Violence and Political Authority: Romeo and Juliet (2024)

Romeo and Juliet and Civil Power

Romeo and Juliet (composed 1593) is framed, by Chorus in the Prologue, by city life, civility, and civil violence:

Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet become lovers, although Juliet is betrothed by her father to marry Paris. The violence between the two households reaches a level where, fights having broken out despite the Prince’s warnings that the punishment of death will be inflicted on those responsible, Romeo’s friend Mercutio dies; and in a fight with Romeo, so does Tybalt from the Capulets. Friar Laurence helps Romeo and Juliet secretly marry, believing that their union may eventually end the enmity. Romeo is banished from Verona. Juliet’s father seeks to hasten the marriage between her and Paris. Laurence arranges that Juliet take a sleeping potion that will make her seem to be dead, with the plan that Romeo come back to Verona to take her away from her family tomb and out of the city until the feud can be ended and the families reconciled. But messages go astray, and Romeo returns believing that Juliet really has died. He kills himself with poison. She awakes to find him dead, so kills herself with his dagger. The finale sees the two families, as Chorus tells us, ‘bury their strife’ [Prologue 8], agreeing to raise gold statues of Romeo and Juliet as a sign of the new civil peace of the city.

Romeo and Juliet is understood, above all, as a great love story. It is received, in contemporary cultures, in the tradition of romance in the sense of ‘girl meets boy’. In Shakespeare’s own context, ‘romance’ indicated fable and fantasy written as a story in a vernacular language. The theme of idealized erotic and intimate love and friendship came later, although a strand of unattainable love, or chivalric heroism for the sake of a woman, was part of the tradition. In relation to Shakespeare, we can intelligibly use the term in part with its later connotations because Romeo and Juliet, and indeed Shakespeare’s love stories in general, are works which transform older romantic themes of quest and codes of chivalry to the intimate context of inter-personal, heterosexual, great love. His works can be seen as formative contributions to the development of the later genres of tragic (which is to say, hopeless or doomed) love, and of romantic comedy.

Morally, from some standpoints, Romeo and Juliet can be read as a warning about the terrible consequences of authoritarian parenting, from others about the terrible consequences of disobedience to parents. The French and English translators of the play’s Italian source narrative prefaced the work with moral warnings of the latter sort.1 Critics and interpreters, in accounting for the tragedy, have often focused on the psychology and character flaws of Juliet, Romeo, and other characters. Juliet might not have lied to her parents about having met Romeo; Romeo might not have acted so impetuously throughout; Juliet’s father might have been less violent and impatient to marry her off; Mercutio might not have been so mischievous and determined to pick a fight; and so on.2 The psychological themes of family drama—the deep need for maternal connection, the struggle with paternal authority, the quest for, or the fear of, adult independent identity—also press on twentieth-century critics and interpreters.3

The great love is connected explicitly, by Shakespeare, to the theme of fate. Chorus, in the Prologue, announces to us ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers’ [Prologue 6]. This locates the workings of fate in ‘the heavens’. But ‘fate’ is located also in parentage: the star-crossed lovers are ‘From forth the fatal loins of these two foes’ [5]. They are born to feuding patriarchs, are members of warring households, their worlds are infused with hate. There’s nothing heavenly about accident of birth and such social conflict, a materialist will say. But ‘the stars’ are a repeated image. Before his first meeting with Juliet, Romeo has forebodings about ‘a consequence yet hanging in the stars’ [1.4.104‒5]; the love poetry of their illicit meeting on Juliet’s balcony repeats the imagery of night and starlight as metaphor for physical beauty and passion [2.1.58‒65, 150‒4; also 3.2.20‒5]. Later, when catastrophe strikes, and he has (false) news of Juliet’s death, Romeo’s immediate response is: ‘Is it even so? then I defy you, stars!’ [5.1.24]. The heavens, as a transcendent, unreachable, realm, and as a mysterious determinant of human fate, symbolize the qualities of Juliet’s and Romeo’s love.

This image of heaven can also be read theologically. The love isn’t only heavenly and fated; it shares the universality of Christian love. Allen Bloom emphasizes that in Shakespeare’s art love is, or can be, boundless. Renaissance theology emphasized God’s all-pervading love. Human love participates in the divine. It won’t be constrained by conventions of city, family, or society; it will defy political power of state, or party.4 Christian theological themes of death and resurrection are also prominent in the plot and imagery. The drug that Friar Laurence gives to Juliet will send her into a deep death-like sleep for forty-two hours [4.1.104‒6]; she will be laid in the family tomb on day one, and on the third day will be spirited away [4.1.113‒17]. The theme of suicide inserts a tension or complication here though—it is a sin for which punishment can be expected.5

Recent critics have emphasized more material, political, economic, and social themes. Feminist readings insist that Juliet’s and Romeo’s fates are determined not by ‘the stars’ but by the inexorable logic of feud and patriarchy.6 In Chapter 1 we saw how patriarchy was a normative structure of power and authority in the state, and also an important moral, theological, and legal principle, connected to the pervasive and generalized dominating and denigrating power of men over women in household, economy, culture, and society.7 The clowning of the Capulet servants who open the action centres on jokes about their courage and anger (or their cowardice), and their prowess (or not) with weapons and sex:

The bawdy and misogyny of this repartee flows into the pervasive misogyny of the young men’s culture of violence with swords (articulated in particular in the scene when Juliet’s nurse goes to meet Romeo, and is teased by his friends [2.3.96‒134]), and into the violence of the patriarchal power that Capulet exerts over Juliet [3.5.140‒95].8 Critics also point to religious—liturgical and theological—allusions here, most obviously in Samson’s and Gregory’s names, but also in the way sexual connotations (such as Samson’s ‘stand’) are entwined with religious ones.9 Sex, religion, and politics are all bound up in Samson’s ‘I will be civil with the maids’ [1.1.21], which ironically echoes, only twenty or so lines later, Chorus’s ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean’ [Prologue 4].

So, the first political problem of the play is what civility can mean in a setting dominated by feud and patriarchy. The association of feud and Italian life is commonplace. The complicated twelfth- and thirteenth-century factionalism and conflict between Ghibellines and Guelphs originated in rival support for the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope respectively—and there really was a feud between ‘the Montecchi’ and the ‘Cappetti’ in Verona, which is reported by Dante in The Divine Comedy (composed 1308‒20).10 From those city conflicts to the organized clan and family violence that we associate with mafia crime and domination, Italian societies have been a source for understanding and modelling the logic of social relations of hostility, hate, and violence that endure over generations. (Unfair, of course, as most societies feature similar dynamics to some degree; and in any case the medieval Italian city states are also originators of the values of republican rule.)11 As generations pass the original disagreement—whether disputes and insults were about religion, or women, or property—can become hazy, issues other than the original one can become more salient, new schisms and factions can obscure the original contention. By the time Dante himself was involved in Guelph politics, the Guelphs had divided into two factions, the Blacks and the Whites—antagonisms can be complicated, as well as sharpened, by brand new interests, in territory or markets. The signs and symbols of membership can become as powerful an incitement to hostility as any substantial rivalry over goods. In the history of Ghibellines and Guelphs marks of membership such as hats were occasions for violence. The Montague boys’ hostility to Tybalt focuses a good deal on Tybalt’s style of sword fighting.12 The densely solidaristic networks of hierarchically organized families, dominated by patriarchs, who have the power of patronage, and thus command allegiance by tying young men into their households—as Tybalt seems to be incorporated into the Capulets—make for an exaggeratedly inward orientation by individuals, and an exaggeratedly hostile and fearful attitude to outsiders.

All of these factors—the significance of signs and symbols, the prominence of family and household allegiance—can be understood as indicators of Shakespeare’s Verona’s ‘political immaturity’, which can be connected, as far as the play’s imagery and symbolism goes, to Juliet’s and Romeo’s permanent immaturity.13 But focus on political immaturity suggests that Verona simply had not, yet, developed the kind of constitution and institutions that mellow out social and cultural antagonisms. In this book, I want to emphasize the moments in Shakespeare’s drama which seem to say that the political way is the better way, and, perhaps, that in late modern polities we all have to be a bit grown up about it. But we cannot overlook the way political power always is in tension with other power claims, and this is not a matter of the age or maturity or ‘development’ of political institutions. In Romeo and Juliet, the power of the state (and its claims for civility on the part of citizens and denizens, as well as its enforcement of law), comes into a tense relationship with patriarchal authority, and with machiavellian ingenuity and manoeuvring. We have met this trio before, in connection with Othello, and we will meet it again. But in Verona these three forms of political power in competition are variously reinforced, challenged, and undermined, by, first, violence—civil violence this time, not the military discipline and punishing authority favoured by Martius in Coriolanus; second, by the forces and pulls of market exchange.

Sovereign Power

The play is punctuated with the exertion of sovereign, princely power. In Scene 1, Prince Escalus addresses Montague and Capulet with an assertion of civic values in the face of uncivilized men:

This speech succinctly performs the executive and police functions of a polity—quashing the disturbance, dispersing the participants, arresting the leaders, and summoning them for judgement. It makes reference to the city’s established places and institutions: ‘old Freetown, our common judgement place’ invokes authoritative, evolving institutions that pre-exist the present inhabitants and will live on after them, emphasizing the communal nature of political and legal institutions.14

Of course, the irony of the play, perhaps an irony of sovereignty itself, is that this sovereign pronouncement and action has no effect whatsoever. The old men, despite their patriarchal power, are unable to control the young men of their households, and the violence continues. We might wish that sovereign power were more effective than Prince Escalus manages to make it. There wouldn’t be much of a play, to be sure, if his pronouncement had the effect he intended—drama as well as deaths would have been avoided. But there are a number of reasons, in any case, to be sceptical of the very idea that there can be this final and decisive power, really. Shakespeare’s representations of sovereign power often play with the idea that absolute sovereignty, than which there is no higher, is an illusion. Sovereignty has an intelligible meaning, but the thing it invokes is fantastic, like a unicorn. Shakespeare shows us sovereign rulers—Escalus; the monarchs of England—repetitively attempting to exert sovereignty. We are not at all surprised that they repeatedly fail in the face of social forces, ruthless enemies, unintended consequences, sheer incapacity, and so on.

Sovereignty in this play describes a similar arc as in Othello. In this first scene we see well-ordered, as it were, sovereign authority attending to matters of state, and exerting unambiguous, final, and overweening authority over Montague and Capulet. In 3.1, Mercutio is killed, in a fight, by Tybalt, and Tybalt in turn by Romeo. A citizen performs an arrest, and the Prince is summoned. Despite having told Montague and Capulet that they were responsible for the conduct of the younger men of their households, and despite having threatened them with death, he now exacts a fine, a financial penalty, from them [3.1.190‒1], and for Romeo’s offence the punishment is exile [3.1.186‒7]. The sovereign threat in 1.1, fails to prevent further violence; and at this point he draws back from the penalty he had promised. In the final scene, sovereign authority comes on stage, too late to prevent tragedy, but ready to dispense justice. When the watchmen find Juliet dead they send for the Prince [5.3.174‒8]; Escalus takes charge. He elicits from Friar Laurence the full story of what has happened. Laurence tells all: ‘if aught in this miscarried by my fault, let my old life be sacrificed, some hour before his time, unto the rigour of the severest law’ [5.3.266‒9]. Escalus judges: ‘We still have known thee for a holy man’ [5.3.270]. To the news that Balthazar has brought a letter from Romeo addressed to his father, Escalus exercises sovereign authority over private relations, intercepting it: ‘Give me the letter; I will look on it’ [5.3.278]. It is he who reads Romeo’s account of events, including that he had bought poison with which to kill himself and to be with Juliet [5.3.286‒90].

The tragedy is a sign, among other things, of the limits and failings of sovereign power. In light of Laurence’s and Romeo’s accounts of the events, the Prince can do nothing. His is still the moral and political voice that can utter reproach to Montague and Capulet: ‘see what a scourge is laid upon your hate, that heaven finds means to kill your joys with love’ [5.3.292‒3], but this moral function is hardly all that traditional theorists were thinking of when they talked of sovereign power. He also is a man and a citizen himself. As such he utters a self-reproach at his exercise of sovereignty which has fallen short: ‘…I, for winking at your discords, too, have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished’ [5.3.294‒5]. Romeo and Juliet articulates the failings and the futility of so-called sovereign power. It is over-ridden by the workings of chance, fate, and heaven. It is exercised by men who are merely men. It is also ironized by the reasoning and actions of machiavellians, whose plots and devices evade and undermine the open pronouncements of authority and dispensations of justice such as Escalus attempts. It is thwarted, by passions, and by the organization of social relations, in particular the power of patriarchs.

Patriarchal Power

We can understand the limits of sovereignty in Verona by seeing that patriarchy does not give way. But it is not quite secure. If fathers stand in relation to their households as heads of state stand in relation to society and the law that governs it, that raises the thorny question of the patriarchal—or other—nature of the power of the head of state over the patriarchs.15 In political and social thought this conundrum is often resolved in the idea of ‘spheres’ of power and authority. But Romeo and Juliet depicts a world in which the spheres of authority of the patriarchs, and the conflict between the households, severely constrains the Prince’s authority over the city. The patriarchs need the city streets and squares as the setting for their feud.

Exercising their power as fathers, Montague and Capulet, we can assume, command loyalty not only from their servants, the young men attached to the household and their friends, but also from allies and parties with whom they are engaged in exchange. Capulet is engaged with Paris for the exchange of Juliet in marriage, which, we understand, will bring Capulet into enhanced relations with Prince Escalus (Paris is listed in the ‘Persons of the Play’ as a kinsman of the Prince). In the first conversation between Capulet and Paris to which we are witness, Capulet demurs in the matter of Juliet’s marriage. She is a good, to be exchanged, to be sure; in particular he speaks to her as of fruit on a tree: ‘She hath not seen the change of fourteen years; let two more summers wither in their pride ere we may think her ripe to be a bride’ [1.2.9‒11]. In their second conversation, while Paris seems to accept that the household and civic turmoil will delay his suit to Juliet, Capulet is suddenly ‘desperate’: ‘Sir Paris, I will make a desperate tender of my child’s love. I think she will be ruled in all respects by me. Nay, more, I doubt it not’ [3.4.12‒14]. This combines the material relationship of pricing and proffering for sale (‘I will make a tender …’) with the overweening importance of exchange in social life (‘desperate tender’) and the patriarchal imperative, the necessity that Juliet is ruled by him.

Juliet, like other Shakespearean daughters, finds ways of evading and opposing her fathers’ authority—in her case, by lies and trickery. But her ultimate form of resistance and evasion is suicide. In patriarchal households, wives and husbands, while each deploys their own form of power, are not symmetrically situated or equal as partners. The patriarch and his wife, though, are central in the household—Juliet’s mother tries to exert influence over her husband, is engaged in the family feud, considers herself to have agency and capacity for action (e.g. in procuring poison with which to murder Romeo [3.5.88‒92]). But Shakespeare’s list of the ‘Persons of the Play’ names her only ‘Capulet’s wife’.

This assertion of untrammelled patriarchal authority contrasts with the ambiguity of the Prince’s rule over Capulet and Montague. At the outset of 1.2, we catch Capulet and Paris mid-conversation: ‘But Montague is bound as well as I, in penalty alike, and ‘tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace’ [1.2.1‒3]. We learn from this fragment of their conversation about the fight that Capulet does not like the sentence the Prince has pronounced, but acknowledges the even-handedness of the justice. He recognizes the reason in the Prince’s sentence; as patriarchs, they should be able to do so. In these lines we see alignment between the republic and the families: the Prince is one patriarch among many, appointed to office whose sovereignty depends on his recognition of the authority of household heads.

Montague and Capulet are both invested in the state: they are engaged in competition for social dominance, and all the economic, cultural, and political advantages connected with it, and the city is the setting for their houses. But they both want to maintain an awful lot of personal and social power in reserve, and to deploy it in the feud which, in many ways—emotionally, libidinally, materially—transcends their investment in the state, in the rule of law, in civility and sovereignty. These are men who partly ‘buy into’ the civil order but reserve to themselves the rights of ‘natural sociality’ in such a way that effectively undermines that very civil order, even while one of the ends they have in view is power within that civil order.

In this sense, the Prince’s charge that their men are beasts [1.1.79], at their masters’ behests, violating civil and political values, both is and is not well-aimed. It might be tempting for some thinkers to see Montague and Capulet as essentially natural beings—top primates. But no matter how attractive to biologically minded social or political thinkers to see them as warring silverbacks, struggling for domination, Shakespeare figures them decidedly as members of a polity and a culture. Republican culture favours—or needs, according to Aristotle—friendship as a dominant model for relations between citizens.16 But the patriarchs preside over a polity of enmity and alliance—solidaristic friendship and kinship within, but not between, the households. They also participate in an economy of accumulation. Montague and Capulet and men like them are in a threshold position with regard to the state—both in and out. They wish to exploit state power while reserving for themselves their social power.

Machiavellian Strategy

Juliet and Romeo are caught between patriarchal power, futile sovereign authority, overweening economic interests, and social violence. Into this impasse, Friar Laurence acts. In Arthur Brooke’s ‘Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet’ (1562), one of Shakespeare’s sources for the play, Laurence is said to be a wise counsellor to the Prince.17 In general, the public political life of Verona is more prominent there than it is in Shakespeare’s play.18 Shakespeare’s Laurence, in my reading, is more of a magus (this interpretation is at odds with Tony Nuttall’s characterization of him as ‘a sweet old man who picks flowers and medicinal herbs’19). His spiritual authority and reputation as a holy man are given a cryptic twist by his focus on the occult and contradictory properties of things. When we first meet him, he meditates on the ambiguity of the categories good and evil, virtue and vice by analogy with the qualities of plants that can be precious when used, with knowledge, for medicine, and baneful when used, unknowing or perversely, for poison [2.2.1‒30]. Paradoxical anthitheses like the ones in Laurence’s soliloquy—and in Romeo’s poetry—were popular poetic and philosophical devices in Elizabethan literature.20 His speech also adverts to the themes of birth and death, the image of the tomb, and the ambiguity of bodily life in relation to death: ‘The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb; what is her burying grave, that is her womb’ [2.2.9‒10].

Shakespeare’s Laurence is confidant and teacher to Romeo, who in the early morning after his first encounters with Juliet comes immediately to him [2.1.234‒5, 2.2.31‒94]. Laurence sees, beyond the vaguely annoying, vaguely amusing, superficiality of Romeo’s love—which seems to have more to do with his eyes than with his heart proper [2.2.67‒72]—that, if the union is real, ‘this alliance may so happy prove, to turn your households’ rancour to pure love’ [2.2.91‒2]. Laurence transfers his understanding of the hidden qualities of plants to the hidden qualities of social relations.

His magus-like insight, though, cannot be pursued openly. He, Juliet, and Romeo will have to use trickery and pretence if the good outcome is to be secured. First, he agrees to marry them without their families’ permission [2.2.63‒4, 89‒90; 2.5.35‒7]. Juliet has the help of her nurse, who carries messages [2.3.151‒205]. The same day, Romeo is involved in the death of Tybalt and the Prince sentences him to banishment [3.1.186‒7]. Laurence brings Romeo the news of the Prince’s judgement, which he considers a sign of Escalus’s kindness [3.3.10‒11, 25‒8] but which Romeo considers worse than death [3.3.12‒23]. Laurence, upbraiding Romeo and reminding him that it is happier for him that he had killed Tybalt than vice versa, that it is better to be sent into exile than be sent to die, that it is better that Juliet be still alive than she be dead, urges him to go secretly to be with Juliet, to leave before dawn in accordance with the Prince’s sentence, and to go to Mantua ‘where thou shalt live till we can find a time to blaze your marriage’ [3.3.145‒53]. Juliet’s father, in the wake of Tybalt’s death, and Juliet’s barely accountable withdrawal from the household, decides to hasten her marriage to Paris—instead of waiting for her to agree, he tells her simply she is to be married, and sets the date for three days later. When she turns to Laurence for help, he comes up with the desperate plan that she should take a drug that will affect her like death—‘stiff and stark and cold’ [4.1.103]. Her body will be put in the Capulet family vault; meanwhile Laurence will have summoned Romeo back to Verona, they will be with Juliet when she awakes, and she and Romeo can go together to Mantua.

These episodes of ingenious planning and persuasion of others to follow his plan have several meanings for readers and audiences. First, they echo and reprise Laurence’s signature theme of good and evil coexisting in the same substance or circ*mstance. In the context of Christian imagery, Laurence’s insistence to both Juliet and Romeo—against their professed desires to die, to commit suicide—that life is better than death is counter-balanced by a version of the view that death will bring life. Both Juliet and Romeo will exchange suicidal despair for new life. Second, they echo Machiavelli’s emphasis on the prizes for seizing the opportune moment—kairos—taking the chance. In Machiavelli’s account of rule and politics, kairos is an aspect of time and history that is more significant than chronos. The passing of time, our understanding of cause and effect, of the flow of events of course is important in life, in technology, in maintaining political power. But seeing opportunities and taking them, acting against the natural flow of causes and effects, arguably is what sets ‘political’ action apart from related phenomena such as administration and legal judgement. Sovereignty also, according to some understandings, works against natural flow, interrupting, bringing processes of deliberation and bargaining to an end with decision. The one who seizes the moment is the one who can dominate in the contest with chance.21

Reading Laurence politically emphasizes the way he sees opportunities and takes them. But this aspect of his character and role in the action is countered by two other temporal phenomena. The first is fate. The tragic action of the play and the outcome of the drama are foretold in several ways. In the Prologue, Chorus relates to the audience the drama we are about to see or read, alerting us to the lovers being ‘star-crossed’, and their love ‘death-marked’ [Prologue 6, 9]. The script is written and nothing can evade the finale. The characters, in their words and reported feelings, also presage the fatal conclusion. Juliet’s mother wishes her in her grave! [3.5.139]. Her father threatens to drag her to the church to marry Paris ‘on a hurdle’ [3.5.154]. Romeo is full of foreboding: ‘I dream’d a dream tonight’ [1.4.48]; ‘my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars’ [1.4.104‒9]. Fatalism, the sense that there is nothing we can do, is politically—perhaps anti-politically—significant. Political action is an effort to exercise agency—over the structures that govern us, over the rules, and the rules about rules. Fatalistic cultures are antithetical to such aspiration. They can be marked by estrangement or alienation from those who do wield power—who dominate, or who extract. Fatalist thinking often engages, rather than with social and political relationships and realities, with supernatural forces, occult realities, myth and legend.22 I return to these themes in Chapter 7.

In Romeo and Juliet the theme of fateful presage intersects with a further time theme: that of tragic coincidence, bad luck, accident. Capulet brings the wedding forward by twenty-four hours [4.2.21‒37] thus giving much less time for the message about Juliet’s feigned death to reach Romeo and for Romeo to get back to Verona. Friar John, in any case, is prevented from delivering the first letter to Romeo in Mantua [5.2.5‒16]. Laurence sends a second, but Romeo is already on his way back to Verona because his servant Balthazar has brought (false) news of Juliet’s death to him before the message from Laurence can reach him [5.1.17‒24]. Laurence arrives just after Romeo has taken the poison, too late to tell him about Juliet [5.3.135‒46]. Juliet awakes too late to see Romeo alive [5.3.147‒50].

Violence and Political Power

The three forms of political power—sovereignty, patriarchy, machination—intersect and thwart one another, making a kind of backdrop of futility against which a human, emotional, relational drama is played out. In Romeo and Juliet love, the potent form of human connection, interacts and intersects with violence, a particularly potent form of human disconnection. Love and violence, connection and destruction also are ironized by a discourse that pervades the drama of economic exchange, this reflective, of course, of what the feud of the patriarchs is—at least in part, we can surmise—about. The relationship between violence and politics is, like everything about politics, contested. For many thinkers and political actors, violence is an instrument—perhaps the most potent one—of political power, whether that is thought of as sovereign authority, or persuasion, or manipulation. But an alternative tradition of political thought associates politics with pacification. The story of the imposition of, or the agreement to, political power (procedures for selecting governors and officers, settling public disputes, passing legislation, managing administration, and so on) is the story of a shift from inter-personal violence to public reasoning, negotiation, and conciliation—from swords to words. This does not mean that social actors are entirely pacified—but when they are permitted, or required, to use violence, and when they are forbidden, is a matter for the public authority to decide; and the public authority controls uses of violence for punishment or military action. The pacification story (emphasizing that in political societies violence is, if not overcome, then minimized) and the monopolization story (the idea that the means and rights of violence shift from individuals to centralized authorities) are differently weighted in rival traditions of political thought.23 Some thinkers speak of governmental uses of police, military, and judicial violence as ‘force’—hence emphasizing its legality, legitimacy, and ‘pacific’ quality; others emphasize the way ordinary common or garden violence, in all its varieties, is barely submerged beneath civil institutions and social manners. In particular, permissions—for instance, to fathers to use violence against children, wives, and servants—make the difference between a ‘political’ society and a non-political one indiscernible from the point of those who are subject to this violence. The same goes for those who are on the receiving end of permitted and legal economic coercion, including being injured by exploitative work conditions or inadequately sustained when prices are too high; or those who are victims of culturally approved ‘punishment’ for those who don’t conform.

Romeo and Juliet is a great play for thinking about these puzzles about the prospects for political society, and in particular how violence works in relation to other forms of power. The plot is carried along by violence.24 First, and most obvious, the feud structures all the social and political relations and actions—exercises of sovereignty, exercises of patriarchal authority, Laurence’s political subterfuge. The themes of enmity and hate pervade the text; and the feud is carried on by physical fighting with deadly weapons. Second, the friendship and camaraderie between the men and boys of the two households is suffused with imageries of violence and victory. Their sport incorporates the equation of fighting with weapons with sexuality, and their misogynistic play makes the streets an uncomfortable place for female characters. Romeo and Juliet focuses on a culture of violence; it is dynamic, and affects other areas of people’s lives (their markets, their parties, their intimate relationships) just because it is governed by norms and standards, and because for the violent actors their skills and capacities are embodied—learned, practiced, habitual. Third, all the anger and combat of the feud, between families and out in the streets, is reprised in private—for example, in Capulet’s treatment of Juliet when she fails to submit to his will, or when the sociable setting of Capulet’s party is disturbed by the mischief of the gate-crashing boys. Fourth, audiences will vary in their judgements of the violence of suicide. We might see Juliet’s killing herself with a dagger as itself a form of violence—a final transformation of the inter-personal violence of the play into violence against herself.

The feud is carried on with deadly weapons. It must be remembered that sword fighting, for sport and in play, has direct relevance to military service. The discipline and skill, and fruits of study, training, and practice, are straightforward social goods for the boys themselves; but capacity to fight, to the death, is also a public good—the kind of thing that, if it is not supplied in the ordinary course of socialization, should be supplied by the government. As discussed in Chapter 3, the question of how citizens can be made into soldiers, and then turned back again after the war is over into citizens, is a central question for republican political thinkers. All these considerations elevate fighting, socially and politically. Sword fights have an enduring place in entertainments such as theatre. For Shakespeare’s early audiences, the allusions to weapons and styles would have been topical rather than of historical interest. The difference between the Montague boys’ and Tybalt’s fighting is marked by Tybalt’s distinctive Spanish style, and also his high level of skill or, at any rate, the advantage of his distinctive way. It also marks him as influenced by foreign ways and therefore suspect as to his character and motivation [1.1.105‒10, 2.3.17‒34].25 The physical violence is accompanied by insult—the intention always to injure, the object always the body. Insults in Romeo and Juliet are most often sexual, and inseparable from expression of misogyny. In 1.1, Samson equates sexual assault of the Montague women with physical assault of the men [1.1.14‒17, 20‒8]. Mercutio’s insults of Tybalt connect Tybalt’s sword fighting with sexuality [2.3.17‒34]. Insults are also belittling—for instance, Tybalt’s use of ‘boy’ [3.1.65, 130]—and the ones to the nurse are simply misogynistic [2.3.18‒132].

The feud and the violence, first, require solidaristic friendship within the camps. In republican theory, friendly relations between citizens facilitate economic commerce and shared governmental institutions, and can transform easily into the comradely relationships between soldiers. But in Romeo and Juliet, generalized friendliness has been severed by the line of enmity between the Montagues and the Capulets. The concomitant of the supportive, joshing, relationships between the Montague boys is their destructive, insulting attitudes to the Capulets. Among the Capulets, hate is a dominating emotion. Tybalt hates the word peace ‘as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee’—he is addressing Romeo’s friend Benvolio [1.1.66‒8]. When Juliet finds out Romeo’s identity she doesn’t hesitate to articulate her own identity in this war:

Lady Capulet is quick to assign blame at the fight in 3.1, to call for exemplary punishment for Romeo [3.1.176‒81]. She assumes that Juliet must be as vengeful, against Romeo and on behalf of Tybalt, as she is herself [3.5.78‒84]. She plans, or promises, to have Romeo poisoned [3.5.88‒92]. This level of hatred, and focus on who is friend and who enemy, is evident also in Tybalt’s sensitivity at the party. He hears Romeo speak, recognizes him as a Montague ‘by his voice’, and, enraged, calls for his rapier [1.4.167‒72].

The gate-crashing, although it might seem to be trivial, and a manifestation of the boys’ high spirits, is reckless, and can be interpreted as a sign of their arrogance. From the point of view of those who are intruded upon, gate-crashing certainly is one form of violence—a boundary has been crossed, and an injury is done to the event that the hosts have envisaged and organized. Tybalt’s reaction—‘Fetch me my rapier, boy … to strike him dead I hold it not a sin’ [1.4.167‒72] is overly violent, but the matter of honour is not all in his imagination.26 Tybalt’s construction of the honour of the house is, though, subject to the arbitrary authority of Capulet the patriarch. As we see in 1.1, the brawls between the households are with the licence, if not at the behest, of the two old men:

But at the party, Capulet wants a civil, hospitable atmosphere, and he disciplines Tybalt. At first, he tries to communicate his bonhomie: ‘Young Romeo is it? …Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone. A bears him like a portly gentleman; …’ [1.4.177‒87]. Tybalt is defiant: ‘I’ll not endure him’ [1.4.189] at which Capulet subjects him to an angry verbal exercise of authority: ‘He shall be endured…; you are a princox, go, be quiet, or … I’ll make you be quiet’ [1.4.188‒201]. The old men cannot, actually, control the young; but at this time Tybalt is, indeed, silenced.

This angry discipline is next used on Juliet when Capulet hears that she will not marry Paris. In response to his anger:

Juliet kneels, or falls. It’s hard to imagine this scene staged without an engagement of Capulet’s body in his extreme emotion, and it’s plausible that his ‘outs’ are accompanied by blows that send her to the ground. The actor could exhibit cold, cutting anger—but that is less consistent with the insults than physically violent blows or near blows.

Juliet’s mother is entirely incorporated into this patriarchal power. In the first scene, she attempts to restrain her husband with mockery—implying an affectionate relationship between them: ‘A crutch, a crutch—why call you for a sword?’ [1.1.72]. But she is entirely implicated in the violence, exaggerating the number of Montagues involved in the death of Tybalt [3.1.176‒9], calling to the Prince for Romeo’s death [3.1.180‒1]. She makes some efforts to stem Capulet’s anger to Juliet [3.1.156], and remonstrates at his attack on the nurse [3.5.174]. But she, too, has no sympathy at all for Juliet’s demurral regarding the accelerated marriage to Paris [3.5.139]. Her remonstration with Capulet has no effect on his diatribe, which continues for a further twenty, uninterrupted, lines [3.5.175‒95], culminating in an angry exit. To Juliet’s plea ‘O sweet my mother, cast me not away!’ [3.5.198] she rejects her: ‘Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee’ [3.5.202‒3].

These episodes of violence carry the plot along. In my interpretation, they supply an energy, establishing relationships, deciding patterns of subordination and hierarchy, making things happen, relevant to the life of the city. This being so, as political theorists we can say either of two things. First, that violence is a political power. It has these public effects, makes differences to how life is lived in the polity, affects and shapes the workings of the public institutions. Second, that violence is a destructive threat to political power. The power of people to establish institutions and offices which govern all, citizens, denizens, and aliens alike, and then to use that power to make and execute laws, to dispute over relationships and transactions, is threatened by violence.

Gender and Commerce

I have pointed out that Montague and Capulet are accumulators of economic and material goods and resources. Even without a stable state, they would preside over their households, dominate their women and younger kinsmen, maintain their fences and their fortifications, strike bargains, and make peace and pacts, or conduct feuds and war with their neighbours. In such a situation, though, they would have far less surplus with which to dispense hospitality and enjoy parties, and to live in the splendour that a city setting allows them. The city setting, and the tense relationship of the feuding families to the laws and the norms of civil public life, serves to emphasize the household wealth, as well as to emphasize the patriarchal power that dominates it.

The significance of wealth, as so often in Shakespeare’s plots and settings, inserts a sceptical question about political power. The Prince is a patriarch and a notable, just like Montague and Capulet. We can infer that Capulet will benefit from a closer alliance with the Prince’s kin group via the marriage of Juliet and Paris, and that this benefit will be both political and economic. According to some materialist thinkers—influenced by the work of Karl Marx (1818‒83) or Max Weber (1864‒1920)—the fiction of sovereign authority always and only disguises the power of a group based on shared material interests. One way of putting this is that political power is really only economic power organized to enforce the kind of systems of law and rule that safeguard established economic interests. Cultural institutions—religion, kinship, the public settings of the state—are the medium through which the legitimacy (in the broadest sense, not simply the legality) of the domination of economic interests in the political realm of the state and society is maintained.27 With his focus on household and domestic relationships, on streets and taverns, on wealth and goods exchanged, Shakespeare’s dramas show audiences this process of legitimation of rule, and also (as in Chapter 2) they show, and articulate, resistance to it.

One way that he articulates ironic comment on material exchange is by the imagery of worth and value that runs through the text. At its heart is Capulet’s physical, material exchange of Juliet, in marriage, for the goods that accrue to a house from an alliance through kinship advantageous in terms of connections and wealth. For this, as we have seen, he relies on patriarchal power over his daughter, on an economy of accumulation and exchange, and also on the laws and institutions of the city—the church, the authority of the Prince. This recognition of the significance of the city is signalled rhetorically in the play by the concept ‘civility’. His remonstration to Tybalt at the party, warning him not to use violence or other aggression against the Montague boys, makes direct reference to his citizenly reputation:

It matters to Capulet what Verona thinks. He is determined that his household should participate in the citizenly sociable norms. Of course, as a patriarch his idea is that compliance should be nothing more than a matter of his expressed will—‘because I say so’—although that is tempered with reasoned argument.

Romeo’s speech consistently emphasizes themes of value and exchange, but in a sense that emphasizes the paradoxical transformation of qualities of goods. His words echo Laurence’s soliloquy on the mingling of qualities of poison and sustenance, vile and good, virtue and vice. Love is ‘a choking gall and a preserving sweet’ [1.1.186‒90]. His images of exchange and value romanticize commerce and exchange, and intersect with another dominant theme in his poetry—quest. Romeo is first lovesick for Rosaline and later heartbroken for Juliet: ‘mine own fortune is my misery’ [1.2.59]. In his intimate encounter with Juliet on her balcony he combines the imagery of voyage and commerce: ‘I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far as that vast shore washed with the farthest sea, I should adventure for such merchandise’ [2.1.125‒7]. The exchange that Romeo seeks with Juliet, unlike her father’s with Paris, is ‘Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine’ [2.1.170]. But Juliet disavows exchange in favour of gift: ‘I gave thee mine before thou didst request it; and yet I would it were to give again’ [2.1.171‒2].28 Romeo’s love for Juliet, on the occasion of their marriage, is such that any sorrow ‘cannot countervail the exchange of joy’ [2.5.4]. Later, though, his sorrow seems to overwhelm all else.

Finally, Romeo makes a fateful and final transaction, exchanging a large amount of gold for a dram of poison [5.1.59‒60]. The poor apothecary sells him the poison, against the law of Mantua [5.1.66‒7]. Romeo here asserts the power of material exchange over that of law and politics:

Here is commerce. The poor apothecary does not wish, or will, to sell Romeo the deadly poison. But in commercial relations, it is not our deliberative judgement, nor our moral convictions, that drive action, but our calculations about the satisfaction of our interests and needs.

However, this imperative of need is not the last word on the transaction. Romeo is cognizant of, and muses on, the ambiguity of this ostensibly rational exchange:

These paradoxical anthitheses—that gold is poison, that gold does more murder than poison, that poison is cordial—emphasize the transformation of qualities of commodities as they circulate around the economy. The poison has a straightforward use for Romeo—he is going to use it to kill himself. This use value is also a transformative value—it will transform his relationship with Juliet.

Romeo’s poetry, and the drama generally, plays with the implications of a world in which everything is for sale, and in which emotions and feelings ricochet between transcendence and despair. Juliet’s and Romeo’s relationship is imagined and articulated in terms of stars, heavens, night, and day—the transcendent, eternal structures of the universe and the world [3.2.1‒33]. He thinks of her and their relationship in terms of precious and rare commodities, valuable goods for which voyages and quests are justified. Finally, the two of them are to be realized in gold as statues [5.3.298‒304]. The obverse of this soaring imagination, and image of bounteous value, is despair and death—of friends and enemies, Mercutio and Tybalt, and of Juliet and Romeo themselves.

I must note, in all of this, that between transcendence and despair, and after his marriage to Juliet, Romeo goes through a brief episode of civil responsibility, attempting to stop the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt: ‘Gentlemen, for shame forbear this outrage. Tybalt, Mercutio, the Prince expressly hath forbid this bandying in Verona streets’ [3.1.85‒7]. But with the death of Mercutio he is overtaken, once again, with his fatalism: ‘This day’s black fate on more days doth depend; this but begins the woe others must end’ [3.1.119‒20]. But that thought is accompanied by regret at the way he has let himself be taken up with paradoxes and transformations, with the transcendence of feminine heavenly love rather than the masculine life of the feuding city: ‘O sweet Juliet, thy beauty hath made me effeminate, and in my temper softened valour’s steel’ [3.1.113‒15].

Clear distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine run through the text of Romeo and Juliet while Shakespeare also shows us, as he does elsewhere, the blurred nature of the gender boundary. Juliet’s parents, as we have seen, live the clear distinctions between husband and wife, and unambiguously endorse and enforce the particular sex-fate of their daughter. The culture of the city, in particular the joshing and teasing of the men and boys, turns on sexuality and eroticism in general, and on heterosexual male to female sexual action in particular [1.1.10‒35; 1.4.23‒30, 51‒92; 2.3.100‒30]. Laurence, who emphasizes the ambiguous qualities of substances and entities, nevertheless insists on a clear sexual distinction (‘women may fall when there’s no strength in men’ [2.2.80]) and an unalloyed standard of manliness from Romeo. ‘…come forth, thou fearful man’ [3.3.1]. ‘Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art. Thy tears are womanish; …unseemly woman in a seeming man’ [3.3.108‒13]. At this point, the nurse also calls on Romeo to be a man: ‘blubb’ring and weeping, weeping and blubb’ring—Stand up, stand up, stand an you be a man; for Juliet’s sake, for her sake, rise and stand’ [3.3.88‒90]. But Laurence also demands manliness of Juliet. When he gives her the sleeping drug he tells her she must be brave—not womanish: ‘And this shall free thee from this present shame, if no inconstant toy nor womanish fear abate thy valour in the acting it’ [4.1.118‒20].

In the end, Romeo’s consciousness of ambiguity is confirmed in their conduct. Juliet, indeed, is valorous in taking the drug. She is afraid, to be sure is seized with terror [4.3.15‒56] but drinks the potion [4.3.57]. Romeo’s violence is ‘manly’ enough: he kills Tybalt with a sword, and similarly Paris, although not knowing it is he, who tries to prevent him entering the Capulet tomb [5.3.70‒3]. Romeo drinks his poison [5.3.119‒20]. Juliet kills herself with a dagger [5.3.170], dying the more ‘manly’ death.

Political Economy, Violence, and Emotion

I have argued that, in Romeo and Juliet, civic and political values are swept away by violence—obviously enough—and also by the imperatives of feeling and emotion in a world in which everything is for sale, and it is the exchange and circulation of goods, and bads, as commodities that allow characters to make sense of their world. I return to the theme of ‘the poitics of emotion and feeling’ in Chapter 5, on King Lear.