bark in cruel seas betost,

Despaireth of the happy haven, in danger to be lost,

The pilot bold at helm, cries, “Mates, strike now your sail”,

And turns her stem into the waves that strongly her assail;

He seeth his ship full right against the rock to run,

But yet he doth what lieth in him the perilous rock to shun. (1361–70; my italics)

Next, the Friar describes what would happen if the pilot were to give up:

But if the master dread, and overpressed with woe

Begin to wring his hands, and lets the guiding rudder go,

The ship rents on the rock, or sinketh in the deep,

And eke the coward drenched is. (1375–8)

Finally, he concludes with a moral:

So, if thou still beweep

And seek not how to help the changes that do chance,

Thy cause of sorrow shall increase, thou cause of thy mischance. (1378–80)

In other words, you have to fight! Give up in despair and and you’d be both a “coward” and the “cause” of your own “mischance,” your ruin no one’s fault but your own.

So, what happens?

Romeus, applying the Friar’s advice, prevails. Steers clear of the perilous rock. Saves himself. Saves Juliet. Saves their young marriage. And the story ends with the narrator describing how the two will reunite in heaven and enjoy eternity together.

The very threat of a wreck: a distant memory by the end.

From the worldly to the otherworldly: that’s the unmistakable drift and tenor of Brooke and other pre-Shakespearean versions of the Romeo and Juliet story.

And precisely what’s not true in Shakespeare’s story itself, where, shockingly, radically, the nautical motif re-appears at the end, and the calamity-at-sea all earlier Montagues were warned against actually takes place.

Brooke’s Romeus, as we’ve just seen, does “what lieth in him the perilous rock to shun.”

Shakespeare’s Romeo? Makes straight for that rock kamikaze style. The same instant his bride is waking up.

Previous Romeos fought to save their wind and wave-tossed barks. Shakespeare’s alone takes his vessel and wrecks it on the rocky seashore.

It’s the exact antithesis of earlier tellings.

And somehow, the change has gone unnoticed. Somehow, the romanticization of Shakespeare’s version of the story persists.

Romeo saves his ship. Destroys his ship. To scholars, it makes no difference.

How about you and me? Can we agree this changes everything?

That this one image demolishes beyond hope of repair the romantic conception of the play?

Forget the experts. There’s no one to turn to. What do you think?

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Do you recall how Shakespeare began? With an appeal to our attendance? Our patient attendance?

The which if you with patient ears attend…

Don’t assume too quickly I’m telling the same story as my Italian predecessors, he seemed to be saying. Set aside your presuppositions—and listen. Listen as if for the first time.

Do you think this may have been one of the changes he had in mind? An alteration he wanted and expected us to notice?

Shipwreck where there had been survival…

Just maybe?

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Finally, let’s return to the opening Prologue and look at more immediate evidence of star-crossed’s nautical and not astrological significance.

The Chorus begins by describing the feud between the two households. It then states:

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love,

And the continuance of their parents’ rage—

Which but their children’s end naught could remove—

Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.

I’ve italicized five terms or compounds, star-crossed included. Do you see what’s so interesting and important?

Passage suggests a “journey by water” or “sea-crossing” (Oxford English Dictionary 2).

Traffic connotes a “trading voyage” (OED 1).

The mark in death-marked suggests the end or objective of a voyage, as well as the seamarks used to designate areas of danger to seafarers (OED 8).

Finally, misadventured suggests a disastrous nautical excursion. Later on, in fact, Romeo speaks of his willingness to embark on just such a misadventure-at-sea, telling Juliet, “I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far / As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea, / I should adventure for such merchandise.”

Sea-crossings. Sea-voyages. Sea-marks. Sea-adventures. A nautical juxtaposition—because a nautical implication. Pretty robust corroboration—agree?

In the First Quarto, Shakespeare uses not the adjective misadventured but the noun misadventures:

A pair of star-crossed lovers took their life,

Whose misadventures, piteous overthrows…

It’s a fascinating and illuminating variant, and a plain pejorative. But then so is the adjective, though no one’s wanted to admit it.

The misadventures of Romeo and Juliet… Not my word. Shakespeare’s. Is that incredible or what?

Of course, today almost no one describes the story that way: as a journey gone badly, fundamentally awry. And yet it’s a self-evidently apt characterization in light of the plot, in light of the play-concluding events discussed here.

Shakespeare has rewritten the story so that it culminates in the lovers’ shipwrecks.

And here, in the first speech of the Chorus, he prefigures his never-before-seen, truly tragic climax.

Shakespeare’s Prologue anticipates his altered ending, comments on it, and comments on it in non-neutral terms: A fearful passage. A sea-voyage that’s misadventured and death-marked and star-crossed.

Misadventured… Death-marked… Star-crossed… They’re synonyms! And no one’s noticed. They’re aptly portentous, plainly nautical characterizations. And convey not undeserved astrological persecution but a self-dooming, ignorance-driven going-forth. A misreading of and not mistreatment by the powers in the sky.

Star-crossed connotes a sea-journey that ends as most ill-judged journeys end: badly. It means navigationally—and thus behaviorally—mixed up.

Romeo and Juliet aren’t crossed by the stars. They have their stars mixed up. Are themselves mixed up.

Shakespeare is calling these two troubled Italian teenagers—the girl a mere thirteen years old, the boy perhaps fifteen—just what the saner among us would hope he’d call them.

Reckless.

Ignorant.

Misguided.