The Rise, Fall, and Misfortune of Romeo and Juliet: A Lesson in Moral Complexity

Arguably, the two texts most influential to William Shakespeare’s composition of Romeo and Juliet are Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562) and Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe.” These two pieces offered similar condemnatory attitudes about the choices of the respective stories’ young lovers. However, while he might have borrowed characters, plot, and conflict from these pieces, Shakespeare did not appropriate the prevailing point of view. Instead, he rooted the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet as a function of Fortune and her Wheel. In doing so, he rendered the moral implications of the couples’ transgressions more ambiguous and challenges the era’s traditional attitudes about young love.

Brooke begins Romeus and Juliet with a letter to the reader, in which he states in no uncertain terms what he would like us to take away from his poem. He offers his story as a cautionary tale and claims it offers, “good lessons to the well-disposed mind” (2). Similar to Brooke, Golding thought his translation of the Metamorphosis could be morally instructive. According to Jonathon Bate in his Shakespeare and Ovid, “Golding stressed the morality and civic worth of his project in the prose dedication to Leicester” (30-31). In his dedication, Golding describes “Pyramus and Thisbe” as “The headi force of frentik love whose end is wo and payne” (8, 110).

The prologue of Romeo and Juliet contains the play’s first reference to Fortune, or rather misfortune, and characterizes the protagonists’ circumstances as “misadventure.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare’s audience would have understood “misadventure” to mean “Bad luck, misfortune . . . [and] a particular piece of bad luck; a mishap.” The prologue provides an overview of the entire play and, in doing so, primes our understanding of the upcoming events. In stating that misadventure is a factor, Shakespeare invites his audience to consider what role that Fortune—and the bad luck she might bring—takes in the tragedy.

Across many of his plays, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Fortune borrows from classical, medieval, and Renaissance conceptions. Leslie Thomson, in her Fortune: All is But Fortune, writes, “The Roman goddess brought bona fortunae, external goods such as wealth, health, power, progeny, and physical beauty—all things that are vulnerable to good and bad fortune” (11). Classical Fortune seems largely to govern prosperity or a lack thereof. In this conception, she is often portrayed as clothed and holding an oar (see Fig. 1). The oar suggests that this Fortune has some agency in choosing and influencing the course of events:

Figure 1.

Pantheum Mythicum, 1697

(permission Folger Shakespeare Library)

As the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, Catholic theology subsumed classical Fortune and positioned her, according to Raymond Chapman in his “The Wheel of Fortune in Shakespeare’s Historical Plays,” as the “handmaid of god. . . .[and] her traditional fickleness was part of the divine punishment of human sin” (1). Fortune functions similarly in Romeus and Juliet when she punishes and casts the young lovers down for, Brooke comments, “thralling themselves to unhonest desire” (1). Further evolving, the medieval iteration of Fortune added a Wheel and used it to symbolize the rise and fall of kings:

Figure 2.

The hystorye, sege and dystruccyon of Troye, 1513

(permission Folger Shakespeare Library)

About this image, Chapman explains, “Fortune raises men to the seat of kingship or casts them down from her ever turning Wheel” (3). In Brooke, both the Montagues and Capulets hold the same high position on the top of the wheel before they are cast off for their progenies’ sins. Within Romeus and Juliet, Fortune acts with clarity and purpose. However, these two attributes are often stripped from her in the latter medieval period and in the Renaissance.

Unlike previous iterations, artists and authors in the Renaissance depict and describe Fortune as blind—through lack of eyes or a blindfold. She is often portrayed standing naked on a round stone, beside her Wheel:

The absence of sight from the goddess...