Romeo and Juliet and William Hazlitt

1/ To compare the Shakespeare plays I’ve read recently, Macbeth is fast-paced and the entire thing is at the pitch of hysteria; Othello is slow at first as things build up but becomes much faster once Iago has dropped the idea of Desdemona’s infidelity and poisoned Othello’s mind; A Midsummer Night’s Dream is dreamy and whimsical; Romeo and Juliet is fast-paced, everyone seems to be driven by passion, whether love, hate, or violence, and everything seems to be in haste.

It might seem odd that the Everyman edition (with Tony Tanner’s excellent introductory essays) puts Romeo and Juliet in Comedies- Volume 1, but I think the point is to pair it with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was written around the same time, and the play within the play is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (spelt Thisby in Shakespeare’s play), which echoes the plot of Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream also starts with Egeus forcing his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, or she has to die, even though she loves Lysander, which is reminiscent of Capulet ignoring Juliet’s feelings and forcing her to marry Paris. 

It’s also interesting that in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare seems to take romantic love seriously, even in its youthful impetuosity, whereas in the other one, he seems to take the piss out of it.  

Romeo and Juliet does have lots of comedy in it though, and Mercutio is probably one of the most spirited characters in Shakespeare, full of sexual innuendos and dirty jokes. The funniest parts in the play are the exchanges between him and Romeo. 

For example: 

“MERCUTIO 

Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done; for thou hast more of the wild goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five. Was I with you there for the goose?

ROMEO 

Thou wast never with me for anything when thou wast not there for the goose.

MERCUTIO 

I will bite thee by the ear for that jest.

ROMEO

Nay, good goose, bite not.

MERCUTIO

Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting. It is a most sharp sauce.

ROMEO

And is it not well served into a sweet goose?

MERCUTIO

Oh, here’s a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad!” 

(Act 2 scene 4) 

(Note: “goose” was slang for “prostitute”). 

Men, I see, have always liked making bad puns.  

2/ See Mercutio after the Queen Mab speech:

“MERCUTIO 

True, I talk of dreams; 

Which are the children of an idle brain, 

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy; 

Which is as thin of substance as the air, 

And more inconstant than the wind, who woos 

Even now the frozen bosom of the North 

And, being angered, puffs away from thence, 

Turning his side to the dew-dropping South.” 

(Act 1 scene 4) 

That makes me think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

3/ If you know me, you’d know that I’m not a fan of stories about love at first sight. Can’t stand them, even.  

So naturally I found myself nodding along with Friar Lawrence a lot. 

Like when he asks about Rosaline and it turns out that Romeo, who was just heartbroken a short while ago, has forgotten her and is now in love with another girl.  

“FRIAR

Holy Saint Francis! What a change is here! 

Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear, 

So soon forsaken? Young men’s love then lies 

Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes. 

[…] If e’er thou wast thyself, and these woes thine, 

Thou and these woes were all for Rosaline. 

And art thou changed? Pronounce this sentence then: 

Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.

ROMEO 

Thou chidst me oft for loving Rosaline.

FRIAR 

For doting, not for loving, pupil mine.

ROMEO

And badst me bury love.

FRIAR 

Not in a grave 

To lay one in, another out to have.” 

(Act 2 scene 3) 

Exactly. Romeo is a silly, fickle teenage boy. 

Friar Lawrence says more later: 

“FRIAR 

These violent delights have violent ends 

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, 

Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey 

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness 

And in the taste confounds the appetite. 

Therefore love moderately: long love doth so; 

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.” 

(Act 2 scene 6) 

That is so good. Later the Friar has a delicious speech scolding Romeo, but I love the poetry here—the similes, the images. 

Although Romeo and Juliet is not my kind of story, it’s impossible to deny its exuberance and Shakespeare’s genius. Everything in it happens too fast—Shakespeare condenses the story of several months into several days—but somehow in the play it all makes perfect sense. Romeo and Juliet are both young, they are passionate, they are impetuous, everything is in haste and they’re both driven by factors beyond their control, and it makes sense that everything happens the way it does. I’m swept up by it, in spite of myself. 

4/ I like that Count Paris is an obstacle, whom Capulet forces Juliet to marry against her will, but he is not a villain. He is hard to like as he’s impetuous and cannot wait—even though Capulet says at the beginning that she’s too young and shouldn’t get married for another 2 years, he keeps asking, and asks again right after Tybalt’s death, which is insensitive. But his presence and action at the churchyard near the end show that he does care about Juliet, even if he has never understood her. 

5/ Here is William Hazlitt on Romeo and Juliet: 

“There is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair. It has been said of Romeo and Juliet by a great critic, that 'whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem'. The description is true; and yet it does not answer to our idea of the play. For if it has the sweetness of the rose, it has its freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale's song, it has also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as glowing and as bright. There is nothing of a sickly and sentimental cast. Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. Everything speaks the very soul of pleasure, the high and healthy pulse of the passions: the heart beats, the blood circulates and mantles throughout.” 

This comes from his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. Indeed, thanks to Shakespeare’s language, the play isn’t corny, and the most poetic lines are said by Juliet and Romeo.  

Hazlitt goes on to defend the play, against the charge that the 2 characters barely know each other and haven’t experienced life, and this is the best defence I have seen: 

“[Shakespeare] did not endeavour to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion from the last expiring sigh of indifference. He did not 'gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles'. It was not his way. But he has given a picture of human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had NOT experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made them drunk with love and joy. They were in full possession of their senses and their affections. Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire. Youth is the season of love, because the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoyments or its wishes. Desire has no limit but itself. Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite, extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it.” 

What an essayist. The whole piece should be read. What is there for me to write anymore, after that? I haven’t read the entire book but all the essays I’ve read in it are wonderful. It is helpful that I’ve not been reading Shakespeare alone—I’ve been reading him in the company of Tony Tanner, William Hazlitt, and my friend Himadri at Argumentative Old Git. With some others.