the close of IV. iii., the close of IV. iv., the close of v. i., the close of v. ii., in v. iii. immediately before the entrance of the Friar, and again immediately after Juliet's death. The use of the mark is evidently not accidental or careless. The dramatic time is carefully noted throughout the play, but presents one inexplicable difficulty. The action opens early on Sunday morning; after the street fray when Romeo and Benvolio meet, it has but "new struck nine." The afternoon has come when Romeo reads the list of Capulet's invited guests; at night the "old accustomed feast" is held, and Romeo after the feast hears Juliet's confession of love at the window. Early on Monday morning Romeo visits Friar Laurence; at noon he jests with Mercutio, and informs Juliet through the Nurse that the marriage shall be celebrated that afternoon. The lovers are married; the encounter with Tybalt, "that an hour hath been my cousin," follows. The sentence of banishment is pronounced; but it is arranged that the new husband and wife shall spend their bridal night together. At dawn on Tuesday morning Romeo parts from Juliet. Capulet on the preceding night had fixed the marriage with Paris for Thursday; he now rages and threatens Juliet; she visits the Friar, who gives her the sleeping potion; she returns, seems to acquiesce in her parents' wishes, and the hasty Capulet resolves that she shall be taken at her word, and married to Paris to-morrow (Wednesday) morning. At some hour of the night of Tuesday Juliet drinks the potion. Old Capulet bustles during the night in preparations for the wedding-" the curfew-bell hath rung, 'tis three o'clock." On Wednesday morning Juliet is found in seeming death; the Friar arrives at the hour prefixed for marriage; all is turned from a wedding to a funeral; Juliet is laid in the tomb of her ancestors. At a later hour of what seems to be the same day (Wednesday), Balthasar informs Romeo of his wife's death; Romeo obtains the poison, sets out for Verona, at night enters the monument by torch-light, and dies beside his beloved. Friar Laurence "at the prefixed hour of her waking" arrives to take Juliet from the vault; she stabs herself and dies; the Prince, called from his morning's rest, enters, and on Thursday at an early hour the action closes.1 The rapidity of the whole conduct of the action is surprising; yet, up to the night on which Juliet swallows the Friar's potion, there can be no question as to the dating of days and hours. At this point Shakespeare creates a difficulty that seems to be insuperable. He had probably noticed in Painter's version of the tale a statement of the Friar that the opiate effects of the drug were to continue for "the space of forty hours at the least." As if to be more precise Shakespeare names the period as two and forty hours." From what time of the night of Tuesday will forty-two succeeding hours bring us to a very early morning hour (the month is July) of either Thursday or Friday? The period is too short to suit Friday morning, too long for Thursday. We should not trouble ourselves about what might be 1 See, together with Daniel's "Time-Analysis of the Plots of Shakespeare's Plays" (New Sh. Society's Transactions, 1879), the notes on p. 202 and p. 219 of Mr. Rolfe's edition of Romeo and Juliet. explained as a mere stage-illusion of time, if Shakespeare had required such a stage-illusion, or if he had not dated the events throughout with more exactness than the stage requires. In Painter the Friar directs Juliet to drink the potion "the night before your marriage or in the morning before day"; in Brooke, "on thy marriage day before the sun do clear the sky." Can Shakespeare at one time have intended that Juliet's soliloquy should represent the passions of a whole night, and that she should not swallow the opiate until a short time before the Nurse came to rouse her in order that she should prepare for the marriage ceremony? And was she to return to consciousness in the first glimmering of a July dawn, as soon after midnight as that might be, on the morning of Friday? The theory is in many ways unsatisfactory, but the mere passage of hours during a soliloquy need not present a difficulty to the student of Shakespeare. In Cymbeline it is midnight when Imogen is seized by sleep; Iachimo comes from the trunk, soliloquises, and the clock strikes three. Yet it can hardly be supposed that Shakespeare ever intended that Juliet should conjure up the vision of the slaughtered Tybalt in the full light of morning. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the difficulty is to admit that it was never meant to be explained; forty-two hours gave an air of precision and verisimilitude to the Friar's arrangement; it sufficed to cover two periods of night preceding two Italian summer dawns; and the dramatist knew that spectators in the theatre do not regulate their imagination by a chronometer. Unlike the play of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet has little of imaginative mystery. The chief subject of difference among its critics concerns what we may call the ethics of the play. "By Friar Laurence," writes Gervinus, "who, as it were, represents the part of the chorus in this tragedy, the leading idea of the piece is expressed in all fulness, an idea that runs throughout the whole, that excess in any enjoyment, however pure in itself, transforms its sweet into bitterness, that devotion to any single feeling, however noble, bespeaks its ascendency; that this ascendency moves the man and woman out of their natural spheres; that love can only be a companion in life, and cannot fill out the life and business of the man especially; that in the full power of its first rising, it is a paroxysm of happiness, which, according to its nature, cannot continue in equal strength; that, as the poet says in an image, it is a flower that, 'Being smelt, with that part cheers each part ; And the critic pursues his well-meant moralisings in the same spirit. Much nearer the mark was Goethe in his arrangement of Romeo and Juliet for the Weimar theatre, 1811: "Before Juliet revives," in Goethe's recast, "the Friar confesses that all his cunning wisdom was in vain ; that if he had opposed, instead of aiding the lovers, things could not have come to a worse end. After 1 The commonplace moralisings and the vigorous Protestant feeling expressed by Brooke in his address "To the Reader," prefixed to Romeus and Juliet, did not influence Shakespeare; and they do not enter into Brooke's poem, where the hero and heroine are not represented as thralling themselves to unhonest desire," and the " 'superstitious frier" appears as an amiable old student of natural science. Juliet has stabbed herself Friar Laurence acknowledges the folly that often attends the wisdom of the wise, that to attempt to do good is often more dangerous than to undertake to do evil. Happy those whose love is pure, because both love and hatred lead but to the grave." 1 That is to say, the amiable critic of life as seen from the cloister does not understand life or hate or love; he is not the chorus of the tragedy, but an actor whose wisdom is of a kind which may easily lead himself and others astray. Garrick was not an eminent moralist, but there is more of truth in the Prince's rhymed tag, with which Garrick's version of the tragedy concludes, than can be found in the ponderous moralities of Gervinus: Well may you mourn my Lords, (now wise too late) From private feuds, what dire misfortunes flow; The tragic issues are the results not of love, but of love. growing on the hatred of the houses. Shakespeare has set forth this in the opening scene, half humorous yet wholly tragic. He reiterates his statement of the fact at the close. Romeo and Juliet die as sacrifices to appease the insane fury, out of which their lives had risen and in which they had no individual part; therefore shall their statues be raised, and in "pure gold": Mon. There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. Cap. As rich shall Romeo by his lady lie; 1 Furness, Romeo and Juliet, p. 445. |