T here are many themes a reader will encounter during a study of the play's text. Of these, perhaps the most important, overarching theme is that of love and its place: love as the cause of violence, love which conquers all, love as fate, etc. There is a history behind the play where this theme is concerned; it requires some explanation.
The idea of Romeo and Juliet is not Shakespeare’s. He didn’t even introduce the story within the English language; that honour fell to a poet named Arthur Brooks, who based his apparently very long, very plodding poem on yet another source. It has its origins in Italy, as befitting the story, though no definitive textual source exists. George Gordon, Lord Byron, a famous nineteenth-century English poet, declared that the Veronese insist upon the tale as fact, that they date it at 1303 and that they can produce a tomb, but even Byron’s story is heavily disputed. A tale very close to that of Romeo and Juliet’s existed in Naples in a collection published in 1476, over a hundred years before Shakespeare’s setting of it. Another record traces a similar story back to a middle Greek source and a writer named Xenophon Ephesius. Star-crossed lovers from warring families were nothing new in literature.
What was new seems to be the treatment of the lovers in such a short period of time, Shakespeare having reduced the timeline of events from approximately a month down to a mere five days; and also, the way that he chose to develop the various themes revolving around love. How much of this was the result of the reign of Elizabeth I is hard to say. Queen Elizabeth, known also as “The Virgin Queen”, was a woman who vowed chastity when she could not marry the man she loved, Robert Dudley. Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Wyatt’s muse Anne Boleyn, also became a great patron of the arts and under her rule, Shakespeare and his contemporaries flourished. But her prized virginity spawned a cult, among other things, and she became on the one hand a great inspiration. There are usually backlashes to any movement, as became apparent earlier in the year with the rise of Modernism following Romanticism and Victorianism, and so therefore, on the other hand, came the rise of ‘eroticised’ love.
“Romeo And Juliet”: Themes in Poetry
The fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, whose decades-long love for a woman named Laura was the inspiration for hundreds of poems, captured several of the moral ‘ideals’ prevalent during his time, themes that are present in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”.
Theme 1: Love’s ‘Platonic’ Ideal
Petrarch: “SONNET CLVII”
“Una candida cerva sopra l' erba.”
THE VISION OF THE FAWN.
Beneath a laurel, two fair streams between,
At early sunrise of the opening year,
A milk-white fawn upon the meadow green,
Of gold its either horn, I saw appear;
So mild, yet so majestic, was its mien,
I left, to follow, all my labours here,
As miners after treasure, in the keen
Desire of new, forget the old to fear.
"Let none impede"--so, round its fair neck, run
The words in diamond and topaz writ--
"My lord to give me liberty sees fit."
And now the sun his noontide height had won
When I, with weary though unsated view,
Fell in the stream--and so my vision flew.
Trans. MACGREGOR.
The ‘platonic ideal’ was later sexualized by Sir Robert Wyatt (1503 – 1542), one of several who translated Petrarch’s poetry for an English speaking audience and who himself was a poet of some renown. Wyatt used the image of the beloved as a white hart (a deer, which acted as a symbol in his own version for Anne Boleyn) and simply changed the distant gazing of the speaker in Petrarch’s poem to active pursuit in his own. Because Wyatt was somewhat of a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, his version of the chaste Petrarchan sonnet is a strong indicator of the tension in Elizabethan England between chaste and pure love, and that which was not.
Wyatt: “Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde”
Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde
but as for me helas I may no more
the vayne travail hath weried me so sore
I ame of theim that farthest cometh behinde
yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
drawe from the Deere but as she fleeth afore
faynting I folowe I leve of therefor
sethens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde
Who list her hount I put him owte of dowbte
as well as I may spend his tyme in vain
and graven with Diamondes in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte
noli me tangere for Cesars I ame
and wylde for to hold though I seme tame
Word key (according to line of the poem):1list likes, pleases 2may can 3travaill effort, labour 8sethens since; the phrase is proverbial 13noli … tangere ‘Touch me not’, Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection (John 20:17) and said to be the motto inscribed on the collars of Caesar’s hinds Cesars I ame cp. Matthew 22:21 ‘Render therefore unto Caeser the things which are Caesar’s’
Theme 2: All-Consuming Love Effeminizes the Man
Petrarch: “SONNET CXXXVII”
“Più volte già dal bel sembiante umano.”
LOVE UNMANS HIS RESOLUTION.
Oft as her angel face compassion wore,
With tears whose eloquence scarce fails to move,
With bland and courteous speech, I boldly strove
To soothe my foe, and in meek guise implore:
But soon her eyes inspire vain hopes no more;
For all my fortune, all my fate in love,
My life, my death, the good, the ills I prove,
To her are trusted by one sovereign power.
Hence 'tis, whene'er my lips would silence break,
Scarce can I hear the accents which I vent,
By passion render'd spiritless and weak.
Ah! now I find that fondness to excess
Fetters the tongue, and overpowers intent:
Faint is the flame that language can express!
Trans. NOTT.
Compare this to Mercutio’s words to Romeo, after they have a good-natured, very masculine verbal sparring match:
MERCUTIO: Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well by nature. For this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole (Act II Scene iv).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17650/17650-8.txt
Ibid.
Idiot
(1) jester’s baton; (2) male anatomy; see also pg 96 in the Folger Shakespeare Library edition.
The art of the time period wavered between the representation of the pure white virgin (see, for example, Sir Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”, an epic poem dedicated to Elizabeth I) and the downright bawdy (see Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”), which had been around before the start of Elizabeth I Regina’s reign and saw a dramatic increase during it. Let’s take a look at the differences. At the top of the handout, you see a poem by Petrarch. Notice the way in which the speaker admires the beautiful animal from afar. The love is ‘platonic’, unrequited. It can never be consummated because she is too delicate, too precious, too pure. The speaker pursues the animal in vain; he becomes weary in the hot sun and the animal escapes. Now look below, to a poem entitled “Who so list to hount” by Sir Robert Wyatt. Wyatt, remember, was enamoured of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I’s mother. Here, in this poem, he reconstructs Petrarch’s ideal of love to reflect the changing attitudes regarding conquests. The ‘hynde’ in his poem is a double entendre, meaning not just the ‘white hart’—the deer—but also, literally, a tail. And so began the extraordinary sexual puns which Shakespeare would liberally sprinkle throughout his works.
The platonic/sexual love wasn’t the only source of tension within Elizabethan England. At the time, it was feared that men who loved too deeply would find themselves effeminised. They would lose their masculine traits because they would allow their passions and emotions—considered at the time to be the sole domain of ‘hysterical’ women (note that ‘hysteria’, ‘hysterical’ and ‘hysterectomy’ all share the same Greek root word: hystera, meaning uterus). This is one reason why Romeo’s all-consuming passion for Juliet, and conversely hers for him, becomes such a central theme of the play. It is partly this love which causes the death of Romeo’s dear friend Mercutio, and therefore not a little bit of foreshadow when Mercutio utters his famous quote in Act II Scene iv of the play, which appears at the bottom of the handout. Take a look now at the Petrarch sonnet which appears before it; more than a hundred years prior to Shakespeare’s rendition, this was of great concern to men. Note, for example, the lines:
Scarce can I hear the accents which I vent,
By passion render'd spiritless and weak.
Ah! now I find that fondness to excess
Fetters the tongue, and overpowers intent
where Petrarch’s complaint about being rendered speechless holds a deeper meaning of the complete emasculation of the male speaker of the poem.
The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare . New York: Gramercy, 1979. 155
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