In Wednesday's post, I mentioned that perhaps the best way to see characters such as Mercutio and the Nurse is to consider their function in the play. It could be argued that both are given their meaning in relation to their role vis a vis the protagonists of the title. Mercutio allows us to see the much deeper imaginative and emotional potentials in Romeo (who has been seen by some as resembling a younger version of Hamlet). His famed Queen Mab speech is probably best understood as an imitation of imagination, as he reduces the contents of dreams to desires and fears. (Sound familiar? Freud would be entirely forgotten were it not for what he learned from Shakespeare.) The Nurse serves a similar purpose in her contrast to Juliet, and her scenes (and Mercutio's as well) allow the mood to be lightened and the audience to be taken away momentarily from the lyricism and foreboding that is the central emotional state of the play. Like an experienced chef, Shakespeare uses these characters and their variety to freshen the palate of the viewer, so that when the catastrophe does arrive, it appears even darker in comparison with what could have been. It's something that became common practice in his tragedies from this point on. Another example tomorrow.

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".

There's a different sort of double-time effect in Romeo and Juliet, quite unlike the type found in Othello and King Lear. In this play, the contrast is caused by the very different perceptions of passing time that we get from the very different worlds of the play: the adult world provides a very strict sense of time, with many references to specific moments and the repeated use of words such as "day" (which appears sixty times in the play), "night" (sixty-five), "time" (forty-four), and "hour" (twenty-four). The world of the young lovers however, transcends this strict temporality with a poetic vision of time that is made to seem elastic in quality. Juliet in particular has many lines of this nature. Towards the end of the balcony scene, when Romeo asks her to send for him at the hour of nine the next day, Juliet responds, "'tis twenty years till then". As he leaves her after their wedding night, she says, "I must hear from thee every day in the hour/ For in a minute there are many days". And perhaps the most memorable moment of this type is said in soliloquy at the beginning of 2.5, as she waits for the Nurse who is to bring her news of Romeo and their engagement:

In half an hour she promised to return.

Perchance she cannot meet him: that's not so.

O, she is lame! love's heralds should be thoughts,

Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams,

Driving back shadows over louring hills:

Therefore do nimble-pinion'd doves draw love,

And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings.

Now is the sun upon the highmost hill

Of this day's journey, and from nine till twelve

Is three long hours, yet she is not come.

Had she affections and warm youthful blood,

She would be as swift in motion as a ball;

My words would bandy her to my sweet love,

And his to me...

It's partly for this reason (i.e. the conflict of imaginative time vs. the clock) that this play, with its story more known than any other, can still create tremendous tension in an audience.