Romeo and JulietPart 35
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Part 35
Little is known of the life of Arthur Broke, or Brooke, except that he wrote Romeus and Juliet (1562) and the next year published a book entitled Agreement of Sundry Places of Scripture, seeming in shew to jarre, serving in stead of Commentaryes not only for these, but others lyke; a translation from the French. He died that same year (1563), and an Epitaph by George Turbervile (printed in a volume of his poems, 1567) "on the death of maister Arthur Brooke" informs us that he was "drowned in passing to Newhaven."
So far as I am aware, no editor or commentator has referred to the singular prose introduction to the 1562 edition of Romeus and Juliet. It is clear from internal evidence that it was written by Brooke, and it is signed "Ar. Br."--the form in which his name also appears on the title-page; but its tone and spirit are strangely unlike those of the poem. We have seen (p. 25 above) that he refers to the perpetuation of "the memory of so perfect, sound, and so approved love" by the "stately tomb" of Romeo and Juliet, with "great store of cunning epitaphs in honour of their death;" but in the introduction he expresses a very different opinion of the lovers and finds a very different lesson in their fate. He says: "To this end (good Reader) is this tragical matter written, to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends, conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity), attempting all adventures of peril for the attaining of their wicked lusts, using auricular confession (the key of whoredom and treason) for furtherance of their purpose, abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage to cloak the shame of stolen contracts; finally, by all means of unhonest life, hasting to most unhappy death." The suggestion is added that parents may do well to show the poem to their children with "the intent to raise in them an hateful loathing of so filthy beastliness."
It is curious that there is not the slightest hint of all this anywhere in the poem; not a suggestion that the love of Romeo and Juliet is not natural and pure and honest; not a word of reproach for the course of Friar Laurence. Even the picture of the Nurse, with her vulgarity and unscrupulousness, is drawn with a kind of humour.
I have quoted above (note on ii. 2. 142) what Brooke makes Juliet say to her lover in the balcony scene. In their first interview, she says:--
"You are no more your owne (deare frend) then I am yours (My honor saved) prest tobay [to obey] your will while life endures. Lo here the lucky lot that sild [seldom] true lovers finde: Eche takes away the others hart, and leaves the owne behinde. A happy life is love if God graunt from above That hart with hart by even waight doo make exchaunge of love."
And Romeo has just said:--
"For I of God woulde crave, as pryse of paynes forpast, To serve, obey, and honor you so long as lyfe shall last."
Of the Friar the poet says:--
"This barefoote fryer gyrt with cord his grayish weede, For he of Frauncis order was, a fryer as I reede. Not as the most was he, a grosse unlearned foole: But doctor of divinitie proceeded he in schoole.
The bounty of the fryer and wisdom hath so woune The townes folks harts that welnigh all to fryer Lawrence ronne. To shrive them selfe the olde, the yong, the great and small: Of all he is beloved well and honord much of all. And for he did the rest in wisdome farre exceede The prince by him (his counsell cravde) was holpe at time of neede. Betwixt the Capilets and him great frendship grew: A secret and assured frend unto the Montegue."
At the end of the tragic story the poet asks:--
"But now what shall betyde of this gray-bearded syre? Of fryer Lawrence thus araynde, that good barefooted fryre? Because that many times he woorthely did serve The commen welth, and in his lyfe was never found to swerve, He was discharged quyte, and no marke of defame Did seeme to blot or touch at all the honor of his name. But of him selfe he went into an Hermitage, Two myles from Veron towne, where he in prayers past forth his age; Till that from earth to heaven his heavenly sprite dyd flye: Fyve yeres he lived an Hermite, and an Hermite dyd he dye."
The puzzling prose preface to the poem is followed, in the original edition, by another in verse, similarly headed "To the Reader," from which we learn that Brooke had written other poems, which with this he compares to unlicked whelps--"nought els but lumpes of fleshe withouten heare" (hair)--but this poem, he says, is "the eldest of them" and his "youthfull woorke." He has decided to publish it, but "The rest (unlickt as yet) a whyle shall lurke" (that is, in manuscript)--
"Till tyme give strength to meete and match in fight With slaunders whelpes."
I suspect that after this poem was written he had become a Puritan,--or more rigid in his Puritanism,--but nevertheless lusted after literary fame and could not resist the temptation to publish the "youthfull woorke." But after writing the verse prologue it occurred to him--or some of his godly friends may have admonished him--that the character of the story and the manner in which he had treated it, needed further apology or justification; and the prose preface was written to serve as a kind of "moral" to the production. After the suggestion to parents quoted above he adds: "Hereunto if you applye it, ye shall deliver my dooing from offence, and profit your selves. Though I saw the same argument lately set foorth on stage with more commendation then I can looke for (being there much better set forth then I have or can dooe) yet the same matter penned as it is, may serve to lyke good effect, if the readers do brynge with them lyke good myndes, to consider it, which hath the more incouraged me to publishe it, such as it is."
The reader may be surprised that Brooke refers to having seen the story "on stage;" but the Puritans did not altogether disapprove of plays that had a moral purpose. It will be remembered that Stephen Gosson, in his Schoole of Abuse (1579), excepts a few plays from the sweeping condemnation of his "plesaunt invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like caterpillers of a Commonwelth"--among them being "The Jew,... representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and the bloody minds of usurers," which may have anticipated Shakespeare in combining the stories of the caskets and the pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice.
That Brooke was a Puritan we may infer from the religious character of the only other book (mentioned above) which he is known to have published. His death the same year probably prevented his carrying out the intention of licking the rest of his poetical progeny into shape for print.
COMMENTS ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERS
JULIET.--Juliet is not fortunate in her parents. Her father is sixty or more years old (as we may infer from what he says in i. 5. 29 fol.), while her mother is about twenty-eight (see i. 3. 50), and must have been married when she was half that age. Her assertion that Juliet was born when she herself was "much upon these years" of her daughter (who will be fourteen in about a fortnight, as the Nurse informs us in the same scene) is somewhat indefinite, but must be within a year or two of the exact figure. Her marriage was evidently a worldly one, arranged by her parents with little or no regard for her own feelings, much as she and her husband propose to marry Juliet to Paris.
We may infer that Capulet had not been married before, though, as he himself intimates and the lady declares (iv. 4. 11 fol.), he had been a "mouse-hunt" (given to flirtation and intrigue) in his bachelor days; and she thinks that he needs "watching" even now, lest he give her occasion for jealousy.
Neither father nor mother seems to have any marked affection for Juliet, or any interest in her welfare except to get her off their hands by what, from their point of view, is a desirable marriage. Capulet says (iii. 5. 175):--
"God's bread! it makes me mad! Day, night, late, early, At home, abroad, alone, in company, Waking, or sleeping, still my care hath been To have her match'd; and having now provided A gentleman of noble parentage, Of fair demesnes, youthful, and nobly train'd, Stuff'd, as they say, with honourable parts, Proportion'd as one's thought would wish a man,-- And then to have a wretched puling fool, A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender, To answer 'I'll not wed; I cannot love, I am too young; I pray you, pardon me.'"
It is more than he can endure; and his wife, when Juliet begs her to interpose and "delay the marriage for a month, a week," refuses to "speak a word" in opposition to his determination to let her "die in the streets" if she does not marry Paris that very week. "Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee," the Lady adds, and leaves the hapless girl to her despair. A moment before she had said, "I would the fool were married to her grave!"
Earlier in the play (i. 2. 16) Capulet has said to Paris:--
"But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart, My will to her consent is but a part; An she agree, within her scope of choice, Lies my consent and fair according voice;"--
but from the context we see that this is merely a plausible excuse for not giving the count a definite answer just then. The girl, he says, is "yet a stranger in the world" (has not yet "come out," in modern parlance), and it is best to wait a year or two:--
"Let two more summers wither in their pride Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride."
He sees no reason for haste; but later, influenced by the noble wooer's importunities and the persuasions of his wife, who has favoured an early marriage from the first (i. 3), he takes a different tone (iii. 4. 12):--
"Capulet. Sir Paris, I will make a desperate tender Of my child's love. I think she will be rul'd In all respects by me; nay, more, I doubt it not.-- Wife, go you to her ere you go to bed; Acquaint her here of my son Paris' love, And bid her, mark you me, on Wednesday next-- But, soft! what day is this?
Paris. Monday, my lord.
Capulet. Monday! ha, ha! Well, Wednesday is too soon. O' Thursday let it be; o' Thursday, tell her, She shall be married to this noble earl."
"She shall be married," and the day is fixed. Already he calls Paris "my son." No question now of delay, and getting her "consent" as a condition of securing his own!
At the supposed sudden death of their daughter the parents naturally feel some genuine grief; but their conventional wailing (iv. 5) belongs to the earlier version of the play, and it is significant that Shakespeare let it stand when revising his work some years afterwards. As Tieck remarks, it "had not the true tragic ring"--and why should it?
Most of the critics have assumed that Shakespeare makes Juliet only fourteen, because of her Italian birth; but in the original Italian versions of the story she is eighteen, and Brooke makes her sixteen. All of Shakespeare's other youthful heroines whose ages are definitely stated or indicated are very young. Miranda, in The Tempest, is barely fifteen, as she has been "twelve year" on the enchanted island and was "not out [full] three years old" when her father was driven from Milan. Marina, in Pericles, is only fifteen at the end of the play; and Perdita only sixteen, as we learn from the prologue to act iv. of The Winter's Tale.
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