What Kinds of Play Is Romeo and Juliet?

Headnote

ABSTRACT

This paper argues for Romeo and Juliet as three kinds of play cooperating on distinct levels. The main kind is a complex exemplum implying several morals. Its very young lovers are meant to be exemplary victims of adult inadequacy. In another kind, the tragic love-story, they are much closer to adulthood. This story was well known in Shakespeare's day, and he uses it as cover for the third kind, which is covertly political, concerned with pressing issues arising from Tudor rule. With the passage of time awareness of the first and third kinds faded, so that the play has come to be understood simply as a wonderful sad love -story. However, analysis of the text reveals that its main concerns are with the other two kinds.

Shakespeare is an inveterate experimenter.1 In plays written for the Theatre between 1594 and 1597 he experiments with genre. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second appears as either a political tragedy or "a history play that extends into a predominantly comic mode"; The Life and Death of King John is "the least historical of Shakespeare's history plays"; and both are de casibus tragedies of an unusual kind in which a subject rises as the king falls.2 The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice turns both tragic and covertly political.3 The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet begins like a comedy, is also covertly political, and, being "pioneering and experimental", it tests the dramatic potential of non-dramatic genres.4 The main one is the exemplum, a story with a moral, a favourite medieval narrative genre deployed frequently in Gower's Confessio Amantis, powerfully in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale (both known to Shakespeare), and durably in the Renaissance.5 Thus in 1562 Arthur Brooke introducing The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet piously assures readers that "as eche flower yieldeth hony to the bee: so every exaumple ministereth good lessons, to the well disposed mynde", and claims that his example (that is, exemplum) concerns "a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authorities and advise of parents and frendes".6 Having thus nodded to propriety he treats the lovers sympathetically in the story, which Shakespeare drew on for his dramatic exemplum.7

He develops his own...