Romeo and Juliet [1595]

There is no doubt that Romeo and Juliet was known on the stage before April 1597, for in that month Danter’s printing presses were destroyed, and he had already produced the ‘bad quarto’ edition using a text pirated from the play in performance. How much earlier it was written we have no sure means of telling. It has been suggested that the mock-play of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was, as part of the joke, a self-parody of Romeo and Juliet, which may be true though it is far from clear. If it is true, then Romeo was possibly written in 1595 which puts it not only before Richard II, but also between Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, possibly not far removed in time from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Such a placing suggests its romance theme, its persistently lyrical tone, and the accentuated formality of its structure and language. There is here not merely the controlled variety of tones which we have seen in earlier tragedies, but even the use of varied verse forms including even entire sonnets (for the chorus, and for the first encounter of Romeo and Juliet themselves). It is obvious that the experience of the non-dramatic sonnets is involved here, arid in fact the play can partly be seen as a dramatic exploration of the world of the love sonnet, in much the same sense that Titus Andronicus is a dramatic exploration of the world of The Rape of Lucrece. In almost every other respect it is its unlikeness to Titus that is obvious. That was political, brutal, hysterical, farcical; this is domestic, romantic, comic (not farcical), and there is no interest whatever in insanity. The contrast, in fact, is so complete, both with Titus on the one hand, and with Richard III on the other, that it would seem clearly to be deliberate, the exploration of three very different kinds of dramatic experience linked only superficially by the term ‘tragedy’. It is only in technique that one can see a likeness; I noted in Titus the multiplication of tragic themes, the highly self-conscious organization and control of utterance, and in these respects there is a marked resemblance to Romeo. The tragic themes are again multiplied, and the range of verse and prose is both wider and more obvious. In other words, we have here the same experimental ambitiousness and fertility of invention in a quite different genre: the tragedy of romance, or of love.