Shakespeare. traits congenial to the English taste of his time, most of which reappear, transfigured, in the finer art of Shakespeare. The poison-seller is already Shakespeare's desperate apothecary; Romeo, on the news of his banishment, already wallows on the ground and tears his hair. Above all, Brooke has struck out a rude but vigorous sketch of the Nurse-in Bandello a mere name,—and given hints which Shakespeare did not despise :-her rambling garrulity about Juliet's childhood, her acceptance of Romeo's gold and prompt desertion of his cause when he is banished. The poem, in fact, contains the entire material of the play, and the story of both might be summarised in almost identical words. But in Brooke the material forms a series of moving incidents loosely strung together in a rambling narrative; in Shakespeare it coalesces in a vital organic whole. The quarrel of the rival houses appears faintly in the background of the poem, contributing casually to the lovers' ill-luck; in the drama it is an essential condition of their tragic doom. Brooke is possessed with the mediæval faith in Fortune, and his Romeo and Juliet are alternately lifted and depressed at the bidding of her changing moods; in Shakespeare an uncontrollable wind of destiny sweeps them through the brief rapture of existence. The most obvious symptom is the enormously heightened temperature and quickened time. In Brooke the action is measured by weeks, in Shakespeare by hours. Brooke's lovers are united and live happily together for three months; then Fortune thinks fit to mingle 'sour with the sweet,' whereupon Tybalt is introduced to make an unprovoked assault upon Romeo. Shakespeare peremptorily rejected this see-saw of joy and sorrow, and made the fatal brawl and Romeo's banishment occur on the very noontide of his marriage, so that the rapture of the lovers is lifted into poetry by the pathos of near parting and mysterious foreboding: O God, I have an ill-divining soul !1 This momentous change is very simply and naturally effected. Tybalt is introduced at Capulet's feast; Romeo kindles his anger at the same moment as Juliet's love, and he is scarcely married when he encounters Tybalt's vengeful fury. But Shakespeare drew the toils of his destiny closer yet. Brooke's Romeo, after vainly attempting to pacify Tybalt, kills him in an access of militant fury like his own. Shakespeare's Romeo deals the blow upon which the whole tragic sequel hangs, in response to a deeper and more inexorable prompting. Tybalt's hectoring threats do not disturb his self-control; he intervenes only to keep the peace. But the fiery Mercutio is not to be restrained. It is only when Mercutio has got his mortal hurt in his behalf that Romeo flings aside respective lenity and falls with fire-eyed fury upon his friend's slayer,—to realise a moment later the abyss into which his destiny has betrayed him: 'O, I am fortune's fool!' Then the prince intervenes, and now, once more, it is only the plea that he had drawn his sword in behalf of Mercutio-the prince's kinsman which converts his sentence of death to banishment. Thus Mercutio's participation in this critical incident gives it a far subtler coherence, and this is his chief function in the plot. In Brooke his namesake merely passes for a moment before us at the banquet, as 1 Presentiments play an unusually prominent part in this tragedy. Premonitions haunt Romeo as he steps into the hall of the Capulets (i. 4. 106); and Friar Laurence's forebodings are mirrored in Romeo's dreams (v. I. init.) A courtier that each where was highly had in price, For he was courteous of his speech and pleasant of device. Shakespeare's Mercutio is the one brilliant figure in that outer world of hate which enspheres and hurries to its tragic doom the inner world of love. In the hands of previous tellers the story had gathered one after another the motley figures which compose this alien milieu :-Bandello's Benvolio with his temperate counsels against love; Brooke's Nurse, with her vulgar parody of it; and now Shakespeare's Mercutio, transfixing love with the shafts of his cynical and reckless wit, a gayer but not less effective negation of romance. But Shakespeare has made the other negations of calm reason and of Philistine grossness sharper and even more decisive than he found them. The Nurse, the Capulet father and mother, are all recognisable in Brooke: Shakespeare alone makes us feel the tragic loneliness of Juliet in their midst; and that not less by his ruthless insistence on every mean and vulgar trait in them, than by the flamelike purity and intensity in which he has invested Juliet herself. Brooke's Juliet is a conventional heroine of romance, distinguished from other heroines only by the particular cast of her experiences, and not palpably superior to her father, whose unreason even acquires from Brooke's rhetoric a certain Roman dignity of invective. Shakespeare's Juliet resembles an ideal creation of Raphael or Lionardo environed in the bustling domestic scenery, the Flemish plenty and prose, of Teniers or Ostade. We are spared no poignancy of contrast. The last rich cadences of the lovers' dawn-song die into the bluster of old Capulet; and Juliet's sublime 'Romeo, I come!' is immediately 1 Juliet's monologue belongs change has completely transin outline to Brooke ; but formed the conclusion. In Shakespeare by an unobtrusive Brooke, after imagining the succeeded by the rattling of keys and dishes, and cooks calling for dates and quinces in the 'pastry.' ensues. Thus Shakespeare at once heightened the tragic antagonism of Romeo and Juliet's world and the lyric fervour of passion which sweeps them athwart it. The entire weight of the tragic effect is thrown upon the clashing dissonance of the human elements. In this earliest of the tragedies, alone among them all, there is no guilt, no deliberate contriving of harm. Far from suggesting a moral, Shakespeare seems to contemplate with a kind of fatalist awe the mixture of elements from which so profound a convulsion He eliminates every pretext for regarding the catastrophe as a retribution upon the lovers. Their love violates no moral law: it springs imperiously from their youth, and Shakespeare has here significantly gone beyond his source and endowed his Juliet with the single-souled girlhood of fourteen;1 neither of them dreams of any illicit union, and their marriage runs counter only to the unnatural feud between their houses. The chief agent in their tragic doom is the one wise and actively benign character in the play. The imposing figure of Friar Laurence, so clearly congenial to the poet, has tempted some critics, like Gervinus and Kreyssig, to regard him as a chorus, and to read Shakespeare's judgment upon the lovers in his weighty utterance :These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, horrors of the vault, she drinks lest her resolution should give way Dreading that weakness might or Hinder the execution of the purposed VOL. VII sudden vision of Romeo in the vault, and Tybalt vengefully seeking him out, drown all consideration but the longing to join him there, 1 In the Italian versions she is eighteen, in Brooke sixteen. 401 2 D The love of Romeo and Juliet is in short condemned · by its unmeasured intensity. 'Shakespeare on his eagle flight above all the heights and depths of human being and feeling, assuredly did not overlook these romantic abysses of the supreme passion.' But we have to do not with the Olympian Shakespeare of The Tempest, but with a Shakespeare who, if we may trust the Sonnets, was not 'flying above' but plunging strenuously through the heights and depths of human feeling, and to this Shakespeare the matter was hardly so clear. He can never, it is true, have shared the modern Romantic's scorn for the world that lies outside love. He who almost from the outset grasped so profoundly the meaning of national life and the potency of law, could never have complete sympathy for lyric emotion, however entrancing, which defies them. But that he saw an ethical problem in the case is plain from the pathos which gathers, under his handling, about the lyric rebel to law, Richard II. That History presents suggestive analogies to our Tragedy. But Romeo and Juliet's passion, sovran and uncontrolled as it is, has a bearing upon public interests quite other than that of Richard's lyric self-love. His measureless caprice disorganises a great and ordered State; their passion breaks like a purifying flame upon one rotten with disease. For the lovers themselves the price of that purification is death; but our pity for them is blended with wonder and even envy. Juliet's glorious womanhood is the creation of her love; Romeo, a weaker nature, retains more infirmity,2 yet he too stands out in heroic stature 1 Kreyssig, Vorlesungen über Shakespeare, ii. 40. 2 Juliet's clear vision never leaves her. Cf. the waking in the vault. Brooke's Juliet at first much amazed to see in tomb so great a light She wist not if she saw a dream or O comfortable friar! where is my lord? |