Now Art Thou Sociable Now Art Thou Romeo Now Art Thou Art by Art as Well as by Nature

Romeo and Juliet

Act Two, Function Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Stanley Wells, another view of the balcony scene, plus a glimpse of the Nurse and Mercutio:

"For all the scene'due south rapture, information technology is conceived in fully dramatic terms.  At its opening, the lovers are apart, and Juliet is unaware of Romeo's presence.  Each has what is in effect a long soliloquy; each in a individual world seeks to attain out to communicate with the other.  And when they practise address each other directly they are at first restrained by consciousness of the feud between their families.  Steadily they come up towards each other, but the climax of their meet comes not with physical contact just with a silence, a sense of equilibrium, of time suspended in a perfect communion that needs no words:

Juliet:

I have forgot why I did telephone call thee back.

Romeo:

Let me stand here till g call back information technology.

Juliet:

I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,

Rememb'ring how I love thy company.

Romeo:

And I'll stay, to have thee still forget,

Forgetting any other dwelling house but this.

[MY NOTE:  Yous say cheerio showtime.  No…YOU say farewell…]

The scene permits as well a delicate comedy in the lovers' hyperbole and their self-assimilation; after hearing Juliet say no more than 'Ay me,' Romeo may make us smiling with the amazed please with which he utters 'She speaks,' as if this were a feat that could scarcely be expected of one and so immature; and after Juliet has enjoined him not to swear by the moon, he may seem touchingly puzzled in his response 'What shall I swear by? – the poor boy is doing his best.

Though the oestrus of the play may indeed be a love-duet, there is far more than to its body than this; the novelist George Moore was quite incorrect to describe it every bit 'no more than a love-song in dialogue.'  For one thing, idealism is only one aspect of Romeo and Juliet'due south dear.  Famously, their first conversation takes the form of a shared sonnet, a sonnet that is witty too as lyrical, that uses religious imagery merely somewhat subverts information technology by its admission of physicality; it is a sonnet of courting, and its climax is non a prayer but a kiss:

Romeo: [To Juliet, touching her hand]

If I profane with my unworthiest paw

This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, fix stand

To shine that rough touch with a tender buss.

Juliet:

Good pilgrim, yous do wrong your hand too much,

Which charming devotion shows in this.

For saints accept easily that pilgrims' hands exercise touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo:

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?

Juliet:

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must utilize in prayer.

Romeo:

O then, dear saint, let lips do what easily do:

They pray; grant thou, lest faith plough to despair.

Juliet:

Saints to not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo:

Then move non while my prayer's issue I take.

HE KISSES HER

Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purged.

Juliet:

And so have my lips the sin that they accept took.

Romeo:

Sin from my lips?  O trespass sweetly urged!

Give me my sin once more.

This is a love that seeks, and finds, total physical consummation.  Juliet looks forrad to her hymeneals nighttime every bit an occasion of sexual spousal relationship:

Come, civil night,

G sober-suited matron all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods

Hood my unmanned claret, bating in my cheeks,

With they blackness mantle till strange love grown bold

Remember true dearest acted unproblematic modesty.

[3.2.10-16]

And the play's final love-duet is the lovers' doom-laden conversation at daybreak after their marriage dark, when Romeo is already banished.  He seeks to remain, even at the cost of his life; she urges him to get, to salve his life.

In that location are, then, three love-duets, one in the evening, one at nighttime, and the terminal at dawn; each represents a moment of tremulous, threatened stasis in the lovers' developing relationship, and each is interrupted by Juliet'southward Nurse.  She is a reminder of the earth of daylight reality which endangers their dearest, and she is also a measure of the greatness of that love.  If R&J is the most romantic of Shakespeare'south plays, it is as well, from the opening episode with its ribald jesting between Capulet'due south servants, the bawdiest.  In the scene that introduces us to Juliet, her Nurse tells a tale that, looking back to Juliet'due south infancy, besides looks forward to the loss of her virginity:  'Yard wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit.'  And the idealism of the balcony scene is prefaced by Mercutio'southward dirty talk of Rosaline:

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open up-arse, and m a popp'rin pear.

Mercutio is Romeo's best friend, the Nurse is closer to Juliet than her parents; they are parallel forces, the two richest and about strongly individual characters in the play, but each is fatally limited in understanding just where it is nigh needed.  Mercutio, for all the delicacy of imagination suggested in his Queen Mab oral communication – a virtuoso display for histrion and author likewise equally for the grapheme – expresses a satirically reductive view of love between man and woman:  'this abused love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole,' and for the Nurse, one healthy human is very much the same as another:  she admires Romeo's concrete qualities – 'for a hand and a foot and a body, though they be not to be talked on, notwithstanding they are past compare' – but after hearing of his banishment immediately transfers her allegiance to Juliet's official suitor, Paris:

I call back you lot are happy in this second lucifer,

For it excels your first; or if it did not,

Your first is expressionless, or 'twere as good he were

As living hence and you no employ of him.

[3.five.222-v]

The technique of juxtaposing romantic and anti-romantic attitudes to love is the same equally Shakespeare uses in his comedies; here as there the romantic mental attitude survives criticism, partly because of the sheer poetic of the lovers' passion, and besides because it includes as well as transcends the physicality to which Mercutio and the Nurse are express."

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And from Garber, a look back and a preview of what is to come up:

"With the death of Mercutio, the possibility of containment, and of comedy, dies as well.  From this point, from the kickoff scene of the third human action, tragedy becomes inevitable.  The phonation of imagination and moderation and perspective is dead, and nosotros stop laughing.  Letters at present become undelivered, parents can no longer speak with their children.  Tragic disorder has come total force upon the play'southward world.  Tybalt is gone, Mercutio is gone, all by the beginning of the third act, and there is no turning back.  Uninstructed by the wiser and more worldly Mercutio, desperately counseled past the Friar and the Nurse, Romeo and Juliet are left to fend for themselves in a world whose blackness is no longer tipped with silver.  Yet nether this pressure they do not fail.  They acquire, they grow, and they change, so that their deaths are tragic, but not futile.

The most hit instance of such growth in the play is the transformation that Juliet undergoes.  When we outset encounter her, she is wholly submissive, even passive.  She is not yet fourteen, and her life is yet dominated by external authority:  her father, her mother, and the Nurse who has been with her – at kickoff as her wet nurse – since she was born.  One of the quieter poignancies of this play is the story of the Nurse's own daughter, Susan, who dies young, and offstage, earlier the commencement of the play.  It is a story nosotros have heard earlier, in Dearest's Labour's Lost, where it was Catherine'southward sister who had died; we will hear it once more, in a fictive version that is withal powerful and haunting, in 12th Night, when Viola bearded as the boy Cesario, speaks of the 'sister' who pined away for love 'like patience on a monument,/Grin at grief.'  To call this bear on Shakespearean is simply to beg the question of its evocative power, and to comment on the charge per unit of child mortality in the period is largely to miss the bespeak.  By inventing these backstories for his characters, Shakespeare as playwright gives the characters enormous depth and reach.

Juliet, asked by her mother what her thoughts are about union, says, 'Information technology is an honour that I dream non of.'  Confronted with Lady Capulet's approving book report on Paris, she answers only, "I'll look to like, if looking liking move.'  She is a daughter rather than a prospective wife.  It is therefore striking to see how rapidly she changes once she sets eyes on Romeo.  Immediately this guileless girl of almost fourteen becomes a clever strategist, decoying the Nurse with false preliminary inquiries so that she tin attain her truthful object, to know Romeo'due south proper noun:

Juliet:

Come hither, Nurse.  What is yon gentleman?

Nurse:

The son and heir of old Tiberio.

Juliet:

What's he that now is going out of door?

Nurse:

Marry, that, I think, be young Petruchio.

Juliet:

What'south he that follows hither, that would non trip the light fantastic?

Nurse:

I know not.

Juliet:

Go enquire his name.

And and so, aside to us the minute the Nurse bustles off:  'If he be married/My grave is like to be my wedding bed.'

Juliet will use the aforementioned device afterwards in the play when her mother tries to press her toward a hasty and unwelcome wedlock, telling her that 'early side by side Thursday' Paris volition brand her 'a joyful bride.'

Juliet:

I pray you lot, tell my lord and father, madam,

I will not marry het; and when I do, I swear

It shall be Romeo – whom y'all know I hate –

Rather than Paris…

[3.five.120-123]

She deceives her mother with Mercutio'south weapon, wordplay and double meanings.

Nowhere is Juliet's sudden transition to adulthood clearer than in the balcony scene, where she controls the scene completely, declaring her ain beloved rather than waiting for Romeo's declaration, alarm him against false vows and rash love contracts.  Twice she leaves the balustrade, and twice she returns; her exits and entrances are deliberately theatrical, and when she reappears on the balcony she reappears to the audience as well.  Each time nosotros think she has departed – to respond the Nurse'south call, the bulwark of authority, or to obey her own instinct toward modesty, the barrier of formality – she reappears and she herself summons Romeo back.  The iconography will mirror her potency, as she stands above and speaks to her lover.  The next love scene betwixt them in the space, the aubade scene (iii.5), volition find them both aloft, having spent the night in lovemaking.  But between those two scenes comes the marriage itself – fatefully performed, in terms of staging, in Friar Laurence'south cell, below, near surely in the same space that will subsequently be used for Juliet'southward tomb, visually underscoring the play's relentless twinning of womb and tomb.  The stage location is thus yet another foreshadowing of the tragic design that is about to overtake them.  The wedding takes place in the last scene of act 2; in the very next scene, the starting time scene of act 3, the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt occur.  Again the day world defeats the night world, and the Prince, persuaded of his ain generosity in doing so, commutes Romeo's capital punishment to adjournment.  All this while, Juliet has been waiting for another night.  When we hear her next, she will speak, again from her sleeping accommodation balcony, in the voice of sexual impatience and desire.  Her great speech begins:

Gallop speedily, you peppery-footed steeds,

Toward Phoebus' lodging.  Such a waggoner

Equally Phaethon would whip you lot to the due west

And bring in cloudy nighttime immediately.

[three.2.1-4]

It is a magnificent piece of poetry, and is fraught with danger signals at every turn.  Juliet wishes the chariot of the sun were fatigued by Phaethon, Apollo's headstrong son, who was too immature for such a task.  The horses ran away with the chariot, and Phaethon was scorched by the sun, and drowned in the sea."

And finally, the beginning of Garber's look at the Nurse:

"Simply as the play provides Romeo with Rosaline, and Juliet with Paris, as signs of what they practice not nonetheless know nearly themselves and about love, so also each has an older adviser, whose assistance and hindrance will together demonstrate the limits of 'wise counsel.'  Juliet has her Nurse, Romeo has Friar Laurence.  Juliet's Nurse is ane of the smashing comic characters of all literature, and her brilliant and funny colloquial speeches illustrate Shakespeare's mastery over the medium of realistic speech.  In the opening scenes of the play the Nurse'due south earthiness and practicality, as well as ser frankness in sexual matters, offer a welcome antidote to the artifice, false idealism, and even prissiness embodied in Lady Capulet'due south advancement of Paris.  The Nurse swears by her maidenhead – every bit information technology was, intact, when she was twelve years old.  She is secretly delighted by Mercutio's remark that 'the earthy mitt of the dial is now upon the prick of noon,' fifty-fifty as she pretends to be insulted by his innuendo.  Her sense of insult is itself physical, titillated by innuendo:  'Now, afore God, I am so vexed that every part about me quivers.'  And her long comic narrative almost Juliet's fall as a child, a narrative that turns on her late husband's labored sexual quip ('dost g fall upon thy face?/Thou wilt autumn backward when thou hast more wit.') shows her at her near amusingly and inconsequentially garrulous; the signal of her anecdote seems to be to bear witness to Lady Capulet that Juliet is almost fourteen years old, something Lady Capulet has just said to the Nurse.  The proper Lady Capulet and the young Juliet of these opening scenes are embarrassed by the Nurse'southward bawdiness, and they try to hush her ('Enough of this.  I pray thee hold thy peace').  The audience is more than likely to be pleased by the volubility and sexual frankness of this forthright descendant of the Married woman of Bath.

Yet the Nurse is a dangerously static character who does not alter in the class of the drama.  Like the Friar, she is established as a stock-still type, and since she does non grow or change, while Juliet does, nosotros can see at one time her charm in a comic world, and her inadequacy for the darker world of tragedy.  Like the optical examination in which the same color looks dissimilar against a light groundwork and a dark ane, so the Nurse is framed – and assessed – differently in the two halves of the play.  Shakespeare shows this to united states in two deliberately parallel scenes, i comic, i tragic, in both of which Juliet tries to become information out of the weary and rambling Nurse.  (The device is parallel to the two contrasting wooing scene in Richard III, where Richard's early on success with the Lady Anne is not repeated when he tries the same arroyo a 2nd time – aiming to ally the daughter of his brother Clarence – and his suit is rejected.)"

More on the Nurse, Friar Laurence, and much more, in my next postal service.

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Two questions for the group:

1.  How do you lot like the pacing of the reading and my posts?  A better pace?  Too long between acts?

ii.  Now that nosotros're about halfway through the play, for those of y'all who have read it earlier (or who know information technology from adaptations etc.), how does it compare to your memories of it?

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Our  next reading: Romeo and Juliet, Act Three

My side by side post:  Th evening/Friday morning

Enjoy

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Source: https://theplaystheblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/now-art-thou-sociable-now-art-thou-romeo-now-art-thou-what-thou-art-by-art-as-well-as-by-nature-for-this-driveling-love-is-like-a-great-natural-that-runs-lolling-up-and-down-to-hide-his-bauble/

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