The Arden Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet ed. by René Weis (review)

The task of editing Romeo and Juliet has become even more daunting of late. Not only is there the vast critical and performance history of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays to present intelligibly to modern readers. But new regard for the first printed text, quarto 1 (1597), has also complicated the relationship with the longer quarto 2 (1599), on which all modern editions are based. René Weis draws on deep experience as a Shakespeare editor and biographer to meet these challenges. His informative and accessible Arden3 Romeo and Juliet offers a rich spectrum of imaginative and critical pathways into the play. It thoughtfully embraces new theories about the diverse agencies behind the play’s early texts, although this currently fluid situation generates unresolved tensions with his traditional editorial practice.

Weis introduces Shakespeare’s innovative story of idealized but doomed romantic love through focused discussions of the play’s rhetorical experimentation and structural attention to the pressures of time. In his later sections on the play’s sources, he takes the measure of Shakespeare’s transformation of Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562) by analyzing the playwright’s bold juxtaposition of erotically consummated desire and poetic transcendence—a practice he compares at several points to the self-conscious modernity of the metaphysical poets and captures formally in a list of the play’s rhymes in an appendix.

Weis draws fresh attention to Shakespeare’s reconception of Paris’s role. Modern performances often eliminate his dialogue from the final scenes to privilege Romeo and Juliet’s mutual sacrifice. He invites directors to reconsider the radical inclusiveness of Shakespeare’s tragic vision, which transforms Brooke’s Paris into a serious but “sympathetic” rival to Romeo—from Paris’s earlier entry into the action to his “dying wish” to be laid beside Juliet (52). Weis brilliantly compares these entangled desires to the gender-reversed triangle in King Lear in which Goneril, Regan, and Edmund “‘all . . . / marry in an instant’ in death” (5.3.227–28).

The introduction and commentary notes highlight the play’s contextual relationships with Thomas Nashe’s satirical tract Have with You to Saffron Walden (published 1596). Besides sharing the same printer with Q1 Romeo and Juliet, Saffron Walden’s reference to the earthquake of 1580 may be connected to the Nurse’s allusion to later recorded tremors in 1585 (p. 36; see 1.3.24). If this is so, her eleven-year-old memories of her daughter Susan may be biographically related to the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son Hamnet in 1596 and and of his twin Judith. Weis’s evidence for the play’s composition in autumn 1596 (from a possible range of 1594 to 1597) (36, 34) also includes a half-dozen unusual words shared by Saffron Waldon and Romeo. Weis’s assumption that Shakespeare borrowed from Nashe is complicated, however, by the fact that the meaning of one word, “ropery” (2.4.140), is close to that of “rope-tricks” in The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.111. Nashe is now widely thought to have been a coauthor with Shakespeare on 1 Henry VI (circa 1592).¹ So Nashe may just as well have been borrowing from Shakespeare, which makes this evidence for later dating of Romeo and Juliet less certain.

Another shared word incidentally opens up Weis’s approach to his Q2 copy text and his ideas about its relationship to Q1. Although Q2 uses the Nasheian “coying” at 2.2.101, Weis chooses the traditionally preferred “cunning” from Q1 (40). He emends Q2 in this way quite often. For example, in the Nurse’s exclamation at 2.5.26, he replaces without explanation Q2’s dialectical “jaunce” with the Q1’s more familiar “jaunt,” even though the Nurse talks about “jauncing up and down” at line 52. At 3.1.190, he emends Q2’s “hearts” with “hates...