Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
(Penguin, 1960)
Economic realities determined the theatrical world in which Shakespeare’s plays were written, performed, and received. For centuries in England and, the primary theatrical tradition was nonprofessional. Craft guilds (or “mysteries”) provided religious drama - mystery plays - as part of the celebration of religious and civic festivals, and schools and universities staged classical and neoclassical drama in both Latin and English as part of their curricula.
Page ix.
Professional theater … existed on the margins of society.
Page ix.
In the ate 1560s and 1570s, however, English professional theater began to gain respectability.
Page ix.
Since natural light illuminated the amphitheaters’ stages, performances began between noon and two o’clock and ran without a break for two or three hours.
Page xi.
Magic appealed to Shakespeare’s audiences as much as it does to us today, and the theater exploited many deceptive and spectacular devices.
Page xii.
Actors wore elementary makeup such as wigs, false beards, and face paint, and they employed pigs’ bladders filled with animal blood to make wounds seem more real.
Page xii.
The music of viols, cornets, oboes, and recorders was a regular feature of theatrical performances.
Page xii.
Until 1660, professional theatrical companies included no women.
Page xiii.
In an intensely hierarchical and status-conscious society, professional actors and their ventures had hardly any respectability; as we have indicated, to protect themselves against laws designed to curb vagabondage and the increase of masterless men, actors resorted to the near-fiction that they were the servants of noble masters and wore their distinctive livery.
Page xiv.
Shakespeare’s company became a joint-stock company, where persons who supplied capital and, in some cases, such as Shakespeare’s, capital and talent, employed themselves and others in earning a return on that capital. This development meant that actors and theater companies were outside both the traditional guild structures, which required some form of civic or royal charter, and the feudal household organization of master-and-servant.
Page xv.
Public officials had good reason to want to close the theaters: they were attractive nuisances - they drew often-riotous crowds, they were always noisy, and they could be politically offensive and socially insubordinate.
Page xv.
The Tudor-Stuart audience was not merely large, it was socially diverse and included women.
Page xv.
The theater was the most widely and frequently available entertainment to which people of every class had access.
Pages xv-xvi.
If we make due allowance for the bloating of modern, run-of-the-mill bureaucratic records, more information has survived over the past four hundred years about William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, than is likely to survive in the next four hundred years about any reader of these words.
Page xvii.
It has been estimated, for instance, that up to one-third of Elizabethan brides were pregnant when they married.
Page xviii.
William Shakespeare’s last surviving direct descendant was his granddaughter Elizabeth \hall, who died in 1670.
Page xviii.
Though he worked in London, his family remained in Stratford, and he seems always to have considered Stratford the home he would eventually return to.
Page xx.
The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common - they are snobs. Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the imagination or background their author supposedly possessed.
Pages xxii-xxiii.
As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England - and Oxford was not particularly well educated.
Page xxiii.
A great deal of testimony from Shakespeare’s time shows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that his contemporaries recognized them s distinctive and distinctly superior.
Page xxiii.
The decision to print the works of a popular playwright in folio is an indication of how far up on the social scale the theatrical profession had come during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Page xxv.
The First Folio was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
Page xxv.
The folio includes only Shakespeare’s plays, not his sonnets or other nondramatic verse.
Pages xxv-xxvi.
The texts of the plays were initially not intended for publication. They were scripts, designed for the actors to perform - the principal life of the play at this period was in performance. And it follows that in Shakespeare’s theater the playwright typically had no say either in how his play was performed or in the disposition of his text - he was an employee of the company.
Page xxvi.
The resulting text belonged to the company. The playwright had no rights in it once he has been paid. (This system survives largely intact in the movie industry, and most of the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time were as anonymous as most screenwriters are today.)
Page xxvi.
Shakespeare was an exceptional figure in this world because he was not only a shareholder and actor in his company, but also its leading playwright - he was literally his own boss.
Pages xxvi-xxvii.
The transcendently beautiful passage in modern editions is an editorial invention: editors have succeeded in conflating and revising the three versions into something we recognize as great poetry.
Page xxviii.
Shakespeare always had performance, not a book, in mind.
Page xxviii.
After the publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet cycle Astrotphil and Stella in 1591, English poets responded with a craze for sonneteering.
Page xxxi.
The prince is firmly and painfully implicated int eh kinship structure of Verona. Mercutio and Paris are his kinsmen.
Page xxxiii.
The play is full of characters whose names are solely a definition of allegiance.
Page xxxiv.
Every character in Verona, except for het friars, is explicitly aligned with social groupings created by this network of kinship and allegiance.
Page xxxiv.
Mercutio may be the prince’s relative but he places himself with Romeo, almost as if he were a Montague.
Page xxxv.
Whatever may have been the originating cause of the feud, it is continued by the earnest need of the young men to prove their masculinity through their swords.
Page xxxv.
In the lay’s complex system of balances, Mercutio is in some ways the counterpart of the nurse. As she is |Juliet’s confidante, so he is Romeo’s intimate friend. Both have a propensity for sexual punning, consciously in Mercutio’s case, perhaps largely unconsciously in the nurse’s.
Page xxxv.
As a young man, Romeo can go where he please in Verona. Juliet, by contrast, as a young unmarried woman, is firmly kept indoors.
Page xxxvi.
It is the friar who most often advises a particular course of action in order ton engineer a particular consequence.
Page xxxvii.
Friar Laurence’s integrity is unquestioned but his rational approach to each problem posed him can only show how conclusively the operation of chance works against human plans.
Page xxxviii.
The play is full of premonitory warning.
Page xxxviii.
Over and over again the drama moves from the possibility of a happy ending to its appalling catastrophe by the tiniest of temporal margins.
Page xxxviii.
The events of the play take place in mid-July.
Page xxxix.
Their contact has a quality of the absolute a bout it that has turned Romeo and Juliet into Western culture’s epitome of love - heterosexual, adolescent, secret, foredoomed.
Page xxxix.
Romeo may go to the Capulet feast simply to see Rosaline (and many modern productions have turned Shakespeare’s unseen figure into a visible presence there) but, once Juliet is seen, Rosaline is forgotten.
Pages xxxix-xl.
Romeo and Juliet teases the audience with the possibility of comedy. But the changes for comedy are progressively eradicate by the changes in the action.
Page xl.
Romeo and Juliet is not the play that its popular image has created.
Page xli.
In a play in which so much happens too soon or too late, the intensity with which Romeo and Juliet snatch time together ma seem scant consolation but the only consolation possible.
Page xli.
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes’
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A cocking gall, and a preserving sweet.
(1.1.189-193)
My child is yet a stranger in the world.
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years.
(1.2.8-9)
One fire burns out another’s burning;
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
(1.2.45-46)
Women grow by men.
(1.3.95)
Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.
(1.4.22)
Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,
Too rude, too boist’rous, and it pricks like thorn.
(1.4.25-26)
I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air.
(1.4.97-99)
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)
Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.
(1.5, 53-54)
This intrusion shall
Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest gall.
(1.5, 92-93)
Give me my sin again.
(1.5, 111)
My grave is like to be my wedding bed.
(1.5, 136)
Romeo is beloved and loves again,
Alike bewitched by the charm of looks.
(2.1, 5-6)
Passion lends them power, time means, to meet,
Temp’ring extremities with extreme sweet.
(2.1, 13-14)
Blind is his love and best befits the dark.
(2.2, 32)
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
(2.2, 33)
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
(2.2, 24-25)
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
(2.2, 43-44)
Stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
(2.2, 67-68)
I have no joy of this contract tonight.
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say “It lightens.”
(2.2, 117-120)
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep: the more I give go ghee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
(2.2, 133-135)
I am afeared,
Being in night, all this is but a dream.
(2.2, 139-140)
Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books;
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.
(2.2, 158-159)
Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
(2.3, 185-186)
Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power.
(2.3, 23-24)
Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.
(2.3, 35-36.)
Young men’s love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
(2.3, 67-68)
Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.
(2.3, 80)
This allegiance may so happy prove
To turn your households’ rancor to pure love.
(2.3, 91-92)
Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.
(2.3, 94)
Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead, stabbed and with a white wench’s black eye, run through the ear with a love song.
(2.4, 13-15)
Old folks, many feign as they were dead -
Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead.
(2.5, 16-17)
You have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose a man.
(2.5, 38-39)
I must another way,
To fetch a ladder, by the which your love
Must climb a bird’s nest soon when it is dark.
I am the drudge, and toil in your delight;
But you shall bear the burden soon at night.
(2.6, 72-76)
These violent delights have violent ends.
(2.6, 9)
Therefore love moderately: long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
(2.6, 14-15.)
Men’s eyes were made to look, and let them gaze.
(3.1, 53)
O sweet Juliet,
They beauty hath made me effeminate
And in my temper softened valor’s steel!
(3.1, 112-114)
O, I am fortune’s fool!
(3.1, 135)
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.
(3.1, 187-190)
If love be blind,
It best agrees with night.
(3.2, 9-10)
I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possessed it; and though I am sold,
Not yet enjoyed.
(3.2, 26-28)
There’s no trust,
No faith, no honesty in men; all perjured,
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.
(3.2, 85-87)
He made you for a highway to my bed;
But I, a maid, die maiden-widowed.
(3.2, 134-135)
Thou are wedded to calamity.
(3.3, 3)
Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.
(3.3, 16)
Stand up, stand up! Stand, an you be a man.
(3.3, 88)
We were born to die.
(3.4, 4)
It is so very very late
That we may call it early by and by.
(3.4, 34-35)
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
(3.5, 11)
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)
Some grief shows much of love;
But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
(3.5, 73-74)
I would the fool were married to her grave!
(3.5, 141)
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds.
(3.5, 153)
I think it best you married with the county,
O, he’s a lovely gentleman!
(3.5, 219-220)
I’ll to the friar to know his remedy,
If all else fail, myself have power to die.
(3.5, 243-244)
What must be shall be.
(4.1, 21)
That is no slander, sir, which is a truth.
(4.1, 33)
In the meantime, against thou shalt awake,
Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift,
And hither shall he come, and he and I
Will watch thy waking, and that fery night
Shall Romeo gear thee hence to Mantua.
(4.1, 113-117)
Tell not me of fear!
(4.1, 121)
I’ll send a friar with speed
To Mantua, with my letters to thy lord.
(4.1, 123-124)
Afore God, this revered holy friar,
All our whole city is much bound to him.
(4.2, 31-32)
Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
(4.3, 14)
What if it be a poison which the friar
Subtly hath ministered to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonored
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is; and yet methinks it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
(4.3, 24-29)
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
(4.5, 28-29)
Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir.
(4.5, 38)
My child is dead,
And with my child my joys are buried!
(4.5, 63-64)
She’s not well married that lives married long,
But she’s best married that dies married young.
(4.5, 77-78)
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possessed,
When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!
(5.1, 10-11)
How fares my Juliet? That I ask again,
For nothing can be ill if she be well.
(5.1, 35-36)
The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.
(5.3, 37-39)
Live, and be prosperous; and farewell, good fellow.
(5.3, 42)
His looks I fear, and his intents I doubt.
(5.3, 44)
How oft when men re at the point or death
Have they been merry!
(5.3, 88-89)
Ah, dear Juliet,
Why are thou yet so fair?
(5.3, 101-102)
Here’s to my love! O, true apothecary!
They drugs are quick. This with a kiss I die.
(5.3, 119-120)
Where is my lord?
I do remember well where I should be,
And there I am. Where is my Romeo?
(5.3, 148-150)
Come, I’ll dispose of thee
Among a sisterhood of holy nuns.
(5.3, 156-157)
O happy dagger!
This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.
(5.3, 169-170)
Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
(5.3, 293)
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
(5.3, 309-310)