Complete. From Dowden’s “Shakespeare,” London 1879.

THE STORY of the unhappy lovers of Verona, as a supposed historical occurrence, is referred to the year 1303; but no account of it exists of an earlier date than that of Luigi da Porto, about 1530. A tale in some respects similar is set forth in the “Ephesiaca” of Xenophon of Ephesus, a mediæval Greek romance writer; and one essentially the same, narrating the adventures of Mariotto and Gianozza of Siena, is found in a collection of tales by Masuccio of Salerno, 1476; but Da Porto first names Romeo and Giulietta, and makes them children of the rival Veronese houses. The story quickly acquired a European celebrity. Altering the name and some particulars, Adrian Sevin related it (about 1542) for his French patroness; Gherardo Boldiero turns it into verse for his readers at Venice. Bandello, partly recasting the narrative, recounts it once more in his Italian collection of novels, 1554; and five years later Pierre Boisteau, probably assisted by Belleforest, translates Bandello’s Italian into French, and again recasts the story (1559). In three years more it touches English soil. Arthur Brooke in 1562 produced his long metrical version, founded upon Boisteau’s novel; and a prose translation of Boisteau’s “Histoire de Deux Amans,” appeared in Paynter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” 1567. We have here reached Shakespeare’s sources; Paynter, he probably consulted; in nearly all essentials he follows the “Romeus and Juliet” of Brooke. It must be noted, however, that Brooke speaks of having seen “the same argument lately set forth on stage”—probably the English stage; it is therefore possible that Shakespeare may have had before him an old English tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet,” of which no fragment remains with us. Resemblances between passages of Shakespeare’s tragedy and passages of Groto’s Italian tragedy of “Hadraina” are probably due to accident.

  The precise date of Shakespeare’s play is uncertain. In 1597 it was published in quarto, “as it hath been often (with great applause) played publicly by the Right Honorable the L(ord) of Hunsdon his servants.” Now the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, died July 22d, 1596; his son, George Lord Hunsdon, was appointed Chamberlain in April, 1597. Before July, 1596, or after April, 1597, the theatrical company would have been styled by the more honorable designation, “the Lord Chamberlain’s servants”; but during the interval they would be described as on the title-page of the quarto. The Nurse’s mention of the earthquake (Act I., Sc. III., l. 23), “’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,” has been referred to as giving the date, 1591, a memorable earthquake, felt in London, having occurred eleven years previously, in 1580; but, while professing an infallibly accurate recollection, the garrulous old woman blunders sadly about her dates, so that even if an actual English earthquake were alluded to, the point of the jest may have been in the inaccuracy of the reference. Several lines in Romeo’s speech in presence of Juliet in the tomb (Act V., Sc. III., ls. 74–120) seem written with a haunting recollection of passages in Daniel’s “Complaints of Rosamunde” (1592). The internal evidence favors the opinion that this tragedy was an early work of the poet, and that it was subsequently revised and enlarged. There is much rhyme, and much of this is in the form of alternate rhyme, the forced playing upon words, and the overstrained conceits (see, for example, Act I., Sc. III., ls. 81–92) point to an early date. If, however, rhymed verse be present in large quantity, the quality of the scenes chiefly written in blank verse is far higher than that of the rhyming passages. We may perhaps accept the opinion that Romeo and Juliet was begun, and in part written, as early as 1591, and that it assumed its final form about 1597. The first quarto, already mentioned (1597), is a pirated edition, “made up partly from copies of portions of the original play, partly from recollection and from notes taken during the performance.” The second quarto, 1599, is described on the title-page as “newly-corrected, augmented, and amended.” This perhaps exaggerates the fact; but here we obtain a true representation of the play, and comparing this with the earlier text, it appears that the play “underwent revision, received some slight augmentation, and in some few places must have been entirely rewritten.”

  “Romeo and Juliet,” apart from its intrinsic beauty, is of deep interest when viewed as Shakespeare’s first tragedy, and as a work which probably occupied his thoughts, from time to time, during a series of years. It is a young man’s tragedy, in which Youth and Love are brought face to face with Hatred and Death. There are some lines in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in which the poet compares “the course of true love” to that of lightning in midnight:—

  It is thus that love is conceived in “Romeo and Juliet”—it is sudden, it is intensely bright for a moment, and then it is swallowed up in darkness. The action is accelerated by Shakespeare to the utmost, the four or five months of Brooke’s poem being reduced to as many days. On Sunday the lovers meet, next day they are made one in marriage, on Tuesday morning at dawn they part, and they are finally reunited in the tomb on the night of Thursday. Shakespeare does not close the tragedy with Juliet’s death; as he has shown in the first scene the hatred of the houses through the comic quarrel of the servants, thereby introducing the causes which produce the tragic issue; so in the last scene he shows us the houses sorrowfully reconciled over the dead bodies of a son and a daughter.

  Romeo’s nature is prone to enthusiastic feeling, and, as it were, vaguely trembling in the direction of love before he sees Juliet; to meet her gives form and fixity to his vague emotion. Shakespeare, following Brooke’s poem, has introduced Romeo as yielding himself to a fanciful boy’s love of the disdainful beauty, Rosaline; and some of the love conceits and love hyperbole of the first act are intended as the conventional amorous dialect of the period. To Juliet—a girl of fourteen—love comes as a thing previously unknown; it is at once terrible and blissful (see Act II., Sc. II., ls. 116–120); she rises, through love, and sorrow, and trial, from a child into a heroic woman. After Shakespeare has exalted their enthusiastic joy and rapture to the highest point, he suddenly casts it down. Romeo is at first completely unmanned, but Juliet exhibits a noble fortitude and self-command. The scene of the parting of husband and wife at dawn is a fitting pendant to the scene in the moonlit garden, where the confession of their love is made; the one scene wrought out of divinely mingled love and joy, the other of divinely mingled love and sorrow. When Romeo leaves his young wife, the marriage with Paris is pressed upon her by the hot-tempered old Capulet, by her mother, and by her gross-hearted nurse. Juliet is henceforth in a solitude almost as deep as that of her tomb. The circumstance of bringing Paris across Romeo in the churchyard, with his death before the tomb, is of Shakespeare’s invention. Paris comes strewing flowers for the lost Juliet; Romeo comes to find her and to die. Paris scatters his blossoms with one of those graceful love speeches, in the form of a rhymed sextet, which flowed from Romeo’s lips in Act I. Romeo’s speech is in earnest and plain blank verse, for he has now dropped all unrealities and prettinesses. In Luigi da Porto, in Bandello, and in a modern version of Shakespeare’s play by Garrick, Juliet awakes from her sleep while Romeo still lives; Shakespeare’s treatment of this scene as to this particular is the same as that of Brooke and Paynter.

  Mercutio and the Nurse are almost creations of Shakespeare. Brooke has described Mercutio as “a lion among maidens,” and speaks of his “ice-cold hand”; but it was the dramatist who drew at full length the figure of this brilliant being, who, though with wit running beyond what is becoming, and effervescent animal spirits, yet acts as a guardian of Romeo, and is always a gallant gentleman. He dies forcing a jest through his bodily anguish, but he dies on Romeo’s behalf; the scene darkens as his figure disappears. The Nurse is a coarse, kindly, garrulous, consequential old body, with vulgar feelings and a vulgarized air of rank, she is on terms of long-standing familiarity with her master, her mistress, her Juliet, and takes all manner of liberties with them, but love has made Juliet a woman, and independent of her old foster mother. Friar Lawrence, gathering his simples and moralizing to himself, is a centre of tranquillity in the midst of turmoil and passion; but it may be doubted that his counsels of moderation, and amiable scheming to reconcile the houses through Romeo’s marriage with Juliet, contain more real wisdom than do the passionate dictates of the lovers’ hearts.

  The scene is essentially Italian; the burning noons of July in the Italian city inflame the blood of the street quarrelers; the voluptuous moonlit nights are only like a softer day. And the characters are Italian, with their lyrical ardor, their southern impetuosity of passion, and the southern forms and color of their speech.