In Discussion

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Tas Emiabata (Capulet), Mark Springer (Mercutio), Tyne Rafaeli (Lady Capulet), Ben Kidd (Assistant Director) and Professor Andrew Gurr discuss the themes of YOUTH, PASSION and VIOLENCE in Romeo and Juliet.

Youth

Tas: Early in rehearsals we talked about the feud, the ancient grudge, and how it manifests itself in the young. They take it into the streets where it erupts into violence. It is possible that some of the young people may not know what they are fighting about.

Mark: It doesn’t say in the play why they hate each other. This is just the way things are. If you grow up in this environment, you don’t know why you are fighting but you are. It is a way of life. I think, with the young characters, the feud manifests itself in a different way to the older characters. There is a moment at the beginning of the play where old Capulet and old Montague almost come to blows, but outside of that, the violence and the physical nature of the feud is basically manifest in the young, in Tybalt, and Mercutio.

Tyne: This is a case of the sins of the father being passed on to the children. If they are born and bred with the conflict there is no reason why the young characters would question it.

Tas: Shakespeare has created a very male-dominated world. The feud and the way society is run works according to the way people like Capulet and Montague dictate.

Tyne: I think when you go back to the subject of generations, rather than it being about age, it is more or a case of experience over innocence or naivety. In wartime, people can digest more easily the fact that soldiers die. However, if innocent people die, it becomes much more tragic. I think Romeo and Juliet are the innocent victims of this conflict which belongs to the older generation. I think that is what is indigestible to an audience.

Tas: A strong issue, for me, in this play is: parents not listening to their children. Capulet believes he knows what is right for his daughter and at no point does he question it. He is governed by his own sense of society and order. At no point does he actually engage with Juliet. He knows nothing of her needs, her desires, and her wants. He doesn’t even know who she is. He treats her like cattle, or something to be traded and bargained with.

Ben: Perhaps Romeo and Juliet are too young, because the feud doesn’t really mean anything to them. Juliet denounces it. You get the impression that they haven’t quite learned it yet. According to the text Juliet is thirteen, she hasn’t grown up and been civilized into hatred yet. Whereas, for example, Tybalt is older and has realised, or learnt, or decided that Montagues are to be hated. Anger and aggression have been bred into him. So the play says something interesting about the innocence of Romeo and Juliet that is maybe tied to the fact that they are the youngest characters in the play.

Andrew: Romeo and Juliet is a play about the young, and violence is part of that, even in the way Mercutio and Tybalt start their duel. Did either really expect to kill the other? Productions have commonly made Mercutio a joker who thinks he can handle Tybalt, and probably would have if Romeo hadn’t got in the way. Nobody, certainly not Mercutio, expected the result. What that does as a learning process to Romeo is get him to kill other people too: Tybalt, County Paris and himself.

Passion

Ben: In the balcony scene Juliet says of their love that: ‘It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden, / Too like the lightning, which doeth cease to be / Ere one cans say ‘It lightens’.’ (2.2.118-120) What she is saying is: we need to take some time and think about this before we start saying or doing crazy things. But, if Romeo and Juliet really love each other and are destined to be together, then there is nothing else that they can do, except for what they do do. But maybe they make a mistake. Perhaps it’s not true love and they just really fancy each other!

Tas: I think, whether it is love or lust, it is incredibly honest.

Tyne: Why does it have to be one or the other?

Tas: They may well be driven by both things.

Mark: It is interesting that at the beginning of the play, in the famous prologue, you are told exactly what’s going to happen. That says to me that Romeo and Juliet are destined to die. They cannot escape from this fate.

Tas: And that gives you the opportunity to look at why they die, to look at the relationships between parents and children, the old and the young. Lord and Lady Capulet insist that Juliet must marry Paris and they don’t listen to her.

Tyne: Juliet’s parent’s never loved each other. Or if they did, they certainly didn’t show it. There is no tenderness in that relationship. The Capulets didn’t spend much time with her and certainly weren’t tactile with her.

Ben: This is a society where it is the norm to have arranged marriages. In modern society it is very easy, from a Western liberal perspective, to say that arranged marriage is ridiculous. But in a society where that is normal, in some Muslim or some Hindi families now for example, I don’t think you can say that because something is arranged it is therefore minus love. We can’t look at the fact that Lord and Lady Capulet would have been married off to one another as proof that they don’t therefore love each other. Maybe there is a sense that you grow to love someone, or that you learn to love someone or perhaps you can lose that love. I think one of the great things about what Romeo and Juliet is that they have no precedent for their relationship. You literally see two people discovering how they feel, very purely and very rawly and without reference to anything, which is where all this ridiculously beautiful language comes from.

Andrew: What we need to keep in mind is how much the play has transformed all thinking, not only in Britain, about love and marriage. Shakespeare wrote a truly radical play because in his own time the rule was to have marriages arranged by parents. Now, feeling about Romeo and Juliet has so influenced social thinking that the Brits now have a law forbidding what they call 'forced marriages'. There was a case a couple of months ago where a girl who had been taken to Pakistan by her parents and made to marry a stranger was freed by the new British law. We need to think very carefully about social situations which cause deaths, like the five in Romeo and Juliet, before we lay down any law that says there is only one way to resolve issues, even those of love and marriage.

Tas: Regarding the question of whether there was any love between Lord and Lady Capulet, I think that there was the potential for love at the beginning of the relationship, providing certain things were fulfilled, that an heir was provided and the Capulet legacy and the heritage were secure. But, there is no direct male Capulet heir and that is amplified by Tybalt’s death.

Mark: Mercutio is fairly scathing of Romeo’s emotions. But I think that is because he is anxious about losing a good friend. Mercutio and Romeo are very close. It goes back to the violent environment in which their relationship exists. Mercutio is a troubled man, and he can’t function properly when Romeo is not with him. Knowing that Romeo has fallen in love and that that might be the end of our friendship is a big problem for Mercutio. The first moment we see Mercutio is the beginning of the end of their relationship. It’s not that Mercutio has a problem with Romeo loving Rosaline or Juliet; it is more that Mercutio has a problem with Romeo loving someone other then Mercutio. The play is full of Mercutio waiting and calling for Romeo. It is a familiar thing between young men who grow up together. You can grow up together so close, but, as soon as girls come on the scene it changes the friendship dynamic. After he meets Juliet, Romeo ignores Mercutio. I think what is interesting is the type of environment that these characters are living in, and the effect this has upon them. They know that if they are involved in a brawl they might lose their life. Life seems to have little value in this conflict. Perhaps if things were peaceful Romeo and Juliet might not have been so rash. Maybe it is the tension and pressure which means that when they find love they grab it wholeheartedly. On the surface it may seem rash, but it is a response to the violent environment that they are living in.

Violence

Ben: From what I have read I don’t think there is any suggestion that real life Renaissance Verona is in any way a model for this play. Shakespeare chose places like Verona because there was no such thing as Italy at the time and Verona was a city state. It is quite a nice little social microcosm. It serves as mini world through which Shakespeare was possibly talking about England, or London, but he’s certainly not trying to say anything about historical Verona. The question is why is this world Shakespeare created so violent? There are all sorts of answers. We have talked about how the young people have taken up this ancient grudge and once locked in a cycle of violence then it is not easy to get out. You see it all the time, today. You see it everywhere, in Baghdad now. Violence breeds violence.

Andrew: Violence breeds, and its birthplace is ignorance. Everybody in this play is helpless to control events, not just Friar Laurence. When Romeo shouts 'Then I deny you stars! (or else 'Then I defy you, stars!')(5.1.24), he is admitting total defeat. With Mercutio and Tybalt both dead, he can’t do anything to keep the marriage he’s just started. The play seems to be showing us how far back the learning process has to go in such violent societies. Good resolutions are well beyond the power of any well-meaning individual.

Tas: I have always taken the line: ‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny’ (prologue, 3.) to mean the feud has been going on for generations. Perhaps Lord Capulet doesn’t even know the real roots of the feud. The cycle of violence is just repeating itself.

Ben: It is hard to stop a quarrel if you don’t have ownership of it. If the feud had kicked off from a bar room brawl that had happened fifteen years ago between Montague and Capulet, then it would be easy to end it. They could just forgive one another. However if it goes back generations it becomes complicated. A good comparison could be the Northern Ireland peace process. It is very complicated to talk about the situation in Ulster, in Northern Ireland, because it goes back generations, back six hundred years. You are dealing with things that you haven’t got ownership over. You can’t say 'let's just bury the hatchet', because people have incredibly strong ties to their heritage. Dealing with the weight of hundreds of years of arguing or fighting is not a simple thing to resolve.

Mark: I am cynical about the grudge actually being resolved. Even the servants are fighting each other in this play!

Tyne: I think this is the kind of conflict that obsessed the whole town. The grocer in the grocery store would have an opinion and he would have picked a side. If you live in a conflict all your life, your identity becomes about that conflict. You don’t want to let that conflict go because where would your energy go? The conflict is your focus. There is nothing else to talk about. There is nothing else for these kids to do. It is their whole way of life.

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