Shakespeare

It is important to understand this connection, if only to bring life to Shakespeare’s use of law and of legal terms in his plays and in his poetry. A drama like The Merchant of Venice can be properly understood only in this context, with the civil law of Portia pitted against the common law of Shy-lock. It is one of the defining structures of Shakespeare’s imagination.

The new company had the benefit of new, or almost new, plays. It is clear enough that Shakespeare revised The Comedy of Errors , and it is likely that he “improved” the other plays he had already written. But it is also worth noting the new vein of romantic drama that Shakespeare began at this time, the principal plays of this period being Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The precise order cannot now be ascertained and, in any case, it is not of much consequence. The general tendency of his art is of much more significance. The hard edges of the early Italianate comedies, and the ornate rhetoric of the first history plays, now give way to extended lyricism and to more tender or perhaps just more complex characters. He was assured of a range of actors who could convey every mood and every sentiment. He was now the single most important dramatic poet of the period, and he had the incalculable advantage of a stable group of actors for whom to write.

We may plausibly imagine the cast list of Romeo and Juliet . We know that Will Kempe played Peter, the bawdy servant of the Capulets, and that Richard Burbage played the leading role of Romeo. One of the boys played Juliet, and another boy – or perhaps an older actor – played the garrulous Nurse. It is generally assumed that Shakespeare played the part of the Friar and the Chorus, as we have seen, but Dryden, in “Defence of the Epilogue”to The Conquest of Granada (1670), says that “Shakespeare showed the best of his skill in Mercutio, and he said himself that he was forced to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him.” Mercutio is the bawdy, gallant, quicksilver friend of Romeo whose speech on the activities of Queen Mab is one of the most eloquent and fanciful in all of Shakespeare; his is the soaring spirit, buoyant and fantastical, unfettered by ideals and delusions, which Shakespeare had to kill in order to make way for the romantic tragedy of the play’s conclusion. Such a free spirit does not consort well with a tale of love’s woe. There is melancholy as well as bawdry in Mercutio’s speeches, and it becomes clear that much of that melancholy springs from sexual disgust. Dry-den believed that this voice was closest to that of the dramatist himself, who could not delineate a tragedy without introducing farcical elements and who evinces all the manifestations of the same disgust. Mercutio has been described by some critics as heartless, even cold, but then so has been Shakespeare. That is perhaps why even in the midst of this lamentable tragedy there is more than a trace of commedia dell’arte; it has even been surmised that there were certain scenes staged in dumb-show.

The mood and imagery of the play is that of summer lightning, flashing across the sky (892-3):

Too like the lightning which doth cease to bee

Ere one can say, it lightens, sweete goodnight…

Shakespeare had heard the phrase “Gallop apace” in Marlowe’s Edward the Second , and had remembered it; he gives it to Juliet as she yearns for the end of the day. “Enter Juliet,” Shakespeare puts in a stage-direction, “somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo.” It is a play of youthfulness, of youthful impulsiveness and of youthful extravagance; it is a play of dancing and of sword-play, both measuring out an arena of energy with sudden violence and swift transitions. In this play he incorporates sudden changes of mood and of thought; he follows the quicksilver thread of consciousness in expression. But if it is seized by transitoriness it is also touched by mystery. As Juliet and her Nurse converse on Romeo, an unnamed and unknown voice off-stage calls out “Juliet”; it is as if some guardian spirit were entreating her.

It has often been stated that Romeo and Juliet are all that lovers were, and all that lovers ever will be, but it is important to notice the sheer artistry with which Shakespeare entwines them. They echo each other’s speech, as if they saw their souls shining in each other’s faces, and in one wonderful passage a formal sonnet emerges out of their dialogue like Aphrodite rising out of the sea (666-9):

If I prophane with my vnworthiest hand,

This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this,

My lips two blushing Pylgrims readie stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kis.

This had never been achieved on the English stage before, and must have been as miraculous for the first auditors as it has been for subsequent generations. Shakespeare had taken the conventions and traditions of courtly love poetry, and had dramatised them for London audiences that had probably never picked up a sonnet sequence from the stationers’ stalls. There are other themes that seem to exfoliate through Shakespeare’s drama – the theme of banishment, of inequality in love, of honour and reputation – but the dramatic invocation of love remains the central and abiding impression.

The play ends in a house of tears, but that is where all dreams end. It concluded formally with a funeral procession, one of the standard spectacles of Elizabethan drama, but the dirge was succeeded by a merry jig. This was assisted by the presence of Will Kempe in the final tragic scene. He accompanied Romeo to his rendezvous with mortality at the tomb, and no doubt clowned his way through the soliloquies on dust and death. It is another indication of the essential stridency of Elizabethan drama, where there is no necessary composure or middle tone. All extremes are possible. Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted as a comedy as much as a tragedy, but of course it can also represent both.

Shakespeare had taken the story from a poem by Arthur Brooke, entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet , but he condensed it; he shortened the time span, from nine months into five days, and imposed upon the narrative a careful and intricate pattern of symmetries. More significantly, perhaps, he alters the moral scheme and burden of the narrative by overtly sympathising with the lovers. That is the difference between poetry and drama. The religious imagery of the play has often been discussed, in particular its atmosphere of the old faith. Any play set in Italy is bound to be mingled with Catholicism, of course, but there is a larger point. It is characteristic of those who have forsworn their faith to cling to its vocabulary, and never more so than when describing the profane. Shakespeare also introduced far more bawdry and comedy, giving Mercutio in particular a greater role. He also changed Juliet’s age from sixteen, in Brooke’s poem, to thirteen. He was aware that he was thereby catering to the lasciviousness of the citizens, but he was a shameless master of effects. He recognised, too, that the crowds would enjoy the sword-fight that opens Romeo and Juliet .

The play was successful, therefore, and on the title page of the first published text it is referred to as one “that hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely.” The phrases of Romeo and of Juliet were on everyone’s lips. The students of Oxford University, at a later date, wore through by intensive studying and copying the pages of Romeo and Juliet in a chained edition of the First Folio. There were two versions published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The first is considerably shorter than the second, and is likely to have been the text actually used by the performers. In this version there is even a joke about the actor (“faintly” speaking the prologue “without-booke”) who needed the prompter to help him through it. In asides like this, the life of the Elizabethan stage revives. The second version seems to be transcribed from Shakespeare’s own papers, before the text had been altered and condensed in the course of rehearsals or in the process of rewriting. After the play was performed he added some passages, for example, and reassigned certain lines to other characters; he seems to have elaborated on Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech by inserting words in the margin of his copy, which the printer mistook for a prose addition. There are also minor inconsistencies in stage-directions and speech prefixes.