The Romeo and Juliet Narrative before Shakespeare
Myth
Novella
Romeo and Juliet： The Play
Love, Death, and Adolescence
Patriarchy
Style and Genre
a Rhetoric
b Tragedy, Comedy, Sonnet
Performance History
Initial Staging
Restoration to the Late Twentieth Century
Dates
The Mobile Text
Quarto 1 1597
Quarto 2 1599 and its Derivatives
Quarto 1 and Quarto 2： Provenance
Editorial Procedures
Abbreviations and References
THE MOST EXCELLENT AND LAMENTABLE
TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET
AN EXCELLENT CONCEITED TRAGEDY OF
ROMEO AND JULIET q1
Index
內容試閱：
INTRODUCTION
The Romeo and Juliet Narrative before Shakespeare
In an age of virtual realities Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet can seem like a hologram. From one angle it appears to dramatize a love-story which transcends time and place. The youthful passion it enacts may cease like lightning, but it reflects an absolute, an ideal of sexual love expressed in the plays most lyrical verse. From another angle the tragedy enacts a love-story shaped by the social and literary conventions of late sixteenth-century England. These give the narrative a political edge and historicity, moderating its idealism. Since the advent of modern psychology a third angle allows for a different construction formulated on change rather than absolutes. From this point of view Shakespeare traces a paradigm of adolescent behaviour.
These perspectives, one by one or in combination, reveal a complex and even contradictory play. With little adjustment they reveal similar complexities in the popular ?ction enacted by the play. Pre-existing novellas which transmitted the Romeo and Juliet story incorporate elements of myth and romance into narratives of a different kind. A new genre, they depended on a rhetorical tradition that promoted not only invention and variety but verisimilitude.
Shakespeares well-known alterationstelescoping events and coincidence, elaborating characters, heightening rhetoricenhance the heterogeneous design, calling attention to the inconsistencies which form the narrative, the coexistence of the timeless and the timely.
As a result, the design of the ?ction has determined the plays effect in different periods and cultures. It originated in archetypes which probably account for the emotional impact of Shakespeares tragedy and its derivatives in media such as music and drama. It adapted to changing historical circumstancessixteenth-century Italian city states, Elizabethan England, America in the 1950sand mirrored the world of each audience with varying degrees of realism. Its literature was at ?rst self-consciously rhetorical, attempting to win readers and achieve credibility. Once it became familiar in the sixteenth century, any artist could play on expectation by altering its prototypes. Shakespeare was the ?rst to modify not only events and characters but style, creating a version which would become the model for those to follow. In the process he left traces of his strategy. Recovering the ?ction will therefore permit a glimpse of the artist at work.
Myth. The primary source of the Romeo and Juliet ?ction is myth, the early narratives obscure in origin, protean in form and ambiguous in meaning. Despite this amorphousness, mythical narratives share certain features which help to de?ne them. They are simple, bold, and symbolical, epitomizing a vast number of analogous stories.
They deal in ideas or desires which are timeless, ordering . . . human experience at a level . . . wider, deeper, and more permanent than the rationalized scene and the literal facts of the moment. According to Northrop Frye, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire, in a space where the human encounters the divine.
There may have been half a dozen myths that governed all the rest, narratives concerned with rites of passage in this world and upheavals among the gods.
Whatever shape they took, these stories became the matrix of literature.
Wagner gave the name Liebestod to the myth which informs the ?ction of Romeo and Juliet. Although the meaning of this term shiftslove-in-death, death-in-love, loves deathit refers to a speci?c narrative format and psychological event. Two young lovers face insurmountable obstacles; they encounter the obstacles with de?ance and secret plans, but their resistance fails because of accident or misjudgement; ?nally both die for love.
By linking passion with death the Liebestod myth sets the limits of desire at the highly charged point where lovers feel they have transcended ordinary human experience, driven to union which means dissolution of self, a permanent metamorphosis. Paradox dominates a narrative in which the compulsion to love is a compulsion to die, and death is the price for an absolute. In this psychological con?guration suffering becomes aphrodisiac and passion is brief.
Between antiquity and the Middle Ages the Liebestod myth took shape not only in folklore but in literature. A range of storytellers from the anonymous to Ovid and Malory related the misadventures of Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe, Tristan and Isolde. In their variety the stories qualify Denis de Rougemonts view that the myth descended into profane life from the thirteenth century： they quickly became particularized through their settings and obstacles; the medieval versions immediately absorbed the conventions of chivalry. During the early Christian era components of the myth circulated through Greek romance, notably the separation plots and character types such as young lovers and opposing parents. Romance included other elements which would attach themselves to the Romeo and Juliet legend, specifically the sleeping potion and premature burial. Whether they transmitted the myth whole or piecemeal, all of the literary versions were rhetorical to different degrees of sophistication.
If Liebestod is the keynote, other myths resonate with the Romeo and Juliet legend. For instance, Marjorie Garber has identi?ed correspondences with the story of Cupid and Psyche, which also connects marriage and death： the love-relationship takes place in a surround of darkness; a young woman becomes free of paternal control; she undergoes a series of trials which mark her progress to maturity.
Typically both of these myths centre on rites of passage, those crucial advances in an individual life from one biological or social condition to another. The most widely accepted description of such rites enumerates three phases： separation from the old state, transition between old and new, incorporation into the new. During the middle phase initiates hover in liminality, a period of suspension or ambiguity which is both dangerous and liberating.
In fact and ?ction young lovers exist in this liminal phase on the verge of adult commitment to both a sexual partner and society. The Liebestodmyth and its literary versions catch them at that moment of change, failing to make a transition into the community, alone at the turning-point. The story of Cupid and Psyche focuses on the initiation of the young woman. In both cases the rituals which normally accompany such rites of passage become part of the narrative, incomplete in various ways or conspicuous by their absence. Marriage is the most striking of these rituals： Pyramus and Thisbe never reach this state; Hero and Leander take a private vow; initially Psyche weds Cupid without seeing him; Tristan and Isolde marry other partners and consummate their own relationship in adultery. By the sixteenth century the Romeo and Juliet story would incorporate night visits and funeral in addition to marriage. Decades before the sixteenth century, however, the combination of traditional myth and contemporary ritual manifested disturbance not only in the private sphere of the lovers but in the public sphere represented by their social world.
Novella. The Romeo and Juliet story familiar to Shakespeares audience originated in Italy during the ?fteenth century.Masuccio Salernitano included most of the plot in the thirty-third tale of his Novellino 1476, the story of Mariotto and Ganozza. During the ?fty-odd years between this version and Luigi da Portos Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti . . . c.1530, a legend which corresponds with the Romeo and Juliet narrative seems to have grown very popular, especially in northern Italy. Stories extant in manuscripts from the ?fteenth and early sixteenth centuries preserve the topos of love and death, combining it with details from romance. When da Porto assembled the full-scale narrative, he probably drew not only on Masuccio, but on the legendary material, an anonymous ?fteenth-century novella Ippolito e Lionora, Ovids account of Pyramus and Thisbe Metamorphoses 4.67201, and Boccaccios Decameron. Da Porto showed originality less through inventiveness than through con?ation of the various models. As motive for the secret marriage he incorporated a feud analogous to civil disturbances in late medieval Italy; and he attributed this state of affairs to the Montecchi and Cappelletti, names of political factions which ?rst appeared in Dantes
Purgatorio 6.1068
The Most Excellent and Lamentable
Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
Prologue Enter Chorus
Chorus
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 misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
And the continuance of their parents rage
Which but their childrens end naught could remove
Is now the two hours traf?c of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Exit
1.1 Enter Samson and Gregory, with swords and bucklers, of the house of Capulet
SAMSON Gregory, on my word well not carry coals.
GREGORY No, for then we should be colliers.
SAMSON I mean, an we be in choler well draw.
GREGORY Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.
SAMSON I strike quickly being moved.
GREGORY But thou art not quickly moved to strike.
SAMSON A dog of the house of Montague moves me.
GREGORY To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand：
therefore if thou art moved thou runnst away.
SAMSON A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will
take the wall of any man or maid of Montagues.
GREGORY That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest
goes to the wall.
SAMSON Tis true, and therefore women being the weaker
vessels are ever thrust to the wall： therefore I will push
Montagues men from the wall, and thrust his maids to
the wall.
GREGORY The quarrel is between our masters and us their
men.
SAMSON Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant： when I
have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids,
I will cut off their heads.
GREGORY The heads of the maids?
SAMSON Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads,
take it in what sense thou wilt.
GREGORY They must take it in sense that feel it.
SAMSON Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and tis
known I am a pretty piece of ?esh.
GREGORY Tis well thou art not ?sh; if thou hadst, thou
hadst been Poor John. Draw thy tool, here comes of the
house of Montagues.
Enter two other Serving-men
SAMSON My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee.
GREGORY How, turn thy back and run?
SAMSON Fear me not.
GREGORY No, marry, I fear thee!
SAMSON Let us take the law of our sides; let them begin.
GREGORY I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as
they list.
SAMSON Nay, as they dare： I will bite my thumb at them,
which is disgrace to them if they bear it.
ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
SAMSON I do bite my thumb, sir.
ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
SAMSON to Gregory Is the law of our side if I say Ay?
GREGORY No.
SAMSON to Abraham No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you,
sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.
GREGORY Do you quarrel, sir?
ABRAHAM Quarrel, sir? No, sir.
SAMSON But if you do, sir, I am for you; I serve as good a
man as you.
ABRAHAM No better.
SAMSON Well, sir.
Enter Benvolio
GREGORY Say betterhere comes one of my masters
kinsmen.
SAMSON Yes, better, sir.
ABRAHAM You lie.
SAMSON Draw if you be men. Gregory, remember thy
washing blow.
They ?ght
BENVOLIO drawing Part fools, put up your swords; you
know not what you do.
Enter Tybalt with his sword drawn
tybalt
What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?
Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.
BENVOLIO
I do but keep the peace. Put up thy sword,
Or manage it to part these men with me.
TYBALT
What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word
As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.
Have at thee, coward.
They ?ght.
Enter three or four Citizens with clubs or partisans
officer
Clubs, bills, and partisans! Strike, beat them down!
Down with the Capulets, down with the Montagues!
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