So she him namde. Yet once agayne the yong and wyly dame : : That yender doth in masking weede beysyde the window stand❞— a fine touch of nature, which Shakespeare instantly seized. Occasionally he reproduces the very phrases of the poem, as when the Apothecary describes the effects of the poison, "Such soon-speeding geer As will disperse itself through all the veins" (V, i), which is Brooke's "Fayr, Syr (quoth he) be sure this is the speeding geer.” So again, when in Romeo's last soliloquy he wrote, "Now at once run on The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark" (V, iii), he no doubt had in his memory Brooke's "God graunt, no dangers rock, ylurking in the dark Before thou win the happy port, wracke thy sea-beaten barke." Lady Capulet's remarks to Juliet about her mourning for Tybalt, III, v, r "What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears? An if thou couldst," etc., echoes Brooke's "Tybalt your friend is dead, what meene you by your tears To call him back againe?" But nothing is more interesting than to note how in the characters he develops what Brooke adumbrates, how he realises, as it were, Brooke's more or less shadowy figures. The most striking illustration of this is Friar Laurence. Brooke describes him as one who "knew the secrets in Nature's woorkes that loorke," represents him as calm, composed, philosophical, and kindly, consenting to marry the lovers because he thought that such a marriage might put an end to the feuds between the two families. The dignified rebuke which he gives to Romeo for his intemperance, "Art thou quoth he a man? Thy shape saith, so thou art, So that I stood in doubte .. If thou a man or woman wert, or else a brutish beast," so impressed Shakespeare that it will be seen he simply repeats the passage, scarcely changing the words. Brooke emphasises his philosophical temper by putting long ethical speeches in his mouth. If he owed the conception of Friar Laurence to Brooke, to Brooke he was also indebted for the nurse, whose character, however, he has more elaborately developed. But her garrulous reminiscences of Juliet's babyhood and childhood, her mingled coarseness and kindliness, her easy compliancy, the distrust with which Juliet plainly regards her, her affected indifference to bribes, which she greedily accepts from Romeo and probably from Paris, her depreciation of Romeo after his banishment, and her pleading the cause of Paris as emphatically as she had pleaded that of Romeo before, - all this furnishes Shakespeare with hints for his inimitable portrait. The traits introduced by himself, for which he found no suggestion in Brooke, come out in her relations with Peter, in her attitude towards Friar Laurence, and in the scene in which Capulet so brutally lectures Juliet — her coquetry and womanly vanity -"Peter, my fan," "Where's my man?" her naïveté, "O Lord, I could have stay'd here all the night To hear good counsel: O, what learning is!" (III, iii), her touchy self-importance when she thinks Mercutio has been running her down, Scurvy knave! I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates" (II, iv), and her burst of honest indignation, when her woman's heart is touched, at old Capulet's treatment of his daughter, "God in heaven bless her! You are to blame, my lord, to rate her so" (III, v). To Shakespeare also belong her amusing fussiness, garrulity, bemuddlement, and "wiggle-waggle," which make her a sort of female Polonius. Juliet's character he directly deduces from Brooke's poem, adding little or nothing; but Romeo is his own creation. It is not very easy to see what Coleridge meant by saying that Romeo is Hamlet in love, for if he has something of Hamlet's morbidity and much of his melancholy he has nothing of his 66 essentially philosophical temper, nothing of his critical brooding introspection and restless intellectual activity, nothing of his many-sidedness. He is little more than the incarnation of that type of character which Aristotle describes as τοῖς πάθεσιν ἀκολουθητίκον — obediently following the passions. He admirably describes himself one whom God hath made himself to mar." Without effeminacy, for when roused he has all the courage of the most courageous, he is so completely under the thraldom of his desire that he becomes not so much its slave as its absolute possession. Consider for a moment the intensity of such an expression as this, he is speaking of his banishment, as "'Tis torture, and not mercy: heaven is here, But Romeo may not" (III, iii), or of the following, "Shall I believe That unsubstantial death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour?" (V, iii), and what pathos the poet has thrown round the character, how beautiful the traits, which not merely redeem Romeo from contempt, but transform contempt into affection and pity!— "Villain am I none; Therefore farewell; I see thou know'st me not" (III, i), is his answer to Tybalt's gross insults, and so when Paris provokes him to a duel at the tomb of the Capulets, "I beseech thee, youth, 66 Heap not another sin upon my head, By urging me to fury: O, be gone! By heaven, I love thee better than myself" (V, iii). Nor does Brooke furnish even a hint for the inimitable creation of Mercutio, who is merely described as "a courtier highly had in price," "courteous of his speech and pleasant of devise." That Shakespeare, after lavishing on him such treasures of wit and fancy and nature, should have the heart to drop him out of the action so early in the play is only one of the many illustrations he has given us of his subordination of everything to dramatic requirement and propriety. Shakespeare's chief deviations from Brooke's narrative are interesting and sometimes curious. In the first place Brooke makes the action extend over some five months-a month passing between the marriage and the death of Tybalt; in the play it extends over exactly four days, from Sunday morning "but now struck nine" till the following Thursday night. Brooke makes Juliet just over sixteen years of age, Shakespeare not yet fourteen. Brooke does not give the name of Romeo's first mistress; Shakespeare calls her Rosaline. In Brooke the man who conveys to Romeo the news of Juliet's supposed death is merely called "Romeus' man"; Shakespeare names him Balthasar. In Brooke Peter accompanies Romeo to the tomb ; in Shakespeare Balthasar, to whom Shakespeare makes Romeo address |