In , Shakespeare’s view of a disturbing world was by a paradoxical and all too precarious balance of good and evil. Paradox is at the heart of this play, and the theme is a foreshadowing used in Shakespeare’s later tragedies. The tragedy of character, destiny, and divine providence are differing themes that all support the balance of the play.
Tragedy of character is catastrophe that develops from faults of character: Romeo’s impulsive nature leads him to despair and death. “This problem is the feeling that Romeo and Juliet lack tragic inevitability precisely because so much of the action turns on ignorance that might have been remedied and on sheer mistiming’s” (Cole 14).
The immediate cause of Romeo and Juliet’s unhappy deaths is Romeo’s reckless fury and blind despair. “On Romeo’s inability to control either his passionate love or his passionate grief, his death and Juliet’s depend” (Dickey, p. 105). Romeo therefore is a tragic hero like Othello in that he is responsible for his own chain of passionate actions. His father makes clear that Romeo’s love is a sickness, when he complains that Romeo’s humor will turn “Black and portentous” (I. i.
141) unless checked. After the sight of Juliet, Romeo’s turnabout in character is noticed by Mercato, who coments on his temper. But with Mercutio’s death, Romeo casts aside all reason and begins a chain of passionate action which leads to death. Rejecting the reasonable conduct with which he had first answered his enemy, he attacks and kills Tybalt .”..
revenge produces the catastrophe of tragedy” (Dickey 114). Romeo’s next passionate mistake is to fall into frantic despair after the Prince sentences him to banishment. Friar Lawrence, the consistent voice of moderation and wisdom, warns him that he is truly unfortunate only in giving way to uncontrolled grief. The next step of Romeo’s march to destruction is his sudden and complete despair when he learns that Juliet is dead. The direct result of Romeo’s frenzied desire to kill himself is his killing of Paris. “I must (die); and therefore came I hither.
Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man; Fly hence and leave me: think upon these gone; Let them affright thee. I beseech thee, youth, Put not another sin upon my head By urging me to fury: O! Be gone… .” (V. Iii. 58-63).
Romeo’s last passion-blinded act is to kill himself just before Juliet awakes, and her suicide may be thought of as the direct result of his. Romeo and Juliet are made for one another, dearer to one another than life itself, and instinctively know this the very moment they meet. In Juliet’s eyes, Romeo is her lover and liberator. She has preserved all the tenderness of her feelings, and has learnt to conceal those feelings when occasion demands. She is beautiful and wise, courageous and quick to act — admirably equipped, in fact, to play the role in which circumstances force her to adopt.
“Practically every word Juliet utters in the balcony scene (II. ii. 90, 98-191, 116-123) marks a step forward, an action, a decision at the whirl of events… .” (Eckhoff, p. 51).
She is impatient when she is waiting for the nurse to return with an answer from Romeo, and more impatient before the bridal night (III. ii. 1-21. ). “Romeo and Juliet are in a hurry even when it comes to dying.
There is no shadow of doubt in their souls that they would rather die than to live apart” (Eckhoff. P. 56). Tragedy of character and the catastrophe of Romeo and Juliet are caused by absolute destiny.
Tragedy of destiny makes fate the main cause of the final disaster: Romeo and Juliet had to die because they were “star-cross’d.” The prologue, the foreboding dreams and imitations of death, and the futility of the elaborately planned attempts to restore Romeo and Juliet to one another all tend to stress that the destiny of the lovers is fated. “Judged by Elizabethan standards, the play is not merely a gorgeous and entertaining melodrama but a carefully wrought tragedy which balances hatred against love and which makes fortune the agent of divine justice without absolving anyone from his responsibility for the tragic conclusion” (Dickey, p.
63). There is no blind fate in the Shakespearean tragedy nor in the Elizabethan universe. Behind what looked like chance stood God in control of his creation. “Fortune was a figure of speech devised by men to explain the inexplicable operations of the Deity” (Dickey, p. 91).
When Tybalt lies dead at Romeo’s feet and a full awareness of what he has done comes upon him, Romeo cries out in despair: “O, I am fortune’s fool” (III. I. 136). This is a crucial line and all its undertones must be understood. “Fool” had two common meanings in Shakespeare’s age. On the one hand it had the common word for “child.” In three other places in the play it is used with the meaning.
When Romeo calls himself the “dupe” or “plaything” of Fortune, he is asserting a capricious, lawless Fortune, and thus he is denying the providence of God. Romeo sees the universe as a mindless chaos, without guiding plan; he is proclaiming a philosophy of despair. “As long as man sees Fortune as capricious and the universe without plan, he must be the slave of Fortune” (Ribner, p. 85). Romeo, the fool, or child of Fortune, has now thrown off the authority of Fortune. “Romeo may want to defy the stars, but in that very defiance he is unwittingly cooperating in his own doom” (Cole, p.
15). The lovers’ deaths are ordained by God to reconcile their feuding families.
Tragedy of divine providence suggests that the love of Romeo and Juliet comes to a terrible end because of the hatred between the two families. The action concerns not simply two lovers but two families. An ancient feud breaks forth anew, involving in its course two lovers whose destiny it is to be sacrificed to the healing of their families’s tribe, “which, but their children’s end, naught could remove” (Prologue, 11).
The pathos is that the lovers’s acrifice is inescapable; their loves is “death-mark’d; they are “star-cross’d” (Prologue; 9, 6), fated to die in the fifth act. This method of foreshadowing the outcome is carried through the play, in the premonitions and misgivings of the two lovers. “I dreamt a dream tonight” (I. iv. 50), says Romeo, as he goes with Benvolio and Mercutio towards the Capulet party. When Benvolio tries to hurry them on: “Supper is done, and we shall come too late!” Romeo reflects, “I fear, too early: for my mind misgives Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, Shall bitterly begin his fearful date With this night’s revels and expire the term Of a despised life, clos’d in my breast, By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
But he that hath the steerage of my course Direct my sail! On, lusty gentlemen!” (I. iv. 105-13). “All of these echoes and foreshadowings emphasize and reemphasize a single theme, a single conception: the seemingly inscrutable necessity of the whole action, a necessity imposed by some power greater than men” (Wilson, p. 22).
The play culminates with the reconciliation of the rival houses, as the prologue states. Old Capulet and Montague, confronted by the terrible results of their hatred in the deaths of their children, are at length brought to recognize their responsibility. The Prince sums it up: “See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love; And I, for winking at your discords too, Have lost a brace of kinsmen; all are punish’d” (V. iii. 282-95). The fact of the feud is emphasized at the outset, and the involvement of Romeo and Juliet is not only innocent but against their will.
The blame of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths lies with the families, with the elders. The design of “a greater power than we can contradict” (V. iii. 153), that finds means to humble the rival houses “with love” as we have it. It is a stern conception of Providence, to the working of whose purposes human beings are blind, which fulfills the moral law that the hatred of the elders shall be visited upon the children — “poor sacrifices of our enmity” (V.
iii. 304), as Capulet describes them — yet whose power turn turns hatred in the end to love. “The tragic irony of the story lies in the blindness of the elders to the consequences of their hatred until it is too late, in the reversal brought about by the power greater than they” (Wilson, p. 30).
“The design of tragedy has been a Christian moral, implicit but still sufficiently manifest to the thoughtful. The three entrances of the Prince mark the three stages of the action intended to show a chain of seeming accidents issuing in a moral design adumbrated in the sonnet-prologue, implicit from the beginning.
The final entrance of the Prince marks the logical climax of a tightly built narrative scheme. This concluding stage of the action reveals, in recapitulation, the significance of the whole design, a design in which the catastrophic deaths of the lovers contribute but a part; the punishment of the elders, and still more their reconciliation, complete the pattern” (Wilson 38).
“Tragedy of character, destiny and divine providence are inseparably linked in Romeo and Juliet, and all of these agents contribute to the catastrophe. The pattern of the action, given shape by Friar Laurence’s warnings, Mercutio’s satiric ebullience, and the Prince’s scattered judgments, revolves around two of the most attractive lovers in all literature” (Cole 16). “The patterns of moral responsibility are necessary to give the action its perspective, and it is these patterns of the destructive as well as the creative force of love and dependence of fate upon the passionate will which most contemporary criticism neglects or denies” (Dickey 117). The paradox is a foreshadowing theme of the workings of a hostile external Fate.
Shakespeare’s developing vision of a tragic universe was to be defined by a paradoxical and all too precarious balance of good and evil.
Works Cited
Cole, Douglas. “An introduction,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Romeo and Juliet: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Douglas Cole, Prentice-Hall, Inc. , 1070. Pp.
1-18.
Dickey, Franklin M. Not Wisely but Too Well: Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies. The Huntington Library, 1957.
P. 161.
Exh off, Lorentz. “Passion,” Shakespeare: Spokesman of the Third Estate. Translated by R.
I. Christophers en, Akademi sk Vertar, 1954, pp. 48-86.
Ribner, Irving.
“Then I Denied You Stares: A Reading of ‘Romeo and Juliet’,” Studies in the English Renaissance Drama. Josephine W. Bennet, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall, Jr. , eds, . New York University Press, 1959. Pp.
269-86.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Dell Publishing CO. , Inc. , 1965.
Reprinted by Harper and Row, New York, N. Y.
Wilson, Harold S. “Thesis: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Hamlet’,” On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. University of Toronto Press, 1957. Pp.
19-51.