The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet

THE ORIENTAL FRAMEWORK OF ROMEO AND JULIET Abdulla Al-Dabbagh There has always been a tendency in literary and cultural scholarship to barricade oneselfbehind narrow specificities and a one-sided sense of "uniqueness," a tendency that may ultimately give the wrong emphasis to national, cultural, or even racial factors. The truly comparative counterapproach has, however, always reached for the universalist standpoint , from which literary phenomena can be regarded across borders and within a complex variety of cultural contexts. In the field of East/ West Uterary relations, and specificaUy in the area ofArabo-Islamic legacies in Western traditions, major strides have recently been taken in this direction. Although most of the advance has been in Spanish, and in general medieval Uterature, such work has impUcations for nearly the whole ofthe Western Uterary tradition. And even though numerous deta üed investigations have been successfully accomplished, a systematic overview of the field is yet to be achieved. The acute absence of such a comprehensive cross-cultural perspective —exemplified here by a lack of awareness or an incomprehension of the Oriental factor in certain Western Uterary phenomena—can sometimes lead to symptomatically misguided conclusions. This paper, however , is inspired by the broader, comparatist approach. It has been written to offer a corrective to the imbalance in many current interpretations of Romeo and Juliet and to contribute to recent advances in medieval/ Oriental studies by extending their spirit to Shakespeare, hopefully as a major stepping-stone to the field of Renaissance humanism generaUy. Emphasis faUs on the Oriental framework as an important key to the play and on its close Unk with the genre of Oriental tragic romance, an emphasis needed to foreground a major factor and to redress a crucial omission. Still, the essay should not be read in terms of the narrow, onesided "interpretation" approach and certainly not of the old-fashioned, cultural aggrandizement streak in comparative studies. Indeed, such a reading would defeat its purpose. The paper offers the Oriental framework as a necessary enhancement for any fuU appreciation of a complex, multidimensional piece of world Uterature, hoping to contribute, within its Umited scope, to genuinely cross-cultural genre studies. The Tragic Romance in Cultural Context—A Scholarly Enigma Three critics have been especially well placed to bring out the Oriental framework of Romeo and Juliet: Ahdaf Soueif and M. A. Manzalaoui, both scholars of EngUsh literature ofArab origin, and Denis de Rougemont , a master of comparative studies in the West. Yet each of them managed to overlook or failed to address the connection to be proposed in this essay. The most comprehensive attempt to encompass the play's VcH. 24 (2000): 64 ??? COHPAnATIST full range of cultural affiliations—unhappily termed its "symboUc context " by Soueif, the Egyptian scholar and later a well-known novelist— rightly affirms, from the beginning, the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of locating Shakespeare's works within an intellectual, or conceptual, framework. Soueif dismisses the view of Shakespeare as the miraculous natural genius happUy "untainted" by any need for systematic thinking. Unfortunately, her essay opts for an eclectic conclusion which, whüe claiming that Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted within the framework of more than one context, ends disappointingly with a conventional recourse to "the miracle [. . .] that in the fire of creative genius even contradictory material may be drüled to work together in harmony." The article tries to "harmonize" three different contexts for the play: Christianity , courtly love, and Renaissance Neoplatonism. In the end, it is the critic's own bewüderment that bursts to the surface. The goal of harmonising the Christian with the non-Christian and the physical with the platonic leads to the unsatisfactory compromise of "sticking" to the golden mean as "the safest and most credible path to take" (Soueif 18). Manzalaoui and de Rougemont, whom one would have thought were the most likely to uncover the conceptual framework overlooked by Soueif , sadly have nothing but the most perfunctory and en passant remarks about the play. Manzalaoui's rich and stimulating essay, on "Tragic Ends of Lovers: Medieval Islam and the Latin West," mentions Romeo and Juliet only in its very last lines. Could the play have been deUberately preserved for a...