Romeo and Juliet

"When we read, you know, Romeo and Juliet about love, we we are like anyone who's ever been in love relates to to a lot of those lines, right? And this is what's so powerful, I think, about the ancients."

"The play (which I’ve, again, known all my life) is Shakespeare’s most popular. It’s more popular than Hamlet , more popular than any of the other tragedies or plays. It’s got this unbelievably brilliant heroine who’s two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday. We know more about Juliet than we know about any other of Shakespeare’s major figures. She has the third largest female speaking part in the whole of Shakespeare, after Cleopatra and Rosalind. She’s a hugely important figure. “Juliet’s ‘What’s in a name?’ is a challenge to all forms of bigotry, and stupidity, and otherness” It’s a companion piece, almost, to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . They are very much of the same period, these two plays, the same magnificent poetry. In this play, Shakespeare explores issues of rhetoric and language. How do you express teenage love? The first time Romeo sees Juliet, his language changes. It moves into a different key from the language he uses about Rosaline, which is a kind of sub-Petrarchan rhetoric, full of the usual kind of conceits, oxymorons, and so on. Romeo and Juliet’s language becomes extraordinarily dynamic, kinetic, full of the most extraordinary images of darkness and light which almost have a life of their own. This is rhetoric at its most highly wrought. ‘What’s in a name?’ It couldn’t be simpler, but this is Shakespeare’s magic: to generate lines that are more powerful for being very, very simple. Juliet’s ‘What’s in a name?’ is a challenge to all forms of bigotry and stupidity and otherness. She is saying: you are what you are, I love this boy because he is who he is. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere in Shakespeare, except possibly Miranda in the last play [ The Tempest ]. Interestingly, this may be entirely tendentious, but Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, was thirteen when he wrote Romeo and Juliet , and of course his son Hamnet, one of the two Shakespeare twins—the other one being Judith—died in 1596. So this play almost certainly coincides with the death of the poet’s own son, which makes it, if that is the case, even more of a miracle because Shakespeare is so determined that these two young lovers commit suicide. Suicide in the period was self-murder and was punishable by death, but nowhere in the play does Shakespeare convey a sense of these two as having committed a mortal sin. He celebrates them all the way. Juliet kills herself, showing extraordinary courage, with Romeo’s dagger, and we’re never meant to think that she’s thereby damning herself. I think we are meant to think that she’s going to re-join her husband, as she is indeed. Hugely, in this play. The conquest of Juliet, if I’m going to put it that way, is after all Romeo’s invasion of her home. First of all he gatecrashes her parent’s party, then he moves into her orchard, and finally he moves into Juliet’s bedroom. One mustn’t forget their extraordinary wedding night, which ends when he wakes to leave. She is the first to speak after the wedding night, which is quite significant. Juliet is brilliantly, and of course emphatically, realised as being part of her family. We know exactly how old she is, but Romeo could be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, we have no idea. He’s out all night, no one needs to care, that’s what young men do. The moment Juliet trespasses, her father—who of course doesn’t know she’s married—turns on his daughter with a vehement violence that is very, very shocking. Absolutely. And of course there’s a clue in the very last line of the play: ‘Never was a story of more woe | Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’. The use of the possessive in that very last line means the story is not Romeo and Juliet, but Juliet and her Romeo. The fact that she has an English name—she’s not called Julietta, she’s called Juliet—means she’s one of ours. There’s a sense in which Shakespeare’s investment in her seems to me very personal, very direct, very powerful and he can’t actually let Juliet go any more than Romeo can let her go. I think that’s part of the power of the play. “Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, was thirteen when he wrote Romeo and Juliet ” Shakespeare’s very good on young women. That’s why the young women rule the roost in all of Shakespeare’s comedies. The only really tragic female figure in all of Shakespeare is probably Juliet. We’ll come to Cleopatra, but Cleopatra’s a different bracket, she’s middle-aged, it’s a different world, as it were, from that of Juliet. With Juliet, there is this tremendous sense of waste and pity and, to my mind, an unmistakable love by the poet for this particular young woman, the thirteen year old. Juliet speaks thirteen lines in the last scene, and she dies on line thirteen. The word ‘thirteen’ never occurs in the play, her age is always defined with reference to fourteen, so Shakespeare’s very conscious of this kind of doom hanging over poor Juliet. But he gives her a tremendous run for her money, no doubt about it, and thank goodness for that."