Romeo and Juliet (review)

Bart Simpson's classmate Milhouse says of his amatory experience, 'It started out like Romeo and Juliet, but it ended in tragedy'. The joke, for knowing viewers, lies in the conjunction. Shakespeare's play has been popular for over four centuries, has spawned countless descendants, and has permeated all levels of Western culture, because it stands as the consummate artistic expression of passionate but doomed young love. Theatregoers respond to it simply and strongly, with something like the Aristotelian mix of emotions promised in the Prologue's 'fearful passage' and 'piteous overthrow'. The Prologue is confident that spectators will be moved – as they are, profoundly, by the end of Shakespeare in Love's imaginary enactment, in a mock-up of the Curtain, of the first performance: Judi Dench's Queen Elizabeth judges that Will's tragedy shows 'the very truth and nature of love'. But Shakespeare's choruses, like movies, are apt to simplify, and contemporary academic criticism explores all that is problematical about the play, approaches it from new angles, and relates it to the literary, cultural, and ideological contexts in which it was written.

R. S. White has compiled a casebook of nine critical essays first published within the last 20 years, adding Berthold Brecht's The Servants, which is a short 'Practice Piece for Actors' in Romeo and Juliet, designed to encourage the cast, and through them the audience, to resist empathy and to think, like good Marxists, about political issues. Neither Shakespeare's groundlings nor the teenagers who flocked to Baz Lurhmann's film would have thanked him, but this selection certainly adds to the interest of the volume. There are articles or book chapters by well-known British (Catherine Belsey, Barbara Everett, Kiernan Ryan), American (Dympna C. Callaghan, Jonathan Goldberg, Barbara Hodgdon, Joseph A. Porter), French (Julia Kristeva), and Australian (Lloyd Davis) academics. New historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, film criticism, popular culture studies, pragmatics, and (in Everett's analysis of the Nurse's reminiscences in 1.3) astute literary commentary of a traditional kind are all represented, with several contributors drawing on more than one of these. Davis's concern with identity and desire, in the wide-ranging essay placed first in the collection, recurs in later contributions, which offer various perspectives on these themes. Goldberg's frequently used phrase 'the name of the rose' is the title of Belsey's piece. White provides a helpful summary of each essay before its endnotes and a substantial bibliography of 'Further Reading'. His introduction, characteristically evenhanded and stylishly written, provides an excellent guide to the material that follows and to the critical climate it exemplifies.

This climate fosters little sense of the theatre and the broad effects possible within its 'two hours traffic'. Goldberg argues, with dazzling ingenuity, that Juliet's 'union with Romeo… continues to summon its allure from the unspeakable terrain of sodomy'. Attending a performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona we may well feel that the truest love in that comedy is Lance's for his dog Crab, but have spectators to the woeful story of 'Juliet and her Romeo' ever felt that its essential dynamic is homoeroticism? I doubt it.