Cheated by death: all joy is gone (4.5.55-64)

PARIS              Beguiled, divorcèd, wrongèd, spited, slain!

                        Most detestable Death, by thee beguiled,

                        By cruel, cruel thee quite overthrown!

                        O love! O life! not life, but love in death!

CAPULET        Despised, distressèd, hated, martyred, killed!

                        Uncomfortable time, why cam’st thou now

                        To murder, murder our solemnity?

                        O child, O child! my soul, and not my child!
Dead art thou. Alack, my child is dead,

                        And with my child my joys are burièd. (4.5.55-64)

In the first quarto, but not any of the subsequent early printed editions, there’s a stage direction in the middle of all these lamentations: All at once cry out and wring their hands. A lot of what’s going on here is verbal hand-wringing, repetitive and quite static, but with moments of intense pressure, and indeed pain, although unfortunately both men also sound as if they’re trying to remember the fates of the six wives of Henry VIII and not getting it quite right… Paris plays it fairly straight, mostly railing at death on his own behalf: both he and Juliet have been beguiled, cheated by death, wronged, and spited; death, he says, has divorced them (which was pretty much the whole idea). But lifeless, he says, Juliet is still his love in death. And then Capulet takes over. At first it seems as if he is speaking in anguished terms about Juliet herself, who has been hated, martyred, killed, or about the pain of his loss as a father – and he may be – but he is also, with not a little petulance, mourning the loss of the party that he’s been up all night putting together, our solemnity which has been murdered by this uncomfortable time, this occasion which lacks comfort, which is hostile, painful. But there is also a more simple statement of his pain: O child, O child! Juliet, he says, has been not so much his child as his soul, and now – devastatingly – dead art thou– this is why she is no longer his child. Because she is dead. And with my child my joys are burièd. Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she.

Again, a reminder: Juliet isn’t really dead. And part of the work that this scene is doing in the play is to provide a contrast – just like the Rosaline-Juliet thing – between different intensities and experiences of emotion and the language and idiom used to express them. But that contrast is there for the audience, more than for the characters. It’s wrong, I think, to write off this scene as parody, or even comedy, because in the moment it is authentic for its characters, and authentic enough – I think – within the experiences and expectations of its first audiences, to ring true. Not necessarily realistic. But with its own kind of truth. Not that we’d want much more of this sort of thing…

 

 

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