Romeo and Juliet is routinely called "the world's greatest love story",
as though it is all about romance. The play features some of the most
lyrical passages in all of drama, and the lovers are young, beautiful,
and ardent. But when we look at the play, the lyricism and the romance
are not really what drive things along. It is true that Romeo,
especially early on in the play, acts like a young man determined to
take his place in an immortal tale of love. Everything he says is
romantic - but rather like an anniversary card is romantic. His words
propel nothing, or nothing but sarcastic admonitions from his friends to
forget about love and to treat women as they should be treated, with
careless physical appetite. The world we have entered is rapacious more
than romantic. Everyone knows something of this, from the film versions
of the story if nothing else. Romeo and Juliet must fight for their love
inside a culture of stupid hatreds. But it is not a simple case of love
versus war, or the city against the couple. If it were, it would nicely
reinforce clichés about true love, fighting against the odds. In this
book Simon Palfrey suggests that the play Shakespeare actually wrote is
more troubling than this. Juliet's passion - for all her youth, for all
its truth - is at the very cusp of murderousness. Juliet is the world's
scourge, in the sense that she will whip and punish and haunt it; she is
also its triumph, in the sense of its best and truest thing. The deaths
her love leads to are in no way avoidable, and in no way accidental.
They are her inheritance, the thing she was born to. Of course she takes
Romeo with her. But it is at heart her play.
