Romeo and Juliet: Stuff to Chew On

To kick off our series on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, we are (as always) starting with an overview of basic facts about the play and an introduction to the major themes and motifs of the play. 

Elyse Sharp (ES): Hi Kourtney.

Kourtney Smith (KS): Hi Elyse. How's it going?

ES: It's going okay. How are you?

KS: I'm also doing okay. It's nice to get back to something familiar.

ES: Yes. I'm so excited to get back to it.

KS: Yes.

ES: And really feel like we are in our 2024 production season.

KS: Oh my god, 2024. And we are starting off with a banger, Romeo and Juliet. I'm really excited to be working on this play.

ES: Yes. And we've got a decent amount of things to chew on for this stuff to chew on. Romeo and Juliet is possibly Shakespeare's most well-known play, most well-read play, because it is often required for English-speaking students in the secondary education level to read.

KS: Yep. The difficult part of our wrap-up is not going to be finding adaptations to watch. It's going to be choosing which ones we want to talk about, because we could probably do a five-hour episode, the length of reading Hamlet start to finish, talking about Romeo and Juliet.

ES: You know, we should start now. Maybe this time we should just start now and start working through them as we research.

KS: Yeah, because this is Shakespeare's heavy hitter. Very popular, very well-known, very well-adapted, and there is a lot of great stuff to chew on here.

ES: Yeah. So, as a reminder, everybody, for our stuff to chew on episodes, we are going to be talking about some basic facts and figures about the play, so your historical facts, as well as topics that you'll likely cover in a class if you encounter this play in an educational setting, things like themes and motifs. Just to get those out of the way, and then we will do our deeper dives later in our series on more specific topics.

KS: Yep.

ES: Okay, so let's kick it off with those important historical dates. Romeo and Juliet is first published in a first-quarter edition in 1597. The title page of this edition says that it was, “played publicly by the Right Honorable the Lord of Hunston, his servants.” Now you may be like, wait, that's not the Lord Chamberlain's Men or the Lord King's Men. I thought I knew Shakespeare's company's name, right?

KS: Right.

ES: So, this puts the writing and first performances of this play into a relatively narrow window of sometime in the nine months between July 22nd, 1596, and April 14th, 1597, because that was the only time that the company Shakespeare wrote for was named after Hunston. This is because there was a seven-months gap when the office of the Lord Chamberlain was not occupied by either Lord Hunston, Sr., who died on the 23rd of July, 1596, or Hunston, Jr., who later succeeded his father in April, 1597. And they were the Lord Chamberlains when he was the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

KS: But when you're absent, it's like the Regency period.

ES: When someone else has the job.

KS: Right.

ES: Also, fun fact, the person who had the job in between was Oldcastle, who was not too big of a fan of Shakespeare because of the-

KS: Of Henry.

ES: The Falstaff.

KS: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

ES: Oldcastle was largely believed to be the basis of Falstaff. And then during this period, we get the Henry V kind of like apology for Falstaff.

KS: Right.

ES: That hopefully maybe got the Lord Chamberlain, who was the Lord Chamberlain because that's the job in between the Hunston family, to be a little bit more friendly to this theater company.

KS: That is actually a really, not to be corny, but that is a very fun fact for me. I think that's a wonderful tidbit of information because that also explains like, it's a little bit of a window into how theaters were ran during the early modern era. And with nobility, there is turnover. And then all of a sudden, it's like, what do you do? Who is in charge of this? It feels like it's so permanent and yet so malleable depending on the person in charge.

ES: Yeah. Also, something that I did not know until reading the introduction to the Arden Third series of Romeo and Juliet was that essentially the theater company didn't go with the title. I always assumed that it was like, oh, the Lord Chamberlain's Men goes with the title. The theater company is something that—

KS: is property of the title. That title.

ES: Like the job comes with you're now the patron of this theater company. And this tells us that no, it was this family, the Hunstons, who were the actual patrons. And so when they were no longer in that position, it was just the Lord of Hunston family theater company.

KS: That's wild.

ES: So maybe it goes more with the Lord title than it does with the office within the court.

KS: Yeah, very cool.

ES: More about this little chunk of time is that the theaters were closed due to plague on July 22nd, 1596, the same date that this kind of window starts. So the theater company would have been touring away from London, and this likely explains why this first quarto, published in 1597 again, is shorter than Q2 and requires a smaller cast. It's largely believed that first quarto is the touring script, and the second quarto is that full manuscript version that would play on the London stages once they were back home and in residency at a theater.

KS: Love it. And again, just to talk about how cool these factoids are. It's a window into the little we know about being a traveling company in Shakespeare's time.

ES: Yep. And then just a little bit more evidence about why we land on this window here. It's unlikely to have been written much earlier, specifically before 1594, because Will Kemp joined the theater company in the latter half of 1594 as an actor, and he is listed instead of the role of Peter in a stage direction in the second quarto. It says Will instead of Peter.

KS: Yeah. I think I saw that on a footnote while writing the synopsis, and it's like, oh, that's so cool. Those are also, you know, as a person who is a perfectionist, I would hate for mistakes to be in my published work. But for people who want the insight, it's like those imperfections and those mistakes are awesome for us.

ES: Human, they’re very—

KS: That's a great way to put it. They are very human. And it's also, I think, important to humanize this playwright who is often seen as some divine genius. And it's like, he actually was just a really great writer, and we have really great plays from him. So I really enjoy that human aspect.

ES: You want one more human aspect?

KS: Please bring it on.

ES: So another reason why scholars point to this like 1596 date as when it was likely first written and first performed is Nurse's line about Juliet being weaned 11 years prior to the events of the play during an earthquake. They said this is another possible clue for the play being written in 1596. If that detail was inspired by a real earthquake, such as the one that rocked Mottingham in Kent, which is not far from London, if this was on Shakespeare's mind, then it was almost exactly 11 years prior to July or August of 1596, which would put it in that window that we've been talking about. Additionally, this earthquake and timing also ties Romeo and Juliet to Shakespeare's own children, as Hamnet was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon on August 11, 1596, and Hamnet and his twin Judith were born in 1585, the year of the earthquake, 11 years prior to the writing of the play, which mirrors the 11 years difference between Juliet's weaning and the events of the play. This would also make Juliet the exact same age as Shakespeare's other daughter, Susanna, who would have been 13 in 1596.

KS: Yep, that is very human. The Anne Hathaway mini episode was very much like, we don't actually know a lot about Shakespeare and his relationship to his family. And a lot of people, I think we, in our intro series, hinted at him being distant from his wife, which we should correct that, but he might have had a much closer relationship to his kids as a working father than we have any evidence of, and this might be a potential not fact, we don't know, but this could be a window into him having a closer relationship to his family than scholars give credit for.

ES: Yeah, these scholars who point to this as tying potentially to the family, and I think what they know is that Nurse's daughter, who passed away, which allowed her to be wet nurse to Juliet, her daughter's name is Susan, which would be, like we say Hamnet is Hamlet, Susan would be Susanna. So this is, again, that sort of like Shakespeare, the possible family man, putting his kids names into a show as a way to nod to them.

KS: I love that. So now that we have some history in mind, let's move on to the sources that likely inspired Romeo and Juliet. So the names Montague and Capulet are used as examples of civil strife that date back as early as the 13th century, as Dante refers to them in 1298. Next, the story of Giulietta Capuletti and Romeo Montecchi, as told by Luigi de Porto and by Matteo Bandello in 1530 and 1554, respectively, are set in Verona during the reign of Bartolomeo della Scala, whose name will be anglicized later into Prince Aeschylus. It is unlikely that Shakespeare used the sources, the original sources, as his source material, but likely used adaptations of the source material being passed down from different writers adapting the stories.

Next, Shakespeare almost certainly read the story of Romeo and Giulietta from William Painter's 1567 Palace of Pleasure. However, his main source above all is Arthur Brooks' Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which is a poem written in 1562, reprinted in 1582 and 1587. The poem is about the same length as Shakespeare's play, and it distills information from previous versions of the story with added exciting details. One change is that Brooks' poem takes place over nine months, and the Capulet feast is part of a Christmas revel while Juliet's marriage to Paris is set for September 10th. And also, Brooks' Romeo and Juliet are married for a month or two before Romeo's duel with Tybalt. So that is the Brooks adaptation.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is over the course of four days, so there is time difference from Brooks to Shakespeare. It makes sense that Shakespeare is inspired by and uses the Romeo and Juliet story because the Romeo and Juliet story was popular in Elizabethan times, as evidenced by a masque written in 1575 for the celebration of marriage between two prominent Catholic families, the Montagues and the Dormers, also make a quick reference to the ancient feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. One of Lord Montague's daughters was the mother of the third Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and Shakespeare may have been well aware of this familial connection as well. So there might be real-life social connections from the time that Shakespeare is referencing as well in the play.

And one other part of Shakespeare's play that is different from this popular Elizabethan story: in his play, Shakespeare expanded the role of Tybalt, who was a minor, though important character in Brook, and has him present from the start. Shakespeare also expands the role of Mercutio and adds the character of Benvolio, who takes on some of the actions assigned to Romeo in Brook, such as trying to quell Tybalt's attempts to duel. I'm very grateful that Shakespeare added more Tybalt and Mercutio and Benvolio.

And the last source that we want to mention is that Shakespeare also likely used Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid's Metamorphoses as another source. And we've talked about Ovid and Metamorphoses and Pyramus and Thisbe from our A Midsummer Night's Dream series, but Romeo and Juliet very much mirrors Pyramus and Thisbe with the feud and the star-crossed lovers and the untimely deaths.

ES: All right, now let's talk about some of the major themes of Romeo and Juliet. So first and foremost, we have love, specifically the forcefulness of love and love as a cause of violence. Love drives most of the action of the play and the choices the characters make that result in the death of the title characters.

KS: Yeah, and I think that there is an examination of what love is because Romeo originally thinks he's in love with Rosaline, and then he falls head over heels over Juliet. And so there's also an examination of the effects of love and what is love. And there's a lot of conversation about that. So it's very dominant.

ES: Yes, that love, specifically in this play, love can lead to violence even when everyone's trying to stop violence. Another major theme is the individual versus society. So Romeo and Juliet as individual people versus the society that they exist in, specifically with the feud between their families and the governmental pressures put on by the prince to stop the brawls in the streets. Romeo and Juliet also struggle against the societal structures that exist within their families, the role, for example, that Juliet's father plays in her life and the roles that Romeo's parents have in his and what their duties to their families also mean. They also are pitted against their individual desires as well as their society's definition of honor, which is ultimately what forces them to get married in secret and for Romeo to be banished and for them to make the choices that they do.

Then there's also fate, specifically the inevitability of fate. This play opens with a prologue that foretells the end of the play and denotes these lovers as star-crossed, that the stars which govern the fate of people's lives are not in alignment. They are crossed and not destined to be. No matter how wonderful their love is, they will not be able to escape their fate of being starcrossed.

We also have the themes of, and these I'm going to kind of tie together, of sex, violence, and youth. Romeo and Juliet get married and consummate that marriage, and there's also a lot of discussion about Juliet's readiness to be a mother to have sex. Paris contends that happily are mothers made who are younger than Juliet in Verona. Other noble ladies have been married earlier than Juliet, become mothers earlier than Juliet.

KS: I believe that Lady Capulet mentions that she was a mother younger in age.

ES: Yes, and really the only one who's kind of like against it is Lord Capulet, who would rather wait for Juliet to get married at least another year.

KS: Yeah, I think two years is, so maybe until she's 16.

ES: Yeah, he does not consider her ready, and this can be seen as a commentary on the physical toll that pregnancy can cause to a young body, a body of a 12, 13, 14-year-old. And there are scholars who suggest that perhaps why the Capulets do not have more children is because if we accept Lady Capulet's assertion that she was pregnant with Juliet when she was younger than Juliet, perhaps something happened that rendered her infertile and of them unable to have more children because of how young she was. And that's that kind of tied in sex and youth a little bit, so I'm going to hop over into youth.

So another major theme is how young these characters are. Not only are even the adults in these situations maybe in their 30s, which is not that old, but we also have these teenagers who are making major choices in their life. We know that Juliet is 14. Romeo's age is not stated, although he is believed by his actions to also be young, like not over the age of 18. And with youth comes sort of the folly of youth, the idea that, like, perhaps if they had been a little bit older, they may not have been so rash. They can take things to extremes, and perhaps that's due to their youth. Romeo's, again, that falling in love with Rosaline and then falling in love so quickly with Juliet, could that be due to their youth? How quickly they fall in love and out of love? And then, of course, their youth also can lead to some of the violence. They are quick to react, quick to act.

And the violence that permeates this play is often enacted by the younger generation of the Montagues and Capulets. The patriarchs, Lord Montague and Lord Capulet, are sworn by Prince Aeschylus to keep the peace in Verona. And the patricians of Verona, who come with bats to break up the fights, are also older. So really, the actual fights that are happening in this play are happening because of an old feud, but the younger generation are the only ones who are actively pursuing violence because of this feud. The play starts with the incitement of a brawl and ultimately leads to a double suicide and—

KS: Many deaths

ES: Several deaths along the way, because the young people involved in this feud are affected so directly by the violence.

KS: Yeah, and for them, it's very literally life and death.

ES: Yes.

KS: All of these situations that we see, every single event in the play is a life or death situation to the younger generation.

ES: Yep.

KS: So those are the major themes. Now let's look at some of the motifs. One of the major motifs in Romeo and Juliet is the idea of light and dark. We have very directly day and night with Juliet as the sun. Romeo also mentions light and dark when he's in the tomb and he mentions the lightness of Juliet and how she can illuminate the darkness. I'm paraphrasing, but he does make that mention. So this idea of light and dark is a very big one for the play. This contrast is not given a particular metaphoric meaning. So light is not always good and dark is not always evil, but light and dark are used to provide a sensory contrast and a hint at opposed alternatives, which makes sense in a play that has a blood feud and two opposing families who are at an old war with each other.

Another motif is opposite points of view. So in this play, Shakespeare includes numerous speeches and scenes that hint at alternative ways to evaluate the play. We see this very prominently in the duel between Tybalt and Romeo and Mercutio. There are opposing accounts of what happened and what has led to the death of Tybalt and leads to the banishment of Romeo. We also see this even at the top. The play starts with a brawl and there are two of them, Samson and Gregory, are talking about how they're going to behave a certain way to egg the other group on, but they're not going to actually explicitly do anything. And then once there is a brawl, there is, you know, who did it first? So these opposite points of view are quite prominent. We also have opposite points of view, not only in the violence, but also in how people see, for example, Romeo's love. What Romeo feels is love. Mercutio and Benvolio, on the other hand, making fun of him, mocking him, specifically with the Queen Mab speech. There's a lot of interpretation of these opposing points of view and these potentially contradictory points of view.

ES: Yeah. I think also they give this broader sense of Verona as well. So I think we can see Romeo and Juliet, the play and the characters, and the Montagues and the Capulets, as very within their own bubble with this feud. And Mercutio, the servants, like the unnamed servants, like the patricians who are breaking up these fights, as well as Paris and Prince Aeschylus, people who are not family members and not associated with either of these families, present this alternative view of what's going on, which is that all of Verona is tired of it, is over this feud, and are specifically aggrieved by the recent outbreak in brawling. In the prologue, it says, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny. So for some reason, this violence has started up again, and other people are tired of it. The prince says about as much.

KS: Yeah, I was going to say Prince Aeschylus very much is like walking out like, again, again, or like, you know, he's exhausted, he's tired. And yeah, it's turned into something much bigger that affects everyone else in Verona.

ES: But they're not involved, and they don't care about this grudge.

KS: They don't want it.

ES: They don't want it.

KS: It's time to end.

ES: They think it's silly, which I think is also why, you know, we're able to see Mercutio and Benevolio convince Romeo to go to the party, because they're not as deeply involved in this feud as the son of Lord Montague. So they're like, why not? Why not just go?

KS: Yeah, yeah, what's the worst can happen?

ES: Yeah. Yep.

KS: Another motif is time. Time is distorted in the play. Characters complain about how slowly things are moving, or they are incredibly specific about the time something will take. Scenes take place at all hours of the day and night. This is very prominent on the eve of Juliet and Paris's wedding. Lady Capulet mentions it's about to be the evening. You should stop making plans. And then—

ES: All of a sudden it's the morning.

KS: And then it's the morning. So there is this sense of time is a very loose construct in the world of Verona in terms of the theatrical sense of time.

ES: Or these people are just staying up for four days straight.

KS: Which, I mean, it might justify why there are so many bad decisions being made. If you are sleep deprived, you are not able to make decisions with a clear head. And so fogginess can lead, I suppose, to murder and death.

ES: Yeah, sure.

KS: And in terms of time, the play, there is a concrete duration for the play. The entire plot occurs over the course of just over four days. It starts on a Sunday morning in late July, and it ends on a Thursday. And I think it's important to note, too, there is this, even in the play, this urgency to get things done in the sense that originally Juliet is going to be married in three days. And then it becomes like, oh, you're getting married tomorrow. So time is something that's on the minds of all of these characters, I think.

ES: Mm-hmm.

KS: And that's it for the motifs.

ES: All right. So that's it for our stuff to chew on. Thank you for listening.

Quote of the Episode:

Stephanie Crugnola: Hi, this is Stephanie from Protest Too Much podcast. And this quote is from Twelfth Night, Act 5,

Scene 1, said by Olivia: Most wonderful.KS:E

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

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Works referenced:

Shakespeare, William, and René Weis. Romeo and Juliet: Revised Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2012.

SparkNotes Editors. “Romeo and Juliet.” SparkNotes.com, SparkNotes LLC, 2005, URL.