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Character Analyses

Romeo

During the course of the play, Romeo grows to manhood. When we first meet him he is a stereotype of the lover: cherishing solitude and night, pensive, pale and sad. He assumes all the attitudes of a rejected suitor, he writes poetry, his speech is a series of contradictory exclamations. At this juncture, Romeo knows no more about love than what he has read in the books he emulates, and he is actually in love with love. His posturing makes him the brunt of much joking on the part of his friends, Mercutio and Benvolio. These two worldly, witty men have loved Romeo for his own devil-may-care brilliance, and they sense that his present hang-dog attitudes are not true to him. Their judgment is correct, for all Romeo's mooning about ceases when he meets Juliet, and in loving her he discovers that joy, not sadness, is part of love. After arranging for his marriage to Juliet, Romeo meets Mercutio and Benvolio. His wit is all air and fire, and he parries each of Mercutio's verbal thrusts so brightly that Mercutio is wholly charmed, and welcomes back the true Romeo.

But the true Romeo has not yet fully emerged. He is not only a courtly, carefree young man. He is capable of the deepest passions of love. In his initial courtship of Juliet, at her father's party and in the orchard, Romeo's entrancement is still, though feelingly, expressed in somewhat typical gestures of holy adoration. His comparison of Juliet to the source of all light is not wholly new either. For Romeo is not an original lover; he is the epitome of all romantic lovers, the consummate lover. In the love duets, the heights of his imagination and expression are equalled by Juliet. It is the thoroughness of his loving, his complete lack of conflict or hesitation in any matter that concerns Juliet, the utter commitment with which he abandons himself to the intense, swift passion, that distinguishes him as a lover. Romeo is not practical or realistic, but his preoccupation is not necessarily indicative of dreamy absent-mindedness. When Tybalt is insulting him and goading him to enter combat, neither lack of courage nor love-sickness constrain Romeo. Rather he is elevated by love for Juliet to an encompassing love which does not permit of fighting, and he is all too conscious of his new status as a relative of the man who challenges him. This complex and moral awareness puts dueling out of the question, but the secrecy of the marriage makes an explanation equally impossible. Romeo's ambiguous retorts are mistaken for softness by his comrades. What really precipitates the fight, then, is the fact that love has completely alienated Romeo from the world. When real honour demands that the youth fight he does so, and revenges Mercutio's death to his own severe detriment. Later, this alienation and consequent lack of practicality emerges more clearly, when Romeo falls to the floor of the Friar's cell in a faint of despair. This does, at first, seem like weakness. Yet the desperate fight, Romeo's exile, his overwhelming love for Juliet, and the total lack of understanding displayed by even the Friar for the all-consuming nature of Romeo's passion, provide sufficient explanation for the lapse.

Romeo's ability to die for love comes as no surprise. We are prepared for it by his falling in the Friar's cell, and by his willingness, after the wedding night, to risk his life to stay in Verona if Juliet so wishes. It is the manner of Romeo's choosing to die that comes as a revelation. Gone are all traces of the standard responses of a lover. Gone, also, is the momentary inability to act that we noticed in his behavior at the Friar's. With the words, "I defy you, stars," Romeo takes fate firmly in his hands and determines the time and manner of his own death. In the very brevity of his words and speed of his actions lies Romeo's stature as a character. He does not pause, either for self-indulgent emotion or in lack of conviction, but with unwavering courage he goes to search out his love in death. Love has become life for him, and without Juliet there can be nothing but death in living. Romeo has come to manhood, but his whole identity as a human being lies in loving. He is not only alienated from the world; he now cares nothing for it or its trappings. He is purely and voluntarily a lover.

Romeo's battle with Paris only demonstrates how much he has forsaken the world. By the time he reaches the tomb he is so given over to death and love, so separate from life and the world, that he can call himself a dead man. His passion now absorbs itself in dying, as it did before in loving. His farewells to life are scarcely farewells. They seem more like greetings to death and Juliet. His imagination and passion have reached their ultimate peak when he dies. In that sense, Romeo has truly triumphed.

Juliet

In the four day space of the play, Juliet grows from a charming fourteen-year-old child to womanhood. Her first appearance with her Nurse and mother as they prepare for the party catches the sweet affirmative aspect of her nature, but she seems merely a docile, untried girl. The Nurse's warm, rambling speech about Juliet's babyhood, with its savouring of the bawdy, gives us a hint of the atmosphere in which this girl grew. Lady Capulet's more cool, sophisticated, and premeditated point of view gives us another. But neither proves to have had much influence, and Juliet seems quite blank until she loves Romeo. The holy aura that surrounds their first meeting is apt, and emphasizes the girl's innocence. Yet it is she that breaks the mood and shows her true responses when, half blushing at the passion she has aroused, half teasing to cover her emotion, she remarks, "You kiss by the book." Later, in the orchard, it is again Juliet who puts their love on frank and open ground by unwittingly professing her feelings aloud before the hidden lover. These traits of innocent coyness, teasing, and yet openness, remain with Juliet throughout. Her gentle images at this meeting are quite her own; for example, her wish that Romeo were her pet bird, whom she would allow to hop away, but who could never escape altogether because of the string she would hold. Juliet enjoys the strain of loving completely, wishes for a longer courtship, and is aware that the sadness of parting is a sweet one. Her perception is expanding rapidly, and she is the practical one who proposes the immediate marriage.

In fact, Juliet is always the practical one, the one who implements action. At the same time her impatience contributes largely to the speed of the love affair. Waiting for her Nurse to come with news of the marriage plans, waiting for the wedding night to fall, Juliet's passion is clear, and so is the vulnerability of the passion. It is at these instances that her imagination becomes extravagant and reaches peaks of exhilaration that result in such poetry as her invocation to the night. She gradually emerges as a girl of much fire as well as charm. But the vulnerability is still there, and the Nurse takes advantage of it in the scene where she tells Juliet of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment.

As Juliet gains in womanliness, she acquires facility with such feminine tricks as necessary deceptions. She successfully deceives both her Nurse and her parents concerning her change of heart about marrying Paris. In fact, with her characteristic fervour she succeeds too well, with the result that the marriage is moved forward another day, and the whole pace of the action is quickened. But Juliet's fervour extends as well into her desperation to preserve her honour, and by that she acquires a sternness of will which allows her to affirm the Friar's plan. Her deepening womanhood is proved in this, and in her ultimate suicide. At the Friar's before determining on the plan, and again alone in her room when she is about to take the potion, Juliet's fertile imagination runs rampant with visions of the horrors of the grave. But the all-pervasive all-enveloping nature of this blossoming woman's passion lifts her finally beyond this. When Juliet takes the potion, she does so for the sake of love. She believes she is marrying death in order to join Romeo, whom she envisions dead, and she toasts him triumphantly with the liquid, just as he later toasts her with the poison. To her, as to Romeo, life is where love is. She, like him, is completely alienated from the world. She finds comfort nowhere, and must rely wholly on herself. Even her scorn for the Friar's fearful flight from the tomb is but a faint emotion. She can scold Romeo in the old, loving way for leaving her no poison. It is with joy that she gives Romeo's dagger its final sheath in her bosom and goes to find love in death, since there is none in this world.