Death and Stars in Romeo and Juliet - Book Report/Review Example

Death and Stars in Romeo and Juliet The last chapter in Dympna Callaghan’s Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts discusses ‘death and stars’ and introduces the subject matter with writings on love misery and tragedy from the ideally named Erotomania by Jacques Ferrand, and afterward shift suddenly to quotes referring to poison from the earliest English effort to control medications—Pharmacopoeia Londinensis. This section also includes the Order for the Burial of the Dead, actual images of prognostications and almanacs, a brief quote on fortunetelling, and a Richard Day bedtime prayer. In other words, Callaghan presents an abundance of important material and enables a diversity of methods for the historically oriented interpretation and analysis of Romeo and Juliet. Due to the legendary reputation of Romeo and Juliet as symbols of starry-eyed, idealistic love, a book, like that of Callaghan, which strongly bases the play in early modern times is particularly acceptable. This essay literary analyses Romeo and Juliet with a focus on the historical context ‘death and stars’. The Star-Cross’d Lovers Romeo and Juliet is perhaps, according to Callaghan (2003), “the preeminent document of love in the West” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 1). The play strengthens the readers’ longing for a heartbreaking tale of love that people still look for in numerous forms. There are audiences who consider Romeo and Juliet as victims of fortuitous bad luck, and there are those who argue that the lovers are in the midst of young love and are destroyed due to their overindulgence. However, the most widespread analysis of the legend is that it reveals a clash between the personal desires of Romeo and Juliet and the prevailing pressures of social, public, and family rules with regard to which those needs are created. Since the desires of Romeo and Juliet cannot be reunited to family and social rules from which they come from, they should exterminate themselves. Their self-destruction is the only way to uphold the demands of their society and family. Such is the argument of Callaghan’s analysis of ‘death and star’ in Romeo and Juliet. For Callaghan, the ‘star-crossed lovers’ are a victim of circumstance. Within the context of Romeo and Juliet, ‘death and stars’ basically refer to fate, which strongly highlights the decisions and actions in the story. The Chorus talks about a ‘star-cross’d lovers’ at the beginning of the play. Their fates are dictated by the ‘stars’, a reality that the characters know and embrace. They cannot let themselves go of the ‘stars’. Thinking that Juliet is dead, Romeo shouts, “Then I defy you, stars” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 418). He is accepting the reality that their love is contradicted by fate. In the section ‘Astrology,’ Callaghan explained that the notion of ‘fate’ is fundamental to the play. During the time of Shakespeare there was prevalent faith in the power of the stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies over the person (Shakespeare & Callaghan 422). Many thought that the specific arrangement of the stars at the moment of their birth determined numerous of their traits, as well as their outlook and health, and also dictated the incidents that would happen in their life. All over the play there are numerous allusions to the sky, planets, stars and the rotation of night and day. These metaphors give a feeling that what comes about to Romeo and Juliet is more essential than ordinary love. The astrophysical aspect heightens their love, linking earthly occurrences with the mechanisms of the cosmos. In this manner Shakespeare expresses the immensity of the feelings of young lovers. From their point of view their love is of astral value. However, some may think of this as insanity, or in Jacques Ferrand’s words, ‘erotomania’ (Shakespeare & Callaghan 403). Although praying to the stars, moon, and the sun raises and boosts the importance of the love of Romeo and Juliet, there is, all through the play, a powerful feeling that ‘fate’ is opposed them. The young lovers are ‘crossed’ or impeded by the stars that dictate their fate. This prognostication of ‘death’ is repeatedly raised all through the play. For instance, in Act 2, in the balcony scene, Romeo summons spoken symbols that depict Juliet as a marvel of the sky, a twinkling star or a furious sun. Although ‘star-crossed’ raises the adverse notion of ‘death’, it also presents symbols that, all through the play, situate the love of Romeo and Juliet on a pedestal, and depict it as something otherworldly and cosmic, divine but fated to be short. The use of prognostication, with consistent mentions of a tragic conclusion and death, elevates the notion of ‘fate’ as a prevailing aspect of the story. The proclamation of the young lovers’ death at the opening of the story, and the repeated allusions to death, create a feeling of certainty of the lovers’ fate; it indicates that the destiny of the lovers is ‘written in the stars’ and hence outside their control. Each of the characters also holds a feeling of imminent death at different parts in the play. When bidding her farewell to Romeo, Juliet cries, “O God, I have an ill-divining soul!/ Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low,/ As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 428). Likewise, before Juliet drinks the sleeping potion she dreams of waking up in the grave without Romeo. The fact that the characters hold some vision of the future means that the future has been predetermined. The notion of ‘fate’ is stressed in the last scene when Rome, prior to his demise, shouts that he will ultimately “shake the yoke of inauspicious stars/ From this world-wearied flesh” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 239), implying that ‘fate’ will ultimately be done with him. Romeo and Juliet are adversaries not because of ‘erotomania’, or ‘unrequited love’, but because of outside forces surrounding them. Because their love is ‘married’, the romance between Romeo and Juliet is inherently social, or not separated from external forces but profoundly entangled in them. This social aspect is fitting to the play as an innately more social form than melodic order. Hence, although the lyrical causalities of fate are the dominant root of the demise of Romeo and Juliet, more narrowly, the occurrence of epidemic-- an actual and current threat to the audiences of Shakespeare—stops Romeo from getting the mail sent to him in his banishment in Mantua (Shakespeare & Callaghan 437). Hence, he was not aware that Juliet’s obvious death the day before her imposed marriage to Paris is nonetheless the outcome of the potion recommended by Friar Lawrence. Nevertheless, more than anything, it is the puzzling resentment of the Capulets and the Montagues that endangered their relationship. Oddly, these families are estranged not by their dissimilarities but by their commonalities. Such, therefore, is an illogical and olden resentment, whose root is never disclosed, that places Romeo and Juliet, in spite of their passion for each other, as adversaries just as it embeds them strongly within, instead of outside, Verona’s social system. Yet, as the Chorus says, Romeo and Juliet cannot endure the ancient hostility between their stubborn families or the power of ‘the stars’, of fate. It is as though Shakespeare tried to emphasize not so much the notion that this tale could have ended with a happily ever after, but instead that it could not; it is regrettable, but inescapable. The audiences of Shakespeare is oriented to assume the lovers’ role from the beginning by the Chorus’s declaration, which reveal that it is the olden resentment between the Capulets and Montagues that is the deadly device of their children’s brutal and early demise, a notion that is eventually supported by Paris: “And pity ‘tis you lived at odds so long” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 184). The remarkable novelty of Shakespeare, although modern audiences ignore this component of the story, is that the story is explicit about the purity and virtuousness of the lovers and the remorse of their parents. Hence, Romeo and Juliet is the story of a fight for self-consciousness and individual liberty, and this story has a tragic arrangement. Nevertheless, the tragic element of this self-consciousness comes not from individual tussles with outside social or natural forces but from the basic awareness that nothing sets a person apart from others completely. Such realization pushes Romeo and Juliet to the knowledge that, if they are to take control of their own lives, they should in some way objectify their uniqueness for themselves, through each other. The romance of Romeo and Juliet is not the tale of two people whose longing to be together is hindered by a “greater power than we contradict” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 425). Instead, it is the tale of two persons who dynamically assert their unique persona, their own liberty, in the sole way that they know of and can, by means of each other. Their romance shows that their uniqueness or individuality is not an enforced, outside need, but the functioning of their self-consciousness and liberty. To express this, they will risk their lives. Shakespeare appears to have been lured to close the scene right now; thus, the following passage: “I hear some noise within. Dear love, adieu” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 425). Yet closing the scene at this very moment would suggest depicting the lovers to be bound by earthly pressures and invasions. For Callaghan, Shakespeare is aware that these invasions do not dictate the destiny of Romeo and Juliet as lovers, and hence he does not end the play abruptly: Juliet says to Romeo, “Stay but a little, I will come again” (Shakespeare & Callaghan 362). Romeo and Juliet get married to emphasize that their shared self-awareness implies controlling their own lives, an additional manifestation of their own freedom (Shakespeare & Callaghan 437): [B]ut come what sorrow can,/ It cannot countervail the exchange of joy/ That one short minute gives me in her sight./ Do thou but close our hands with holy words,/ Then love-devouring death do what he dare;/ It is enough I may but call her mine. Romeo and Juliet are, basically, separating from each other. The relationship does not end, but they are beginning to accept their liberty with each other as their ability to actively separate, with the reality that ‘asserting’ this separation, even in its sad outcomes, is the fundamental bliss of their personal lives. Neither desires the actual death of the other. The actual death of Romeo would in fact be mismatched with the joy of her brand-new liberty. Conclusions Dympna Callaghan demonstrates in her book that Romeo and Juliet are indeed ‘star-crossed lovers’, hindered by their social and familial circumstances, and their deaths are the only way to escape their fates. Yet, the truth is, the young lovers are trying to control their own lives, their own destinies. And their deaths are a symbol of their separation from each other, of claiming their individual freedom. Such is the context of ‘death and stars’. Work Cited. Shakespeare, William & Dympna Callaghan. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Print. 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