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.

One of the most important books in the history of Shakespeare criticism, Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us, first published in 1935, contains many enlightening observations. One of the most telling is her comparison of Shakespeare's use of recurring image patterns with the illustrations found in the illuminated poetry of William Blake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake#Illuminated_books). First, she gives an astonishingly accurate description of these unique masterpieces, and in particular the illustrations found in them: "These are not, for the most part, illustrations in the ordinary sense of the term, the translation by the artist of some incident in the narrative into a visual picture; they are rather a running accompaniment to the words in another medium, sometimes symbolically emphasising or interpreting certain aspects of the thought, sometimes supplying frankly only decoration or atmosphere, sometimes grotesque and even repellent, vivid, strange, arresting, sometimes drawn with an almost unearthly beauty of form and colour."

She then brilliantly relates Blake's work to Shakespeare's by comparing the effect of these illustrations to the one created by poetic image patterns in the plays: "Thus, as the leaping tongues of flame which illuminate the pages of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell show the visual form which Blake's thought evoked in his mind, and symbolize for us the purity, the beauty, and the two-edged quality of life and danger in his words, so the recurrent images in Macbeth or Hamlet reveal the dominant picture or sensation - and for Shakespeare the two are identical - in terms of which he sees and feels the main problem or theme of the play, thus giving us an unerring clue to the way he looked at it, as well as a direct glimpse into the working of his mind and imagination." Tomorrow, I'll summarize some of Spurgeon's thoughts on the imagery of Romeo and Juliet.

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.

"What is the end of study?" is the question that Berowne puts to the king of Navarre in the opening scene of Love's Labour's Lost. Not only is it challenging to answer, and not only can it lead to many more questions of an epistemological nature, but it can also be interpreted in two diverging ways due to the fact that two senses of the word "end" suit it equally well. In the first, the word can signify a terminal point - and the question becomes something along the lines of, When have we studied enough? And in the second, it would refer to a purpose - and we get something like, What is the point of study? Of course, my opinion is simple: The answers to both of these questions are provided by the model of Shakespeare's career. Has knowledge ever been put to better use?