The Take-Ative: Infelicity in Romeo and Juliet
Abstract
:- JULIET
- Romeo, doff thy name,
- And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
- Take all myself.
- ROMEO
- Juliet thinks she utters her words in solitude, but Romeo emerges from the shadows to “take” them from her—and thus, also, to take her. “I take thee at thy word” punningly condenses Romeo’s erotic, or matrimonial, taking of Juliet—if not also the taking of her maidenhead—with his taking her utterance as having enacted a serious, sincere commitment. In fact, the latter stands as a rationalisation of the former: Romeo feels justified in taking Juliet because he takes her words as her word. But, of course, Juliet did not realise her words were being overheard. Said in supposed solitude, “Take all myself” is taken to have consequences she did not intend. Romeo’s interruption is all the more shocking given that, as Harry Levin has observed, he “violate[s] convention, dramatic and otherwise, by overhearing what Juliet intended to be a soliloquy” [4] (p. 3). However, in Romeo’s defence, what Juliet intends to be a soliloquy nevertheless assumes the rhetorical form of a speech directly addressing him:
- O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
- Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
- Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
- And I’ll no longer be a Capulet (Act 2, Scene 1, 76-9).
- Not only do these lines address Romeo as if he was present, but they are imbued with a performative force that make a claim upon him. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” does not describe a denial or refusal, but is something like an entreaty, or an impassioned plea. It not only demands a response, but implicitly construes Romeo’s subsequent actions, including silence and inactivity, as being responsive to it. Such utterances are ripe for the taking—as indeed Juliet’s language makes her out to be. That is why Romeo’s entrance, though unexpected, nevertheless feels so right; though breaking formal conventions, as well as giving Juliet a shock, his interruption satisfies the grammatical expectations of utterances addressed to him. Said in presumed solitude, Juliet’s words unwittingly cast the spotlight into which Romeo will emerge from the darkness.
In the case of perlocutionary acts, on the contrary, especially those that track what I have come to call passionate utterances (“You delight me”, “I intimidate you, I hear”), you are better placed than I to determine whether the act has been accomplished; indeed it is part of the conditions of felicity of the (perlocutionary) act that (there being no standing conditions for its felicity), it demands of you to say (and that you in fact say), what its accomplishment (felicity) has been [13] (pp. xix–xx).(See also [14].)
- What Cavell says here of perlocution has implications for illocution too. If one is to take seriously the uptake claim, there are situations in which “you are better placed than I to determine whether the [illocutionary] act has been accomplished”. For though, unlike perlocution, illocution does indeed have “standing conditions” for its felicitous performance, these conditions are constantly being worked out: the felicity of my commands might only be realised by seeing how other people respond to my issuing them; my promises assume (or attempt to script) a relationship with another that might be denied if they tell me that they do not trust a word I say. Whilst performatives require standing conditions, they also involve the claim that such conditions are applicable to a particular situation—a claim that a listener can refuse. This is why performatives cannot always unambiguously secure uptake, and instances exist in which “it demands of you to say (and that you do in fact say), what its accomplishment (felicity) has been” (my italics). Romeo’s interjection, “I take thee at thy word”, names the accomplishment of Juliet’s “Take all myself”. And though it was not intended by her, it is an accomplishment whose consequences she nevertheless must bear9. Something has been done with words, but what, and how, and to what end? (And even if nothing has been done, Juliet must nevertheless answer the claim that something has.) These questions articulate the curious power of infelicity to produce a drama in which the participants in a speech situation are called to determine what exactly has happened, and how they might be implicated. Where a felicitous performative might also prompt consequential responses, it will do so along the contours of established relations and conventions. By its nature, infelicity projects new relationships, albeit ones that cannot exist, and invites interlocutors to improvise in them. Romeo’s interruption is paradigmatic of the “you” that emerges from the shadows, forces itself into the picture, and engenders action.
- Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
- Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
- For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.
- Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
- What I have spoke; but farewell, compliment. (Act 2, Scene 1, 128-32)
- Juliet’s conflicting obligations to the conventions of female modesty, and to the sincerity of what she has spoken, expresses itself as embarrassment, a condition which affirms both. This is why she describes the “maiden blush” upon her cheek, otherwise obscured by the “mask of night”: it proves that she spoke truly, but expresses awareness that she spoke excessively, indecorously truly. Fain would she dwell on form, even if that word “fain” suggests “feign”, and punningly infers that her musings in solitude, not meant for other ears, falsified through poetic excess17. But to deny would also be to feign. And Juliet’s refusal to deny affirms that, as far as she is concerned, something sufficiently consequential has happened to call for denial. The refusal is also aimed at Romeo, who too easily withdrew into the figurative, and intended to make him realise that Juliet takes his taking seriously.
- Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay”,
- And I will take thy word; yet if thou swear’st,
- Thou mayest prove false. At lovers’ perjuries
- They say Jove laughs. (Act 2, Scene 1, 133-6)
- “And I will take thy word”. Juliet seeks reciprocity, and to do to Romeo’s words what he had done to hers. But she realises that words cannot be taken that are so openly given. She cannot (as Romeo had done) emerge from the obscurity of the night to take declarations made in a moment of unguarded solitude. Romeo cannot be found out, as she had been. Juliet can only ask for words whose felicity she is pre-disposed to affirm. In a sense, such words cannot succeed because they never truly risk failing. They are excessively secure in their efforts to achieve uptake. Juliet’s dissatisfaction with such performatives implies a subtle awareness that (at least, in this situation) performatives can only be felicitous if their speakers do not presume to know how they will be taken. Uncertainty is not the bugbear of illocution, to be eradicated by more precise expression, but necessary for genuine responsiveness to the specifics of a situation, the uniqueness of an interlocutor, and a commitment to making things up as they go. What marks these performatives in particular as requiring uncertainty is that (as Cavell says of passionate utterances) they demand of the listener to say what their felicity has been. Vows and oaths usually invoke the authorising power of a deity in whose name they are enacted18. But Juliet envisions Jove as having abdicated from this role. He laughs not just because lovers lie, but because such lies are willingly and so easily taken as truth; his laughter is at the expense of those who believe such perjuries, including those who believe what they say. Aspiring to reciprocity, but intimating a troubling asymmetry in their interaction, Juliet falls back on imploring Romeo to be honest: “O gentle Romeo, / If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully” (Act 2, Scene 1, 136-7). Needless to say, this restates rather than solves the problem: what does it mean to pronounce love faithfully19?
- I should have been more strange, I must confess,
- But that thou overheard’st, ere I was ware,
- My true-love passion. Therefore pardon me,
- And not impute this yielding to light love,
- Which the dark night hath so discovered. (Act 2, Scene 1, 145-9)
- Regretting that she might have seemed too fond, and therefore as having merely yielded to “light love”, she behaves as one who has been found out, and who affirms the truth and consequence of what has been found by expressing anxious uncertainty as to how it is taken. This is why, though regretting that she was not “more strange”, Juliet does not deny the sincerity of “Take all myself”. If she did, not only would she impute herself as having spoken falsely (which is what she implores Romeo not to do), but she would work against her aim: to get Romeo to realise that he has taken something.
- ROMEO
- Lady, by yonder blesséd moon I vow,
- That tips with silver all these fruit tree-tops –
- JULIET
- O swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon,
- The monthly changes in her circled orb,
- Lest that thy love likewise prove variable.
- ROMEO
- What shall I swear by?
- JULIET
- Do not swear at all,
- Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
- Which is the god of my idolatry,
- And I’ll believe thee.
- ROMEO
- If my heart’s dear love –
- JULIET
- Well, do not swear. (Act 2, Scene 1, 150-9)
- Perhaps startled that Juliet should interrupt so poetic a pronouncement, Romeo slips out of lyric mode—“What shall I swear by?”—thereby exposing his swearing all the more obviously as a performance. It is a performance that attempts to achieve felicity not by genuinely addressing its audience, but by fidelity to a poetic ideal: these are the sorts of pronouncements a poetic lover is likely to say. What makes them unable to earn Juliet’s belief is that they treat it as something that they can secure, and they leave no room for her to say “what their accomplishment (felicity) has been”. They do not avail themselves of being taken. Vows of love, especially those made to assure the beloved, must be made in recognition of the fact that they might be rejected, or even go unrecognised. They are not (as Romeo presumes) incontrovertible happenings, or undeniable verbal monuments, but gambits that might fail, or offerings that might be refused, or gauntlets that might remain on the ground. (Nor is there any guarantee that they will be sufficiently construed as performatives to be recognised as failed performatives. A gauntlet thrown on the ground might be taken by another as having been carelessly dropped.)
- Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee,
- I have no joy in this contract tonight:
- It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
- Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
- Ere one can say ‘It lightens’. (Act 2, Scene 1, 159-63)
- What exactly is this “contract” for which Juliet claims to have no joy? Editors often note that she refers to lovers’ vows, with an oblique reference to betrothal22. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that Juliet would grant contractual status to Romeo’s vows given her unceremonious rejection of them. One possibility is that “this contract” refers not to any commitment they have actually made but to one whose verbal formulation is still in the process of being found. The words “this contract” are therefore not simply constative, in that they refer to an existing contract, but performative, in that they construe the preceding exchange as an attempt to find a language that can bind, or obligate, or commit its speakers to each other. Juliet’s refuse-atives do not simply refuse Romeo’s vows but provoke him to take seriously the effort to find better ones.
- ROMEO
- O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?
- JULIETWhat satisfaction canst thou have tonight?
- ROMEO
- Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.
- JULIET
- I gave thee mine before thou didst request it;
- And yet I would it were to give it thee again.
- ROMEO
- Wouldst thou withdraw it? For what purpose, love?
- JULIET
- But to be frank and give it thee again,
- And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
- My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
- My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
- The more I have, for both are infinite. (Act 2, Scene 1, 168-78)
- Romeo and Juliet are both dissatisfied, but for inverse reasons. Romeo longs for what he has already taken; Juliet longs for what she has already given. (It is a measure of the extent to which Juliet now owns her earlier utterance that she says that she “gave” it.) Because Romeo cannot acknowledge what he has taken, but which Juliet feels bound to, Juliet longs impossibly to say again the words that he took. But so much is Romeo the poet of solitary longing that he has not the language to acknowledge what he has. “Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied” is the primal scream of the Petrarchan lover, which here dis-acknowledges the words he took from his beloved, even despite her commitment to them. At this culminating moment, the listener who gave felicity to these words cannot (will not?) recognise their force. In response, Juliet affirms her fidelity to them by saying that she would take them back in order to give them again, an ultimately fruitless gesture that prompts the realisation that the language of longing has led her into contradiction: “And yet I wish but for the thing I have”.
- SAMSON I mean, an we be in choler we’ll 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. (Act 1, Scene 1, 3–7)
- Punning on “coals” and “choler”, Samson says that, if angered, he will draw, but is quickly cautioned by Gregory that such impetuosity could result in a “collar”, a hangman’s noose, being placed around his neck. Samson responds by affirming how quickly he can attack an enemy, but he is cautioned again by Gregory not to be so quickly prompted to attack. Embodied in these two characters is both the motive for “new mutiny” and also the cautious resistance to such violence given the likely punishment. The first six lines of the play thus establish the problem: how can dramatic action ensue when its engendering is punishable by death?
- 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. (Act 1, Scene 1, 18–26)
- Although the sense is clearly Samson’s, the nature of punning allows him to ascribe it to Gregory: it is something that he takes. But unlike Juliet’s take-ative in the balcony scene, Samson’s punning is deployed for the taking; it is an invitation, if not a provocation, into a particular kind of reading, one which can nevertheless be later ascribed to the listener. Gregory takes up this invitation. His response, which itself puns on “sense”, also plays on “take”. Where Gregory had used “take” to evoke the interpretative freedom of his interlocutor, Gregory’s “They must take it” describes a situation in which the maids must endure what they have no power to refuse. (Though Romeo does not (to my mind) intentionally connote rape when he says, “I take thee at thy word”, the utterance does utilise the same linguistic apparatus operative here25.) The punning subtly prepares us for how violence will emerge: by words or actions in which offence will be taken.
- 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. (Act 1, Scene 1, 36–40)
- Where Samson suggests they “take” the side of the law (and wait for the Montagues to begin), Gregory plans to bait them with a frown, which the Montagues will “take” as they will. “Take” gives the speakers the grammatical means to switch their conception of who is the agentive party in the ensuing encounter, and who therefore bears moral responsibility for the violence which follows. Samson thus suggests something more provocative: biting his thumb. Though more incendiary, this is a performative whose felicity must remain ambiguous in order for the Montagues to determine its felicity “as they dare”. Attempting to obscure itself as cause—“I do not bite my thumb at you, sir”—it challenges the Montagues to say what its felicity has been—“but I do bite my thumb, sir” (Act 1, Scene 1, 46-7).
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1. | Another scene from early modern drama to which this scenario can be compared is the clandestine marriage in Act 1, Scene 2 of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. In this scene, Antonio unwittingly—or only partially wittingly—performs actions that are taken by the Duchess as commitment to her. Antonio takes the Duchess’ ring to soothe his bloodshot eye, only then for the Duchess to tell him that she once vowed only to part with the ring to her second husband. Thus appraised, Antonio can either give the lie to the Duchess’ vow or marry her. He happily does the latter. A significant difference between this and the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet is that, in Malfi, the woman is the initiator. The socio-political imbalance between a duchess and a steward of her household means that the former must play the typically male role of wooer: “The misery of us, that are born great! / We are forc’d to woo, because non dare woo us” (Act 1, Scene 2, 350-1). By contrast, the balcony scene struggles to think beyond the Petrarchan convention in which it is the man that does the wooing, and the woman the resisting. In fact, as I shall argue, part of Juliet’s frustration is that Romeo is unable to see that she is an active speaker in the courtship, and that he plays an equally important role as an active listener. |
2. | Questions of a technical nature are already raising their heads. They here centre on the two ways in which an utterance can be infelicitous, which, according to Maximillian de Gaynesford, are not only reflected in Austin’s felicity conditions but also in his subtle uses of language: “For Austin uses ‘not happily performed’ as a term of art, to denote acts that are open to criticism but are nevertheless performed (his general name for such compromised successes is ‘abuses’ …), whereas his ‘not successfully performed’ pulls in the opposite direction: that the acts in question are not performed at all (his general name for such unequivocal failures is ‘misfires’ …)” [1] (p. 89). Such clarifying distinctions are useful if only to note where they can no longer be sustained. Even at this early stage, we can see that take-atives cannot neatly be characterised as misfires or abuses because they comprise disagreements as to how they are to be characterised. Part of what makes them infelicitous is that it is impossible absolutely to determine what makes them so. |
3. | My principal philosophical debt is to Stanley Cavell, whose specific engagement with Austin I discuss later, but whose exploration of the nature of scepticism in The Claim of Reason remains an important (though more tacit) influence [2]. |
4. | All references to the play will be cited in the text. |
5. | P. F. Strawson and William P. Alston have supported Austin’s claim, but in a weakened form. Both question whether the performance of illocution is dependent on securing uptake. (My warning that a bull will charge takes place whether or not my interlocutor understands me). They argue, instead, that the performance of illocution requires the attempt to secure uptake, and that the illocutionary act occurs irrespective of whether the attempt succeeds or is frustrated. (See [6] (pp. 448–449), [7] (p. 24).) More recently, Rae Langton has advanced a stronger reading of the uptake claim: that the illocutionary act simply does not happen if uptake is not secured. I discuss her views and their detractors below. |
6. | According to Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby, this challenge lies at the heart of Austin’s understanding of language: “Austinian illocutions, for which uptake is required, are indeed, in one relevant sense, ‘hostage to one’s audience’: linguistic communication presupposes reciprocity, but reciprocity may be missing because of one’s audience’s states of mind” [10] (p. 81). |
7. | Identifying this lack, Strawson attempts to supplement the uptake claim with Grice’s idea of nonnatural communication. (See [6] (pp. 445–449).) |
8. | Though I am not claiming that uptake is a sufficient condition of illocution (either in this specific case or more generally), my position is informed by those who have taken it to be a necessary condition. Theorists who have held this position have done so in a context highly relevant to that of the balcony scene: a woman’s inability to perform an act of refusal. Langton identifies a form of silencing which she calls “illocutionary disablement” in which, “although the appropriate words can be uttered, those utterances fail to count as the actions they were intended to be” because the conditions of a certain context have stopped them “from counting as the action[s they] were intended to be” [11] (pp. 299–315). Langton has considered the way pornography dramatizes a situation in which a woman cannot perform an act of refusal—in which “no” cannot perform as the speaker intends—and therefore also has the power to silence refusal in real-life contexts. (See also [12]). The take-ative might also be said to silence a speaker, so long as we understand “silence” not simply as the prevention or obstruction of meaningful speech, but the wilful re- or mis-construal of what was intended by the speaker. The take-active might paradoxically be said to silence by giving voice. |
9. | It is only by virtue of Romeo’s rejoinder that Juliet is construed as having given her word at all. This is not to say that any utterance of Juliet’s could have been so construed. That it is addressed to Romeo (albeit figuratively), and that it makes a claim upon him (albeit in his presumed absence), constitute criteria which make it take-able. Though it is not my purpose to provide a philosophical account of the minimal criteria for a take-able utterance, it is self-evident that such criteria exist, even if disputes subsequently arise over whether they exist in a particular situation. |
10. | Rosalie Colie’s notion of “unmetaphoring”—“treating a conventionalized figure as if it were a description of actuality”—is central to Shakespeare’s attempts to address “the real problems involved in turning lyrical love into tragedy” [16] (p.145). For instance, Colie notes that the virginal beloved was conventionally compared to the hortus conclusus, a metaphor realised literarily in the balcony scene: “The virgin is, and is in, a walled garden: the walls of that garden are to be breached by a true lover, as Romeo leaps into the orchard [16] (p. 145). By such means, lyric is realised as bodies on stage, and metaphor becomes flesh. (See also [17,18].) |
11. | Such a transaction is most intensely enacted by Romeo, who “tries out the difficult and dangerous Petrarchan script”: “difficult” because “all poetry, if not all language, balances the dream of transcending time and space over the referential facts of limitation, separation, and death”; and “dangerous” because, though the poetic (especially Petrarchan) word is “performative, Romeo lives out its terms in a referential way” [19] (p. 30). |
12. | In this sense, Schalkwyk’s work continues the seminal work of Giorgio Melchiori in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Meditations: An Experiment in Criticism. |
13. | Schalkwyk has contrasted Romeo’s responsiveness to Juliet’s words with his unresponsiveness to Mercutio’s earlier attempt to “conjure” him: ““I take thee at thy word!” is the immediate performative response to Juliet that Mercutio’s conjuration vainly sought, and it recognizes from the momentary singularity of his being the unique integrity of her call and promise” [21] (p. 201). Though this reading rightly identifies the performative nature of Juliet’s “call and promise” (“Take all myself”), it does not sufficiently account for its infelicity, nor the crucial role played by Romeo’s response in making it a call and promise. |
14. | In more recent work on this scene, Schalkwyk has remarked on Juliet’s “Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself”: “Especially significant about Juliet’s solitary musing is that her call is not so much a demand as a gift: she offers to replace his name and the social ties that it represents with “all” of herself. In contrast to her dutiful promise to her mother to trim her desires in accordance with parental will, she now assumes that she is wholly her own to give” [22] (p. 201). Notwithstanding Schalkwyk’s reservations, later expressed, about Juliet being “wholly her own to give”, it is worth pausing to consider the sincerity of an act of giving performed in presumed solitude. I do not suggest that Juliet’s words are explicitly insincere—they are musings, longings, thinkings out aloud—but that she can only be brought to sincerity after Romeo has “taken” them. It is at that point that she is called to mean what she says; it is only after being taken that the words become a gift. |
15. | There is a stark contrast between Romeo’s nonchalant entreaty to call him by a new name and what Derrida has referred to as the “most implacable analysis of the name” in Juliet’s speech [23] (p. 427). It is surprising that Romeo, who had apparently overheard this implacable analysis, would respond to it with such little understanding. |
16. | Paul Kottman’s seminal essay sets itself against a long tradition of reading the lovers as tragically struggling against external forces, whether social or natural. Kottman argues that the “tragic core” of the play “is the story of two individuals who actively claim their separate individuality, their own freedom, in the only way that they can—through one another. Their love affair demonstrates that their separateness or individuation is not an imposed, external necessity, but the operation of their freedom and self-realization” [24] (p. 6). Juliet’s struggle to have Romeo recognize what he has taken from her—and that, in a sense, he has taken her—is one aspect of her having to claim “separate individuality” through another. Juliet cannot endorse his taking, and thus claim to having willingly given her word, if Romeo cannot see what and that he has taken. Though Romeo’s “challenge is to allow Juliet to appear free to him and with him—to make himself necessary for Juliet’s freedom”, in the balcony scene he remains constrained by the Petrarchan tradition which continues to script his relationship to her [24] (p. 21). Kottman’s compelling argument allows us to see what is so clear to Juliet: that Romeo must liberate himself from these constraints in order “to make himself necessary for Juliet’s freedom.” |
17. | In the context of love poetry, this is a well-known pun: “Loving in truth, and feign in verse my love to show”. |
18. | See Schalkwyk’s discussion on the difference between oaths and promises [22] (pp. 120–121). |
19. | The idea that performatives must conform to convention, a familiar refrain in Austin, is questioned by Strawson [6] (p. 444). |
20. | Stanley Cavell makes a similar point about Scene 1 of King Lear. Eschewing the poetic hyperbole of her sisters, Cordelia refuses to declare her love in exchange for a third of the kingdom, and thus shows her father “the real thing” [25] (p. 62). |
21. | Juliet’s refusal has sometimes been read as a suspicion of vows per se. Levenson notes that H. M. Richmond and Naseeb Shaheen reference the same passage in Matthew in which Christ warns against swearing any oaths at all (Matthew 5: 34–36). Schalkwyk makes a similar point: “Juliet’s ‘do not swear at all’ is a precise acknowledgement of Badiou’s point – that to say ‘I love you’ already entails a commitment that can only be diminished by an explicit vow” [22] (p. 204). |
22. | In the Arden edition, René Weis cites the OED (“a formal agreement for marriage; a betrothal”), which itself cites As You Like It: ““[Time] trots hard with a young maid, between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized” (Act 3, Scene 2, 307–9).” (See [26].) |
23. | This stands in subtle contrast to Schalkwyk’s understanding of the tragic nature of the scene which falls within his broader characterization of Juliet’s giving herself: “The tragic blindness and the relieving transgression of Juliet’s call are equally encompassed by her belief that she is wholly hers to give. There is indeed a self that is hers to bestow, but it cannot wholly transcend the trammelling claims of her name as it binds her to the world” [22] (p. 205). |
24. | Lloyd Davis: “‘Our scene’ is initially laid in a kind of continuous present, yet one that remains hanging between ‘ancient grudge’ and ‘new mutiny’” [15] (p. 59). |
25. | That connotations of rape nevertheless haunt the grammar of the word “take”, including Romeo’s earlier usage of it, is consistent with the broader characterization of the play offered by Robert M. Watson and Stephen Dickey: “Though Romeo’s covert activities beneath Juliet’s window may not seem especially sinister on their own, there is something lurking out there with him: a cumulative culture of sexual extortion from which Juliet will have to extricate her love story” [29] (p. 127). When Romeo steps out of the shadows, he steps into this cumulative culture; in other words, at the genesis of dramatic action, one course of action available to Romeo is that of a rapist. Watson and Dickey’s provocative article has us balance the facts that “Romeo is innocent”, but “the world is not”: “the lover and the rapist are often separated by exactly the kind of reassuring conventional boundary that Shakespearean drama is always threatening to blur” [29] (p. 150). The value of this consequential reading is that “If we do not acknowledge the ancient specter of rape haunting this story, we cannot recognize what Juliet does to exorcise it” [29] (p. 154). One of the words haunted by the spectre of rape is the word “take.” As I have tried to show, Juliet attempts to exorcise this spectre by bringing Romeo to acknowledge what he has taken. Only then can taking be subsequently construed as (an albeit unwitting) giving: “I gave the mine before thou didst request it”. |
26. | In his consideration of the notion of “civility” in the play, Glenn Clark has identified a “startling paradox” at the heart of the Prologue’s account of the origins of the feud: “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (Prologue, 3–4). Such lines suggest that “civility may be the maker of a grotesque disorder … In this context, line four links civility to the creation of insubordination. It implies that civility will reveal its genuine self in the form of what it makes: a mutiny, a foully insubordinate rebellion against natural order” [30] (p. 286). Moreover, such mutiny is enacted not merely against the aristocracy by disaffected servants such as Samson and Gregory, but in imitation of it [30] (p. 287). Clark does not explicitly consider the theatrical problem of how dramatic action can arise from an “ancient grudge.” But his consideration of civility is illuminating of how “new mutiny” need not be blamed on one side more than the other because it is the structural possibility of “a social order in which the behavior of those who claim superiority has begun to appear unnatural or grotesque” [30] (p. 300). |
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Lamb, J. The Take-Ative: Infelicity in Romeo and Juliet. Philosophies 2024, 9, 125. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040125
Lamb J. The Take-Ative: Infelicity in Romeo and Juliet. Philosophies. 2024; 9(4):125. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040125
Chicago/Turabian StyleLamb, Julian. 2024. "The Take-Ative: Infelicity in Romeo and Juliet" Philosophies 9, no. 4: 125. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040125