Relative Immaturity of Romeo and Juliet - Essay Example

"Too Soon Marr'd: The Question of Maturity in Romeo and Juliet" Shakespeare's 1595 play Romeo and Juliet is unique in many ways. Not only does it signal his first foray into the tragedy genre, it is the first and only time that he uses mere children as his protagonists. This first tragedy is an experimental one, leaving behind the Aristotelian traditions of focusing on the doings of kings and high aristocracy, and themes of wars and issues of the state for child protagonists and the theme of love (Dickey 65). One wonders at Shakespeare's choice, since he deliberately changed Juliet's age from his source texts from between sixteen and eighteen (Franson 333) to two weeks shy of fourteen. Close analysis reveals several effects of this choice on our reading of the play, as well as the playwright's possible motives. On one level, the tragedy results from rash actions and haste. Within a record twenty-fours hours, Romeo, formerly madly in love with Rosaline, meets and is "alike bewitched" by Juliet (I.v.275), with whom he vows eternal and unflinching love and gets married, despite the otherwise forbidding fact of their families being engulfed in "ancient grudge" (0.15). In the second day Romeo in revenge kills Juliet's violent cousin Tybalt and is banished from Verona, pausing only to consummate his "star-cross'd" marriage. On the third day Juliet, in despair at being forced to marry Count Paris, feigns death, leading only a day later to not only her real death, but that of Romeo and Paris. Romeo is fickle and rash like many other Shakespearean lovers (see for example Orlando in As You Like It, 1599), and his lack of maturity might well be complicit in the tragedy. Not only does he fall in and out of love from one minute to the next (II.iv.168-9), he is also unable to make sane decisions and is easily led and influenced by the actions and words of others. On Mercutio's prompting he agrees to go to a forbidden ball; on Juliet's prompting he rushes to arrange their marriage, and on Tybalt's slaying of Mercutio he is quick to forget "the reason [he has] to love [him]" and commits murder. When he is consequently banished, he is ready to commit suicide without considering the consequences or options, stopped only by the Nurse's admonition: "Stand up, stand up! stand and you be a man" (III.iii.87-88). In response to Romeo's "sudden haste" to marry his enemy, Friar Laurence advises, "Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast." (88-9), but at the crucial moment when Romeo finds Juliet seemingly dead in Capulet's tomb, without counsel he rushes into suicide, when had he waited he would have led Juliet away, both alive. Dickey points out that "among the imperfections of youth Aristotle lists 'strong passions', doing things excessively and vehemently" (87). Juliet on the other hand is precocious despite her fourteen years. Brown, in her article, "Juliet's Wooing of Romeo" suggests that despite her youth, Juliet is "a multifaceted character who transcends Romeo in maturity, complexity, insight, and rhetorical dexterity" (333). The play's break-neck speed is partly due to Juliet's impatience to be free from her parents' tyranny. In Elizabethan society, women were the property of the man, first the father, then the husband, and in default brothers or uncles. As the property of her father, and underage, her will is subject to her father, whose will it is to marry her to Paris: "And you be mine, I'll give you to my friend/ And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets," (III.v.190-1). Juliet's maturity is evident in her absolute rebellion and rejection of her parent's will. Not only is she mistress of dissemblance in her double-entendres over Tybalt and Romeo, she also revolts openly at her father's dictatorial "decree": "I pray you tell my lord and father, madam/I will not marry yet, and when I do, I swear It shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate/Rather than Paris" (III.v.20-2). Even from her first meeting with Romeo, her thought is on marriage: "If he be married/ my grave is like to be my wedding bed" (lines 250-1). It is either youthful lack of reflection or singular disregard for authority why she ignores the implications of marrying a Montague, even as she recognizes the impropriety of her feelings for him (II.i 84). Juliet is mature enough to recognize the "rashunadvis'dsudden" nature of their love (II.i.160), and the importance of time in mellowing "this bud of love" into "a beauteous flower" (II.i.164), yet she herself urges Romeo to move in rash haste in not only swearing his love but also to marry her straight away (II.i.185-90), anticipating elopement (she plans to "follow [him] throughout the world" -- line 190), as this would not only provide her "happy nights to happy days" but also independence from her father's (and mother's) tyranny (Brown, 333). Apart from her will to belong to Romeo rather than her father or Paris, we see Juliet's eagerness to marry as more and eagerness to have sex: "O I have bought the mansion of a love/ But not possess'd it, and though I am sold/ Not yet enjoy'd" (III.ii.26-28). Later, on news of his banishment mere hours after their wedding, she bemoans: "But I a maid die maiden-widowed/ Come cords, come Nurse. I'll to my wedding bed, And Death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead! (135-6). It seems as if her ensuing grief is not so much over the person of Romeo but the lost promise of sexual fulfillment of their nave passion. However, the prologue and the Prince frame the personal tragedy in a larger social context. On the one hand, the youth of the protagonists makes them subject to the counsel and will of adults in the play, and Shakespeare demonstrates how it is largely this unwise adult counsel, more than their age, that contributes to their untimely deaths. When Juliet says she has no thoughts of marriage her mother rejoins "Well, think of marriage now" (II.ii.68), leaving Juliet little choice in the matter. Juliet's eagerness to marry and have sex are partly due to the Nurse's lewd influence, as she constantly sows in Juliet the seed of desire and fill her mind with thoughts of sex and womanhood: "Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days" (II.ii.100). Mercutio's advice to Romeo about love is equally sexually oriented: "If love be rough with you, be rough with love /Prick love for pricking and you beat love down" (II.iv.27-8). Romeo, by Mercutio's counsel, accompanies them to the forbidden Capulet feast against his will; this inspires Tybalt resentment and makes him swear to "strike him dead" (II.iv.175). The resulting challenge (further egged on by Mercutio) has for its issue the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, and the banishment of Romeo. Nor is Friar Laurence free from culpability in the young lover's tragedy: instead of using Romeo's banishment and Juliet's impending marriage as the occasion to reveal their teenagers' marriage, he concocts the poison plot that leads to double fatality. Fearing discovery, the Friar cowardly deserts Juliet when she needs him most (V.iii.153-160). Juliet's desperate act of feigning death which escalates into the triples deaths at the end, is directly caused by her being deserted by the adults on whom she relies for "counsel" and "comfort". Not brooking her remonstrations, Capulet insensitively orders her: "fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next/To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church/Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither." (III.v.153-5); her mother rejects her: "Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee" (III.v.202-3); and when in despair she turns to the Nurse with "Comfort me, counsel me!" (III.v.208), her last succor replies, "I think it best you marry'd with the County/ O he's a lovely gentleman!" (III.v.217-8). In her woeful lines to Friar Laurence: "O shut the door! and when thou hast done so/ Come weep with me" (IV.i.44-5) Juliet reveals that she is in dire need of the "counsel and comfort" that her parents and the Nurse have failed to give her. Friar Laurence is her last hope on this regard. See how she lunges at his desperate solution, even if she has misgivings of its efficacy: "Give me, give me! O tell not me of fear!" (line 121). Even at the point of drinking the "dram" she longs for adult comfort (IV.iii.18). On the other hand, it is the family feud that is responsible for the secret wedding, Tybalt's challenge and the resulting deaths of himself and Mercutio, as well as Romeo's banishment. Harold Bloom suggests that love is an agency of youth, powerful enough to overcome the hatred of the warring families (27), but Mercutio's slaying under Romeo's arms (III.i) is the first signifier that the latter's love for Juliet isn't enough to pacify the "ancient grudge" of the two families "Which but their children's end nought could remove" (0.10). The conclusion of the matter is aptly given by the Prince, in whom Shakespeare's indictment of the culpability of the parents is mouthed: "See what a scourge is laid upon your hate" (V.iii.293). We can only conjecture what would have been different had Romeo and Juliet not been so young. Firstly, the Elizabethan audience and those through the ages wouldn't have been so scandalized at the impropriety of the (both forced and voluntary) wedding of a girl of thirteen. Capulet protests that Juliet is too young to marry, and would be "too soon marr'd" by such a state (I.ii.9-13), yet he has no qualms to compel her to marry a man who has not even wood her less than two days later. It also raises the question of what kind of man is Paris to want to wed a thirteen year old. In a way, their untimely ends provides catharsis for this abrogation of societal norms. Franson comments that "Attention to [Juliet's] premature introduction to adulthood shifts much of the blame for the disaster to the Capulets, Paris, the Nurse, the Friar, adults who pressure and manipulate Juliet into marriage while she is still a child" (244). In addition, an older Romeo and Juliet would have to bear the responsibilities of their own grief, since the family feud would still weigh on their love. Romeo would have (supposedly) been in a position to elope with Juliet, like Desdemona (Othello, 1603-4), who eloped with a Moor against her father's wishes. This of course is assuming that Romeo wouldn't have fallen in love with another girl "more fair than she", if age wouldn't improve his propensity to be a "waverer" as Friar Laurence calls him, and assuming that their passion in the absence of the urgency of youthful folly and passion wouldn't fizzle. More importantly, they would have been able to make their own decisions and not lean on the well-meaning but ill-hatched counsel of Friar Lawrence. In essence, while many questions are raised by Shakespeare's unique choice of child protagonists for his tragicomedy, the age and relative immaturity of Romeo and Juliet provides him an opportunity to make a commentary on the dangers of premature marriage (Franson, 244), as well as on precocious girls/women. Shakespeare uses young characters in his play to heighten the link between their tragic fates and the rivalry between their families, and ultimately moves the play from a small-scaled tragedy to a macrocosmic indictment on society. Works Cited Bloom, Harold, ed. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. Brown, Carolyn E. "Juliet's Taming of Romeo." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36.2 (1996): 333+. Dickey, Franklin M. Not Wisely but Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1957. Franson, J. Karl. "'Too Soon Marr'd': Juliet's Age as Symbol in Romeo and Juliet." Papers on Language & Literature 32.3 (1996): 244+. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. (1595). Richard Hosley, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954. ___________. The Works of William Shakespeare Gathered into One Volume. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Read More