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.

One definitely good thing, one possibly terrible thing

At the end of this week I'll be back to Seattle for... something or other. I dunno. I let Girlfriend handle these things.

Actually I'm more on top of my social schedule than usual at the moment (I bought a planner!) and I am well aware that my illustrious friends Bryan and Katie are getting married (to each other, no less) the Saturday after next. So I will be heading there to congratulate them, and also to catch Bryan's last performance in a universally praised The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not every week you get to see a live romantic comedy where one of the actors actually gets married at the end.

To temper the joy you are probably feeling at this moment, I choose this moment to reveal that I am currently investigating the possibility that my new house has bed bugs. I hope it proves to be otherwise, but after finding three small bug bites in a line across my stomach today, I've laid down tape at the edge of the beds in hope--no, not in hope, but fear--of catching a few as they go about their vile business. No, I do not hope to find bedbugs--and God knows the neighborhood is rife with other suspects--but if they are here my malice toward them is endless.

The good news seems to be, at least, that some of the more extreme bed bug remedies, i.e., arson and seppuku, are no longer recommended.

We shall see, and hopefully we shall sort it out quickly (as these things go).

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."

On villainy

Last night I watched the 1996 movie version of The Crucible, which prompted me to read parts of the play. Girlfriend's edition of The Crucible has something that I think was missing from whatever edition I (think I) read back in high school: long digressions by Arthur Miller on the characters and his research. While my reading of plays is admittedly limited, I don't know of anything to parallel The Crucible for the length, depth, or digressiveness of its character descriptions. When Reverend Hale comes on the scene, for example, Miller dispatches the character's physical description in one sentence, his history and personality in four more, and then goes on for three additional pages about the idea of the Devil as a political tool.

But in the spirit of such digressions, I'm using this as an excuse to talk about something else. The very first character description in The Crucible set me thinking in this particular direction: it was the description of Reverend Parris, that "In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him." (On the subject of that "very little good," the text is silent; we learn instead about the bad rest of him.) It got me thinking about the construction of good villains.

Parris isn't the villain of The Crucible, but he doesn't come off well, and Miller makes no effort to soften the blow. It is a problem, I think; I believe I am against the portrayal of evil people with no good at all in them. This isn't to say that a work of art should contort itself to show a glimmer of goodness in every evil character, but to look behind the curtain and see that Miller saw nothing positive in him gives me the sense that his conception of the character was lacking.

Oh, yes, pick a fight with Arthur Miller, why don't I?

Well it's not really about him, but this mostly reminded me that there has been something good, or at the very least pitiably human, in every villain who has really affected me. Sometimes it is a very small thing, but it creates depth--I would go so far as to say that it allows horror.

As is often the case, I go to movies for my examples. I first noticed this effect in the 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma, in the character of Charlie Prince; he was violent, sadistic, thoroughly amoral, and loyal with a purity that touched on innocence. I thought at the time that it was the ability to be hurt that made him stick in my mind, and that was part of it, but not all.

As I said, it allows horror. A villain who is merely a force is immune to judgment, like a natural disaster. We need the glimmer of good in order to register that it is a human doing the villainous deeds in a story.

A good villain is both evil and imposing (with regard to the protagonists). The necessary opposite faces of these elements are good and pathos. Without them a villain is hollow from behind.

Hence we have Darth Vader's paternal impulses and physical disfigurement. Hence we have Heath Ledger's Joker unconsciously tonguing his scars. (I search my memory for some sign of good in him, and can only think of his rationalizations. He claims to be seeking after some sort of truth; contrast with Bane in the following movie, who accomplishes similar kinds of terror but with explicitly sadistic intent.)

"What about Iago?" a certain sort of person might challenge. "He is evil without good or pathos, and considered to be the greatest villain ever set down."

"I disagree," I would say to this imaginary person who I created for the sole purpose of disagreeing with him. I would patiently explain how it is the mystery of Iago's motivation, not its absence, that seizes the imagination. Iago has values, he has a grievance, and he has a motivation. We are interested in him because we know these things; if we discovered that he wasn't, in fact, human, I suspect that we as an audience would lose interest.

(Meanwhile, as I write this, the Superbowl has apparently stopped because the lights went out. Speaking of losing interest.)

A last point on the subject is that I don't think the ideas of "good" and "evil" are very useful in creating compelling characters. Not to say that I prefer a grey-and-grey moral universe to a black-and-white one (not least because the greys tend to darken until the morality is black-and-black). But perhaps it is better to regard characters as "virtuous" and "vicious." The question of virtue and vice shouldn't be wholly detached from what side of the story the character falls on, but it represents a whole lot of continuums.

The metaconflict: Artist vs. plot

Back in college my friend tried to get me into Evil Dead. I wasn't impressed. Besides the fact that I didn't (and still don't) like horror movies, Evil Dead just didn't seem very good. My friend tried to impress on me that there was another story going on: that a bunch of film students without much in the way of equipment or experience went into the woods and made a whole movie, with plot and editing and makeup and a script and everything.

I didn't see that story, even though I see how he did. I didn't have the interest in the mechanics of film as such to analyze how or if they were done. Besides, I figured, the story of "someone made this thing" necessarily underpins basically everything.

Lately I've noticed myself paying attention to that "someone made this thing" narrative, though, and today I remembered Evil Dead.

If you watch my blog's sidebar (and I don't really know why you would) you've seen that I've been working my way through The X-Files. Girlfriend and I have been watching it in large gulps, almost always while one or both of us are working. As a long-running show, it had its good episodes and its bad episodes, but we noticed an odd and very unscientific correlation: the better written an episode was, the more likely that characters would survive and the problem would actually be resolved. Some weeks, it seemed, the writers stumped themselves completely with whatever terror they had thought up.

Of course, every writer faces this problem to some extent, but most of the time not coming up with a smart solution meant shoehorning in a dumb solution. The structure of The X-Files had the advantage (drawing, maybe, from the horror branch of its genealogy) that failure was an option. The entire supporting cast of an episode could die without upsetting the status quo. There was no guarantee that Mulder and Scully would solve the mystery, either. If the writers wrote themselves into a corner, they didn't necessarily have to write themselves out again.

Sometimes, when an episode didn't seem brilliantly written, Girlfriend and I would start watching the other story--the one about television writers on a deadline trying to think up a solution to their premise in time to save the supporting cast. They won some; they lost some.

I only recently realized how often I do this, though.

Yesterday Girlfriend and I got to see the Folger Shakespeare Theater's production of The Taming of the Shrew (on the very last day, no less). I didn't have any particular need to see The Taming of the Shrew as such, but well-produced Shakespeare is often worth the trouble. We were particularly interested in how they would "handle" it, because there's so much in the play that, taken at face value, is offensive or even disturbing to modern sensibilities. So we went out fully expecting a sort of gladiatorial theater: Folger Theater vs. The Taming of the Shrew; a fight to the finish, perhaps even to the death.

I'm glad to report that both combatants survived. However, there was no clear winner. The theater's strategy was bare-fisted; rather than cut the play deeply they tried to pin it down by laying interpretations on top of it. Two choices in particular were, in retrospect, like breaths of fresh air.

First, a lot hung Petruchio's sincerely exasperated and regretful delivery of "He that knows better how to tame a shrew, now let him speak; 'tis charity to shew."

Second, after the scene where Petruchio denies Kate a a hat and dress, they added a dialogue-less scene in which Kate, alone, discovers that Petruchio has given her an even better dress (well, really a nice duster and a pair of pants, since the whole thing was western-themed). As a rule, I dislike such brazen insertions, but in this case I'll concede that it was welcome.

I'm not sure there's any way around Kate's speech at the end, though. Ultimately we and Shakespeare's audience just have different ideas of what constitutes a happy ending; we have different conceptions of the natural state that needs to be restored. To the first audience, that Kate was unequivocally submissive was an unequivocal good. Petruchio's responsibility, they might have said, was to be a fair and loving master, not to share power. Try as we might to find an ambiguity to hang our own ideas on, Shakespeare didn't give us one. Because ambiguity is a flaw in a happy ending. So, because our ideas have changed, the ending of The Taming of the Shrew is unambiguously uncomfortable.