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.

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.

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.