Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

What makes Love's Labour's Lost difficult going for some readers is the topical humor and the banter and baiting among the “low” characters, many of whom are figures of literary and scholarly pretension—schoolmasters,

The learned jokers, then, are in part there to be laughed at.

“They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps” (5.1.34–35), is a good-humored indictment not only of the pseudo-learned characters in the play or of their historical Elizabethan models, but of all those who allude to the authority of written texts, including the playwright.

For Shakespeare and his audience many of the classical quotations and grammatical niceties would have been familiar stuff,

Romeo and Juliet

Ten

The audience is confronted with the ludicrous spectacle of two old men, vainly flailing long-swords at each other

while each is held back by his wife. Age pretending to be youth:

Escalus, although in title a prince, occupies a structural place analogous to that of

the Duke in plays like The Comedy of Errors or A Midsummer Night's Dream. He ordains and enforces a law that is inflexible and will lead, potentially, to tragedy.

Thus Romeo and Juliet, like many of Shakespeare's plays, begins with an edict, a stern attempt to create order through an unbending law. As in so many cases, especially in the comedies, this law will lead not to order but to a new and more sweeping kind of disorder. Its repressiveness will backfire, just as the King of Navarre's no-girls-allowed rule backfired in Love's Labour's Lost.

In Romeo and Juliet, however, the stern law and its consequences will lead to tragedy.

Romeo's love for Rosaline, as extravagantly performed in the early moments of the play, is really a kind of parody of Petrarchism, a deliberate onstage caricature of the sonnet-writing, lovesick, moon-struck lover who places his lady on a pedestal, and is really in love either with the idea of love or, even more acutely, with the idea of himself as a lover.

When Romeo falls in love with Juliet, his language changes, and becomes sharply inventive, witty, and original. It is then that Mercutio will recognize him as “himself” again: “Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art by art as well as by nature” (2.3.77–78). The Romeo who moons after Rosaline is hardly sociable.

“dote” is a term of emotional excess or folly. Romeo dotes on Rosaline; he will behave quite differently when he falls in love with Juliet.

Balancing the false pair of Romeo and Rosaline is the equally inappropriate couple

of Juliet and Paris, a pairing that is artificial for a different reason.

Romeo and Rosaline, Juliet and Paris. The hackneyed language of Petrarchan clichés, on the one hand, and the

ornate, bloodless, and perfectly rhyming couplets of Lady Capulet's favorable book report, on the other.

Night will be the setting for all the play's crucial private moments, moments of tragedy and love:

were performed in full daylight, in the middle of the afternoon. The sense of foreboding night and pervasive blackness is conjured up

entirely by and through language, with the assistance of a few well-placed props and costumes:

The play is built on such oppositions (light/darkness) just as it is built on the opposition between realistic prose

(the language of the Nurse and some speeches of Mercutio) and formal verse (the sonnet prologues and the rhyming couplets favored by Paris—and by Lady Capulet when she is describing him).

Opposites feud with one another: night and day, darkness and light—and youth and age.

Juliet's Nurse is one of the great comic characters of all literature,

The audience is more likely to be pleased by the volubility and sexual frankness of this forthright descendant of the Wife of Bath. Yet the Nurse is a dangerously static character who does not change in the course of the drama.

Like the Friar, she is established as a fixed type, and since she does not grow and change, while Juliet does, we can see at once her charm in a comic world, and her inadequacy for the darker world of tragedy.

The Friar is all authority and no experience, the Nurse all experience and no authority. Once again the older generation, stuck with

its proverbs and its books and its ancient feuds, is inadequate to the tragic world of reality, of love and circumstance.

The injunction “lose yourself to find yourself” that we saw operative in a play like Love's Labour's Lost is

embedded, as well, in Juliet's eloquent, and desperate, wish.

every utterance has a double meaning, encodes a warning, a foreboding of the tragedy to come.

The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, like the deaths of many major characters in the other love tragedies, are explicitly what we might call “erotic suicides.”

it is a comedy gone wrong, a comedy turned inside out,

Figures like Tybalt are representatives of an old order of heroism and revenge—on the one hand, heroic, but on the other, unable to function in a modern world of politics and compromise, the world of The Prince, the world of law and language. Such characters never survive in Shakespeare's plays. They all die, as did their historical models, usually, before their time.

With the death of Mercutio, the possibility of containment, and of comedy, dies,

too. From this point, from the first scene of the third act, tragedy becomes inevitable. The voice of imagination and moderation and perspective is dead, and we stop laughing.

The most striking instance of such growth in the play is the transformation that Juliet undergoes.

It is therefore striking to see how quickly she changes once she sets eyes on Romeo. Immediately this guileless girl of almost fourteen becomes a clever strategist, decoying the Nurse with false preliminary inquiries so that she can attain her true object, to know Romeo's name:

Nowhere is Juliet's sudden transition to adulthood clearer than in the balcony scene, where she controls the scene completely,

My dismal scene I needs must act alone. 4.3.14–19

Modern culture's paradigmatic heterosexual love story, Romeo and Juliet, is a play written for an all-male cast.

two young “star-crossed” lovers who have become for the modern world the very archetypes and words of love.

HAKESPEARE WROTE A Midsummer Night's Dream in the same years that he wrote Romeo and Juliet, and the two plays have a great deal in common.

we could say that A Midsummer Night's Dream is Romeo and Juliet turned inside out, Romeo and Juliet transformed into a comedy.

The “tale or history” to which he refers is a strangely familiar one, a tale of star-crossed lovers. It is almost as if Lysander has been watching, or reading, Romeo and Juliet.

in the larger logic of this play it appears that both the authoritarian father and the authoritarian duke have a good deal to learn about the way love breaks old rules and makes for new ones.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about a war between the sexes as figured in the dissension between Oberon and Titania (or, indeed, between Theseus and Hippolyta—the parts are often doubled in modern productions).

Elizabeth was frequently compared to an Amazon, and indeed the intermittent threat of a world of Amazons, a topsy-turvy world in which women ruled over men, was a nightmare that haunted much writing in the period.

Theseus, like the historical Elizabeth I, is a benevolent monarch who goes on progresses among his people, generously responding to their sometimes amateur theatrical performances.