Who Says Now Art Thou Sociable Now Art Thou Romeo

Romeo and Juliet

Act Ii, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Stanley Wells, another view of the balcony scene, plus a glimpse of the Nurse and Mercutio:

"For all the scene's rapture, it is conceived in fully dramatic terms.  At its opening, the lovers are apart, and Juliet is unaware of Romeo's presence.  Each has what is in effect a long soliloquy; each in a individual globe seeks to reach out to communicate with the other.  And when they do address each other directly they are at first restrained by consciousness of the feud betwixt their families.  Steadily they come towards each other, but the climax of their encounter comes not with physical contact only with a silence, a sense of equilibrium, of time suspended in a perfect communion that needs no words:

Juliet:

I have forgot why I did call thee dorsum.

Romeo:

Allow me stand up here till thou think it.

Juliet:

I shall forget, to have thee still stand up there,

Rememb'ring how I beloved thy visitor.

Romeo:

And I'll stay, to have thee still forget,

Forgetting any other home simply this.

[MY Notation:  Yous say farewell first.  No…YOU say goodbye…]

The scene permits too a delicate one-act in the lovers' hyperbole and their self-absorption; after hearing Juliet say no more than 'Ay me,' Romeo may brand us smile with the amazed please with which he utters 'She speaks,' as if this were a feat that could scarcely be expected of ane so young; and after Juliet has enjoined him not to swear by the moon, he may seem touchingly puzzled in his response 'What shall I swear past? – the poor male child is doing his best.

Though the heat of the play may indeed exist a love-duet, there is far more to its torso than this; the novelist George Moore was quite wrong to draw it every bit 'no more a beloved-vocal in dialogue.'  For ane affair, idealism is simply one aspect of Romeo and Juliet'southward dear.  Famously, their first chat takes the form of a shared sonnet, a sonnet that is witty also as lyrical, that uses religious imagery but somewhat subverts it by its admission of physicality; it is a sonnet of courtship, and its climax is not a prayer merely a buss:

Romeo: [To Juliet, touching her hand]

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this:

My lips, ii blushing pilgrims, set stand

To smooth that rough affect with a tender osculation.

Juliet:

Expert pilgrim, you do wrong your hand besides much,

Which charming devotion shows in this.

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands exercise touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' buss.

Romeo:

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?

Juliet:

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must utilize in prayer.

Romeo:

O then, love saint, allow lips do what hands practice:

They pray; grant yard, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet:

Saints to not movement, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo:

So move not while my prayer's issue I accept.

HE KISSES HER

Thus from my lips, past thine my sin is purged.

Juliet:

Then accept my lips the sin that they have took.

Romeo:

Sin from my lips?  O trespass sweetly urged!

Give me my sin again.

This is a love that seeks, and finds, full physical consummation.  Juliet looks forward to her nuptials night equally an occasion of sexual marriage:

Come, civil night,

K sober-suited matron all in black,

And larn me how to lose a winning lucifer

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods

Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,

With they black mantle till strange love grown bold

Remember true love acted unproblematic modesty.

[3.ii.10-16]

And the play's final dearest-duet is the lovers' doom-laden conversation at daybreak afterwards their wedlock night, when Romeo is already banished.  He seeks to remain, even at the toll of his life; she urges him to become, to relieve his life.

In that location are, then, three beloved-duets, one in the evening, 1 at night, and the last at dawn; each represents a moment of tremulous, threatened stasis in the lovers' developing relationship, and each is interrupted past Juliet's Nurse.  She is a reminder of the earth of daylight reality which endangers their love, and she is also a measure of the greatness of that dearest.  If R&J is the nigh romantic of Shakespeare's plays, it is too, from the opening episode with its ribald jesting betwixt Capulet's servants, the bawdiest.  In the scene that introduces us to Juliet, her Nurse tells a tale that, looking back to Juliet's infancy, as well looks forward to the loss of her virginity:  'One thousand wilt fall backward when chiliad hast more wit.'  And the idealism of the balustrade scene is prefaced by Mercutio'southward dirty talk of Rosaline:

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open-arse, and 1000 a popp'rin pear.

Mercutio is Romeo's best friend, the Nurse is closer to Juliet than her parents; they are parallel forces, the two richest and virtually strongly individual characters in the play, simply each is fatally limited in agreement just where information technology is most needed.  Mercutio, for all the delicacy of imagination suggested in his Queen Mab speech – a virtuoso brandish for actor and writer too as for the graphic symbol – expresses a satirically reductive view of love between man and woman:  'this abused love is like a great natural that runs lolling upward and downward to hide his bauble in a hole,' and for the Nurse, one healthy man is very much the same as some other:  she admires Romeo's physical qualities – 'for a hand and a foot and a body, though they exist non to exist talked on, yet they are past compare' – but after hearing of his banishment immediately transfers her allegiance to Juliet's official suitor, Paris:

I think you are happy in this second match,

For it excels your commencement; or if it did not,

Your get-go is dead, or 'twere as good he were

As living hence and y'all no use of him.

[3.5.222-v]

The technique of juxtaposing romantic and anti-romantic attitudes to love is the same as Shakespeare uses in his comedies; hither as there the romantic attitude survives criticism, partly because of the sheer poetic of the lovers' passion, and also because it includes every bit well equally transcends the physicality to which Mercutio and the Nurse are express."

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And from Garber, a look back and a preview of what is to come:

"With the death of Mercutio, the possibility of containment, and of comedy, dies too.  From this indicate, from the beginning scene of the third act, tragedy becomes inevitable.  The vocalization of imagination and moderation and perspective is dead, and we end laughing.  Letters now go undelivered, parents can no longer speak with their children.  Tragic disorder has come full force upon the play's earth.  Tybalt is gone, Mercutio is gone, all by the beginning of the 3rd deed, and at that place is no turning back.  Uninstructed by the wiser and more worldly Mercutio, badly counseled by the Friar and the Nurse, Romeo and Juliet are left to fend for themselves in a earth whose blackness is no longer tipped with argent.  Nevertheless under this pressure they do not fail.  They learn, they grow, and they change, then that their deaths are tragic, but not futile.

The most striking instance of such growth in the play is the transformation that Juliet undergoes.  When nosotros outset encounter her, she is wholly submissive, even passive.  She is not yet 14, and her life is still dominated by external authority:  her begetter, her mother, and the Nurse who has been with her – at first as her wet nurse – since she was born.  One of the quieter poignancies of this play is the story of the Nurse's own daughter, Susan, who dies young, and offstage, earlier the beginning of the play.  It is a story nosotros have heard before, in Love's Labour'south Lost, where it was Catherine's sister who had died; we will hear it again, in a fictive version that is all the same powerful and haunting, in Twelfth Nighttime, when Viola disguised as the boy Cesario, speaks of the 'sister' who pined away for love 'like patience on a monument,/Smiling at grief.'  To telephone call this touch Shakespearean is just to beg the question of its evocative power, and to comment on the rate of child mortality in the menstruum is largely to miss the point.  By inventing these backstories for his characters, Shakespeare as playwright gives the characters enormous depth and reach.

Juliet, asked by her mother what her thoughts are near marriage, says, 'Information technology is an honor that I dream not of.'  Confronted with Lady Capulet's approving book report on Paris, she answers only, "I'll look to like, if looking liking move.'  She is a girl rather than a prospective married woman.  It is therefore striking to see how quickly she changes in one case she sets eyes on Romeo.  Immediately this guileless daughter of almost 14 becomes a clever strategist, decoying the Nurse with fake preliminary inquiries and so that she can attain her truthful object, to know Romeo's name:

Juliet:

Come hither, Nurse.  What is yon gentleman?

Nurse:

The son and heir of old Tiberio.

Juliet:

What'due south he that now is going out of door?

Nurse:

Marry, that, I think, exist young Petruchio.

Juliet:

What'due south he that follows here, that would not dance?

Nurse:

I know non.

Juliet:

Go ask his name.

And then, bated to united states the minute the Nurse bustles off:  'If he be married/My grave is like to be my wedding bed.'

Juliet will use the aforementioned device later in the play when her mother tries to press her toward a hasty and unwelcome marriage, telling her that 'early on side by side Thursday' Paris will make her 'a joyful helpmate.'

Juliet:

I pray you lot, tell my lord and father, madam,

I volition not marry het; and when I do, I swear

It shall exist Romeo – whom you know I hate –

Rather than Paris…

[3.5.120-123]

She deceives her mother with Mercutio'south weapon, wordplay and double meanings.

Nowhere is Juliet'southward sudden transition to adulthood clearer than in the balcony scene, where she controls the scene completely, declaring her own love rather than waiting for Romeo'due south declaration, alarm him against simulated vows and rash love contracts.  Twice she leaves the balcony, and twice she returns; her exits and entrances are deliberately theatrical, and when she reappears on the balustrade she reappears to the audience as well.  Each time we think she has departed – to respond the Nurse's telephone call, the barrier of authority, or to obey her own instinct toward modesty, the bulwark of formality – she reappears and she herself summons Romeo back.  The iconography volition mirror her dominance, as she stands above and speaks to her lover.  The next love scene betwixt them in the space, the aubade scene (3.five), volition detect them both aloft, having spent the night in lovemaking.  But betwixt those two scenes comes the marriage itself – fatefully performed, in terms of staging, in Friar Laurence's cell, beneath, virtually surely in the same space that will later on be used for Juliet's tomb, visually underscoring the play'due south relentless twinning of womb and tomb.  The stage location is thus withal another foreshadowing of the tragic pattern that is about to overtake them.  The hymeneals takes place in the final scene of act 2; in the very adjacent scene, the first scene of act 3, the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt occur.  Again the day world defeats the night world, and the Prince, persuaded of his own generosity in doing so, commutes Romeo'southward death sentence to banishment.  All this while, Juliet has been waiting for another night.  When we hear her side by side, she will speak, again from her sleeping room balcony, in the voice of sexual impatience and desire.  Her great oral communication begins:

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Toward Phoebus' lodging.  Such a waggoner

As Phaethon would whip you lot to the west

And bring in cloudy night immediately.

[iii.2.one-four]

It is a magnificent slice of poesy, and is fraught with danger signals at every turn.  Juliet wishes the chariot of the sun were drawn by Phaethon, Apollo'due south headstrong son, who was too young for such a task.  The horses ran away with the chariot, and Phaethon was scorched by the lord's day, and drowned in the sea."

And finally, the beginning of Garber'southward expect at the Nurse:

"Only equally the play provides Romeo with Rosaline, and Juliet with Paris, equally signs of what they practise non yet know well-nigh themselves and most love, and so also each has an older adviser, whose assistance and hindrance will together demonstrate the limits of 'wise counsel.'  Juliet has her Nurse, Romeo has Friar Laurence.  Juliet's Nurse is one of the dandy comic characters of all literature, and her vivid and funny colloquial speeches illustrate Shakespeare's mastery over the medium of realistic speech.  In the opening scenes of the play the Nurse's earthiness and practicality, as well equally ser frankness in sexual matters, offer a welcome antitoxin to the artifice, false idealism, and even prissiness embodied in Lady Capulet'southward advocacy of Paris.  The Nurse swears by her maidenhead – as it was, intact, when she was twelve years one-time.  She is secretly delighted past Mercutio's remark that 'the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon,' fifty-fifty as she pretends to exist insulted by his innuendo.  Her sense of insult is itself physical, titillated by innuendo:  'Now, afore God, I am and then vexed that every function about me quivers.'  And her long comic narrative about Juliet'south fall equally a kid, a narrative that turns on her late husband's labored sexual quip ('dost thou autumn upon thy face?/K wilt fall backward when 1000 hast more than wit.') shows her at her nearly amusingly and inconsequentially garrulous; the point of her anecdote seems to exist to prove to Lady Capulet that Juliet is nigh 14 years one-time, something Lady Capulet has just said to the Nurse.  The proper Lady Capulet and the young Juliet of these opening scenes are embarrassed by the Nurse's bawdiness, and they effort to hush her ('Enough of this.  I pray thee hold thy peace').  The audition is more than likely to be pleased past the volubility and sexual frankness of this forthright descendant of the Wife of Bath.

Yet the Nurse is a dangerously static character who does not change in the course of the drama.  Like the Friar, she is established equally a fixed type, and since she does not grow or change, while Juliet does, nosotros can see at one time her charm in a comic world, and her inadequacy for the darker earth of tragedy.  Like the optical test in which the aforementioned color looks different confronting a calorie-free background and a dark one, then the Nurse is framed – and assessed – differently in the 2 halves of the play.  Shakespeare shows this to usa in 2 deliberately parallel scenes, one comic, i tragic, in both of which Juliet tries to get information out of the weary and rambling Nurse.  (The device is parallel to the two contrasting wooing scene in Richard Iii, where Richard's early success with the Lady Anne is non repeated when he tries the same approach a 2d time – aiming to marry the daughter of his brother Clarence – and his adjust is rejected.)"

More on the Nurse, Friar Laurence, and much more than, in my side by side mail service.

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Two questions for the group:

ane.  How practise you similar the pacing of the reading and my posts?  A better step?  Too long between acts?

2.  Now that we're near halfway through the play, for those of yous who have read it before (or who know information technology from adaptations etc.), how does it compare to your memories of information technology?

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Our  next reading: Romeo and Juliet, Act Three

My side by side postal service:  Th evening/Friday forenoon

Enjoy

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Source: https://theplaystheblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/now-art-thou-sociable-now-art-thou-romeo-now-art-thou-what-thou-art-by-art-as-well-as-by-nature-for-this-driveling-love-is-like-a-great-natural-that-runs-lolling-up-and-down-to-hide-his-bauble/