Verona

We might expect a small and ancient city like Verona to consist of numerous households integrated in their political, economic, and social relations. Each would consist of a house, holding family, servants, and material goods, and a father who holds them together. He would rule his own household himself, and the city in association with the heads of other households who hold them together as parts of a coherent whole.

In Verona, however, “two households” have, from time immemorial, regarded the city merely as the setting for their private feud. As long as these “two foes” (Prologue.5) continue to generate, the feud will regularly erupt, and “civil blood” will make “civil hands unclean” (Prologue.4). The word “civil” is used unconventionally, once in the Prologue, and three times by the inhabitants. “Citizens” are mentioned only twice in the play, and three times in a few added stage directions, unheard by the audience. There is no history of the “ancient grudge” and, therefore, no account of its origins. If there were, there might be a rational resolution. No one refers to past events, or current issues. Late in the play, we hear of “searchers of the town” (5.2.8), health inspectors of some kind, who quarantine people exposed to the plague. They have a job to do in the city, but we do not know whether their authority is civic. There is no mention of municipal buildings, public places, or foreign relations. Verona is a strange city.

Its walls and gates are closed at night against outside dangers, and the Capulets have a private guard around their own house inside the city (2.2.65) and watchmen around their family tomb. As in many cities with feuding clans, an ineffectual Prince nominally governs, but he appears only when there is trouble among his “rebellious subjects” (1.2.79). He has kin in Verona, but we hear of no predecessors or customary succession. Two stage directions call him “Escalus,” but the people of Verona never use his name, so the audience does not know it. Effective rulers are usually visible to their subjects, and talked about. The Prologue does not name the “two households,” but scene 1 makes clear what names matter in Verona. “Escalus” is not among them.

Young Montagues and Capulets prowl the streets, seeking their enemies and disrupting ordinary city life. They travel in named packs, for example, “the Capels” (3.1.2). Male retainers of the two families have only first names, some not spoken in the play itself. But they are not anonymous, for they, too, are “Montagues” or “Capulets.” These servants remain conventionally attached subordinates even after they reach maturity. Their manhood is merely a natural condition; it does not indicate legal readiness for an adult role in the city. A brief comic episode shows that some have not learned to read. Arrested in a state of adolescent servitude and sex, they are as bound by their masters’ names as are the offspring of their masters’ loins.

These biological offspring will come of age legally, but they too show no signs of approaching maturity. They have a superficial interest in the past as a pretext for fighting, and show no interest in the future. They express their adolescent spiritedness in dirty jokes. They do not expect to deliberate or fight on behalf of their city, or to love and care for women, rather than use and abandon them. Verona lacks a visible population of young men and women moving together towards marriage. Romeo's first romantic love is as immature as his friends’ raunchy lust; both are all talk. His second love moves him far beyond them, but it too fails to move him into adulthood.

Mercutio, whose part Shakespeare greatly expanded from that of his original in Brooke's source story, is the most interesting of Romeo's companions. At first we are intrigued by his energy and wit, and by his odd detachment. But he soon becomes less attractive. He leaps and turns, but does not go anywhere. His “freedom” is negative; there is nothing he wants it for. Audiences often applaud when he concludes his Queen Mab routine. But it too reveals how unbounded and ungrounded he is. Wherever he heard about the Celtic fairy, she is an odd subject for a big talker from Verona. He describes the dreams of lovers, courtiers, lawyers, ladies, parson, and soldiers, mostly responsible adults in functioning cities; and he mocks them all. Mercutio admits that his dreams are “the children of an idle brain, / Begot of nothing but vain fantasy” (1.4.98–99). This is the only time this childish young man refers to children. He conceives and delivers one verbal novelty after another, but his loins will generate no new flesh-and-blood children. Before his fatal wounding, he expresses no interest in the feud or his own prominent family. His last word is “houses” (3.1.110), but he asks only to be carried into “some” house (3.1.107). Unlike Tybalt, he is not bound for a family grave. After his death in act 3, Mercutio is mentioned only once. His death removes him from Verona, as well as from the stage, but he has never lived, much less loved, in real time and place. Like all of the young people in the play, he dies without growing up.Footnote ³

The rest of the population tries to avoid the belligerent children of the ancient enemies, but does get caught in their frequent street fights. One production exhibits a bleeding baby,Footnote ⁴ making it clear that the feud is a matter of life and death for all of Verona's families. On the other hand, they quickly gather to watch the fights, lively displays in a city where there are few civic spectacles. Perhaps the feud provides a bit of public entertainment in this shell of a city.

After the first brawl, the Prince commands Montague and Capulet to come to him separately, and at different times, to “old Freetown, our common judgment-place” (1.1.100). “Common” suggests “public,” but no witnesses are mentioned and we never hear what happens at those meetings. Unlike Shakespeare's Venice (Merchant of Venice, Othello), Verona has no formal procedures for prominent citizens to participate in judicial or military deliberations. The play eliminates Arthur Brooke's allusions to a council and decrees (2985–86);Footnote ⁵ news of Romeo's judgment is spread by hearsay, not official decree.

The sentence itself indicates that Verona has not attained civic self-sufficiency; it avoids its own responsibility to enforce law and punish violators. The Prince fails to satisfy Lady Capulet's plea for “justice” (3.1.182)—the only use of this word—and Romeo is not punished at home, but banished. Friar Laurence thinks the Prince “kind” to have “rushed aside the law” (3.3.26). Banishment is a weak sentence; an exile's whereabouts are unknown, and he usually has supporters at home. Romeo's attachment to the weak city is weak from the beginning. Once he attaches himself to Juliet, both lovers become virtual exiles in Verona. When he returns, he returns, not to the city, but to her.

Mantua

The banishment points to yet another way in which Verona is not a fully developed city. Juliet's parents have some unexplained personal contacts in Mantua (1.3.29; 3.5.88). But the exiled Romeo is a complete stranger there. Verona has no political intercourse with Mantua or any other city. The feud and the weak Prince might explain Verona's lack of external, as well as internal, political activity. Cities with active feuds tend to focus on their own internal difficulties; those with strong laws are more likely to interact with others. In Mantua, the Apothecary is certain the law will punish him with death if he breaks it. Such a city might well be wary of relations with unruly neighbors. Friar Laurence sends Romeo to Mantua, where he can easily receive messages and hire post horses to come home (5.1.21, 26). But, for most of the play, Verona seems to be a city unto itself.

A Third “City”

Verona does look beyond itself in another way, for it is a Christian city, part of the universal Catholic Church, the “city of god” that extends far beyond Verona's walls. Might this looking outward have the same effect as the city's turning inward, away from other worldly cities? The play shows how excessive sub-city love has weakened attachment to the city as a whole. The platitudes of Friar Laurence suggest that super-city love of a greater whole may also weaken attachment to the local city. After Juliet's “death,” the Friar tells her parents to rejoice that she has “advanced” from mortal life in the inferior world to eternal life in heaven (4.5.65–78). Shakespeare added the Christian consolation to earlier versions of the story. Feuding, fractured Verona is not a healthy, whole city. Some say that Christianity teaches the mortal and fractured inhabitants of every earthly city, however well governed it is, to regard heaven as their true home.

The institution the Friar represents may even have a disproportionate presence in Verona. St. Peter's Church, for example, is the only public gathering-place mentioned. For baptism, confession, marriage, and burial, the Capulets and the rest of Christian Verona must go beyond the household. But the church, though visible and respected, has no civic role. About Verona's “ancient quarrel,” it seems to have been as negligent or impotent as the Prince. The Friar's bold personal attempt to save the young lovers and end the feud reveals how little he has thought about his pastoral function.

Friar Laurence, its local representative, is permanently stationed in Verona; Capulet says, “All our whole city is much bound to him” (4.2.32). But Shakespeare, unlike Brooke (580), does not say that he counsels the Prince. We first meet him in his garden, thinking about the nature of plants. All have the power to do good, unless they are turned to evil ends by human agents in whom “will” has overcome “Grace” (2.3.24). His theological musings are not developed, but seem to be informed by his trust in the harmony of Creation, and his confidence in his own knowledge of men and herbs. He does not speak about God's first garden, the place of man's first Fall, but one assumes the Franciscan friar has superficially absorbed St. Paul's teachings about the Fall and salvation, as well as consolation.

The play depicts a wide range of vices, and the ease with which human beings can be corrupted, or fall from virtue. Does it suggest that we are by nature fallen, or that we can hope for more than healthy human communities—families and cities—to shape and support healthy human souls? Friar Laurence hopes that human and divine love will eliminate human hatred. Others consider these to be weak “herbal remedies” and teach that ruthless power and cunning prudence are more efficacious. The Friar's clumsy attempt at beneficent deception is disastrous for those he would save. Perhaps we hear his limitations in his singsong verse, familiar to all grownups from nursery rhymes, and used by Shakespeare in other playsFootnote ⁶ to mark simple responses to adult difficulties?

Let us turn now from the diffused city, where the feud has repelled family from family, preventing the full development of a civic whole. It has had the opposite effect on the families themselves, tightly fusing each household, turning it inward, and preventing the full development of its individual members.

Montagues

The Montagues remain indoors for most of the play, but we see nothing of their private life. They emerge only after public brawls between the enemies. Lady Montague speaks only three times, her husband, eight. After the first fracas, Romeo's parents withdraw into their house, leaving others to investigate what his father “and many other friends” (1.1.144) have failed to discover. The Montagues are a tighter, less extended clan—both horizontally in space and vertically in time—than the more sociable Capulets. We never see their “other friends” or relatives. They do not speak about their future or an heir. By spending little time on the Montagues, Shakespeare can devote much of the “two hours’ traffic” (Prologue.36) of his play to the Capulets. It is a detailed, rich depiction of human life confined to the household, a life that has not attained its full development. We stop briefly at the threshold, and then enter their great hall, orchard, balcony, kitchen, bedroom, and, finally, the family tomb.

Capulets

Old Capulet also emerges from his house after the first street fight. A stage direction says he is in his “gown.” One editor calls it a “robe of office” or a “symbol of magistracy” that shows how the feud interferes with his civic duties.Footnote ⁷ But the play never indicates that he has any. He wears his dressing gown, and is in no hurry to leave his house. He is a household patriarch, not a city father.

Hearing the disturbance, Capulet calls for a sword. His wife suggests that a “crutch” would be more appropriate (1.1.73–76), and Montague's wife also tries to discourage her husband. The patriarchs instinctively assume fighting posture. But the very feud that has made them enemies has attenuated their fighting spirit and they withdraw. It is not the feeble, idle old, but the vigorous, idle young, who fuel the ancient feud.

In his next appearance (1.2), Capulet, in a street near his home, meets the County Paris, who presses his suit to marry Juliet, Capulet's only child. His authority in his mostly female household seems gentle at first. The expansive Capulet does want grandchildren and the status of a marriage with Paris, who is related to the Prince, but the loving father will not force his daughter to marry against her will. He is cordial to Paris and invites him to woo Juliet at the ball “at my poor house” (1.2.23). Note how often he refers to “my house.” They have the same name. The guest list for his house party reveals that the invited are mostly Capulets.

We next enter female quarters deep inside the house. Lady Capulet is spare in speech and flesh. Rather cold and hard, she is much younger than her husband. He probably married her, not for love, but to produce an heir. Juliet calls her “Madam” (1.3.7), not “Mother.” She too has no personal name; the Nurse tells Romeo she is “the lady of the house” (1.5.112). She and Lady Montague suggest the limited development of women in patriarchal clan societies, perhaps because they are tightly restricted to social relations in private households. Their husbands ignore their weak attempts to prevent them from fighting. They seem less like mature individuals than means to increase the families into which they are married when they themselves are young and immature. The house holds her, providing safety and bodily needs, at the cost of isolation and limited freedom. We hear of no social contact with other women. Restricted in time and place, she does not initiate and is not consulted. Like Verona and its idle young, she seems stunted.

The second adult woman, Juliet's nurse, is the embodiment of body, the nurture of which is the special responsibility of the household. Good-humored and motherly, she is, perhaps, the source of the capacity for love that Juliet could not have learned from her cold mother. It is the warm and fleshly Nurse who has held, dressed, told tales to, and tucked in the Capulet child. And she cannot stop talking.

Women servants are also permanent sub-units of the great families; and they, too, are body-servants. The Nurse's own child made her mother's milk flow for Juliet. The Nurse mentions Susan's name; she died early and her parents continued to dote on the master's child, never imagining that she, too, would die before she grew up. The Nurse herself has only the name of her function, although her master once calls her by her incongruous given name, Angelica (4.4.5). Like male servants, she has no family name of her own. She married a man whose name is not mentioned, into whose household she never moved. She repeats his conversations and jokes with such gusto that we almost remember him too as an embodied character. They seem to have had the only cheerful marriage in the play.

Her vulgarity gives this homebody a down-to-earth perspective. She associates Juliet's weaning with a memorable earthquake, remembering just how it felt (1.3.24–35). At first, she seems to have a moral, as well as physical, solidity that some of her superiors lack. In the midst of the grotesque feud, we are quickly drawn to this funny, affectionate, comfortable person. But it is precisely her taste for comfort that makes her betray Juliet. The earthbound Nurse is unmoved by higher principle, law, or spiritual love. Her heart of flesh does not understand the passion of the child she is so fond of, or why she cannot adjust to necessity, forget Romeo, and marry Paris. We, like Juliet, are shocked, especially when we understand that our appreciation and our anger are reactions to the same thing. Our changing view of the Nurse is an extraordinary example of one way that Shakespeare's plays educate his audience, that is, help us grow up.Footnote ⁸

The Nurse's prominence sets the domestic tone of the Capulet household. The patriarch who called for his sword soon changes into a genial host, concerned with the pleasures of his guests. Welcoming his relatives, Capulet speaks of his lost youth. Perhaps this sense of encroaching age has moved him to entertain Paris's proposal; for one not engaged in the affairs of an enduring city, marriage and family are a way to counter mortality. Capulet reminisces with an elderly cousin, also named Capulet, about a family wedding in the distant past; a clan coheres in its shared name and in memories of shared experiences. The Nurse's memories are understandably confined to the events of the household: marriages, babies, and local earthquakes. But it is surprising that the “great rich” Capulet does not mention a single public concern.

At Capulet's ball, Tybalt recognizes Romeo, but Old Capulet forbids a confrontation; it would “mar the feast” (1.5.73) “in my house” (1.5.69). He fears a “mutiny among my guests” (1.5.79). In the Prologue, the Chorus says the “ancient grudge” gives rise to “new mutiny,” a word that usually refers to an upheaval against a legal authority. Capulet's authority derives from nature, from age and sex, not from law. He asserts it entirely at home. When his will is thwarted, he becomes an irascible indoors tyrant.

The genial host is disappointed when Romeo and his friends depart, for he has prepared yet another “banquet” for his guests. While the feud has focused spirited young men on street fights, it has turned the attention of their elders from typically masculine, competitive, outdoors civic activity to typically feminine, cooperative, indoors domestic activity. The latter is preferable to deadly fighting. But an entirely domestic life is a partial life for a mature man. Like the kids of Verona, Capulet has not “grown up.” When he is fussing in the kitchen, applying all the managerial skill he has never exercised in the city to the preparation of the wedding feast, he recognizes that he is playing “the housewife” (4.2.43). The Nurse calls him a “cotquean” (4.4.7), a man who does woman's work. Whatever “gown” he wears when he first appears in public, here he should wear an apron.

After the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio, Juliet's formerly considerate father insists that she marry Paris. In a tyrannical display of power, he repeatedly changes the wedding day, and asks if his wife has delivered “our decree” (3.5.138). Previously unable to lift his sword against his male foe, he is now ready to attack a girl, to banish his own flesh and blood from his household: “Graze where you will, you shall not house [his word for ‘live’] with me” (3.5.189), but “hang, beg, starve, die in the streets” (3.5.193). Given his previous solicitude and the extent to which home defines their life, the threat of paternal eviction is shocking.

A Third “Household”: The Friar's Cell

Romeo calls the Friar “father,” and he calls Romeo “son” (2.3.27–30). Romeo is a sort of orphan in his own biological family, and the Friar is almost a substitute father. But the “ghostly [spiritual] sire” (2.2.192) will never generate his own children. He loves this troubled boy, but has not experienced the passionate attachment families have to their own flesh and blood.

“Hope” propels the Friar's plan to end the feud by marrying the young lovers. He does not appreciate how generations of hatred might lead to the violent disowning of children who refuse to marry according to their parents’ wishes. The plan to reunite the lovers after Juliet's feigned death shows his lack of practical experience. Perhaps his confidence in the Providence of God has stunted his own “providence,” that is, “prudence.” He knows about medicinal potions, but it does not occur to him that his messenger might be delayed by an attempt to deal with the spread of disease. The Friar also does not anticipate that his beautiful boy will die for love if he thinks that Juliet is dead. On his flight to Juliet's balcony, Romeo says of Mercutio: “He jests at scars that never felt a wound” (2.2.1). Now he says it is the Friar who “canst not speak of that thou dost not feel” (3.3.64). The ignorant Nurse admires Friar Lawrence's “learning” (3.3.160). But his “philosophy” (3.3.50) and years of merely hearing the confessions of haters and lovers have failed to deepen his own understanding of the human heart. Prudence in the affairs of those who live in this world might require more personal experience of hate and love.

Christian teachings may also limit his appreciation of passionate attachments based on blood ties. If all human beings are “children” of God and “brothers” in Christ, “whoever does the will of my Father is brother, sister, and mother to me” (Matt. 12:50). St. Francis himself famously demonstrated and insisted that he recognized only his “Father in heaven,” not his “father on earth.” Friar Laurence swears “by my brotherhood” (5.2.17). He and Friar John come from different families, but their paternal names do not matter. Interfamily hatred is a passion presumably alien to those who have dedicated themselves to universal love. The friars live in an incomplete, all-male community in which they have not been generated, and which does not generate future “brothers.” Like Mercutio's, their “loins” are irrelevant. In his simple household of one in the quiet Franciscan abbey, the Friar may underestimate human resistance to attempts to weaken biological and erotic ties. Again, Shakespeare points to the Friar's inexperience. Until the last scene where he panics and runs, we see him only in his own “close cell” (2.2.192).

Prologue: The Meaning of Weaning

We found our first attraction to Juliet's Nurse superseded by a more mature rejection of her sensual utilitarianism. As in life, however, one should always keep listening.

One would expect a talkative wet nurse to refer to her main qualification for her occupation. But why does Shakespeare spend so much time on her chatter about her breasts—she has a very large vocabulary of synonyms for them—and on her extended report of Juliet's weaning? In these comic set pieces, perhaps we can hear the prosaic, natural alternative to Juliet's poetic and tragic story. A long series of unions and separations precedes the meeting of all young lovers. Years before, male seed emerges from the confines of a father's loins and merges with female seed. Excluding all others, the two become one, a single, complete individual, once again contained, now in its mother. Our first “household” is the womb. Emerging again at birth, the separated infant is held close and nourished by its mother, or a surrogate, and has little desire for independence. Sometimes it may have to be forced to give up such satisfying attachment. The child is weaned by making the breast bitter; the Nurse, too, knows her herbs. A little wormwood will not poison the baby, but will increase its self-sufficiency. In this second detachment, it begins to live in its own place and time, although still within those of the family household. The Nurse recalls another odd detail about Juliet's weaning. On that day, “my lord and you [Lady Capulet] were then at Mantua” (1.3.29). Juliet's distant mother was doubly distant almost from the beginning, away from the baby she never nursed, and out of town at her weaning. Almost fourteen years later, as her father threatens to drive her from home, Juliet cries out, “O sweet my mother, cast me not away!” (3.5.199). The tenacious teenager recalls the toddler who resisted weaning. The Veronese feud will require an even more traumatic separation from her tight family than that of most adolescents. Her new attachment, likewise, will be more intense and passionate than most; eventually it will destroy her and her new love.

We might describe the emergence of young adolescents from their families as yet another “birth” and “weaning.” A developing sense of individuality, of singularity, prepares for new attachments and new satisfactions. The words “weaning” and “Venus” are derived from the same root (wen-, “wont”), meaning “desire,” “satisfy,” or “accustom.”Footnote ⁹ Once again the child emerges from the desire for and satisfaction of the safe and same, the “familiar,” into a more risky desire for and satisfaction with the new and different. The intense new eros may be as shocking at first as a forced weaning: liberation is exhilarating, frightening, empowering, and overpowering. Again, one feels united, fused, to the new, to another, at first, to the exclusion of all others.

Such passionate union is often experienced as a “death” of the self. It is a commonplace in early English poetry to refer to sexual union as “dying.” The most extreme representation of such loss of self is the “love-death” music at the end of Wagner's Tristan.Footnote ¹⁰ In most societies, the move from parental household is encouraged, but supervised, and does not aim at complete and permanent separation. After an initial period of isolated euphoria, married lovers settle into new households, while remaining attached to those from which they have emerged. The timeless love-death grows into a love-life in time, one that shares mutual loves and enterprises outside themselves. They look together at the changing world as well as into each other's eternal eyes.

Our first “household” is the womb; our last, the tomb. We enter and dwell in each alone. But in between, we are fortunate if we can experience a variety of loves in nested communities that look toward the future even though we ourselves are mortal.

Shakespeare conveys this earliest stage of passionate union as well as any writer can. This does not mean that he offers it as a paradigm of full love to those who are rightly moved by it. Rather, he shows how, in Verona, just as the feud has prevented overly cohesive families from developing into a coherent city, so it has forced their children to sever themselves from these families and cling only to each other. Like their arrested city and households, they and their love cannot mature over time, according to the Nurse's crude, but somehow natural, expectations. Let us look, at last, at these beautiful, doomed young people.

Two Lovers: Romeo and Juliet

The Romeo we meet at the beginning of the play is a peculiar member of the Montague household. We never see him at home with his parents, and he hardly acknowledges them when he meets them elsewhere. Romeo is drawn to shadow, the dim time before sunrise, and the darkness of his own room. He avoids city, family, and feud, and the daylight that exposes distinctions.

Always on the move, he seems always out of place, out of time. His first love might be an attempt to escape oppressive family bonds. Perhaps, instead of Capulets, he pursues Rosaline. He thinks he wants her, but his attention is on Love, on himself, and on his own bad Petrarchan poetry. Unlike many infatuated young lovers,Footnote ¹¹ he hardly mentions the name of his beloved. When he reads it in Capulet's invitation, he does not seem to care that she is on the wrong side of the feud. The idea of Rosaline has temporarily distracted him, but the embodied, responsive Juliet will radically detach him from household, city, and life itself.

Our first views of Juliet emphasize her extreme youth. The Nurse describes her as a lively toddler. We first see her to be a quiet adolescent. Like Romeo, she is an only child. But she has no friends and does not roam “abroad.” She leaves the house once, to go to confession. She seems to show little sign of thinking beyond the household, telling her mother that marriage is “an honour that I dream not of” (1.3.67). Before the nighttime party, she is a daytime girl, happy in the light, who does not cross lines. Her nurse is the one who urges her to “seek happy nights to follow happy days” (1.3.106). What, if anything, is stirring beneath the surface?

A Pair of Lovers: “Romeo and Juliet”

Ball. Romeo's arrival at the Capulet house is surely the first time a Montague has crossed the threshold of the ancestral foe. Tybalt calls it an “intrusion” (1.5.90). This is the first of four times in the play—ball, balcony, bedroom, and tomb—that Romeo penetrates the Capulet household, violating the universal human custom that outsiders must be invited into the homes of insiders.

Romeo's friends have persuaded him to compare the rarely seen Rosaline with other women at the ball. Almost immediately he knows that another “lady” (1.5.41) is the one beyond comparison. He, as usual, is shadowed, and a mask partially obscures his face and any family connections it might reveal. Neither he nor the lady has a name, the undeniable evidence that we come with strings attached. They love “at first sight.” Reasons for their initial attraction are no more available than for the origins of the feud. She “falls” for him, as the Nurse's husband predicted little Juliet would do for some man (1.3.42–58), but not on her back. Romeo thinks she is above him, a “saint”; her hand is a “holy shrine” (1.5.93); his use of the word “yonder” indicates how unattainable she seems. Thinking, perhaps for the first time, of a world beyond the Capulet household, she, too, picks up this word.Footnote ¹² The “celestial” Juliet immediately responds to Romeo's very first words.

Most people do not immediately recognize that this first exchange is an English sonnet. Those in the know love to reveal it to others, who are always impressed. Romeo and Juliet, playing the parts of pilgrim and saint, speak from a distance at first, in separate quatrains, each ending with the word “kiss.” They then alternate lines in the third quatrain, which ends with a real kiss. Each speaks one line of the closing couplet, in which they themselves become a couple. The sonnet has an additional quatrain—or a new one that they begin immediately, as if they cannot stop. In the first three lines, speakers and rhymes (aba) alternate. They share the fourth line (b), which couples them even more closely than the concluding couplet does. It too is sealed with a kiss. The two are one—until the Nurse bustles in and separates them.

There is another oddity here. Most sonnets, including all of Shakespeare's, are spoken by one person, sometimes entertaining opposing ideas, but always as an internal dialectic. Here, a dialogue between two speakers contracts into the conventional form of a single speaker. Their first “exchange” eliminates distance, and their first love, so beautifully and so problematically portrayed in what follows, starts with a poem that merges them. This is genuine romantic speech with another person. But, like Petrarch's sonnets, the poem is conventional and nothing like the extraordinarily beautiful and original language of love we shall soon hear from them. Romeo's courtship is depicted against the courtship of Paris who does not “fall” in love “at first sight,” and who does think beyond the present. He first approaches Juliet's father, sets a date, and arranges the customary church wedding, procession, flowers, and music. His language is proper and dull. In his one exchange with Juliet in the Friar's cell, the alternating lines do not couple in rhymes. The two speak at cross-purposes; no sonnet emerges. He leaves her with a chaste and unreturned “holy kiss” (4.1.43).

Balcony. The erotic explosion that undermines Paris's conventional courtship has nothing to do with household and civic life. It is unanticipated and unplanned. Romeo leaves the ball abruptly, climbs a wall, and ascends to a place never meant to be an entry to the house. A private militia of Capulet kinsmen stands guard. Young men of other cities scale enemy walls with fellow citizen-soldiers. But Romeo invades an orchard. “Love” allowed him to “o'erperch these walls” (2.2.66). This “leap” of love will be repeated several times—Juliet picks up the word (3.2.7)—without the sanction of city, parents, or other kin. Their “courtship” moves directly from “leap” to a marriage that resembles an “elopement,” a word appropriately derived from that word.

The “balcony scene” is the most famous in the play, but there is no actual balcony in Romeo and Juliet.Footnote ¹³ Shakespeare probably thought of Juliet leaning out upon a wide windowsill. Nevertheless, nearly every production is done this way, and rightly so, because a balcony is the perfect place for an illicit visit. A porch, or parlor, where suitors are invited to come “calling,” often with symbolic offerings of respect and the ability to provide, is a place for potential spouses to spend time together. It is the proper threshold to the courted woman's household, and her family must permit and acknowledge such visits. The Capulets have no idea that Romeo is lurking on their balcony; he brings no food or flowers, and his only music is his own, now beautiful, poetry. He insists he will remain, “forgetting any other home but this” (2.2.175). Oblivious to time and place, he says nothing about a future household with Juliet. She will give him all her “fortunes,” and follow him “throughout the world” (2.2.148); where does not matter, as long as they are together. She would prolong the night, stop time, and “say goodnight till it be morrow” (2.2.185). But she will also welcome “tomorrow,” because it will sanction the union of their bodies. Juliet expects marriage before she falls on her back.

Her famous lines about Romeo's names refer to their origins in the feuding families. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name… and I'll no longer be a Capulet” (2.2.34–36). His name, unlike his hand, foot, or leg, is no “part” (2.2.41) of him. In exchange for his name, Romeo can “take all myself” (2.2.48), and he replies, “Call me but love and I'll be new baptized. / Henceforth I never will be Romeo” (2.2.50). The lovers, liberated from their birth families, are born again, each generated by the other. The two only children become a “pair of… lovers,” a new “dual” being with a new “dual” name; both are “new baptized.” From Shakespeare's day to our own, they will be known as “Romeo and Juliet.”

The feud intensifies their natural attraction, experienced as personal fusion in an eternal present, and denies it communal context in the future. Romeo and Juliet, like most new lovers, are not concerned that balcony passion does not endure forever, and that marriage means more than making sonnets and making love. Like embryos that do not mature, or babies that are never weaned, they will not learn, as older spouses do, that lovers who unite enter a future in which they retain and further develop their individual selves. Grown-up lovers know what it is to coordinate different tastes and abilities, to admire, be embarrassed, disagree, separate, and reunite again. Beyond the balcony one learns that the “other self” one loves is, indeed, “other.” Romeo refers to the “childhood of our joy” (3.3.94), and Juliet compares herself to an “impatient child” (3.2.30). But neither speaks of children as the future fulfillment of their union. They contract from two to one; most lovers unite and multiply: from two to one to three, that is, to yet another one. Unlike the Nurse, Juliet does not associate love and sex with hungry babies who must be fed on time.

Wedding. When they meet to be married at the Friar's cell, he tells them, “you shall not stay alone / Till holy church incorporate two in one” (2.6.36–37). The “balcony scene” goes on and on, almost till “tomorrow.” But, in this extremely short scene, Shakespeare does not even show the wedding. The Friar makes “short work” (2.6.35) of it, dispensing with the required waiting period. He marries them, not in “holy church,” but offstage. There are no nuptial clothes, rings, vows, procession, or witnesses. Brooke (767–70) includes them all. Nowadays, such omissions are typical of lovers who regard marriage as a private matter, or who see no need for it. In Verona, where the feud has deformed civic, family, and personal life, no one will know that Juliet Capulet is now a Montague.

Wedding Night. On their wedding night, Romeo again enters Juliet's home in the dark. Again he climbs a twisted ladder through a port not meant for entry, and leaves unseen. Juliet crosses no threshold into adulthood and a new household. Rather, she and her husband go backward to her parents’ home and her childhood chamber, prepared as usual by her doting nanny. Perhaps a worn teddy bear witnesses their first and only sexual union. Echoing the “balcony” farewell, they attempt to stop time, to extend dark night until they must acknowledge tomorrow: “more light and light it grows… more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.35–36).

From the beginning, Romeo has preferred night to daylight. Most of his meetings with Juliet take place at night. On their wedding night, as she waits for Romeo, she uses the word eleven times.Footnote ¹⁴ In one of the most beautiful speeches in the play, she eagerly anticipates their first “love-performing night” (3.2.4–5). Like Tristan and Isolde, they will be night people, not just because their love is forbidden, but because darkness is the time to ignore boundaries, lose self-consciousness, and merge. She now wants to be “two in one” corporeally, not in a church ceremony, to make love, not a sonnet. Romeo is now “my Romeo” (3.2.21). Touch and darkness destroy distance. Such self-abandon and other-absorption is certainly part of the story and remains so for most enduring loves. But adult lovers also recognize that they themselves are separate individuals. Their bodies are “monuments,” literally, “reminders,” of who they have been, in those first fast moments, and over time. Scars, wrinkles, blushes, smiles and frowns cannot be seen in the dark. Nor can other visible reminders, with which most people surround themselves, of families and friends, other loves, who are also parts of their life together. Sometimes they like to look at each other and at the world that has taken a long time to make together. Romeo and Juliet, children of the dark feud, yearn to merge in the dark, but do not live long enough to want to turn on the lights.