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.

Romeo, the murderer

I had the pleasure the night before last of seeing a preview performance of Romeo and Juliet by DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company. This post isn't a review; briefly, it was excellent. This post is about the thoughts it made me think on the way home, particularly about dimensions of the tragedy that I've never seen a performance (even this one) explore.

(Addendum: I had further thoughts soon after. If you're interested, they are here.)

There are two main popular conceptions of R&J. The first is as an idealized love story; the second is as a cautionary tale, or satire of teenage lovers getting carried away with themselves. (The first interpretation is most common in people who've never read the play; the second is most common in people who had cool English teachers and like to feel like they have one over on the first group.) I think the truth isn't in the middle, but at both extremes simultaneously. Part of what makes Romeo and Juliet wonderful is that duality: the love story is beautiful and stupid, which is what makes it tragic and not just unfortunate.

Shakespeare creates this duality in a lot of his plays by subverting his source material, but not contradicting it. R&J draws on sources that have much less sympathy for their reckless, horny teenage protagonists. Shakespeare grants that their decisions are terrible and precipitous, but finds beauty and nobility in their motives. Othello's source is a cautionary tale against miscegenation that doesn't even name its murderous Moor of Venice; Shakespeare makes Othello the noblest Venetian and invents Iago to drive Othello into murderous passion. Hamlet's antecedent is cunning and dutiful; Shakespeare's Hamlet is these things but also conflicted and possibly insane.

Othello and Hamlet are definitive Shakespearean tragic heroes. They are noble figures driven to extremity, and they end their respective plays as whirlwinds of destruction. The audience ends up caught between sympathy and horror for them.

What I think I realized is that Romeo has more in common with Othello and Hamlet than we acknowledge. In fact, we edit it out of performances.

Hardly anyone stages Paris' death anymore. To recap: when Romeo goes to the Capulet's tomb, intending to kill himself next to Juliet, Paris is already there paying his respects to the woman he thought he was going to marry. Paris sees Romeo breaking into the tomb and declares a citizen's arrest. Romeo kills him, but grants Paris' dying wish to be part of the tableau in the last scene.

Everyone but Julian Fellowes cuts Paris' death scene. For one thing, it adds to the number of actors trying to breathe inconspicuously onstage for the last few minutes of the show. For another, there's an idea that it interrupts the flow of the play's climactic sequence. But I would argue that Paris' death only looks extraneous to the play because we're already ignoring or excising the inconvenient context.

We edit it out, I think, in order to preserve an image of Romeo as unambiguously sympathetic and pathetic rather than threatening. We want to see Romeo's fall as a more or less straight line from tragedy to self-destruction. But Romeo's fall isn't about self-destruction, it's about destruction more generally.

Tybalt's death* is just a starting point. He's quick to try to kill himself, prompting Friar Laurence to warn, "Wilt thou slay thyself? And stay thy lady too that lives in thee?" (Answer: yes, yes he will.) Exile only puts him in a state of suspense, and the first provocation (in fairness, it's a big one) sends him charging back towards death. More to my point, he makes it very clear how ready he is to take others down with him.

Romeo immediately suborns the convenient apothecary to a capital crime. (Should we assume the apothecary gets away clean? He could just as easily be among those the prince promises to punish in his final speech.) Moreover, here's how Romeo tells Balthasar to leave him alone at the Capulet tomb:

But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry
In what I further shall intend to do,
By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint
And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs:
The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.

That's him threatening to dismember his friend, and in about the same tone that Hamlet declared, "Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world: Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on," shortly before mostly-accidentally killing Polonius. Romeo goes immediately from this exchange to his confrontation with Paris.

Romeo killing Paris is hardly surprising. Romeo is a powder-keg at this point**. He's been itching to kill someone since Friar Laurence talked him down from killing himself the first time. I think that we should be afraid of Romeo by the end, like we are afraid of Hamlet at his most manic or Othello at his extremity of passion. He has become the explosion that everyone else has warned about since the first act, and maybe we should feel a little relief when he's finally extinguished.

Romeo and Juliet ends with four named corpses on stage, even with the closing abattoir of Hamlet. I think we miss whole dimensions of the tragedy by downplaying these other victims, or by treating Romeo as fundamentally passive in all this destruction. In fact, Romeo starts the play trying to hold himself aloof from the violence in Verona. He ends it not just as a victim, but a participant--driven to it by the thing we hoped would take him out of it. The change in Romeo is why his part of a story is a "tragedy" in the way we use that word in English classes, and not just in the way we use it on the news.

* As some oft-excised lines make clear, Romeo fights Tybalt because he believes manhood requires that of him:

O sweet Juliet,
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate
And in my temper soften'd valour's steel!
...
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!

There's a paper in there about toxic masculinity, but I'll leave it to someone more enthusiastic to write.

** There is definitely a gunpowder motif in R&J. I'm surprised I've never seen it on the lists of obvious Shakespearean motifs, alongside poison in Hamlet and blood in Macbeth.

Memorial Day Weekend

It's been a week. It being Tuesday now, the week I'm referring to would be last week, more or less. Going backwards, yesterday to Saturday my parents were here, so I was showing them around my stomping grounds in the Maryland area. (When last they had visited me here, more than a year ago, I had done hardly any stomping at all, so there was no stomped ground to show them. Now, on the other hand, when my parents want to know what I've been doing with my life, I can at least show them where you can get really good nachos.) Then, on Friday, was Girlfriend's 8th-grade class's production of Romeo and Juliet, which in spite of the odds was something many people could justly be proud of.*

We cleaned over the week, so the house is simultaneously comfortable and slightly alien. Things which I am used to seeing "around" have been put "away," which in this case could refer to either a place where they usually belong or simply a place where I would not think to look for them.

As is often the case after a long weekend, everything feels "off." Today is a Monday that is not a Monday; it is a Monday three days before Friday, a two-sided triangle. We have entered the non-Euclidian workweek.

* Protip: When watching live middle school theater,** sit closer to the front than you would for the same show performed by adults. Remember that the actors are smaller.
** Protip: When watching recorded middle school theater, drink.

My Shakespeare is shrinking!

Well, shame on me, first off, for delaying last weekend's post until the middle of this week. I should know better.

I've kept busy, if perhaps not on the things I should be busy with. Girlfriend (a while ago, actually) got it into her head to produce Romeo and Juliet with her middle school, and I consequently got it into my head to go through the script and cut it down into a middle-school-manageable size. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, and I've spent a good bit of the last few days reading, cutting, and splicing the first three acts. Not rewriting--she was vehemently opposed, and it is probably for the best. Just presuming to cut the play in half is intoxicating enough in its boldness.

It's been a while since I had read Romeo and Juliet (I won't say how long) and it is better than I had remembered--not that I remembered it badly. It seems fashionable to knock R&J, perhaps precisely because it is the preeminently popular Shakespeare play of this generation, but I think it deserves its laurels. Re-reading it, and needing to really get a sense of the scenes and the lines, is forcing me to appreciate it.

On one hand, we have those who take R&J as a great love story. On the other hand we have the scoffers (not scoffing at the text, but at the people on the first hand) who take it as a deconstruction, pointing out that Romeo and Juliet are stupid teenagers who get entirely carried away and die in a hormonal conflagration that takes four other people with them.

I think the beauty of the play is that it's all of those things. I have insisted and will continue to insist that Romeo and Juliet's romance is a good and beautiful thing--or at least that it would be if the context for the romance weren't a murderous powder keg. The play also deconstructs romance, but without denying its potential beauty. Romeo and Juliet's love is simultaneously poetic and chemical, profound and superficial, innocent and lustful, redemptive and annihilative. The play is both a cautionary tale and a celebration.

It's actually misleading to say that Romeo and Juliet get carried away by their emotions. They do--oh, they definitely do--but so does everyone else. To dismiss Romeo and Juliet (or Juliet and Romeo, for the sake of variety) as overemotional teenagers misses the point. The play seems to say that they get carried away, not because they are adolescents, but because they are humans. That is the tragedy of humanity, and the tragedy of the play only comes about because so many major players act on their emotions at exactly the wrong time.

Juliet and Romeo's emotional vices are love, which has the potential to be a good thing, and despair, which--given their ultimate situation--is understandable. The emotions that rule their elders--spite, rage, and cowardice--are less forgivable.

Let's take a moment to consider how almost everyone who should be helping Juliet and Romeo screws the play up by being emotional.

First and most obviously, the anger driving the Capulet-Montague feud seems to touch everyone except Benvolio. Tybalt is supposed to be Juliet's friend, but he's a ball of hate from curtain-up to curtain-down. Mercutio is not much better. His anger on Romeo's behalf provokes him to escalate Tybalt's insults into violence, and where Mercutio draws a sword in Romeo's cause is where things actually start going downhill.

The next unforced error by a grownup goes to Lord Capulet. The problem isn't that he is so tone-deaf as to arrange Juliet's marriage on the afternoon of her cousin's death. The problem is that when Juliet objects he becomes enraged. His anger takes everyone else in the scene aback. His plan to lift his daughter's spirits becomes an ultimatum: obey utterly or be disowned. For fear of his anger, Lady Capulet will not even discuss delaying the wedding. Thus Juliet has to replace her original plan with haste.

And Friar Laurence--oh, Friar Laurence. Here's a man who knows what he's about, for the most part. In the safety of his cell he can lay a pretty good plan--heck, his plan for Juliet works just fine in Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe there's nothing he could have done to save Romeo's life, but he is there in the crypt when Juliet wakes up. He should be protecting her--she could survive. In fact, Laurence previously stopped Romeo from stabbing himself--maybe he could do the same service for poor Juliet?* But no--in Juliet's moment of extreme need he hears people coming and flees. His betrayal is so sudden and banal it must come from sheer terror. We never saw this weakness in him before because we never saw him in immediate personal danger. In the end he can give good advice, but the pressure of a do-or-die moment breaks him, and the flight reflex overwhelms all his well-intentioned schemes.

With these people around them, it really would have taken more than a cold shower to save Romeo or Juliet. A bucket of cold water in the face of Mercutio, Lord Capulet, or Friar Laurence at a critical moment could have saved their lives.

* He does exactly this in Act 4--which I had forgotten, having only gotten through the first three acts as of writing yesterday... I don't think Friar Laurence's official policy on this is "Everybody gets one."