960 shakespeare, William
ready to fall into an arranged marriage with her two-
dimensional suitor, Paris, at the tender age of 13.
But Romeo and Juliet’s scripted, lackluster lives are
shattered when they chance to see each other at the
Capulet ball in a love-at-first-sight scenario.
Some have asserted that Romeo and Juliet fails to
satisfy as a tragedy because its protagonists are too
young to fully understand their fates. True, fortune
and the stars play a significant role in the lovers’
downfall, more so than any mistake or moral failing
on their part. There is also a sense of rushing in the
play (Romeo and Juliet meet on a Sunday, marry
the following day, and are both dead before dawn
on Friday), which further emphasizes the youth of
these characters and their complete surrender to
love. The language of the play is rich in images of
light and darkness as these lovers shun the hot, glar-
ing world of responsibility and restrictive codes of
behavior (courtly love, masculine honor, patriarchal
control, and so on) and seek only to enjoy each
other against the dark background of their feuding
families. And they die in the rapture of unqualified
young love, making this Shakespeare’s earliest, and
purest, love tragedy.
Anthony Perrello
deatH in Romeo and Juliet
The German word for what might be called the con-
fusion between love and death is liebestod—literally,
“love-death,” a drive identified by Sigmund Freud
as a death impulse in humans. The dark melancholy
felt by the brooding Romeo in Shakespeare’s play
culminates in his own suicide by the body of his wife.
In medieval romances, love is often indistinguishable
from death. For instance, in Gottfried von Strass-
burg’s Tristan und Isolt, Isolt beholds the body of her
dead lover, lays down next to him on a bier, embraces
him, sighs, and dies. Scenes like this present them-
selves time and again in erotic tragedies such as
Shakespeare’s othello and Antony and Cleopatra.
The confusion between love and death in Romeo
and Juliet proceeds perhaps from the familiar Elizabe-
than pun on “die,” which meant both to cease breath-
ing and to reach sexual climax. The Friar expresses
the tight connection between love and death in the
Renaissance mind with a paradoxical couplet using
a familiar, almost cliché pair of rhyme words: “The
earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb. / What
is her burying grave, that is her womb.” (2.2.9–10).
Such wordplay hints at comedy, and in fact Romeo
and Juliet shares quite a bit with another Shakespeare
play written about the same time, a midSummer
night’S dream. This ostensibly festive comedy
actually presents a farcical retelling of its tragic coun-
terpart, in miniature, in Pyramus and Thisbe, a play-
within-a-play enacted for Duke Theseus’s nuptials.
The chief purveyor of comedy in Romeo and Juliet,
however, is not the ridiculous, physical rustic Bottom
but the witty cynic Mercutio, whose name links him
to the Roman god who influences his character—he
is lively, quick-witted, volatile, and mischievous.
Mercutio’s death marks the end of the possibility of
comedy in Romeo and Juliet. After he is inadvertently
and fatally stabbed by Tybalt, Romeo rashly kills the
“prince of cats.” This death—the structural turning
point in the play—means that Romeo and Juliet are
stripped of choices; Romeo is banished and must rely
on the Friar’s doomed plan.
Romeo and Juliet is saturated with death. Romeo
and Juliet are “star-cross’d” lovers, and readers are
continually reminded that their love is doomed.
The Chorus speaks of their “death-mark’d love,”
born against the dark background of their feuding
families. Such foreshadowing occurs time and again
in the play. Romeo feels it, strangely, before entering
the Capulet ball: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 closed in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
(1.4.106–111)Juliet’s mind also “misgives” after the couple’s wed-
ding night. Juliet pleads “window, let day in, and let
life out” as Romeo leaves her chamber. Staring down
at him, she says,O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
(3.5.54–56)