Chapter 1　The Most “Lamentable Comedy” of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare’s Ironic Vision

I.

An Impure Dramatist Playwrights can be called “pure” or “impure” dramatists, depending on whether or not they write purely one single sub-genre of drama. Some famous classical dramatists were thus “pure” because they chose to write either purely tragedies or purely comedies. When we say there were three great tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and one great comedian (Aristophanes) in the Greek Period while there were two remarkable comedians (Plautus and Terence) and one remarkable tragedian (Seneca) in the Roman Period, we are suggesting this sense of purity. The classical dramatists’ pure devotion to either Thalia (the Muse of comedy) or Melpomene (the Muse of tragedy) is an obvious fact although we cannot fully understand why they should stick to such “purity.” Some later playwrights followed their purist tendency, but others simply ignored it. In the neoclassical France, for instance, Moliere wrote comedies only while Corneille wrote both comedies and tragedies. Yet, pure dramatists have definitely become very rare since the classical times. Many distinguished comedians (e.g. Ben Jonson) and tragedians (e.g. Racine) of later times actually attempted both genres. In the case of Shakespeare, we do not even know whether we ought to call him a comedian or a tragedian as he excels in both types of plays. Shakespeare’s impurity involves another complicated matter. He is impure not only in the sense that he is not devoted purely to a single sub-genre of drama but also in the sense that a play by him is often not purely a comedy or a tragedy no matter what sub-genre the play’s title may indicate. We commonly tell people that Shakespeare wrote three types of drama (history, comedy, and tragedy) or four types (the three plus romance), and scholars have been classifying or discussing his entire oeuvre on the basis of this understanding. However, we know at the same time that Shakespeare seldom observed the classical or neoclassical rule of the so-called “purity of the genres.” That is why people like Dryden and Johnson had to defend his mixing tragic and comic scenes, and today we can still debate on the use of “comic relief” in his tragedies. Different reasons can be given, of course, for Shakespeare’s impurity. We may attribute it, for instance, to what Neander/ Dryden calls his “largest and most comprehensive soul” (Dryden 149), thinking that purity is narrowness; Shakespeare’s soul is too great to allow anything to contain only one single element. Or we may follow Johnson to assert that Shakespeare is “the poet of nature”; his drama is “the mirror of life”; his scenes, therefore, contain both the comic and the tragic in life (Johnson 208-9). But here I am not to build my argument on any previous authority. In this essay I will contend that Shakespeare’s impurity is a result of his ironic vision─a vision which enables him to see the necessary co-existence of opposites, and a vision which finds its most vivid expression in the play about Romeo and Juliet.

II.

A Play“Without”the Play We all know that the-play-within-the-play is a conventional dramatic device often employed by Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to further the central action and sometimes to help develop the central theme of the play. The best-known Shakespeare’s play within the play is, of course, the one Hamlet uses to “catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.601).1 But no less noticeable is the Peter Quince play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This play, as Peter Quince tells us, is titled “The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe” (1.2.11-12). It is presented in the Dream, as we see, to serve as an entertaining interlude to the celebration of the three wedded couples. If we probe deeper, we will find this play-within-the-play not only provides an amusing finale to an evening of delight but also echoes the pronounced themes of the Dream. For, despite the rustics’ bungling enactment, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe surely demonstrates that “the course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.34) and, worse still, death “did lay siege to” true love, making it “momentany as a sound,/Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,/Brief as the lightning in the collied night” (1.1.142-5). If “The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe” is a theme-echoing play within the Dream, then The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Juliet (as the good quarto edition of 1599 titles the play) is a play without (“outside of”) the Dream to echo the same themes. For, like Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet are crossed in love through familial hindrance and they meet their tragic fate through rash misinterpretation. In fact, the play of Romeo and Juliet corresponds to the play of Pyramus and Thisbe not only in theme but also in tone. In his lecture on Romeo and Juliet, Northrop Frye says that the play has more wit and sparkle than any other tragedy he knows, that “we may instinctively think of it as a kind of perverted comedy,” and that it might be described “as a kind of comedy turned inside out” (33). Then he asks, “If we tried to turn the play we have inside out, back into comedy, what would it be like?” His own answer is: We’d have a world dominated by dream fairies, including a queen, and the moon instead of the sun; a world where the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe has turned into farce; a world where feuding and brawling noblemen run around in the dark, unable to see each other. In short, we’d have a play very like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ...(33) Indeed, Romeo and Juliet can be treated as a mock-serious play because it has too much comic wit and sparkle in it. Just as the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe can be turned into farce by the rustics’ perverted performance, so the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet can be performed in the manner of a farcical comedy, too. In this connection, we can conclude that A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a play- within-the-play (the Peter Quince play of Pyramus and Thisbe) and a play-without-the-play (the Shakespeare play of Romeo and Juliet), both of which can be performed comically as they are similar in theme and tone. III. A Successful, Bad Play? Talking of performance, we know Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been very popular on the stage and on the screen. But the success of presentation does not engender high esteem among professional critics of the play. Frequently, in fact, the play has been thought of as still immature or even bad, although as Shakespeare’s tenth play and third tragedy (to follow the scholarship of Sir Edmund Chambers) it can be counted as one of the three masterpieces (the other two being Richard II and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to establish “the first high crest” of Shakespeare’s poetic career (Coghill 11). Two drawbacks have often been pointed out to account for the failure of the play. One is the lack of that rhetorical control which marks Shakespeare’s great period, and the other is the improper use of mere chance to determine the destiny of the hero and the heroine (Kermode 1055). Indeed, abundant rhetoric─especially the stilted language of Petrarchan conceits along with the wordplay─has flooded the play. Granting that Shakespeare’s audiences in the early 1590s really “expected characters on the stage to talk in high-sounding phrases and to make long speeches on every occasion, full of rhetorical devices, stuffed with mythology and bookish similes” (Harrison, Introducing, 166), in many cases the rhetoric has really been purchased at the cost of such elements as logic, reason, propriety and truth which normally go with tragedy. As will be discussed below, we can enjoy such rhetorical language only if we can regard it not as a serious tragedy but as a frolicsome play. As to the matter of chance, we feel A. C. Bradley is right in saying that in most of his tragedies Shakespeare “allows to `chance’ or `accident’ an appreciable influence at some point in the action” (9). But, Bradley also tells us, “any large admission of chance into the tragic sequence would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe” (10). So, in his opinion, Shakespeare really uses chance “very sparingly” (10). In actuality, the phrase “very sparingly” does not apply to Romeo and Juliet. In this play many things can be imputed to chance. According to Nevill Coghill, Romeo and Juliet are battered by successive blows of fortune : It chances that her only love is sprung from her only hate, it chances that Mercutio is killed by Tybalt when Romeo, with the best intentions, comes between them, and Mercutio is hurt under his arm, it chances that the Friar’s letters to Romeo are not delivered, it chances that Romeo reaches the tomb a moment before Juliet awakens from her drug, and takes his own life thinking her dead, it chances that Juliet is left alone with her lover, his lips still warm, and there is no one to stay her from stabbing herself. (16) To these we may add: it chances that the servant who is sent to invite the Capulet clan to the family feast meets Romeo on the way and unwittingly asks Romeo to read the list for him, thus giving Romeo a chance to know that Rosaline is among the invited, and thus making Romeo determined to attend the feast; and it also chances that Juliet’s profession of love at the window is overheard by Romeo, thus speeding their mutual love and speeding up their tragic end. If too much chance is bad for tragedy, it is not necessarily so for comedy. In a footnote Bradley adds that “the tricks played by chance often form a principle part of the comic action” (10). We can agree to this idea. That is why one critic can claim that the final scenes of Romeo and Juliet, although tragic in outcome, are comic by nature inasmuch as everything hinges on accidents of timing” (Rozett 154). And that is also why another critic can remind us that “many critics of the play have found its structure flawed in the way in which, in its first half, it seems to develop like a comedy, and then, in the second half, hustles towards tragedy by the stringing together of improbable accidents and coincidences” (Brennan 52). From critical opinion like this we can plainly see that we must look at the play’s plot structure in the light of comedy if we want to appreciate it well and judge it right. If we insist on looking at it from the perspective of tragedy, our conclusion will always be close to this: ...the deficiency of the tragic patterns that are clearly inherent in Romeo and Juliet is sometimes ignored in the process of overpraising the play. Indeed, the vast popularity of the play with audiences in Shakespeare’s time (four quarto editions before the First Folio), down to this very day, as well as some delightful poetry and tightly woven dramatic suspense, are not to be ignored. It has many moments of fine melodrama, which would not have been bad had Shakespeare meant his play to be a melodrama. But the play seems to have aspired for more (“fatal loins,” “star-cross’d lovers,” “death-mark’d love”). These expectations, however, fail to materialize. With the unfolding of the action it becomes clear that the very foundations of tragedy, fate and human insight, are here replaced by fortuitousness and ignorance. (Oz 136-7) Aside from the two above-mentioned drawbacks (too much rhetoric in language and too much chance in plot), as a tragedy Romeo and Juliet also suffers criticism for lack of logic or reason in action. One critic, for instance, thinks it strange that the rival houses have mutual friends. Mercutio, Montague Romeo’s close acquaintance, is an invited guest at the Capulets’ ball. Stranger still, so is Romeo’s cruel lady, Rosaline, who in the invitation is addressed as Capulet’s cousin. It is odd that Romeo’s love for her, since she was a Capulet, had given him no qualms on the score of the feud. When Romeo is persuaded to go gate-crashing to the ball because Rosaline will be there, there is no talk at all of its being a hazardous undertaking. Safety will require, if ever so much, no more than a mask. On the way to the ball, as talk is running gaily, there is still no mention of danger involved. Indeed, the feud is almost a dead letter so far. The son of the Montague does not know what the Capulet daughter looks like, nor she what he is like. The traditional hatred survives only in one or two high-spirited, hot-blooded scions on either side, and in the kitchen-folk. (Charlton 56) Another critic reminds us that no original cause is assigned to the ridiculous street brawl and he questions: “How do Sampson and Gregory come to be wearing swords and bucklers since they seem to be neither gentlemen retainers nor hired bravoes of the house, but lower domestics and clowns absolute?” (Harbage 140). For a third critic, it is inconceivable that with Tybalt hardly buried, and Juliet weeping for him, they should urge Paris’ suit for Juliet, and Capulet “has shaken off the mourning uncle and turned jovial, roguish father-in-law in a trice” (Granville-Barker 32). For me, it is simply absurd that Capulet should send a servant unable to read the list to invite the guests listed, that the apothecary should sell Romeo the poison, not fearing death penalty, just after the exchange of a few words, and that the Capulets should leave their vault so unguarded that Romeo, Paris, Friar Laurence and others apparently can come and go freely. The lack of logic or reason in action, as some critics have noticed, is often the result of Shakespeare’s trying to speed up the action by compressing the time over which the story stretches. In all earlier versions of the story, it is observed, Romeo’s wooing is prolonged over weeks before the secret wedding; then, after the wedding, there is an interval of three or four months before the slaying of Tybalt; and Romeo’s exile lasts from Easter until a short time before mid-September when the marriage with Paris was at first planned to take place. (Charlton 54) But in this Shakespearean play all this is “pressed into three or four days” (Charlton 54). No wonder that we feel “Romeo has hardly dropped from the balcony before Lady Capulet is in her daughter’s room” (Granville-Barker 33), and the travel between Verona and Mantua seems as easy as the travel between the Capulet house and Friar Laurence’s cell, or as short as the travel from the public street to Capulet’s orchard. If we wish to dwell on Shakespeare’s illogical or unreasonable arrangement of time and action in Romeo and Juliet, we can surely think out many other examples. And if we wish to evaluate the play as a serious tragedy, this lack of logic or reason is certainly another shortcoming. However, if we can judge this play as a comedy, we will be able to overlook this fault. For, after all, comedy is associated with “mirth, ” “levity,” “the sunny malice of a faun,” not with “profundity,” “gravity,” “density of involvement,” “earnestness” (Merchant 3).

Chapter 1　The Most “Lamentable Comedy” of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare’s Ironic Vision

I.

An Impure Dramatist Playwrights can be called “pure” or “impure” dramatists, depending on whether or not they write purely one single sub-genre of drama. Some famous classical dramatists were thus “pure” because they chose to write either purely tragedies or purely comedies. When we say there were three great tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and one great comedian (Aristophane...

Preface
Chapter 1　The Most “Lamentable Comedy” of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare’s Ironic Vision
Chapter 2　Kingship and Counterfeit: Shakespeare’s Deconstructionist Vision in Henry IV
Chapter 3　Signification and Equivocation: Shakespeare’s Semiotic Vision in Macbeth
Chapter 4　The “Strange Eruption” in Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Psychoanalytic Vision
Chapter 5　The Jew and the Moor: Shakespeare’s Racial Vision
Chapter 6　The Two Lears: Shakespeare’s Humanist Vision of Nature
Chapter 7　The Nietzschean and Foucauldean Prospero: Shakespeare’s Vision of Power

Preface
Chapter 1　The Most “Lamentable Comedy” of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare’s Ironic Vision
Chapter 2　Kingship and Counterfeit: Shakespeare’s Deconstructionist Vision in Henry IV
Chapter 3　Signification and Equivocation: Shakespeare’s Semiotic Vision in Macbeth
Chapter 4　The “Strange Eruption” in Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Psychoanalytic Vision
Chapter 5　The Jew and the Moor: Shakespeare’s Racial Vision
Chapter 6　The Two Lears: Shakespeare’s Humanist Vision of Nature
...