No. III.-ROMEO. "Of this unlucky sort our Romeus is one, For all his hap turns to mishap, and all his mirth to mone." "NEVER," says Prince Escalus, in the concluding distich of Romeo and Juliet, It is a story which, in the artificial shape of a black-letter ballad, powerfully affected the imagination, and awakened the sensibilities, of our ancestors, and in the hands of Shakespeare has become the love-story of the whole world.* Who cares for * Long before Shakespeare wrote "Romeo and Juliet," there was an English play upon the subject. The Veronese, who believe the story to be historically true, fix its date as 1303. Nearly two centuries later, Massaccio, a Neapolitan, gave embodiment to the story in a romance or fiction, changing the scene to Sienna, and varying the catastrophe. Other Italian authors also took up the story, and, from these various sources, a French novel was composed by Pierre Boisteau, of which a translation was published, in 1567, by William Paynter, an English writer, in his "Palace of Pleasure." But Arthur Brooke had anticipated Paynter, partly using the French novel, partly taking the story as related by Bandello, the Italian, in 1554. Brooke published a poem called "The Tragicall Hystorye of Romeus and Juliet," in 1562, and intimates, in his preface, that the subject had already been "set forth on the stage." Lope de Vega, in Spain, and Luigi Groto, in Italy, had also dramatized it. Mr. Verplanck says that to Brooke's poem "Shakespeare owed the outline, at least, of every character, except Mercutio [what an exception! sufficient to have made a reputation as brilliant as Sheridan's, for an ordinary dramatist]. He owes, too, the story, and many hints worked the loves of Petrarch and Laura, or Eloisa and Abelard, compared with those of Romeo and Juliet? The gallantries of Petrarch are conveyed in models of polished and ornate verse; but, in spite of their elegance, we feel that they are frosty as the Alps beneath which they were written. They are only the exercises of genius, not the ebullitions of feeling; and we can easily credit the story that Petrarch refused a dispensation to marry Laura, lest marriage might spoil his poetry. The muse, and not the lady, was his mistress. In the case of Abelard there are many associations which are not agreeable; and, after all, we can hardly help looking upon him as a fitter hero for Bayle's Dictionary than a romance. In Romeo and Juliet we have the poetry of Petrarch without its iciness, and the passion of Eloisa free from its coarse exhibition.* We have, too, philosophy far more profound than ever was scattered over the syllogistic pages of Abelard, full of knowledge and acuteness as they undoubtedly are. But I am not about to consider Romeo merely as a lover, or to use him as an illustration of Lysander's often-quoted line, up in his dialogue." In his illustrative notes on "Romeo and Juliet," Mr. Verplanck gives several proofs of this indebtedness, and says, "he used what was best, and improved it."-M. tears. "The incidents in 'Romeo and Juliet' are rapid, various, unintermitting in interest, sufficiently probable, and tending to the catastrophe..... No play of Shakespeare is more frequently represented, or honored with more Madame de Stael has truly remarked, that in 'Romeo and Juliet' we have more than in any other tragedy, the mere passion of love; love in all its vernal promise, full of hope and innocence, ardent beyond all restraint of reason, but tender as it is warm. The contrast between this impetuosity of delicious joy, in which the youthful lovers are first displayed, and the horrors of the last scene, throws a charm of deep melancholy over the whole. Once alone, each of them, in these earlier moments, is touched by a presaging fear; it passes quickly away from them, but is not lost on the reader."-HALLAM. "Read 'Romeo and Juliet:' all is youth and spring-youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies; spring with its odors, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play."-COLERIDGE. "The course of true love never did run smooth." In that course the current has been as rough to others as to Romeo; who, in spite of all his misfortunes, has wooed and won the lady of his affections. That Lysander's line is often true, can not be questioned; though it is no more than the exaggeration of an annoyed suitor to say that love has never run smoothly. The reason why it should be so generally true, is given in "Peveril of the Peak" by Sir Walter Scott; a man who closely approached to the genius of Shakespeare in depicting character, and who, above all writers of imagination, most nearly resembled him in the possession of keen, shrewd, everyday common-sense, rendered more remarkable by the contrast of the romantic, pathetic, and picturesque, by which it is in all directions surrounded. "This celebrated passage :— ['Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,' &c.] which we have prefixed to this chapter [chap. xii., vol. i., Peveril of the Peak], has, like most observations of the same author, its foundation in real experience. The period at which love is felt most strongly is seldom that at which there is much prospect of its being brought to a happy issue. In fine, there are few men who do not look back in secret to some period of their youth at which a sincere and early affection was repulsed or betrayed, or became abortive under opposing circumstances. It is these little passages of secret history, which leave a tinge of romance in every bosom, scarce permitting us, even in the most busy or the most advanced period of life, to listen with total indifference to a tale of true love." * * Was Sir Walter thinking of his own case when he wrote this passage? See his Life, by Lockhart, vol. i., p. 242. His family used to call Sir Walter Old Peveril, from some fancied resemblance of the character.-W. M. [It was in the Parliament House (the law-courts) of Edinburgh, that the sobriquet of "Old Peveril" originated, and was principally kept up. Lockhart These remarks, the justice of which can not be questioned, scarcely apply to the case of Romeo. In no respect, save that the families were at variance, was the match between him and Juliet such as not to afford a prospect of happy issue; and everything indicated the possibility of making their marriage a ground of reconciliation between their respective houses. Both are tired of the quarrel. Lady Capulet and Lady Montague are introduced to the very first scene of the play, endeavoring to pacify their husbands; and, when the brawl is over, Paris laments to Juliet's father that it is a pity persons of such honorable reckoning should have lived so long at variance. For Romeo himself old Capulet expresses the highest respect, as being one of the ornaments of the city; and, after the death of Juliet, old Montague, touched by her truth and constancy, proposes to raise to her a statue of gold. With such sentiments and predispositions, the early passion of the Veronese lovers does not come within the canon of Sir Walter Scott; and, as I have said, I do not think that Romeo is designed merely as an exhibition of a man unfortunate in love. * I consider him to be meant as the character of an unlucky man- a man who, with the best views and fairest intentions, is perpetually so unfortunate as to fail in every aspiration, and, relates that soon after the novel appeared, Patrick Robertson (then an eminent advocate, and afterward a Judge), seeing the tall conical white head of Scott advancing toward a crowd of the briefless who were congregated around the stove in the Outer Hall, exclaimed, "Hush, boys, here comes old Peveril -I see the Peak." Lockhart adds that "the application stuck; to his dying day, Scott was in the Outer House Peveril of the Peak, or Old Peveril, and by-and-by, like a good Cavalier, he took to the designation kindly. He was well aware that his own family and younger friends constantly talked of him under this sobriquet."-M. * Hazlitt, who says of this play that "there is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair," declares the lovers' courtship to be "Shakespeare all over, and Shakespeare when he was young." In another place he gives it as his opinion that "Romeo is Hamlet in love."-M. while exerting himself to the utmost in their behalf, to involve all whom he holds dearest in misery and ruin. At the commencement of the play an idle quarrel among some low retainers of the rival families produces a general riot, with which he has nothing to do. He is not present from beginning to end; the tumult has been so sudden and unexpected, that his father is obliged to ask "What set this ancient quarrel new abroach?” And yet it is this very quarrel which lays him prostrate in death by his own hand, outside Capulet's monument, before the tragedy concludes. While the fray was going on, he was nursing love-fancies, and endeavoring to persuade himself that his heart was breaking for Rosaline. How afflicting his passions must have been, we see by the conundrums he makes upon it :"Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; And so forth. Being purged,† a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; What is it else? -a madness most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet." The sorrows which we can balance in such trim antitheses do not lie very deep. The time is rapidly advancing when his sentences will be less sounding. "It is my lady; oh, it is my love! O that she knew she were!" speaks more touchingly the state of his engrossed soul than all the fine metaphors ever vented. The supercilious Spartans in *The word is raised, in the quarto of 1597, but made in other editions.-M. † In Collier's Shakespeare (Redfield, New York), which is corrected by the MSS. emendations in his copy of the second folio edition of 1632, this line reads 'Being puff'd, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes," which alteration is consonant with common sense, and makes the passage intelligible.-M. Is there not a line missing?-W. M. [In Collier's corrected folio of 1632, the missing line (if any), is not supplied.-M.] |