So today, let's talk about Romeo and Juliet. One of the two tragedies, the other is Titus Andronicus. The Shakespeare right near the beginning of his career in the early 50s, 90s. Then, as you well know, as he moves away from tragedy to comedies and English histories, comes back to tragedies with Hamlet around the time of the 17th century. So these are romaji that with titles ironic cause he's a bit of a kind of generic chronological kind of misfit.
It's it comes within it at the time of comedy writing, and that may come up later in the lecture. So most critics would that romaji let to about 15, 1945, somewhere in between Midsummer Night's Dream and which is the second Midsummer Night's Dream, has obviously got the kind of Romeo Juliet parody in the pyramids. And this big plot, either a pre-emptive parody, if it comes before, or a kind of afterwards, parody if it comes afterwards.
But we don't we don't exactly know. It's quite interesting to think about Romney. And you get formal linguistic structures, though, I think in relation to those two adjacent plays that cluster plays together. Midsummer Night's Dream. Romeo and Juliet. Richard.
The second are in some ways the most formal or the most formally kind of inflected of Shakespeare's plays, the most obvious use of the rhyming sonnet for with Romeo Juliet, for instance, all the different kinds of language that the different characters use in Midsummer Night's Dream.
And just as a sideline, maybe you think that putting plays together because of something about their poetry or something about how they sound might be an interesting way to group plays as opposed to what we generally do, which is to group them by plot broadly or by character, because we're usually in these lectures. I begin by giving an outline in the play of the play in the expectation that at least some of you won't have read it or seen it. It seems a bit pointless with Romeo and Juliet.
And in some ways, that pointlessness, the pointlessness of some random plot, I guess, is what I want to try and talk about today. Would it be possible in the educated, English speaking world, not even beyond, I guess not to know in outline the tragedy of doomed love, as well as some of its most iconic visual and verbal moments? Juliet Balcony, perhaps so carefully reconstructed, and Mussolini's Italy on a likely looking mediaeval building in Verona to encourage tourism.
It's a wonderful back projection. The invention of Verona. That's as the as the President and Juliet very much post states, a level that predates the plane or perhaps the famous Romeo Romeo. Wherefore art thou, Romeo. Amongst the thousands of parodies of this just in brackets. I think Southsea gay friend on YouTube is the best. If you don't know these, you should se gay friend. And there are imitations. But isn't there is great sassy gay friend interrupt Juliette.
Just as she is about to kill herself over the body of Romeo asks her What are you doing? And gives us some home truths that this guy on Sunday, he says you're 14 years old in a mindset and gloriously he glosses her most famous line. It sounds to me like desperate, desperate. I'm really, really desperate. So Romeo and Juliet is a play we somehow already know before we encounter it.
When we talk in a minute about whether that was always the case, but the play itself emphasises this quality that we already know what's going to happen in one form or feature, which is unique in the Shakespearean canon. That's a prologue which tells us what's going to happen. A spoiler in movie speak of relapses in narrative theory speak.
So let's start by him in two households, both alike in Dignity in Fair Verona, where we lay our scene from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, a pair of star crossed lovers take their life whose misadventure piteous overthrows duffed with that that bury their parents strife.
The fearful passage of their death marked love and the continuance of their parent's rage, which put their children's and not could remove, is now the two hours traffic of our stage, which if you with patient ears attend what here shall miss our toil, shall strive to mend the question, or to try to organise this lecture around is why? Or perhaps more importantly, to what effect? What does it do to our experience of the play to have this clear statement of what will happen before it begins?
I want to kind of think about this question in terms of genre, in terms of sources, in terms of the place text to history and in terms of performance. In some ways, the kind of vector's I guess I always tend to. Firstly, let's think a little bit about Corrick Prologues to Shakespeare's plays.
We get one Ed Henry, the fourth part two one in Henry, the fifth one in Troilus and Cressida, one in parallelise writing in their book Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre, Doug Forrester and Robert Wyman identify the function of the prologue as a kind of ritualised transition. They say it helps us transition between the turbulent world of the playhouse. So I guess the noise and come kerfuffle of people before they settle down and the representational world of the performers play sets,
let alone the housemates or something like that. It warms the audience that things are about to kick off. About a third of extant plays in the 15 nineties have a prologue. And certainly by this quality evidence that by the next decade or so, the decade from say, sixteen hundred sixty ten prologue looks a pretty old fashioned thing to have no jokes about. How prologue is a sign of an old fashioned kind of a play in the fifty nineties. About a third of it someplace.
Have a prologue and the other one's in Shakespeare tend to work to establish the scene to tell us about the Trojan wars, for example, to introduce us to to the incestuous cult of King Amchok. Imperatives via the mediaeval writer Galla Henry, the fourth part to subvert this function a little bit by making a game about what really did happen before the play begins. It characterises the prologue as the figure of rooma dressed in a cloak decorated with eyes and ears.
So it kind of sets up the difficulty of knowing the historical past. Henry the Fifth takes up another function of both prologues and epilogues to the old movie theatre, a kind of negotiation with the fact of stage representation, a consciousness of its power and its limitations, or perhaps its power in its limitations. So there are a lot of different things Shakespearean purp prose can do. That's to say. But none of it does what Romeo and Juliet does.
Preview the plot, broadly speaking, in its entirety. So one thing is clear. We all already know Romeo and Juliet before we come to watch it. We know what's coming. The play is strongly teleological, heading inexorably to a conclusion that is already strongly written and necessary. The chorus tells us it's only through the death of the children that the parents feud will be ended.
So we've got to get to that point. The lovers are dead in terms of our experience of the play even before we meet them. They they're introduced to us only to further this fatalistic plot. Not only does the chorus tell us the plot outline, but it's sonnet form. It's forming the Shakespearean sonnet heads relentlessly towards a closing couplet that's full of the language of determinism and it's kind of formally deterministic. A sonnet form is not something that we expect.
Something surprising happened at the end. So the fatal loins of the families has the idea of fated as well as fatal, meaning deadly. The lovers are starcrossed, their astrological fated, their misadventures meaning unlucky, their love is death market even before it begins. So the language, therefore, and the worldview expressed in this chorus stress, the inevitability, the prescriptivist, the already happen ignace of the events in the playhouse that is still to come.
It's a clever trick of Basilone and one of a number of clever tricks. In that 1996 film to have the prologue delivered by a newscaster, the bland, almost formulaic structure of Shakespeare's first here and the absolute unwillingness to apportion blame, which is something we'll come back to, fits the reported after the fact. Too late to be different. Format of broadcast news. What's on the news is by definition, what's already happened and the sonnets rhythmical structure.
Also Same's serves the same purpose. Those alternate and rhymes form a kind of microcosmic version of inevitability at the level of the syntax over the level of the form of the lines. We've got something inevitable once the pattern has been established. We're just waiting for the rhyme. It's like waiting for the shoe to drop. The rhyme comes inexorably and each positive or relatively neutral term turns bad when it's completed in the rhyme.
Dignity becomes Mutiny's scene becomes unclean, foam's overthrows, life strong. So I guess what I'm saying here is that the language of the prologue, both in its formal structure and in its fatalistic content, serves to underline that prolacta or spoiler like presence of the opening Sunit. And it of course, anticipates later elements of the play which have a prophetic or practic element. Romeo's premonition, for example, just before the Capulet board.
I fear too early. I think I fear too early as a sort of headline for this. But this play somehow I fear too early for my mind, misgauged some consequences. Yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin his fearful date with this night's rebels and expire. The term of a despised life. Close it in my breast. Quite some vile forfeit of untimely death. That would be wholly untimely comes, I think, about six times in this play.
It's a play about, um, timeliness is going to go on to see. So what do we make of that? I guess early modern audiences and early modern readers more generally seem to have been less interested in shock endings or surprise fictions than we are, or at least and we think we are a humanist education system suspicious of novelty or invention, or in some ways even fiction itself was morally compromised.
Fourth, generations of playwrights and poets that reworking translation and rewriting existing texts were the sign of the poet. So instead of those terms, which we might think that we we rate in our literary fiction, novelty or invention, we've got instead reworking translation and rewriting the intellectual environment known, of course, as in the top tier.
And the context of imitative, the idea that texts were based on a whole network of other texts that you also would know was part of reader's pleasure or audience pleasure. Spotting the sources, feeling that you understood the kind of intellectual inheritance of a piece seems to have been what people enjoyed.
When John Manningham goes to see Twelfth Night at Middle Temple, for instance, in February 16 to one of very few reference, we have references we have to a Shakespeare play in performance money. Description of the play is that it's like comedy of errors. Um, Plautus is Macnee. So the tone of the diary entry doesn't seem to be Yerby. Are you all that before?
Seems to be that that's a source of pleasure and reinforcement for him and for the play that it's got this inheritance, it's got this legacy, and he can recognise it longer narratives in this period often had Intermedia plot summaries.
Think of those short verses that precede the cantos of Spenser's fairy preened, for instance, suggesting that the pleasure of reading was not in the surprise, surprising fulfilment of seeing how things might turn out, but enjoying the variations on an established theme. Maybe we're not actually so far from this ourselves. Watch any movie trailer and it's pretty self-evident.
What is going to happen? And those Internet lists of movie clichés show how much of our own mass entertainment is enjoyable precisely because it operates within existing narrative paradigms. If a movie hero has a sidekick and he mentions his family in the first two minutes of the film, the sidekick will be killed, especially if he has a picture of his family on his desk, and especially if there is a golden Labrador involved.
This is one of my favourites. A hero will show no pain even during the most horrific beating. Yet he will always wince when a woman attempts to clean a facial wound. But in larger plot points to how often do you really go to a forum or read a novel when you can't imagine how it's going to end? So the spoiler of Romeo and Juliet is related to ideas about the low cultural status of originality and surprise in the early modern period.
But we might feel that those elements are not so common in mass entertainment anymore. The second point, perhaps about spoilers is more specifically generic is something about tragedy. And I want to spend a little bit of time with a French playwright of the mid 20th century. John onWe only wrote a version of the Greek tragedy Antiquity, which was presented in occupied Paris in 1944. He adds into the play in the voice of the chorus, something which is not at all present in Sophocles is original,
a kind of disquisition on the nature of tragedy. So here he is. I've accepted it, but it's still quite long. But you'll get you'll get the drift of it. Here's only on tragedy. The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. This is what is so convenient in tragedy. The leaves little turn of the rest will do the job. Anything will set it going. The rest is automatic. You don't need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order.
It has been oiled since time began and it runs without friction. Tragedy is clean. It is restful. It is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama, with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, Avengers, sudden revelations and eleventh hour repentance is death in a melodrama is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The feel of father might so easily have been saved. The honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.
Interesting thing about that distinction only matters between melodrama and tragedy and whether that's useful for thinking about Romeo and Juliet. This is only just finished. In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquillity. There is a sort of fellow feeling amongst characters in a tragedy. He who kills is as innocent to see who gets killed. It's all a matter of what part you're playing.
Tragedy is restful. And the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing has no part in it. There isn't any hope. So I think what's interesting about this part of this play in relation to our discussion of Romeo Juliet is clearly that it's heavily invested in tragedy as inevitable, inexorable, unstoppable. There's something mechanical about it, even in the language whose only use is the spring on coils.
The machine has been oiled. It's like one of those elaborate patterns of dominoes set up by a single nudge. There's nothing you can do. What to do its thing. Nothing is in doubt. Everyone's destiny is known as only. That makes tragedy restful. There's no striving, no uncertainty, none of the stress of hoping it might actually turn out for the best. Sit back and enjoy it. They're all going to die and there's nothing anyone can do.
No sense that tragedy is somehow streamlined. Li Inevitable is one of the things which is often said about it as a genre. So it's an ideological as well as a formal construct. It's a view of the tragic world in which human agency is so reduced as to be almost non-existent. You've got this machine. You've got some kind of machine like world where there's absolute tranquillity and nothing for people to do. It's a very passive kind of manifesto.
I think on these Antigonish Susan Snyder has a great take on this in her book, The Cosmic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies. This is the balance book pick out of that book. She argues that the tragic world is governed by inevitability. The conflict between human and cosmic law. The contradictions inherent in the individual and or his or her circumstances. So that's that's a principle of inevitability. There's no turning back.
There is no alternative. There is no path not taken. There's no this this is a view of tragedy which doesn't really allow for one of those kind of moments of choice where you choose you choose to be tragic or you could turn away from it. It's a sense that tragedy is tragedy right from the beginning. And Snyder gives us the useful contrasting principle of equitability as the condition of comedy. Comedy, she notes, rewards, opportunism and pragmatism.
Comedy twists and turns to avoid obstacles and to come to a redemptive or a procreative conclusion. So inexorability, therefore, the already nowness, that identifying is one major feature of romantic lietz chorus. Is in fact, the hallmark of tragedy. So. Now, it's easy to see the appeal of this for only in the context of occupied France in 1944. The lot at stake and say bad things happen and there's nothing humans can do about it.
But there are a number of important modern takes on Shakespearean tragedy which do something similar, which really stress inevitability that the impossibility of turning this tragedy into anything different right from the start. Top of my list, I guess, would be the opening sequence of Orson Welles film of Othello, which begins with the funeral march of Othello and Desdemona on the Cyprus battlements.
And he Argo captured and taken off the punishment. It's all over before it's begun, says Welles. Just like the Romeo and Juliet chorus. Don't get your hopes up that it can be any different. Now settle down. Watch it unfold in horrific car crash. Car crash. Slow motion. So Welles is Othello like Romeo and Juliet? Chorus clearly sees tragedy within an entirely fatalistic working. So is tragedy, John, in which the human capacity to affect his or her situation is undermined?
I think questions of agency, human agency and tragedy are really important. Electrum Beth really goes into that theme. And perhaps the popularity of tragedy as an early modern form reflects a cultural, historical interest from the question of agency philosophies of causation move in this period from providential geocentric ideas of mediaeval Christianity.
Things happen because God makes them happen via Machiavelli, unflinching stress on human ingenuity and significance, and come out somewhere around the philosopher Thomas Hobbes writing his theory of the social contract and Leviathan in the Civil War. Things happen because humans individually and collectively behave in particular self-interested ways. Perhaps the Romeo and Juliet prologue also has an agenda for its own fatalistic world view.
At the end of the play, the prince announces some shall be pardoned and some punish, and some shall be pardoned and some punish and not really clear who is in which camp. But the suggestion that one of the important things to do at the end of the play is to mete out temporal judicial punishment does suggest that human agents can be held responsible for what has happened. There is lots to say, less of a star crossed lovers faithful Loynes misadventure, Pythias overthrow by to the end of the play.
Than there is to the beginning. If it was always going to be like that. It's hard to blame any particular and probably minor character for making it happen in a story written in the stars. Can you really blame the apothecary for bringing the poison? So Romeo and Juliet is already written in some metaphysical sense because that's the genre of tragedy.
And in a more local sense, it's already written. Because as these lectures always end up saying, the story pre-exist Shakespeare, there are undoubtedly stories of lovers on opposite sides of some human divide, which means they are doomed in cultures across the world. And long before the Renaissance. But the direct saw Shakespeare is using is the long poem by Arthur Brooke. Translated from the Italian under the title The Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet, published in 50 62.
Brooks poem also starts with a sonnet. That's quite a useful time to put alongside Shakespeare's chorus. Here's Brooke. Love hath inflamed Twain by sudden sight and both to grant the thing that both desire. They wed in shrift by counsel of a friar. Young Romeos climbs fair Juliet bar by night three months he doth enjoy his chief delight by Tebartz rage provoked and ire. He paid death to Tybalt for his higher banished man escapes by secret flight.
New marriages offered to his wife. She drinks a drink that seems to relieve her breath. They bury her that sleeping yet half life. Her husband hears the tidings of her death. He drinks his Baim and she with Romeo's knife. When she awakes herself, alas, she slay. Perhaps this helps us to see two things more clearly about Shakespeare's version. Firstly, Brooke gives a lot more detail about how how this plot is going to happen and the order of events.
And still some of the details are different from Shakespeare. But he makes it pretty clear that the blame for this is really on the couple themselves. Their behaviour leads to their downfall. It's the twain who have done certain things which then has consequences. But none of that fated or starcrossed language of Shakespeare's opening chorus. Even the two different sonnet forms point this out. You see, Brooke is writing a kind of sonnet with no final couplet.
So there's even in the form of that poem. It's less inexorable, is less teleological. So while Shakespeare may have taken the idea of having an argument, an outline from Brook, he changes the motivation for this tragedy quite distinctly. Broks prefatory material to Romeo and Juliet is all moralistic, largely anti Catholic. The message is that young people should do what their parents say and they should have nothing whatsoever to do with Fryer's.
Brooks poem as a whole is more sympathetic to the lovers than the initial framework. But we can see that Shakespeare throws out this didactic notion. It would be it would be pretty perverse to generate from the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
The message. Do what your parents tell you. The unexplained and therefore unjustified family feud, not the changeable and distant parents sorry, the unexplained and therefore unjustifiable and unjustified family feud, nor the changeable and distant parents are not presented by Shakespeare as sources of moral authority. This is not a play which says your parents no backs the parents, their best friend.
Quite the opposite. But it's interesting to see that Shakespeare can change the framework for the tragedy. He can take out that moralistic element, but he can't transform it so completely that the lovers escape their families and live happily ever after in Mantua. Perhaps the tragedy retains its own inexorable shape. The fatal law here is not just one of genre in general, but of the source in particular.
The standard line on how Shakespeare uses his sources is that he transforms them from present dross into poetic gold. And what this may often be true, it's also the case that he is rarely able majorly to reshape them. The source seems to already trace out the narrative arc in a way that's irresistible. He gets King Lear is the only important exception to that. So Romeo and Juliet is overdetermined by many proceeding's structures of both genre.
The idea of tragedy and of source. The outcome of the young love in Brooks, Romeo and Juliet. Maybe it starts to look as if this issue of hobbled or compromised agency is as much a feature of the playwright as all of his characters. They are all playing out to cosmically preordained script with none of that equitability that Snyder identifies as the roadmap for comedy. So the chorus follows the source and diverts from it in some interesting ways.
Maybe we can think about the relation between the if the source and the play as parallel to that between the chorus and the play. Each of the first terms, Saltum and chorus is prolific, anticipatory, pre-emptive. It sets out the ground that the following term the play has to follow. Maybe we could think about this rhetorically. The great rhetorical term, which is called History on Protozoan, is still on the programme. That's your task to this week. It can find an opportunity to up.
So historian Protozoan George Putnam, who is the most interesting early modern anatomist and rhetorical figure, defines it in fifteen eighty nine in this way. Another man of disordered speech. We call it in English proverb the cart before the horse. The Greeks call it historian protoje wrong. We name it that. Preposterous, as he said. My dame that bred me up and bammy in her womb, whereas the bearing is before the bringing up. So historian Protozoan is the cart before the horse.
Putting something that should come afterwards before her. Shakespeare later plays with the old patriarchs like Lear or Pericles or Prospero. And the sense of looking back over a long, perhaps too long life both within the plays and in the kind of retrospective these plays cast on Shakespeare's previous plays. These are often discussed in terms of relatedness. Perhaps we could use that same chronological model to see Shakespeare's early plays as being about earliness or about something premature.
Something that doesn't yet have the chance to develop. Let's take earliness like lateness as a theme of the plays rather than just a factual condition of their writing. Some of the ideas that later literary shocked the errors have generated about the concept of juvenilia might be helpful here. Shakespeare isn't a juvenile writing this play. Probably about 30. He is new to the theatre, relatively speaking.
And he is writing about very young people. Those are the elements of this play are about being premature, about coming too soon. The pun is somehow unavoidable. This is a play with a kind of structural premature ejaculation. Consummation is too quick, wrongly placed. Actually, having sex in Shakespeare's plays is pretty fatal. It's hard to think of a single character, particularly a female one who has sex in Shakespearean, doesn't quite quickly die of it.
And so we can see that that is a problem in the play. Comedies work as comedies by sublimating sex into wordplay and leaving us at the door of the bedchamber, which is my measure for measure and all's well, which don't conform to that. So challenging here in Romeo and Juliet. What should be at the end of the play? Its confirmation is brought into the middle and so there's no way good for the plate to go. We might compare this briefly to that contemporaneous play, Midsummer Night's Dream.
I mentioned to start at the beginning of Midsummer Night's Dream. Theseus is impatient to be married and the whole play is a kind of pretext or time filler so that the time of his marriage, Hippolyta and the night time when that marriage will be probably consummated can be filled up. This is all time-wasting before Theseus can get his marriage and half his marriage night. So that's a play about waiting and remind you that I guess as a player around the same time is about being unable to wait.
Romeo Juliet is a play that can't wait. The chorus already spills out the story even before we settled into our seats. Juliet is only 13, even though she's talked about and has not yet been 14. Even that's the kind of anticipatory youth are kind of trying to get to 41 when the point is that she's not. Her father tells Parish First House Parish she won't be married until she's older, then reconsiders and arranges that she'll be married within days.
The play's timescale escalates. What day is it? Juliet's father asks Paris Monday. Well, Wednesday is too soon, says Capulet, before setting the marriage date for Thursday. Do you like this? Everything in this place in a rush. Juliet cannot wait for Romeo to arrive. Famous soliloquy of hers gallop apace. You fiery footed steeds towards Phoebus. Lodging such a wagoner as fate would whip you to the west and bringing cloudy, cloudy night immediately.
The rhythms here are clearly impatient and breathless. The inverted footprint begins. The soliloquy with a Trocaire is not an item, so it's stressed, unstressed rather than unstressed, stressed, which we associate with their are and stretches on the first syllable.
Gallop Kievan. The language is in a hurry, and Juliet's own image for her impatience understands that it is not just that she is too eager for Romeo's arrival there and then but there she is actually too eager for this adult experience. So tedious is this day, as is the night before some festival to an impatient child.
The tough new robes and may not wear her hurts her kind of go to image for what it's like to want something and not be able to have it yet is that you've got new clothes and you can't wear them. Similarly, it's from childhood experience and it movingly captures the gap between the present and the hurried future, the kind of foreclosed future to which Juliet is committing herself.
We used to assume that because Shakespeare must have intended this play to represent high romantic love, early teen age was a normal time to be married. That was an assumption based on a few the evidence of a few very young betrothal in noble families as a sign of long term dynastic alliances. But in fact, the average age for marriage in the fifty nineties was probably only slightly lower than it is now.
Around the mid twenties. It's clear that everyone who was watching this play would have thought that Juliet. And we don't know Romeo's age, but there's no sense of a particular age gap. Everybody would have thought, too, that he's too young for this. And it's also clear that her age is really emphasised, which is really important to the play, that we know how old she is. And you can count the number of characters in Shakespeare whose age is told to us probably on the fingers of one hand.
Her age is emphasise course by that great comic monologue by the nurse about her weaning and the earthquake. So Putnam's term historian approach Iran is developmental as well as rhetorical and structural. The cart has come before the horse. It's psychological or psychosexual development as well as in structural ways. The chorus's spoiler serves as a Mårten improv play, which is always ahead of itself. Always precocious, too much, too soon, too impatient.
Even that two hours traffic of our stage sets the clock ticking. It's hard to think that the play could ever have been over quite so fast. That adds to its hectic quality. Maybe this gives us a way to see the play as a whole. The chorus doesn't just tell us what's going to happen. It enacts that tumbling forward. It is the hysterically stare on protozoan that is endemic to this play in Merman's film.
In other, DiCaprio plays in Romeo, who likably Gorki and Clumsy, running around in an overgrown, uncoordinated adolescent kind of way. It's a good cinematic attempt to humanise a character who can seem a bit two dimensional more than a bit. But it's also a way to humanise the plot or to embody the plot in physical action. The plot is Helter-Skelter too quick. It needs to slow down. Friar Lawrence says sagely, wisely and slow.
They stumble that run fast, even though, unfortunately, in his other hand, he has the starting pistol tragedy. OK, so so far we've talked about haste. Anticipation collapses as part of the play's incorporation of or reflection on its own relation to its sources and to its metter story. The genre of tragedy. There are a couple of other points to try make before the end of the lecture. The first is about comedy and the second is about what the play's like without the chorus.
It's a bit of a critical cliché to say that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that fails to be accommodated by a matter of minutes. Although it is appropriate to the rush that I've been describing, that Romeo kills himself just a bit too quickly to realise that Juliet is not actually dead. Susan Snyder argues, though, that this is a play that becomes rather than is tragic. It becomes rather than is tragic. And there are lots of ways in which women, Juliet, seems to be built on a comic frame.
Young people programme towards romantic love coupledom and ultimate reproduction are figures from comedy. Their disapproving parents in Romeo Juliet take up the archetypal role of blocking figures, those anti comic figures who are always persuaded or ultimately circumvented by comic plotting. Comedy tends to see the young young win out or supersede their elders in the whole point about comedies. It's about regeneration and a kind of social progress.
It's a comedy belongs to the children, not to the parents. It makes some someone that scream, which is referred to before as a kind of useful comparison. It it see, Midsummer Night's Dream is another father who is dead set against his daughter's choice in marriage. But his objections are simply overruled as the play comes to its multiple comic marital ending. We might think the prince in Romeo Juliet for the undeveloped figure to be particularly weak figure in a way.
But there he is. He's being primed to step in and say, let's stop this. We're not having any more of it, although that doesn't happen. It's exactly what does happen in Midsummer Night's Dream. When Theseus overrules Jess McHugh shows staff itself a consequence of Romeo's awkward and hasty intervention into the fight with Tybalt is often cited as the point at which the play stops being a comedy and turns inexorably towards tragedy.
In fact, both lovers must leave aside their comic companions. The nurse and McHugh show an end to that lonely world. That is the precursor of tragedy we see in the play a busy, sociable world of the play's opening or of the party perhaps narrowing to the claustrophobia of the Capulet, too. So this is a trap. If this is a tragedy, Bill Snyder would have it on a comic matrix. Perhaps the purpose of the chorus is more pointedly pre-emptive. It might look as if this could all turn out well.
But you've already heard that it won't. You might be all churned up and anxious. But on this point, we know what's going to happen. Tragedy is restful. It's reinstated by the fact that the chorus or perhaps the cosmic conclusion is borne out. Marriage is transformed here into a kind of country made. And with that, some of that is out there in the tube. The idea that death is a bridegroom. So maybe the place gestures towards comedy are all written out in a in a grey, more sombre form.
Or maybe they're always contained in the narrative that's foreclosed on a conclusion by having the courts tell us what's going to happen. So my final point is what happens when the chorus doesn't tell us that? Romeo and Juliet is an interesting play. Textually it exists in a quarter of 15 '97. And another of 15. Ninety nine. These two quarters are substantively different from each other.
And if you actually want to work on this most familiar of plays, there's some really helpful de familiarisation about looking at the two texts alongside each other. The arguments about whether the differences between Q1 50, 97 and Q2 50, 99 record authority, revision, adaptation for performance or simply errors in transmission are still unresolved, probably unresolvable. But if you look at the text in parallel, we can pinpoint what's specific to each version.
And not least because in the cases of King Lear and Hamlet, we've seen a certain editorial scrupulousness in how to keep the text clearly separate. Not to conflate them into one kind of super text. It's interesting to think how why Romeo and Juliet hasn't have that, when what modern medicines of romantic that tend to do is to pick and choose from the two early versions where they think it's preferable. So disaggregating is looking at them separately.
I think is a really interesting thing to do. A key one is shorter by about a fifth. It probably could fit into two hours. Its opening prologue is 12, not 14 lines. Juliet's row is particularly diminished in Q1. So if you're interested in any of those things, looking at the to text is interesting.
But the point I wanted to embalm is not a part about the differences between Q1 and Q2, but about one difference in the Foleo tax for the Foleo tax was published in the Posthumus complete works of sixteen twenty three. It has no independent authority. It doesn't have any other information in it. So it's not particularly interesting editorially, except in one distinct feature. It has no opening chorus. So scratch everything said no spoiler, no prolapsed, no histone on programme.
Now the reasons that the FOLIA does not have the chorus to Romeo and Juliet are set almost certainly practically attributable to some kind of textual mistake. Typically, Stern has argued brilliantly about how certain elements of play texts, particularly songs, prologues and epilogues, were porous, separable bits of the overall play script quite likely to get detached, replaced or omitted depending on the occasion that she elements that they're not integral to.
The place which can impact us is that the play script itself is not an integrated and autonomous unit. So the question of why the prologue is missing is probably a theatre, historical or a textual one. The question of why it might matter is more about topic today and more literary or interpretive wonder. And the fact that one early version of the play does exist without this element perhaps makes my opening question a bit more pertinent and a bit less hypothetical.
How is the Folio? Romeo and Juliet different from the quartos by not having this chorus? Is it less deterministic? Is there more chance for the for the characters to take on these roles and do something with them? Is it less assured? Is it less relaxing in always terms? Could we be watching a play which we well, we genuinely don't know what's going to happen.
There's been a long history from the 18th century onwards, a performing Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending or alternating a happy ending, Romeo and Juliet with a tragic ending on alternate nights. There is a kind of wish for this play to work out. Well, I'm playing with the end of the play. Playing with the sequence by which Romeo and Juliet die is absolutely endemic in almost every production.
C11 do that. Do that too. So is it more comic or more evitable, that principle of Snider's, that things could go in different directions? Is it less tragic? It's worth reviewing some of what we've said today about the chorus and the work that it does in the light of the photos publication without it. Is it possible to get a sharper sense of the work that that short prefatory verse does?
The text of Romeo and Juliet, with which we are also overfamiliar when we look at the fact that it isn't that in the 60s, 23 Foleo and in fact is not part of the play in published editions for about one hundred years after that. Okay, so finish up, Ben. I've been talking about Rome and Juliet in terms of over determinism, fatalism, already written.
Nice. I've tried to introduce Putnam's lovely figure of the preposterous or disordered speech historian approach Protozoan and talk a bit more about this next week when the play I'm going to be working on is Julius Caesar. I think I want to ask something about the walk-On part of Cinner, the poet in the spirit of the plot. Spoiler with. We've been concerned today. Let's say it's in, but he doesn't walk off.
And I want to try and use this cameo from Julius Caesar to think about writing poetry and what the Roman world means for Shakespeare.