Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet by Joseph Pearce (review)

Christianity and Literature 394 Readers of Christianity and Literature, both professional and amateur, who have an interest in temporality, medieval studies, queer theory, or medievalisms, will find reading this book a valuable and singularly pleasurable use of their time. Rebecca Dark Dallas Baptist University Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet. By Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-1-58617-684-6. Pp. 179. $14.95. Like Pearce’s other books on Shakespeare, Shakespeare on Love views Shakespeare’s life and writing from a Catholic perspective. Pearce provides a brief preface that reviews evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism, including references to classic and recent scholarly works that support his perspective. However, the majority of the text focuses on Pearce’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. The prologue to the text questions how the couple’s love fits with the great love affairs of literature, setting up an explicitly Christian frame by noting that love can be right or wrong, “heavenly or hellish” (16). Though subsequent readers have seen Romeo and Juliet’s story as the height of romanticism, Pearce doubts that Shakespeare would have shared that view. The first chapter of Shakespeare on Love focuses on Shakespeare’s revision of his sources and on the misreading of Romeo and Juliet that Pearce sees in much of the play’s criticism. Pearce believes Shakespeare frequently chose sources that demonstrate marked anti-Catholicism in order to “[correct] their anti-Catholic biases with modes of expression more conducive to his own beliefs” (18). Thus in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare softens the Puritan stance of Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by changing the development of the play’s characters and removing anti-Catholic commentary. Moving quickly to discuss the play itself, Pearce claims that scholars interpret the play in one of three ways: as an illustration of fatalism, in which the lovers are helpless before the crushing whims of fate; as a romantic dream, in which the lovers’ true passion sets them apart from their hateful families, who ultimately cause the tragedy; or as a cautionary tale, in which the actions of the principal characters produce consequences that together form a moral picture. In Pearce’s judgment, only the third option results in a correct reading of the play. Following the introductory chapters, Pearce walks through the play, act by act and scene by scene, building the moral picture that arises from his “cautionary tale” reading of the text. Pearce begins with two sets of paired chapters; in each 395 Book Reviews set, he discusses first Romeo, then Juliet, examining their attitudes and behaviors before and during the Capulets’ party and then in the balcony scene. Pearce claims that Romeo’s passionate nature is based wholly on the physical and expresses itself through trite clichés. According to this argument, Romeo loves Juliet because the first object of his passion, Rosaline, is unavailable to his desires. Rather than truly loving Juliet in a meaningful way, Romeo desires her because he finds her more amenable to his will. This fickle approach to love is possible because Romeo is a “sonnet lover” who loves in the tradition of Petrarchan sonnets rather than according to Christian morality. As such, Romeo is morally an idolater who makes women his goddesses. In discussing Juliet, Pearce first emphasizes her youth. In the sources, Juliet is either fifteen or seventeen, yet those texts refer to her as too young to marry. Shakespeare alters her age to an even younger thirteen, even though, as Pearce demonstrates, less than ten percent of women in Shakespeare’s lifetime married before age fifteen, and most women actually married in their early to mid-twenties. Therefore, Juliet’s father’s willingness to marry her to Paris before her fourteenth birthday would have shocked the Elizabethan audience. Because of Shakespeare’s insistence on Juliet’s youth and her father’s increasing hurry to marry her off, Pearce reads this play in part as a demonstration of bad parenting. Regarding Juliet’s character, Pearce claims that she begins as an innocent who is respectful of religious belief and imagery, but quickly falls into sensualism under...