If you take a look at the sources that influenced Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (his first tragedy as well as his first Roman play), Seneca's Thyestes and Ovid's story of Philomela from Metamorphoses, you'll see that the bloodiness of his play didn't come out of nowhere. Even by today's standards, these works are nasty. Not that Shakespeare didn't match them in this regard: he did. In fact, thanks to his unequaled verisimilitude, he surpassed them, and created a play that is harrowing to watch or read. But as I mentioned in my previous post, I think recent audiences and commentators are getting past this fact and seeing some of the many qualities that the play contains. I also mentioned in my last post that I think the writing of the play was crucial to Shakespeare, and that I would try to demonstrate some of the influence the play had on his later career. Here we go: 1. In the storyline itself, there are strong parallels with Coriolanus (particularly the story of Lucius joining forces with an opposing army to subdue Rome) and King Lear (not only are the opening scenes very similar in terms of stagecraft, but the subplots involving Edmund and Aaron are introduced and then integrated into the main plots in very similar ways). 2. The scenes set in the Andronici mausoleum can be seen as precursors to those in the Capulet tomb in Romeo and Juliet. 3. In terms of the story's arc, a very clear parallel can be drawn with Macbeth, as the two title characters go from being highly decorated and respected warriors to infamy in the eyes of their societies, from which point they discover their inner natures. 4. The theme of madness, real or assumed, as it pertains to Titus, of course brings Hamlet to mind. 5. Tamora's first speech in the play, in which she begs for her son's life by describing the importance of mercy, is clearly the seed that led to Portia's famous words in The Merchant of Venice. 6. The four other works set in Rome that he was to write later (in order of composition, The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus), which treat in every case a major turning point in Roman history, can all be seen as an attempt to answer the central question posed by this play (and which may have influenced the title of one of the most famous works in the study of history, Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire): What happened?

I'm not sure that there is an artist in any field that can compare with Shakespeare in terms of the depiction and understanding of time. Technically, his plays are largely the result of his treatment of it, and to get to know them from the point of view of craft, it's a vital area of study. I've mentioned it before in another context, but one of the many changes that Shakespeare made to his source material for Romeo and Juliet, Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), was to telescope a four-month period into one of four days, while still allowing breathing room for characters such as the Nurse and Mercutio, and maintaining the audience's belief throughout. In terms of theme, time is central to many, perhaps most, of the plays, but some, such as Macbeth, are almost entirely absorbed by it: The play is perhaps best approached as a dramatic example of how people can destroy the present by obsession with the future. And in Henry IV, part Two, the king (i.e. Bolingbroke), nearing the end of his life, which was filled with civil wars, rebellions, illness, has these lines, as powerful as any in Shakespeare, about the entangled natures of life and time:

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea; and other times to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

Would shut the book and sit him down and die.

Another scene in which we get a fleeting meeting with minor characters who are nevertheless memorable occurs during the preparation for the Capulets' masquerade ball (1.5). The servants who are readying the setting are engaging in the primary topic of conversation of employees everywhere and to this day: who is and who isn't working hard enough. Then there's some angling for perks ("marchpane" has become "marzipan" in modern parlance, by the way), which is another frequent activity in the working world. Shakespeare's ear (these characters have a poetry of their own) and insight into the psychological effects of virtually every type of activity is unerring. And even his seemingly small moments can lead to large thinking. Here's the excerpt:

FIRST SERVANT

Where's Potpan, that he helps not to take away? He

shift a trencher? he scrape a trencher!

SECOND SERVANT

When good manners shall lie all in one or two men's

hands and they unwashed too, 'tis a foul thing.

FIRST SERVANT

Away with the joint-stools, remove the

court-cupboard, look to the plate. Good thou, save

me a piece of marchpane; and, as thou lovest me, let

the porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell.

Antony, and Potpan!

SECOND SERVANT

Ay, boy, ready.

FIRST SERVANT

You are looked for and called for, asked for and

sought for, in the great chamber.

SECOND SERVANT

We cannot be here and there too. Cheerly, boys; be

brisk awhile, and the longer liver take all.

Is it harsh to include the Nurse among Shakespeare's villains (as I did yesterday)? There would be arguments for both sides, as is usually the case with characters as three-dimensional and true-to-life as Shakespeare's, but certainly in the scene in question (3.5) her conduct would be evidence for the affirmative. But at other points, she is so full of life and humour that it's hard to maintain that judgement. Of course, it could be argued that the question is beside the point, and that it's more important to see her in her dramatic function: how she serves as a foil to Juliet, just as Mercutio does to Romeo.

But there's another angle from which to see the Nurse's behaviour in the scene as well, and that is that it was influenced by the admonishment she received from Capulet only a few moments earlier (as she was attempting to assuage his anger over Juliet's refusal to marry Paris), in which he says: "Peace, you mumbling fool!/ Utter your gravity o'er a gossip's bowl;/ For here we need it not." In this light, it's not impossible to sympathize with her for seeking the easiest way to avoid further conflict. Perhaps she even feels pushed past caring about the whole business, at least momentarily. Either way, and to return to the question above, there are no easy answers in Shakespeare.

Another point relating to yesterday's post (regarding the way time is perceived in the adult world versus the idealized one of the young lovers) is the manner in which the Nurse derives her knowledge of Juliet. She makes a very big deal of the fact that she knows exactly how old Juliet is ("Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour") and that she can tell stories of her very young days (and particularly the endlessly repeated one of how Juliet responded unknowingly to an off-colour question by her late husband), as if things of this nature are all that knowledge of a younger person entails. And over the course of the play, as Juliet grows to inner maturity, it becomes apparent that the Nurse doesn't know her at all. The final break comes, of course, when she recommends to Juliet to forget her marriage to the banished Romeo and marry Paris. It's a remarkable scene:

NURSE

Beshrew my very heart,

I think you are happy in this second match,

For it excels your first: or if it did not,

Your first is dead; or 'twere as good he were,

As living here and you no use of him.

JULIET

Speakest thou from thy heart?

NURSE

And from my soul too;

Or else beshrew them both.

JULIET

Amen!

NURSE

What?

JULIET

Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous much.

Go in: and tell my lady I am gone,

Having displeased my father, to Laurence' cell,

To make confession and to be absolved.

NURSE

Marry, I will; and this is wisely done.

[Exit]

JULIET

Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!

Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn,

Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue

Which she hath praised him with above compare

So many thousand times? Go, counsellor;

Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain.

I'll to the friar, to know his remedy:

If all else fail, myself have power to die.

It's another example of the truth in Robert Penn Warren's statement: "All of Shakespeare's villains are rationalists".

I keep learning more about Shakespeare's technical treatment of time with every play that I re-visit. In Romeo and Juliet, time is particularly important in several different ways, and over the next few posts I'll be summarizing some of what I've learned recently. For today, the first thing that must considered in this regard is the way the story has been collapsed from several months in Brooke's narrative poem (which was Shakespeare's primary and perhaps sole source) to four days in the play. But somehow it still feels entirely believable. Perhaps it's due to the fact that our memories tend to work this way as well, because when we look back on our own lives, we tend to remember the big events, the ones that changed things, rather than the cups of coffee and so forth. And many years can get turned into recollections that might take only a few moments to re-live mentally. Tomorrow, I'll write about how the play is influenced both technically and thematically by a particular time of day.

It's interesting to note that the main concept that makes the plot engine run in Romeo and Juliet is ignorance. By this I mean that at one point or another in the play, virtually every major character is left to make decisions while unaware of a crucial piece of information. And the audience is left to squirm, laugh or cry, depending on the situation. (It could even be argued that ignorance is one of the play's themes, and that it's brought to our attention through dramatic rather than verbal means.) Of course, this device is commonly referred to as dramatic irony, i.e. when the audience knows more than the characters, but I think that in this play, it goes beyond that. I think we might need some new terminology here. Any suggestions?

The turning point in Romeo and Juliet, according to Harold Goddard's The Meaning of Shakespeare (), is the point at which Romeo is unable to free himself from his violent upbringing, to turn his back on the incorrect teachings of history, his family and the feud - and "give all to love" (in the words of Emerson). When Mercutio and Tybalt begin to tangle, instead of sticking to his plan to befriend Tybalt (a Capulet, to whom he's now related by marriage), he instead tries to fight violence with violence, or as Goddard puts it: "He descends from the level of love to the level of violence and attempts to part the fighters with his sword". Here's the specific passage:

Draw, Benvolio, beat down their weapons

Gentleman, for shame, forbear this outrage!

Tybalt, Mercutio, the prince expressly hath

Forbidden bandying in Verona streets:

Hold, Tybalt! good Mercutio!

There is an argument to be made that at this point Romeo either could have let them fight it out (which perhaps would not have resulted in a death), or he could have revealed everything, including his secret marriage to Juliet. Instead he tried to interpose with the use of force, with the results we know, including the pathetic moment when Romeo answers Mercutio's reasonable question, "Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm", with: "I thought all for the best." Mercutio then turns away from him in disgust, anger, disbelief (take your pick) and says: "Help me into some house, Benvolio, or I shall faint."

One of my favourite moments, of many, in Harold Goddard's classic The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) is in the essay on Romeo and Juliet, in which he gives his theory of the turning point of the action. One of the most marvelous aspects of the book is that it is filled with descriptions like this one, where the outcome of events is held in the balance and determined by a fateful decision. And the importance of these decisions is not immediately apparent, but Goddard is very persuasive in virtually every case, and at the very least we're left with an increased appreciation of Shakespeare's mastery of plotting and suspense. I'm going to employ a little suspense myself in this case, and reveal the full theory tomorrow. But in the meantime, here's a hint: the irrevocable decision is Romeo's.

After having quoted from Emerson's poem, "Give All to Love" (http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/give_all_to_love.htm), Goddard writes the following: "The play is usually explained as a tragedy of the excess of love. On the contrary, it is the tragedy of the deficiency of it. Romeo did not 'follow it utterly', did not quite give 'all' to love." Tomorrow, I'll explain what he's referring to.

Caroline Spurgeon is quite a bit harder on Arthur Brooke (the writer of The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which was probably Shakespeare's only source for Romeo and Juliet) in her classic work of criticism, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us from 1935, than even I was the other day when I contrasted Shakespeare's philosophical sophistication with Brooke's heavy-handed moralizing. In giving credit for the fact that Shakespeare took from Brooke the idea of using recurring images of light and darkness, she wrote the following: "He took the idea from the last place we should expect, from the wooden doggerel of Arthur Brooke, and the germ of it is in the sing-song line in which Brooke describes the attitude of the lovers: 'For each of them to other is as to the world the sun.'" I'm not sure I find that line, or Brooke's writing overall, quite as bad as Spurgeon does, but it is surprising to realize that Shakespeare didn't necessarily require a good source (i.e. an excellent writer such as Plutarch, for example) from which to fashion a masterpiece.

In her essential text, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us from 1935, Caroline Spurgeon thoroughly examines the causes and effects of Shakespeare's visual references. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, he keeps returning to images of light and darkness: "In Romeo and Juliet the beauty and ardour of young love are seen by Shakespeare as the irradiating glory of sunlight and starlight in a dark world. The dominating image is light, every form and manifestation of it: the sun, moon, stars, fire, lightning, the flash of gunpowder, and the reflected light of beauty and of love; while by contrast we have night, darkness, clouds, rain, mist and smoke."

Re-reading the play with this statement in mind is an enjoyable experience, and it led me to another understanding: It's for this reason that many of the most powerful Shakespeare performances that I've seen have been done on thrust stages (like the Globe, of course), with no scenery or backdrops of any kind, except for the mental ones provided by the poetry.

Most scholars think that it's likely that Shakespeare only used one source in writing Romeo and Juliet. Arthur Brooke's long narrative poem entitled, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet from 1562 was part translation and part extrapolation of Bandello's Italian version. Brooke's attitude towards the young lovers is simple: This is what happens when young people don't listen to parents and other authority figures. He summarizes his purpose thus: "To this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and frendes...", and so on. It actually gets worse.

It's amazing to consider that from this, Shakespeare fashioned one of the most revolutionary pieces ever written. And the reason for its revolutionary nature is simple: Shakespeare wasn't trying to forward an agenda or purpose. He was trying to tell a story of love confronting hatred, which is something that still happens daily. And what he ended up with is perhaps the first work of literature that shows the parents being wrong, and the kids being right.

While preparing for my upcoming lecture on Romeo and Juliet (next Wednesday at 11 am at the Atwater library), a realization came to me regarding Shakespeare's use of poetry. It occurred to me that no other form of writing could contain all the complexity of life - its changes and ambiguities, the fact that we have to search and think to find meanings in events, our psychological upheavals and lack of inner consistency, the way that words and objects can have meanings far beyond themselves - all of these are best expressed, and perhaps only expressed, through poetry. Shakespeare, the "Chief Poet", as Keats called him, allows us to see the workings and potentials of our minds through the unwavering quality of his poetic writing. And even his prose is poetic, as you know from this justly famous passage: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" Shakespeare shows us not only what we are but also what we may be.