The Romeo and Juliet You Never Knew

A Guest Essay by Shakespeare Scholar Jack Heller

[Romeo and Juliet by Henri-Pierre Picou  (1824–1895); image in public domain] 

Note: It’s my delight to have a guest post this week from Shakespearean scholar and friend Jack Heller. More information on Jack is below. He will be back in a couple of weeks to share his experiences in teaching Shakespeare to incarcerated people. You won’t want to miss that! In the meantime, you can get started, if you wish, in reading Shakespeare’s sonnets 18, 55, 73, 116, 130, and 138, which we will cover in weeks to come.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

Romeo and Juliet is so much a part of our culture that we hardly need to read it to have an idea of what it is about. Even so, it is the most read of Shakespeare’s plays.² It competes with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the most frequently performed Shakespeare play. It has also been frequently adapted and re-imagined, in Shakespeare’s own time and in our time—West Side Story, Warm Bodies, Gnomeo and Juliet, and Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” for example. Shakespeare himself wrote a counterpart with Antony and Cleopatra, in which older lovers are opposed by the young. 

Yet as popular as Romeo and Juliet is, I have often found people’s understandings of the play have been distorted. Part of this has been a result of cuts and censorship of the play text. Recently, the Hillsborough County, Florida, school board decided to assign only excerpts from Romeo and Juliet to align their requirements with the state’s laws restricting the discussion of sex in literature. Public school textbooks in the 1960s and 70s had as much as 60% of the play cut, and when more of the play was restored in textbooks in the 80s, the play was still missing 300 lines, mostly of bawdiness. Based on what my former students have told me, I suspect that the play is still cut in some homeschool curricula.³  

Even the earliest text of Romeo and Juliet, printed in 1597, shows a sign of censorship. In Act 2, scene 1, lines 40-42,⁴ Romeo’s friend Mercutio takes too much interest in Romeo’s sexual opportunity with his first infatuation, Rosaline:

Ah Romeo that she were, ah that she were

An open Et cætera, thou a pop’rin Peare. 

Et cætera and etc are common in early play-texts to indicate language the printers could not get licensed permission to use. I have seen a recent Signet paperback edition retain “etc,” but most standard modern editions read, 

O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were

An open-arse, thou a pop’rin pear. 

Relative to the usual subtleties of Shakespeare’s bawdy language, Mercutio’s punning on actual names of pear varieties is straightforward locker room talk, but we can make several observations. First, the sexual activity this passage describes would conflict with at least two of the three reasons the 1559 Book of Common Prayer gives for marriage: procreation and avoiding fornication. The third reason, companionship, is secondary or irrelevant to what Mercutio imagines could be Romeo’s sexual satisfaction. Second, these lines are the justification for actors to characterize Mercutio as Romeo’s gay best friend. Such characterization does not distort the text, but current readers and audience members should keep in mind that physical and emotional intimacy between men was more common before the 20^th century. Recall the shepherds sleeping together in the fields of The Second Shepherds’ Play. The fullness of Mercutio’s characterization includes that he is affable, intelligent, creative, and loyal. He is a victim, whatever his sexuality, not a villain in the play. 

Romeo’s early sexual interest in Rosaline is familiarly adolescent. Shakespeare does not include Rosaline as a character in the text, although she appears sometimes in performances of the play. Rosaline is a cypher upon which Romeo and his comrades imagine all sorts of vulgar fantasies. Early in the play, Romeo hopes to get Rosaline to “ope her lap to saint-seducing gold” (1.1.222), but it is a standard feature of Shakespeare’s comedies that adolescent sexual desire becomes directed towards marriage bonds.  

Whenever possible, readers should consider Shakespeare’s sources to see how he modifies them to create his plays.⁵ His most immediate source for Romeo and Juliet is Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Brooke introduces his poem with this summary:

And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with drunken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instruments of unchastitie) attempting all adventures of peryll, for thattayning of their wished lust . . . [page 6 at the link]

Brooke’s poem is not as humorless and sour as his summary would suggest, but we can see from it that Shakespeare added all the bawdy language and developed Mercutio and Benvolio as characters. And where Brooke attributes lust and dishonest desire to Romeus and Juliet, Shakespeare attributes those to the world they inhabit. 

The world that Shakespeare creates in Romeo and Juliet is sex-excessed. The play opens with talk of naked weapons, phallic swords, and the violent rape fantasies of Capulet’s men. We later find out that Tybalt’s weapon is a rapier, which certainly has aural resonance. Whereas Brooke charges Juliet with disobedience, let’s note the character of her parents. In 1.5.34-74, Lord Capulet is remembering a dance with his cousin that occurred around thirty years earlier; while we are not given his precise age, we may suppose that Capulet was at least a teenager then. During the play, then, he may be 45 years old or older. Lady Capulet, on the other hand, walks down memory lane with the nurse and Juliet in 1.3.75-80, recalling that she was already Juliet’s mother when she was Juliet’s age. Juliet, we are told in 1.3.8-21, is thirteen, two weeks from her fourteenth birthday. This would all put Capulet at 32 or older when Lady Capulet was 13 or 12 and pregnant. Juliet’s age is no block to Capulet arranging for her marriage to Paris, whom he describes as among “lusty young men” (1.2.26). 

At this point, when I taught this play, I often got the question: Didn’t couples marry at younger ages in Shakespeare’s time? Yes, they did; English law allowed girls as young as 12 and boys as young as 14 to get married. Marriages at those young ages were usually arranged marriages for the upper classes and nobility. But I do not think we need to set aside the moral judgments we might make today. Drama allows playwrights to portray behavior naturalistically, as it might seem to happen in the world the characters would inhabit. In the same scene (1.3) in which Lady Capulet, the Nurse, and Juliet are revealing their ages, the Nurse recalls past joking about Juliet’s future sexuality while she was still a toddler, to Lady Capulet’s and Juliet’s chagrin. Later in the play (3.5.225-255), the Nurse recommends that Juliet consider bigamy as a solution to the dilemma of marriage to Paris while she is already married to Romeo. Juliet uses her own moral sensibility to call this wicked. 

Readers and audience members will usually agree with Friar Lawrence that Romeo and Juliet are much too hasty in falling in love and getting married (2.6), and this haste too is a change Shakespeare made to the Brooke poem. The events of this play occur over four days—meet, marriage, sex and Romeo’s exile, Romeo’s return and death. When Romeo and Juliet first meet, in the cutest of all meet-cutes, they speak a sonnet; please do read 1.5.104-117. In contrast to his lust for Rosaline, Romeo speaks with Juliet of his pilgrimage to a shrine, his metaphor for Juliet. Juliet picks up on his pilgrimage language but identifies herself with being a saint worthy of devotion, and therefore embodied, in contrast to a shrine. Even before they know each other’s names (see 1.5.125-132 and 148-155), they are pledging faithfulness to each other. 

Another instance of Shakespeare embedding a genre poem into the play occurs in 3.5.1-36, when Juliet and Romeo are observing the arrival of dawn from their bed and are regretting that Romeo must leave. This genre of poem is called an aubade, and aubades serve the purpose of showing that a couple has been sexually intimate and do not wish to part yet. Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne wrote a famous aubade which you may find here.

Religious language appears throughout the dialogues between Romeo and Juliet. He pledges his willingness to be rebaptized and thus renamed away from being an enemy (2.2.53-55). In conversation with Friar Lawrence, Romeo sees Juliet’s love as her grace to him: “Her I love now/ Doth grace for grace and love for love allow” (2.3.91-92). Juliet, for her part, calls Romeo the god of her idolatry (2.2.118-121).⁶ 

A problem for readers judging this play and its lead characters arises from a problem with Juliet’s lines to Friar Lawrence in 4.1.56-60: 

God joined my heart and Romeo’s, thou our hands;

And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo’s sealed, 

Shall be the label to another deed [of marrying Paris],

Or my true heart with treacherous revolt 

Turn to another, this [knife] shall slay them both.  

On the one hand, Juliet echoes Christ in the gospels where he says, “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matthew 19:6 and Mark 10:9). On the other hand, Juliet threatens to kill herself if she doesn’t get what she wants, an immature solution to an adult problem. 

I assume that most readers of this essay have read Romeo and Juliet previously, but not necessarily recently. Our judgments of the characters of Romeo and Juliet and therefore of the play may be based on readings that have missed too much or on texts that have been censored too often. In my 60s, I admire the characters that Shakespeare created: Yes, they are immature, as teenagers are. Yes, their hormones are raging, as teenagers’ hormones do. But Shakespeare imagines these teenagers as trying to do the right thing when they have nothing but morally stupid guidance from the adults in their lives. One does not have to endorse the foolishness of young Romeo and Juliet to credit them with trying to love well and rightly. I invite readers to return to the play, to read it again and to see it performed, and see what more some admirable literary teenagers have to teach us. 

Jack Heller retired in 2023 after 21 years as an English professor at Huntington University in Huntington, IN. He specialized in English literature up to 1800, Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, and African American literature. He authored one book on the English dramatist Thomas Middleton, Penitent Brothellers, and a few articles on Shakespeare, including one on Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing and one on the sacraments in Julius Caesar (not online). Heller has also done an online video interview with Jessica Hooten Wilson about Ernest Gaines and his novel A Lesson before Dying. If you would like a copy of the Caesar essay or otherwise want to contact Heller, you may reach him at jack.heller62@gmail.com. 

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. How can I prove this? I suppose one may track sales, downloads, and school assignments, and informally survey college freshmen to see what Shakespeare plays they had been assigned to read in high school. But I am taking the word of the afterword essay in the Folger paperback edition of the play.

3. Perhaps the readers can help me to confirm this. Further into this essay, I will quote some lines from Mercutio in Act 2, scene 2. If readers have access to an edition created for homeschool use and if it is missing Mercutio’s lines, please let me know the title of the textbook, who published it, and in what year. I would appreciate it.

4. The earliest texts do not have line numbers, and scene numbers are often modified in modern editions. Act 2, scene 1 in early editions include both Mercutio’s conversation with Benvolio and Romeo’s wooing at Juliet’s balcony. Most modern editions divide this into two scenes. I am basing act, scene, and line numbers on the Folger edition, available in a paperback and linked throughout the essay. Hereafter, rather than writing act, scene, and lines, I will use 2.1.40-41.

5. Most good editions of Shakespeare’s plays will have introductions, notes, and additional study helps, including excerpts from the sources. One of the plots Shakespeare most radically changed is King Lear, which has a happy ending in the sources.

6. The marriage ceremony of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer includes the pledge of the groom to the bride, “With my body I thee worship.” Etymologically, “worship” descends from “worth-ship,” so Juliet’s idolization (or idealization) of Romeo is within a word bank familiar to Shakespeare’s audience.