Student essay: Romeo and Juliet – Destiny or Free Will

By Rebecca N.

[Note:  This is a condensation of an essay by a home school student who participated in our 2012 Summer Shakespeare Seminar.  It was written in partial fulfillment of the high school credit certificate offered in connection with the Seminar.]

     At first glance, Romeo and Juliet seem to be unfortunate but innocent victims of fate, or of the stars. This assumption isn’t surprising when we see that the prologue calls the lovers “star crossed.”  Focus on the Family’s review of Romeo and Juliet takes from the phrase, “star crossed” the conclusion that destiny rather than God guides the lovers. But is Romeo and Juliet really just “a tragedy of unawareness?” (Amanda Mabillard, “Themes in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”) Or could the fault actually belong to them because of their choices along the way?

     While things such as fate, fortune, and the stars are mentioned throughout the play, Romeo is almost always the one talking about them. In addition, he is the only character who refers to the stars as having authority. What could be his reason for this?  H.B. Charlton says Romeo “disowns responsibility and throws it on Destiny, Fate.” 

     Romeo makes many poor moral choices, each of which brings him one step closer to his doom. He chooses to hastily and secretly marry Juliet, murders Tybalt and later Paris, and finally commits suicide. We do not see Romeo assume responsibility for any one of these choices, or recognize how those choices are affecting his life.

     We cannot place all the blame on Romeo, however. Other characters are at fault also. For instance, though Friar Lawrence warns Romeo against haste, he agrees to marry the pair, and later offers Juliet the sleeping potion that leads to her death as well as Romeo’s. Juliet’s nurse bears some blame by choosing to help the two lovers get secretly married. If the Montague and Capulet families had been reasonable and settled their differences long ago, Romeo and Juliet may not have felt it necessary to keep their love a secret, and then to resort to suicide.

     So, while on the surface it appears that Romeo and Juliet were victims of destiny doomed from the beginning of time by fate, if we look closer it is easy to see that not destiny, but foolish choices by several characters came together and resulted in this tragedy.

Romeo & Juliet: Married to their Graves

In this post I want to look at chastity and marriage, death and suicide, topics that tragically intersect in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. 

At least four characters use metaphors in which the marriage bed and the death bed overlap, starting with Juliet’s comment about Romeo at the masquerade party before she even knows who he is or whether he is single. “If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed,” she says. (Act I, Scene 5, lines 148-149.) The day of the pair’s secret wedding and the untimely killing of Mercutio leading to Romeo’s banishment, Juliet hopes fervently for a wedding night with her groom before he flees, and vows that if it doesn’t happen, “I’ll to my wedding bed, And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead,” (III.2.149-150). Even after their consummation, and the charming “lark and nightingale” scene, she looks at Romeo and her “ill-divining soul” imagines seeing him in a tomb (III.5.54-57). 

That very morning, Juliet’s mother unwittingly takes up the same theme in frustration when Juliet refuses the marriage to Paris that her parents have arranged. “I would the fool were married to her grave,” (III.5.145). As the argument continues, Juliet says—in what turn out to be her final words to her mother—that if her parents insist on this marriage they may as well “make the bridal bed” in the family tomb (III.5.213). The next day when Juliet’s father discovers the apparently dead body of his daughter, he laments to Paris, the intended groom, “Death hath lain with thy wife,” (IV.5.41-45). 

Away in Mantua the banished Romeo, who has heard none of this, has his own similar—but temporarily hopeful—forebodings. “I dreamed my lady found me dead” but brought him back to life as an emperor with her kisses, (V.1.6-10) Don’t miss the irony of what will actually happen soon as a result of Juliet kissing Romeo when she finds him dead! And of course within a few lines, Romeo will have heard the report of Juliet’s ostensible death, and will promise, “Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee tonight,” (5.1.37). 

Suicide

Several of the lovers’ statements just cited imply or directly state that suicide will be the solution to their dilemma. This is probably the most problematic element of the play for Christian readers/ viewers and suggests that while the young people are honest and earnest about their love, and respectful of marriage and sexual fidelity as we shall see, they are immature in their understanding of God’s wisdom, love, and ability to provide the solutions for their problems.

Friar Lawrence, as the voice of the church and Christian orthodoxy, vehemently warns Romeo against “doing damned hate upon thyself” (III.3.128). Meanwhile Juliet is considering her own alternatives and clearly including suicide among them, (III.5.255). As soon as she can meet with Lawrence, she tells him she will kill herself if he has no better solution (IV.5.55-68) and even as she privately prepares to put the Friar’s scheme into effect, she sets the suicide knife at hand as the back-up plan (IV. 3.24).

Romeo, of course, makes specific provision for his death (V.1.37-91) calling the lethal liquid that he will swallow a “cordial [stimulating drink] and not poison” (line 90). When he does drink the mixture, it is in the style of a toast, “Here’s to my love,” (V.3.119). Both lovers have treated suicide as brave and virtuous under their circumstances, ignoring or unable to grasp the warning of Friar Lawrence or the reality of God’s sovereignty.

A High View of Chastity

I’ve addressed the point in a previous post that Juliet has a high moral standard when it comes to sexuality, and that Romeo, if he did not have one before meeting Juliet (think about I.1.216-232) certainly does after meeting her. See “Romeo & Juliet: Sexual Propriety and Impropriety,” dated 4-24-12, and “Sexual Morality” dated 7-22-10. Notice how Romeo in II.2.1 pivots quickly away from Mercutio’s bawdy joking about Romeo’s attraction to Rosalind (by then a non-issue anyway) and into the stark contrast of the famous, innocent garden and balcony scene. The young man is, on the one hand, covertly peeping in at this girl late at night from her back yard, but his private fantasy goes like this: “Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek,” (II.2.25-26). Later, in one of his most sensitive utterances in the play, he describes the “vestal modesty” of her kisses (III.3.39-41). Even the couple’s very brief “wooing scene” is an exchange of word play on religious terminology—shrine, pilgrims, saints, prayer, purging of sins (I.5.104-121).

A High View of Marriage

It should naturally follow that high respect for chastity means high respect for marriage as well, and in Romeo & Juliet it does. Draw your own conclusions as you survey statements made by the lovers and by Friar Lawrence in the following lines: III.2. 133-155, II.3.64-65, II.6.36-37, III.5.217-220, IV.1.56-60, 89-90. Of course, these good marital intentions on the part of all three characters are flawed by the haste and secrecy in which the marriage is entered, and that may well be the central explanation for why the story ends so tragically. At the same time that we take into account the extraordinary circumstances of the feud between the two households that drives the risky choices that are made, we can take from the play the kind of lesson that all tragedies are supposed to convey. In this case it seems to be a caution against ignoring the “unchanging counsel of God” in decision making. Psalm 33:11 promises, “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation.” The corresponding warning is in Psalm 106:13, “They quickly forgot His works; they did not wait for His counsel.”

Moral Choices, Not “Inauspicious Stars,” in Romeo & Juliet (with a conjecture on Romeo’s tragic flaw)

Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet has acquired a reputation for putting forth a fatalistic world view, as if these young lovers’ lives (and possibly everyone’s) are dictated more by astrology than by the consequences of human choices.  But this reputation is ill-deserved and comes from too much shallow reading of the play.

Yes, line 6 of the opening Prologue calls the lead characters “star-crossed lovers,” and Romeo, upon hearing of Juliet’s supposed death, defiantly cries, “Then I defy you, stars!”  In his last speech before his suicide Romeo says he is about to “shake the yoke of inauspicious stars” (Act V, Scene 3, line 111, or V.3.111, in the Folger Shakespeare Library edition). 

Very early in the play, before crashing the Capulet’s masquerade party where he will meet Juliet, he expresses fears that:
“Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels…”  (I.4.114-116).

After he has rashly killed Tybalt in the play’s pivotal scene, Romeo laments that he is “Fortune’s fool” (III.1.142) rather than expressing any remorse for a tragic moral choice.  In the final scene he professes himself to be “writ… in sour misfortune’s book” (V.3.82).

Isn’t that enough to constitute a theme of the play?  Not if we look closer.  Notice that every one of these references—other than the line from the Prologue—is in the words of one character:  Romeo.  Other characters refer to “heaven” or “the heavens” (clearly a metonymy for God) as having power to influence the action.  See Friar Lawrence in IV.5.100-101 and Prince Escalus in V.3.302-303.  Juliet uses “the clouds” very similarly (III.5.208).  But these are references to a superintending deity exercising moral judgment, not the impersonal zodiac.

Moral Choices

The play is driven at every turn by the free moral choices of its major characters.    Inordinate haste in matters of love and marriage, especially matters hidden from both sets of parents, is a moral issue that the characters are aware of yet hurry ahead regardless.  Juliet in the famous balcony scene pushes the romance forward precipitously despite confessing “no joy” at a contract that is “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” (II.2.124-127).  Friar Lawrence soon seconds her concern, urging Romeo, “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast,” (II.3.101) yet the young lovers hasten ahead with his assistance.  Lawrence even foresees that “These violent delights have violent ends” (II.6.9).

Morally irresponsible decisions by the characters themselves create virtually every development leading to the final tragedy.  Romeo’s fatal vengeance on Tybalt, (III.1.88-91) which he admits is abandoning mercy in favor of “fire-eyed fury” (III.1.128-129) is provoked by Tybalt himself, but still not excusable on biblical grounds (“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord,” Rom. 12:19) and Prince Escalus does not totally excuse it (III.1.196-197).  [It is worth noting, however, that Escalus reduces to banishment his previously-threatened penalty of death even as he moralizes that “Mercy but murders, pardoning those who kill” (III.1.207).  He will later regret his leniency (V.3.304-305) and blame that moral fault in himself for additional deaths—those of his own kinsmen.]

In the final graveyard scene Romeo kills Paris unnecessarily and seems to blame the victim for the sinful act, even acknowledging that his killing of Tybalt was similarly sinful.  “Put not another sin on my head by urging me to fury” (V.3.62-63).

We should not let Friar Lawrence himself escape our moral scrutiny.  He does marry a 13-year-old girl to the young son of her household’s mortal enemy without telling either family, and then puts the young bride through a “desperate” exploit (IV.1.70), which goes fatally wrong after all, in an effort to keep the matter hidden.  Even more inexcusably in the graveyard scene, he leaves the desperate Juliet to her suicide in the tomb (after V.3.165) because “a noise did scare me from the tomb” (V.3.271).  He will admit that his action was blameworthy (V.3.234-236) and express his willingness to die for this guilt (V.3.275-278) but Escalus immediately (and leniently!) excuses him as a “holy man.”

The only crucial plot development that was nobody’s fault is the miscarried message from Friar Lawrence to notify Romeo of the pseudo-death stratagem involving Juliet, which Lawrence will only call “Unhappy fortune” (V.2.17) and an “accident” (V.2.27 and V.3.260) rather than blaming it on the stars.

We’ve examined moral choices of Romeo, Friar Lawrence, and Escalus, and we could do the same with other important characters including Juliet.  But we can probably afford to excuse her for being 13, and even without her the evidence seems as overwhelming as it is generally overlooked.  Romeo & Juliet is not a play about fatalistic celestial interference in innocent lives, but a straightforward cautionary tragedy with the standard Aristotelian features of a tragic hero and his tragic flaw which brings about his tragic fall.  (See my 7-26-10 post titled “Tragic Heroes”.)  Too often Romeo is easily dismissed as an exception to Aristotle’s rule, but here is the conjecture on his tragic flaw promised in the title.  Isn’t Romeo, young as he is, fatally flawed with moral denial—that is—a refusal to acknowledge his own responsibility for his woes and a “default reaction” of blaming, instead, the stars (fate) and even the victims of his fury (Tybalt and Paris)?

James 1:13-16 warns us not to be deceived into thinking that our sins result from forces outside ourselves (even God, specifically) that impel us to sin.  It is temptations and lusts within ourselves, not acknowledged and resisted in a godly way, that lead to sin and “bring forth death.”  If we refuse to take responsibility for our own sins, we are calling God a liar, says the apostle in First John 1:8-10, a text that Romeo desperately needed to understand and obey.  

Well, there’s the big ending for now.  But I have at least one more post that I want to get into words before long dealing with another serious moral issue of the play.  Suicide.  It’s not just the bleak outcome of the play, it’s a recurring theme throughout, and it deserves a Bible-based exploration one of these days.

Romeo & Juliet: Sexual Propriety and Impropriety

In an earlier post I generalized that Shakespeare typically shows his upper class characters adhering to much higher standards of sexual behavior than the “servant class” does. In Romeo and Juliet, this difference is not as much a social class distinction as it is a marker of sincere love contrasted with crude shallowness.

Romeo’s companions (with the possible exception of Benvolio) engage in the equivalent of boys’ locker room humor, as do the young men of the opposing house of Capulet. In the dramatic structure of the play this creates a shady, worldly backdrop that in turn makes the idealized love of Romeo and Juliet shine all the brighter.

The play can be directed in a style that moderates this contrast by deemphasizing the immature male joking (much of which can be lost in the “translation” to a modern audience anyway). The 2012 production on the Ashland stage, however, sometimes underlines the coarse humor through inflection and gesture. It will be helpful for viewers to understand Shakespeare’s purpose in these scenes in order to appreciate the innocence and comparative maturity of the famous young couple’s romance.

See Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s own description of the age-appropriateness of their 2012 Romeo & Juliet at www.osfashland.org/education/teachers/recommendations.aspx#Play1. On the same web page you will find descriptions of their other plays also, including As You Like It.)

Teachers' Resources for Shakespeare

The following is a list of books and other resources that can be very useful for teachers preparing lessons, discussions, and assignments on Shakespeare plays. Please contribute your ideas for extending and improving this list.

• Brightest Heaven of Invention, A Christian Guide to Six Shakespeare Plays. Excellent book by Peter J. Leithart (Cannon Press, Moscow, ID, 1996) with chapters on Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing. Also an introduction on "A Christian Approach to Literary Study" and general introduction essays to history, tragedy, and comedy plays. I find the material quite sophisticated, and use it primarily with A.P. English classes, although it can be a useful resource at the College Prep level as well.
  
  
• Stories from Shakespeare by Marchette Chute. For generations a standard little reference book with easy-to-read but literate and accurate prose summaries of 36 of the 37 plays of Shakespeare (the 36 included in the First Folio, excluding Pericles). When you need a quick summary for any reason, this is an excellent resource. I sometimes have students read one of the summaries if I want them to have a working knowledge of a plot line that somehow parallels a play they are actually reading. (Teach Twelfth Night and include a summary of Comedy of Errors, for example.) The book also has a useful 7-page introduction.
  
  
• Twisted Tales from Shakespeare by Richard Armour, "twistfully illustrated by Campbell Grant." My dear old Dad, bless him, introduced this book to me while I was still in high school. A hilarious collection of pseudo-academic spoofs on Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Also spurious introductions on Shakespeare's Life, The Elizabethan Theater, and Shakespeare's Development, and appendices on The Sonnets and Authorship of the Plays, which offers a fractured guide to those theories that Shakespeare didn't write anything at all. My rule: Students MUST master the real play before being allowed to see the spoof. Out of print for years, I'm seeing used copies on Amazon for $14 and up. My old copy says $2.45 on the cover, 70 cents higher than the original 1957 published price.
  
  
• An excellent on-line "concordance" to Shakespeare's works is available at www.rhymezone.com/shakespeare/ Enter a word or phrase and find where it appears in Shakespeare's writings.
  
  
• Christ in the Drama by Fred Eastman, (Macmillan Co., New York, 1947). Chapter Two is titled “The Influence of Christ in Shakespeare’s Plays.” In this venerable classic, Eastman gives special attention to Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, but also deals with Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Julius Caesar. (Other Shakespeare titles are referred to in passing.) Available as of this writing from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.
  
  
• Shakespearean Criticism, published by Thomson Gale. This is beyond being a gold mine; it’s the Mother Lode! In printed form it is a series of more than 80 volumes, with new volumes added periodically, collecting short scholarly articles and excerpts on Shakespearean drama. Each volume updates a complete indexing of the entire set, with a Character Index, Topic Index, and Topic Index classified by play titles. Bibliographic information is included. Probably available only in large libraries such as those on college campuses. My students and I use the set at the University of Oregon library. The material is now being made available as an online database as well.

Tragic Heroes

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the tragic hero, the tragic flaw, and the tragic fall, has survived pretty well. It is not always the rule that great or small playwrights follow, but it remains the standard against which their forays into tragedy are judged, or at least compared. Shakespeare was very willing to violate some of Aristotle’s precepts, especially as his career progressed, but that gives us no less reason to understand what the great Greek philosopher wrote in the first place, based on his observations of the considerable body of tragedy that he was privileged to witness in his lifetime.

To start simply with the tragic hero himself, Aristotle said that he must be both great and good. By “great,” he meant a man in a high position such as a king or a general. He reasoned that the tragic fall of a lesser man will not sufficiently engage the attention or emotions of the audience. In the greater scheme of things (cf. the medieval idea of the Great Chain of Being) he wouldn’t be falling very far. [In modern times, Arthur Miller mounted a very conscious challenge to this idea with his play Death of a Salesman and his essay Tragedy and the Common Man. The salesman’s wife delivers a heart-tugging statement of Miller’s premise in her “I’m not saying he’s a great man…” speech.]

By “good,” he meant a man of sufficient moral quality that we will lament, “What a loss!” when his fall comes. The fall of a villain is just what we expect and desire; it does not teach the moral lesson that the Greeks were trying to teach in their dramas. (The Greeks, remember, used their plays for religious reasons, as acts of worship to the god Dionysus—not that Dionysus was a particularly “moral” god!—so moral improvement was to be the goal of worthwhile scripts.) We think of ourselves as good, so we will identify best with a good hero and take warning that if he falls, we might also unless we beware.

However, this good man must have a serious moral flaw that will contribute powerfully to his downfall. The more clearly the audience members can identify this flaw and see its consequences, the better they will be morally instructed about that particular flaw. So here is the fulcrum of the delicate balance that made a great tragedy in Aristotle’s view. The flaw had to be a grievous one yet the hero had to be, on balance, good. This required that external factors must also contribute to the fall. These could include coincidence or accident, villainy on the part of others, etc. The delicate balance is that too much tragic flaw makes the hero too close to a villain, and too much external factor weakens or destroys the “moral lesson” aspect. My extreme example of the latter is that a good, great man at the height of his virtue is walking down a sidewalk and is killed by a flowerpot falling from a fourth-floor window.

Tragic flaws are not just moral slip-ups or particular unwise choices. They must be deeply-rooted flaws in character, not individual sins but a malignant core of sin that metastasizes to take harmful control of a man’s life. The most common example in the Greek tragedies, and certainly represented among Shakespeare’s heroes also, is “hubris,” the Greek word for a titanic level of pride that challenges even “the gods.” King Leontes in the first half of the tragicomedy A Winter’s Tale provides the most blatant of Shakespeare’s examples when he reluctantly consults the god Apollo’s oracle at Delphi to determine whether his charge of adultery against his queen is true, but then, when the god’s verdict in the queen’s favor is unsealed and read at her public trial, bellows, “There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle. The sessions shall proceed. This is mere falsehood.” (III.2.151-152) The divine retribution comes down on Leontes’ head immediately.

Other seemingly obvious flaws that bring about some of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes include Macbeth’s “ambition” in the negative sense of challenging God, and Othello’s “green-eyed monster,” jealousy. But even in these cases, Shakespeare makes sure the flaw is not as one-dimensional as it appears. Othello’s jealousy, for example, is definitely fueled by his insecurity and gullibility. But are these tragic flaws? And could the jealousy have grown without them?

Even more often, Shakespeare builds outright ambiguity into the question of his tragic hero’s flaw. Identifying Hamlet’s flaw has been a controversial exercise for centuries now. Indecision? Yes, but is that a moral failing? And what is Romeo’s tragic flaw? Acting too hastily on his first-sight youthful passion for Juliet by marrying within hours? His killing of Tybalt in a street brawl he had tried to avoid? Mistakes in judgment, but moral flaws worthy of death? King Lear’s flaw? Bad temper? Misjudging his daughters? Shakespeare complicates this one by giving us a tragic hero who is eighty years old and showing signs of senility from the beginning of the play. [Arthur Miller borrows from this device, complicating the tragic flaw question with his salesman’s mental state. A fair question: How responsible can people be for the deteriorating of their own minds?]

The ultimate tragic fall of the hero almost always includes his death. Sophocles’ Greek classic Oedipus the King is one exception, but only because the hero chooses something he considers worse than death rather than the expected suicide.

A Christian study of literary tragedy can be enriched by having students apply what they’re learning to the Bible’s account of King Saul in First Samuel chapters 9-11, 13-24, 26-29, 31.

Sexual Morality

Shakespeare's plays include elements of appropriate or inappropriate sexuality. Christians might be uneasy with some of these story lines, and feel that the overall body of Shakespeare's work sends mixed messages as to sexual morality.

One generalization I would offer is that Shakespeare sometimes implies a distinction between upper class characters and commoners with higher standards expected of the former, while lower standards for the latter might be assumed.

The exceptions among the upper class are treated as serious matters, often with weighty consequences. Hamlet takes his royal mother bitterly to task for her adulterous (by his society's standards) marriage to her brother-in-law (III.4.19-106). Juliet (III.5.216-255 and IV.1.51-90) is desperate to avoid violating her marriage as she has been advised to do by her nurse.

Even false accusations of fornication among the upper class are extremely serious when believed, whether in Shakespeare's comedies (Much Ado about Nothing IV.1.81-210) or tragedies (Othello IV.2.37-105). Yet in Much Ado, Borachio and Margaret seem to have something going on (II.2.12-49), as do Cassio and Bianca in Othello (IV.1.123-158), but these liaisons between commoners are treated as normal. Measure for Measure (the only Shakespeare play named from a verse of scripture, Matt. 7:2) deals with fornication and hypocrisy via a unique plot line in which the premature sexual union of a "nearlywed" couple is regarded as a mitigated sin in contrast with the immeasurably worse intentions of Angelo, the city's interim ruler.

All's Well that Ends Well offers another unique story in which a young nobleman brushes the boundaries of adultery. See my post on that play describing the two buffers between Shakespeare's general rule about sexual misconduct by the high-born and what actually happens. First, Bertram has already despairingly given up his title and considers himself ruined, virtually a dead man. Second, he never actually commits adultery although he fully intends to and just as fully believes he has! In the same play, notice the frequent words in praise of virginity and chastity. See also the modest propriety of Hermia, another nearlywed, under tempting circumstances in Midsummer Night's Dream (II.2.41-70).