Revisiting Don Quixote in one of his essays, George Orwell cites Nietzsche’s
observation that later generations do
not always read a literary work in the spirit that the original audience, or
the author, might have done. When the
crazy old man has half his teeth knocked out with a sling bow, we moderns tend
to feel pity. But in Cervantes’ own day,
Nietzsche speculates, the episode might have been considered screamingly
funny. Perhaps so, in an era when people
burned each other.
Long
before Reception Theory – that the audience creates the meaning – became current,
the truth of Nietzsche’s observation can be seen in the response of Romantic
critics to Dante’s Francesca da Rimini. Dante,
the character in the poem, weeps for pity; but Dante, the poet, doesn’t. If you take the stanzas without preconception,
they read like a Browning monologue: the more the protagonist speaks, the more
she condemns herself. Romantic critics, however, unashamedly brought
their preconceived values to the text.
Passion is magnificent. Francesca
has passion. Therefore, Francesca is magnificent.
The rights and wrongs of who owns a work of
literature – writer, reader, or both – are not my concern in this essay. I am simply exploring whether the way in
which we moderns regard Romeo and Juliet is
necessarily that which the author intended.
As long as I’ve been alive – and
that’s a long time, now - any
production, stage or screen, any critical discussion, has seemed to assume as a
matter of course that Shakespeare is on the side of the lovers against their
parents, of youth against age, of the
freedom to choose your partner for love against commercially-arranged marriage. That Shakespeare explores these issues in
the play is indisputable, but to explore is not necessarily to approve; any
more than to say that because Milton
In
Much Ado about Nothing, the case against conventional marriage and
parental control does seem to me to
be convincingly argued: the characters of Beatrice and Benedick, and their
values, are deliberately introduced into the original story in contrast to –
and implicit criticism of – the stiff conventionality of Hero and Claudio. But I find no such convenient touchstone for
comparison in Romeo and Juliet: if
anything, and particularly in the case of Romeo, an implicit criticism of the
excesses to which uncontrolled passion can lead. And in Shakespeare’s political and history
plays, there is – at the least – an ambivalence about the unthinking mob, about
the dangers of upsetting the existing order of things. What I am saying, I suppose, is that the key speech
about degree in Troilus and Cressida
has its counterpart in Romeo and Juliet,
and that the Ulysses of Romeo and Juliet is
Friar Lawrence: although his concern is with the horizontal rather than the vertical.
The
equivalent of the Degree speech is Friar Lawrence’s opening gambit in Act 2
Sc3. Arguably, this is the most
important speech in the play: certainly as much so as the more-famous
Prologue.
Two
such opposed kings encamp them still
In
man as well as herbs – grace and rude will;
And
where the worser is predominant,
Full
soon the canker death eats up that plant.
Balance
is all. Get the amount right, and you have medicine;
get it wrong, and you’ve got poison. Partly,
this speech anticipates Juliet’s apprehension before she drinks the potion that
the Friar has prepared for her. Far more, it reflects the excesses of passion
that poison communal and personal health. The anger and irrationality and
hatred that fuel the feud threaten the stability of the city state, and
generate the violent reaction of love in the younger generation.
Take the lovers at face value, and
the sort of things that Friar Lawrence says are simply what you would expect an
aged celibate to say. That, certainly,
is the modern view. It may be so; or it
may be that that Friar Lawrence is Shakespeare’s spokesperson in the play, with
perceptions akin to the Friar in Much Ado
who asserts Hero’s innocence. Much hinges on how we view the presentation of
Friar Lawrence, which will be in turn be influenced by how we interpret
Shakespeare’s - or, indeed, our own - attitude towards Catholicism.
Romeo
when we first meet him speaks in oxymorons, and these violent extremes
characterise him all through the play. When Romeo justifies himself against Friar
Lawrence for his rapid change of heart – “Thou chid’st me oft for loving
Rosaline.” – the Friar points out that he was criticising not an emotion, but
an excess: “For doting, not for loving,
pupil mine.” Rosaline – one of the most
sympathetic characters in the play although we never meet her – had realised
this about Romeo: that he was more in love with the idea of love than he was with
her.
Friar Lawrence’s
conversation to Romeo is peppered with warnings about excesses of speed or
rapture: “Wisely and slow, they stumble
that run fast.”; or “These violent
delights have violent ends… Therefore
love moderately.” It is the external voice of reason against the inner voice of
passion; but, of course – or there would be no tragedy – the heart fails to
listen to the head.
All Shakespeare’s plays are too
multi-faceted to be confined to any one interpretation. However, there can still be an overall
prevailing view: nearly everyone except a PhD candidate looking for something
original to say seems to feel that Shakespeare is on the side of Othello rather than Iago, or of Hermione
rather than Leontes. When sense is
ignored by sensibility, disaster follows.
That could well have been Shakespeare’s ‘message’; so that we moderns do
indeed experience the play in a way quite other than what was intended.
Stranger things have happened. One of the resolutions of Swift’s old age
was, “To despise all small children, nor to let them come near me hardly.” It was the punishment of posterity that his
most famous work should end up as a children’s classic.
No comments:
Post a Comment