Understanding (and misunderstanding) “Romeo and Juliet”
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post from February of 2007. At the time I first wrote it, I didn’t know how to upload YouTube videos here. Since then, I’ve certainly mastered that skill. So I’m now able to include a video at the end that illustrates one of the scenes I was talking about.]
One of the most famous misunderstood lines in all of literature is Juliet’s balcony query: “Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
As most of you may know, the archaic “wherefore” means “why.” But the misconception that the word means “where” persists, even though the latter would make no sense in the context of the scene: Juliet is musing to herself and Romeo is eavesdropping, overhearing her words without her knowledge. She’s certainly not searching for him at that moment.
Shakespeare is difficult, and it’s not just because of his use of outdated words that require explanation in order to understand (well, we can hardly blame him; they weren’t outdated at the time). We’re simply not accustomed to hearing such sophisticated speech and being able to divine meaning from its poetry, its playful images and complex metaphors. Apparently in Shakespeare’s day people were more adept at that, but it’s since become a lost art.
Studying Shakespeare with a good teacher can bring the words and their meaning alive in a way that makes the plays the beloved masterpieces that they have been for centuries. I once had such a teacher; we’ll call him Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones was an ex-actor with a vaguely British accent crossed with a hint of a Jamaican lilt. He was also a black man at a time when African American teachers weren’t all that common, back in my junior high school days. How he ended up at my school I don’t know, nor do I know much else about him except that he lived with his elderly mother.
Mr. Jones was very big on reading aloud. He had an old-fashioned over-the-top rhetorical style, a huge voice left over from his days treading the boards of un-miked stages, and a fearless disregard for giggle-prone eighth-graders. He would declaim in that commanding voice, and his presence would stifle any desire to laugh. The sounds would wash over us impressively, even if the meaning eluded us.
But he wanted us to understand the meaning, as well. And to this end we spent months studying Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” One would think that this work would be the best choice among all Shakespeare’s plays for a bunch of eighth-graders, and one would be right. After all, Juliet, at fourteen, could have been an eighth-grader herself.
But she wasn’t like any eighth-grader we’d ever known. And Romeo was no better. What were they talking about? It seemed an impenetrable thicket of verbiage.
Mr. Jones tackled the whole thing by making us read every single word aloud. He called on some students to act out each part for a few pages, then switched to other students, and on and on, right to the last line. It took months. No matter how embarrassed we were, or what poor actors we were, or how we stumbled and faltered, we had to read those words. And he was big on non-traditional casting, too; he’d sometimes call on the boys to read the female parts and vice-versa. Talk about embarrassment!
One boy, Carl Anderson, who had the platinum hair and fair skin of his Norwegian forebearers, blushed scarlet every time he was called on to read. Then he’d blush even more startlingly scarlet as embarrassing words were revealed (“Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast! Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!”). But read he did.
Some read in monotones, some gave it pizazz. And then, after every couple of lines, Mr. Jones would have them pause and try to explain the meaning. If they couldn’t guess, the class would tackle it. If all else failed, Mr. Jones would tell us. But, line by line, the wonderful and sorrowful story emerged, and we slowly got better at deciphering it.
As the characters came alive for us, line by line, Shakespeare (and Mr. Jones) managed that feat at which the writers of so many modern movies fail abysmally: making us care about the characters, and making us believe the lovers actually love each other, and showing us why. We loved Romeo and Juliet, too; and we could see that they were exceptionally well-suited to one another, each able to express emotions in ways no other teenagers ever have or ever will.
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at the ball, they have a conversation in which both show an equal adeptness at imagery and playfulness. The whole scene is an extended metaphor that compares the religious (the hands in prayer) with the sexual (the lips in a kiss).
Classier pickup lines were never heard, at least not in my life:
ROM: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet plays hard-to-get with an equally witty rejoinder:
JUL: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Ah, but Romeo is not so easily put off from his goal:
ROM: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
But again, Juliet is equal to the task of parrying him:
JUL: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r.
But Romeo is not to be dissuaded. He cleverly extends the image in an attempt to get what he’s looking for—a kiss (to understand what he’s getting at here, think of two hands clasped together in prayer):
ROM: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Ah, who could resist? Certainly not Juliet, who clearly doesn’t even wish to hold him off, although she pays some final lip service (pun intended; after all, Shakespeare liked puns!) to restraint:
JUL: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
And Romeo sees his opportunity:
ROM: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d. [Kisses her.]
Are they not well-matched? Precocious and intensely emotional, they exude the essence of heady young love, love that has as yet no experience of sorrow or betrayal (although they’ll know sorrow soon enough). These two love with all their hearts; they are made for each other, and the audience knows it immediately through their words.
A few years later when I saw the Zefferelli film version of “Romeo and Juliet,” I marveled at the scene as it was acted out with suitable hand gestures (oh, so that’s the way it works!) by the achingly-young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. If you’ve never seen that film, please take a look. Yes, it was roundly criticized for leaving at least half the play on the cutting-room floor and changing a few of the more archaic words here and there. And for including nakedness (as I recall, a rear shot of Romeo during the post-wedding rendezvous in Juliet’s bedroom). And for casting unknown actors who were so young they lacked the requisite Shakespearean gravitas.
But for me, the film made the play come alive. You believed they loved each other. You believed their desperation. And in the death scenes, you could not help but cry at the waste of these two beautiful young lives.
In the film, the meaning of all those Shakespearean lines was clear; a testament to the actors’ skill. But they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as clear to me—or as wonderful—without those efforts of Mr. Jones.
Thank you Neo. My college prof who deeply introduced me to Shakespeare did it this way: “If you will please take ONE writer — only one — and give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he made no mistakes and that EACH WORD was chosen for a reason, make that one writer be Shakespeare.”
Just to see a teacher love a writer so much was – well – rapture!
I minored in literature, and in one course had to do a complete exegesis of one scene from Shakespeare, including looking up every word in the OED.
This apparently tedious task revealed amazing levels of complexity and nuance, since even words that have not changed literal meaning have changed in their connotation. The classic example, of course, is Hamlet’s line, “Get thee to a nunnery,” which makes perfect sense to us literally. We miss, however, the secondary colloquial meaning in Elizabethan times, when “nunnery” was sardonic slang for a brothel, changing an apparent exhortation to an insult.
The entire scene (I’ve forgotten which play, act, and scene it was) offered similar examples of the matryoshka-like structure of Shakespeare’s writing.
Fascinating!
FYI the Zefferelli film is available online via Netflix.
I envy you such a teacher, Neo. But, his efforts have definitely born fruit.
Wonderful post; Thanks so much. You are blessed to have such a wonderful teacher. I saw “Romeo and Juliet” with Hussey and Whiting when it first came out when I was a kid on a class trip. My mother and father were both college English professors and so an appreciation for Shakespeare was inculcated in me at any early age. When I was in high school my English teachers had us read some parts of the plays aloud. I remember playing Cassius in “Julius Caeser” in 10th or 11th grade and loved it. Right now, part time I teach drama to kids who are in middle school. We have performed scenes from “As You Like It”, “Macbeth”, “Much Ado About Nothing” and “A Midsummer Nights Dream”. They had never been exposed to Shakespeare before and because we talked about what things meant, they loved the experience of performing scenes from his plays.
I also remember seeing the Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet version in the theater, when it first came out – and oh, what a wonderful way to see it! Ages later, when my daughter was in high school and her class was doing Shakespeare, she brought our VHS copy for the other girls to watch (all Catholic girls HS in San Antonio) and she came home laughing, because all of the other girls had immediatly developed a mad crush on Leonard Whiting – and they were so crushed to discover the movie was … well, that Leonard Whiting was now at least their father’s age.
For some reason, my daughter got seriously entranced by Shakespeare when we lived in Greece. We used to go to our next-door neighbors to watch Jewel in the Crown, when it was showing (with subtitles in Greek, on one of the local channels) and when they didn’t have an episode to air, they would put up one of the history plays, as done by the Royal Shakespeare Company – and my daughter at the age of 4 would be just entranced. It was like it cast a spell on her, she would just be rivited in front of the TV, watching every move and listening to every word.
My kids (grades 6 and 8) were fortunate to have that special teacher who brings Shakespeare to life. Every year, for the past 27 years, this brave woman has led middle school students in a production of one (full-length!) play. This year it was was The Merry Wives of Windsor:
As a proud mom I can’t help but share this very short video feature about this year’s show:
http://foresthills-regentsquare.patch.com/articles/st-maurice-students-perform-shakespeare-comedy#video-5839200
I’m a former English major who loves Shakespeare (thanks to one particular college professor). It’s a real gift to have that kind of teacher. Makes all the difference in the world.
Thank you for sharing this. Maybe I will read a Shakespeare play and see a movie in response.
The only time I ever got an A in an English course was for a Shakespeare course. My high school teacher teacher had emphasized reading the plays and knowing the details. ” If you don’t know the details, how can you discuss the broader points?” Some years after high school, I finally followed his advice and read each play twice for that Shakespeare course in college.
Neo,
I had a 5th-8th grade music teacher (Mrs. Lovelace) who instilled in me the same love for classical music that your teacher helped you get for literature.
A teacher like that gives society more than almost any politician one can name.
Wish I’d had Mr. Jones. The time-serving bureaucrat who was my high school English teacher managed to make Henry V and Macbeth boring. I had to read them again (and see live performances) later in life to get the full appreciation of them.
Wonderful post, Neo!
How fortunate you were to have such a teacher!
“Palmers” is such fine word:
“And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
In ferne halwes, couth in sondry londes…”
as Chaucer sang…
Jamie Irons
That part you quoted, Neo, is also a perfect sonnet — Shakespeare showing his dazzling felicity with the Mother Tongue.
I also had a superb Shakespeare professor who opened the treasures of the play to me, Robert G. Hunter, at Vanderbilt. I took the full 2-semester course, and it was like being let into Aladdin’s cave.
I’m going to see Derek Jakobi in King Lear in a couple of weeks, at BAM in Brooklyn. A once in a lifetime event.
Okay, I’m off to get the link for my favorite ballet version of the balcony scene. Which I think you’ll appreciate.
Here you are.
Fonteyn. Nureyev. The glorious choreography of Kenneth MacMillan, in the Royal Ballet’s 1966 production of Romeo and Juliet. Set to Prokofiev’s gorgeous music — piercingly beautiful with a saving touch of astringent melancholy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBRN5BXt6o
Nureyev and Fonteyn broke with ballet custom in kissing at the end: both felt that the scene was so passionate that they had to finish it that way. (Rumor has it that they were lovers, though Fonteyn always denied it. Watching this, you can certainly believe it.)
Fonteyn’s port de bras is meltingly exquisite.
I guess I’m one of those who had gotten the basic theme wrong. I thought is was, at root, political. The effects of the misplaced mercy of a prince toward a group of emotionally incontinent citizens.
“Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.”
PRINCE
And for that offence
Immediately we do exile him hence:
I have an interest in your hate’s proceeding,
My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding;
But I’ll amerce you with so strong a fine
That you shall all repent the loss of mine:
I will be deaf to pleading and excuses;
Nor tears nor prayers shall purchase out abuses:
Therefore use none: let Romeo hence in haste,
Else, when he’s found, that hour is his last.
Bear hence this body and attend our will:
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
Frair to Romeo:
“Thy fault our law calls death; but the kind prince,
Taking thy part, hath rush’d aside the law,
And turn’d that black word death to banishment:
This is dear mercy, and thou seest it not.”
Uhhh, that would be Friar, I think.
I’ve picked up some hints and clues that the Japanese are particularly interested in Romeo and Juliet. They have translated this play into Japanese and act it out for school and such.
A couple of reasons I think they find such affinity with it.
1. In Japanese feudal romance, prostitutes would swear their love to a particular man they feel devoted to by cutting off their pinky finger.
2. In Japanese history, double suicides or instances where you kill your romantic other, was seen as either duty or romance. So in certain settings and situations, a woman may ask her lover to kill her, as a testament of his and their love. This may not make much sense to modern senses, but in the days of Cleopatra, the Romans, and Japanese feudalism, being captured was seen as the ultimate dishonor/disgrace. Not to mention what people will do to you once they capture you: torture, rape, mutilation, etc.
3. The Japanese had a small, but significant tradition of samurai women, Onna Bugeisha, who trained with the naginata from birth (since they were born to the samurai class and were allowed to wield weapons. Female/Male had less to do with it given the division between class).
Because of 3, it is a slightly romantic expression for a armed retainer, a female samurai, to die for her lord. This is devotion or love.
My interpretations here based upon what little observations of Japanese culture and actions I have seen, lead me to believe that the Japanese have a more than average interest in Romeo and Juliet.
Old English is more similar to Japanese than it does to Modern English. The Japanese can be very ambiguous and indirect. Poetic.
One thing I realized recently, off topic, is why so many Germans and Japanese like to tour the world (they call it traveling, we call it tourism). I realized that German and Japanese culture share one thing in culture. An iron bound sense of order and hierarchy.
People “travel” to get away from that. They have wanderlust precisely because their home culture is so stifling at times.