Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form

5 Playing for Time Generic Disunities and Ludic Dimensions in Romeo and Juliet

229 m 5 Playing for Time Generic Disunities and Ludic Dimensions in Romeo and Juliet In the last chapter, I laid the groundwork for an early modern Ovidian poetics, one that correlates narrative technique to generic purport. For Petrarch, the carmen perpetuum posed two related questions : (1) If an epic can be cobbled together from romance epyllions, can a romance be assembled from a sonnet sequence? (2) How does one create narrative continuity, an “unbroken song,” from disparate scraps? For Shakespeare, the generic issue raised by Ovid is not romance continuity but romance discontinuity, the disjunctions in time, place, and action native to Ovidian love plots that flout Aristotelian tragic rules. When romance and tragedy meet in a play like Romeo and Juliet, which poetics, which generic temporality should take precedence ? The carmen perpetuum may also be understood as a temporal paradox: both the historical time frame of events and the poem rendering these events, inasmuch as it brackets the same span, are perpetuum, yet one is manifestly briefer than the other. Poetry, in other words, has the power both to distend and to constrict time. Like the Ovidian song, the great promise of Shakespearean romance is its perpetuity, the Princess’s “world-without-end bargain” in Love’s Labor’s Lost, or Montague’s golden monument to love’s perdurance. Given the romance resistance to closure, what “unities,” we may ask, comprehend romance? Just as Petrarch takes poetic edification from Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice, so in his great tragic romance Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare recurs to “Phaëthon” and “Narcissus and Echo.” 230 romance form and formality To begin, let us assume for the sake of argument that Romeo and Juliet is not about star-crossed lovers or feuding families, but more profoundly about the generic insufficiency of time that afflicts everyone and everything to do with romance, author as well as characters. Poetically and emotionally, temporal insufficiency is essential to romance , a quality that brings it into an anxious symbiosis with tragedy, whose emotional effect depends on temporal finality. Romeo and Juliet succeeds as a romance because it confirms the besetting, archetypal anxiety of all lovers, that despite their promises they will not be able to transform the accident of a single meeting into the necessity of a life together, one moment into an eternity. Yet the play’s success as a tragedy depends upon preventing the lovers’ desired synchronicity from enduring in life, a generic countermovement to love’s dilation of the moment. The interference of romantic and tragic rhythms, the mutual dependence of temporal modes in tragic and romance plots, is perhaps the most important poetic issue at stake in Romeo and Juliet, and one to which Shakespeare was alive. In adapting his most proximate source, Arthur Brooke’s Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Shakespeare telescopes the chronology of the story from roughly nine months to four days, Thursday through Sunday. Then, as if in a conscious attempt to fit too much into too little, to force a tragic outcome, the prologue hurries the events once more, recasting the question of story-time as a dramatic problem: The fearful passage of their death-marked love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which but their children’s end nought could remove, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.1 (Prol. 9–14) Sudden angst and unjustified urgency is the mood the chorus seems to want to foist upon us. The fictional journey we are about to embark upon is a “fearful passage,” made all the more so by the scant two hours allotted its course. Is that enough time, we ask (mod- Playing for Time 231 ern productions have yet to manage it), to see the story through to its end? The answer, of course, is “no.” Doubtless Shakespeare knew that two hours, like the lovers’ abbreviated four days, is inadequate and would force the cast to step up what Harley Granville-Barker calls the play’s “quickening temper,”2 even to the point of hurrying lines past an audience struggling to keep pace with the plot. Indeed, the chorus anticipates the likelihood of lines’ going unheard, an important motive that strangely has gone overlooked. To counter the “quickening temper” it incites, the chorus first begs the audience’s patience: “if...