Perfect hamartia: Romeo and Juliet's interlocking tragic flaws

Continued mulling on Romeo and Juliet since my last post has led me to a new conclusion, and maybe a less contentious one. Like I said before, R&J is dualistic, so now that I've argued for the ugly and frightening aspects of the story it's time to find something more traditionally romantic there. But I get ahead of myself.

I seized on the idea that Romeo (and Juliet; I'll get to her) is a tragic hero, following the pattern of other tragic heroes. This has certain requirements, and certain implications. As a baby English lit student, I learned that all tragic heroes, from King Oedipus onward, must have a hamartia--a tragic flaw. The hero's downfall must come from an element of the hero's personality, and for maximum effect it should be connected to whatever virtue propelled them upward in the first place.

R&J is a story with two tragic heroes. What are their fatal flaws? I went looking for Romeo's, but Juliet's came to me first. Juliet's tragic flaw, which makes her great and destroys her, is her fidelity.

She has this virtue from the start of the play. We see her first as an obedient daughter, promising to make a go of falling in love with Count Paris, since her mother asked her to, "But no more deep will I endart mine eye than your consent gives strength to make it fly." What more could the parent of a 13-year-old ask for?

Once Juliet has married Romeo* her fidelity transfers to him. Romeo immediately tests whether Juliet is more faithful to her family or her new husband by killing her cousin. In fact, while Juliet laments Tybalt's death and has strong words about what this implies about Romeo's character, she stops short of wishing Romeo any ill. When the nurse declares, "Shame come to Romeo!" Juliet recoils, and launches an epic tirade in Romeo's defense.** She makes it very clear that Romeo supersedes any other allegiance she may have had.

Juliet will take extraordinary measures to remain true to her husband, Romeo. It's treated as a heroic trait, and it's the one Lord Montague acknowledges in the final scene:

For I will raise her statue in pure gold;
That while Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.

But, like I said, fidelity is also Juliet's tragic flaw. It is what kills her. After Romeo is banished, Juliet has an out: she could forget her one-day marriage to Romeo and marry Paris. She explicitly refuses--she will do any number of awful things, including kill herself, but betraying Romeo is not an option.

And in the end, finding Romeo dead, Juliet follows her husband into death. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this is not mandatory. One could imagine a character enduring the same traumatic scene and allowing herself to be led away, devastated but alive, by the well-meaning Friar Laurence. One could imagine a character doing that, but not Juliet.

On the other hand, when we meet Romeo at the start of the play, fidelity is not among his virtues or his flaws. In fact, if he had Juliet's sense of devotion the play would be called Romeo and Rosaline and who knows if anything interesting would have happened? No, what Romeo has in spades is reckless passion. It's what leads him to pine after Rosaline, and what leads him to forget about her. It leads him to approach Juliet, to sneak into her garden, and to agree to marry her the next day. Romeo is the type to completely commit to whatever feels right, for as long as the emotion carries him.

And yes, this reckless passion leads to worse things than a shotgun marriage.*** Once Tybalt has killed his friend, Romeo has no sooner figured out how he feels about it than he engages Tybalt in mortal combat. Likewise, when he hears that Juliet is dead, his first impulse is to go to her and die; he forms and executes a plan with astonishing alacrity. Romeo hardly pauses enough to say, like Macbeth, "This deed I'll do before this purpose cool." Of course if he had hesitated, he could have lived, and so could several other characters. But it's not in Romeo's nature to separate feeling from doing.

With that depressing assessment, I remind myself that I opened this post by claiming I had found something romantic in all of this. Here it comes: R&J presents passion and fidelity as two halves of romantic love. Romeo and Juliet each have one without the other. (I've talked about how inconstant Act I Romeo is, but consider Juliet's first scene too. She is all duty and passive obedience, without even a thrill of anticipation about possibly falling in love with the allegedly admirable Paris.) It is only when Romeo and Juliet meet that they learn their missing aspect.

In their first exchange, Juliet presents herself as an inert painted saint; Romeo introduces passion to the image, and in doing so, to her. When they meet at her balcony, they are both overflowing with passion, but Juliet teaches Romeo fidelity (and a little about delayed gratification). When she says,

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

she isn't just quibbling over metaphors. She has Romeo dead to rights. But he is willing to embrace fidelity, at least with regard to her--and she embraces passion toward him, but not before she feels it cracking the boundaries of the merely dutiful person she had been. "I am too fond," she says. "I should have been more strange."

There is a moment, once both vows and affection are exchanged, when there love is complete and nearly perfect:

And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

Romeo's passion joined with Juliet's fidelity seems capable, like this blog post, of continuing forever, if only for that moment. But time proceeds, the moment passes, and the tragedy begins from that high point.  

* Not before. Recall that she arrests the sexual momentum of the balcony scene with--as Elizabethan virtue would require--a marriage ultimatum. She does not meet Romeo again until the wedding.

** Specifically, she says:

Blister'd be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame:
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit;
For 'tis a throne where honour may be crown'd
Sole monarch of the universal earth.
O, what a beast was I to chide at him!
....
Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?
But, wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?
That villain cousin would have kill'd my husband:
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring;
Your tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.
My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain;
And Tybalt's dead, that would have slain my husband:
All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?

*** It's easy to feel like Juliet's defining virtue isn't a vice, except by accident, while Romeo's defining vice isn't a virtue, except by accident. That may be fair. I will point out that Romeo's recklessness might have been called courage if the story worked out differently, and without it none of the good things in the play would have happened either. And given the consequences of Juliet's choices, it would be just as fair to call her fidelity "reckless" as Romeo's passion.