I joked recently about telling my high-school freshman that the play she's going to be reading for English class, Romeo and Juliet, is intended as a cautionary tale about what happens when people her age think they are "in love." It's possible that an earnest reader of the play could believe me. Probably shouldn't, however.
In the first scene, Romeo is moping about, and explains, when his friends ask what ails him, that he's been dumped by the most exquisite specimen of female humanity in Verona. This elicits from his friends much cynical merriment. The scene shifts to the Capulet household, where the highly placed Paris is asking Juliet's father to bless his planned courtship of Juliet. Capulet is reluctant, on account of his daughter's age, just 13, but he invites Paris to a party he's throwing. Juliet will be there, of course, but so will a lot of other attractive young women: if after regarding them all Paris is still determined to court Juliet, they'll talk more, says her father. Back to Romeo, who's still pining after lost love in the company of his sneering friends. When by chance they learn of the Capulet party, one of the friends essentially repeats to Romeo old man Capulet's line to Paris: Romeo should go to the party, where he'll see his ex (her name is Rosalin) surrounded by a lot of other beauties, and suddenly she won't be all that and a bag of chips anymore. Romeo is indignant—
One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun
—but agrees to go, since at least he'll be able to admire Rosalin from afar (and, his friends would say, wallow in the pleasures afforded the lovesick). He enters the ball in disguise, as the Capulets are the bitter enemies of his family, and immediately views Juliet across the room, whereupon:
ROMEO [to a Servingman]
What lady's that, which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
SERVINGMAN
I know not, sir.
ROMEO
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
The justness of the friends' sneers is thus in every detail ratified. Romeo, a ridiculous figure, drops one pose and adopts another as easily as he might change clothes. His praise of Juliet, in perfectly metered lines adorned with chiming rhymes, is out of the Hallmark shop. And there's a lot more where that came from. In his first exchange with Juliet, she listens to a few of his lines before remarking, "You woo by the book." This has always seemed to me an aptly tart observation, raising the question of why she falls for such an absurd fellow—so hard and fast that she's soon consenting to the desperate plan that ends in their double suicide.
In reading here and there in search of enlightenment regarding such a question, I came across the following morsel from Frank Kermode: "Whenever Shakespeare is working largely from a single text, [as he is in Romeo and Juliet], one observes his readiness to accept and transform a conventional morality, and to find an appropriately limited place in his play for what had struck the author of his source as being the whole moral bearing of the story." The source for Romeo and Juliet is a long and, according to all who've read it, tedious poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, by a poet named Brooke, first published in 1562, a couple years before Shakespeare had been born. From what I can understand, "the whole moral bearing" of Brooke's poem is in line with the cautionary tale I described to my daughter: in matters of the heart, young people should not take themselves so seriously, for when they do, ignoring the wise counsel of their elders, tragedy ensues. This conventional lesson is present in Romeo and Juliet, but the exposition of Romeo's callowness, preeminently the mocking treatment of his love sickness, which I assume is entirely Shakespeare's invention, obscures Brooke's tidy lesson and transforms it into something enjoyable on the stage.
Then, as events unfold, the tidy lesson suffers more and harder blows. I have in mind two scenes, mainly. The first is the one in which Juliet's feigned death is discovered. If you're familiar with the plot, you'll remember that, having secretly married the banished Romeo, Juliet drinks a potion the night before she is to marry Paris. The potion has the effect of making her appear dead for a period of time sufficient to be entombed at the family monument. The plan is that, in addition to avoiding the wedding with Paris, she will when she awakens be reunited with Romeo, who is to be recalled from exile in Mantua. On the morning of the wedding day, then, the Capulet household is busy with wedding preparations while Juliet sleeps in. The audience knows that soon the trivialities will be interrupted by the discovery of her "death." The dramatic challenge is to draw out the scene long enough for tension to build but not so long that the audience's interest begins to flag. Of course Shakespeare manages it perfectly. It's Juliet's nurse who discovers her. "O lamentable day!" she wails. Lamentable: usually grief does not deploy polysyllables. Juliet's mother echoes, "O woeful time!" Then the nurse again:
O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!
Most lamentable day, most woeful day
That ever ever I did yet behold!
O day, O day, O day! O hateful day!
Never was seen so black a day as this.
O woeful day! O woeful day!
It doesn't rhyme, unless you count four "day"s, but each line has the correct number of syllables, and one wishes Romeo's friends were on the scene to comment. Capulet enters the bedroom and declares himself unable to speak, his grief being too great. He soon recovers, however, and there creeps into his eloquent lament regret over his meticulous plans for the wedding celebration having come to nought. This guy really enjoys planning and putting on parties.
Recall that the idea of what I've called "the tidy lesson" is that the reckless young should listen to the advice of their more experienced elders, whose wisdom and prudence is worthy of emulation. Along this line, it might be mentioned too that, in the coming climactic scene at the Capulet tomb, the Friar who has been assisting the young lovers exhibits too much prudence, thereby abetting the tragedy.
The second scene I have in mind relates to Romeo exiled in Mantua. The letter by which the Friar meant to inform him of the plan to fake Juliet's death miscarries, but a messenger who knows only as much as the Capulet family makes his way to Mantua with the bad news. Romeo immediately determines that life then isn't worth living: he will kill himself at Juliet's tomb and be united with her in death. How to acquire the means? He remembers seeing a seedy apothecary business, and surmises that the owner, out of financial desperation, will for a price be persuaded to supply him with an illegal dose of poison. As he searches out the shop, alone on stage, he describes the druggist and his failing business—it's almost my favorite thing in the play:
Meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones;
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuffed, and other skins
Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses
Were thinly scattered, to make up a show.
His surmise about what the proprietor of this business might be willing to do, for a price, is in the event confirmed, and Romeo's speech as money and poison change hands is why I said the description of the business is only "almost" my favorite passage:
There is thy gold—worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murder in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.
I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.
Farewell. Buy food and get thyself in flesh.
Come, cordial and not poison, go with me
To Juliet's grave, for there must I use thee.
I feel sure that this incident, if it is in The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, has been elaborated by Shakespeare, and that the vivid description of the place of business, as well as the expressions of worldly disgust and sympathy for the poor apothecary—"Sharp misery had worn him to the bones . . . Buy food and get thyself in flesh"—are not from his source but from his mind. It might almost be objected that the scene is too elaborate, a slack digression from the plot, or that the Romeo of the early scenes could never speak like this. Just so, however. In the course of the play Romeo's consciousness expands to such a degree that he's able to take in the suffering of others and be disgusted by the world's trivial, money-grubbing ways. Juliet had complained that he speaks "by the book" but she could not say that about his speeches in the fifth act. If you don't believe in Romeo's transformation, you can still love Shakespeare for making him talk this way. In his play, notwithstanding the poem he used as a source, speaking by the book is a sign of dubious character and it's the older generation that never leaves off.