JULIET Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow. [Exit above]
ROMEO Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast!
Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!
Hence will I to my ghostly sire’s close cell,
His help to crave, and my dear hap to tell. Exit. (2.2.184-189)
It’s easy to take the end of this scene for granted, or to think of it solely in terms of a couple of teenagers, you hang up first, no, you hang up first (or is that hopelessly out of date?!), and just grin a bit. But we should notice Juliet’s oxymoron, sweet sorrow, so much more vital and animated because of what this scene has done than Romeo’s unfelt Petrarch-by-numbers in his earlier scenes. Romeo picks up the sweet, and it’s there in the assonance too (sweet/ sleep/ peace/ sleep/ peace/ sweet; the repetitions bind it together even more, as does the framing with sweet). (Is it fanciful to imagine an unspoken ‘thee’, too, in whom is sweetness, and peace, and rest?) It’s a tranquil, intimate parting, imagining peace and sleep as Juliet’s night-time companions and wishing that he could take their place, snuggling up. And then Romeo breaks the spell: Hence, I am going to go somewhere else, away from here, to see a character who hasn’t yet been met or even mentioned (and we perhaps have to dive into the commentary for ghostly, spiritual). The cell is close because it’s private, but it’s easy to hear it as close by as well, and one of the effects of that is that suddenly we are jolted, like Romeo, not just into the light of early morning, but back into a community, where there are other people, other relationships, a town. (There’s a nice symmetry in the way in which the Friar is introduced here to bring the scene to a close and to shift its focus: mentioning him does a similar thing to the Nurse’s off-stage interruptions earlier in the scene, moving the scene, and the plot, on. The Friar and the Nurse have parallel positions in their relationships with Romeo and Juliet, and similar functions in the plot.) Romeo certainly needs the Friar’s help, but he’s also bursting to tell someone about this momentous, life-changing thing that’s just happened to him, my dear hap, luck, good fortune.And we imagine him exiting – as he entered – at a run, flying back over the orchard walls.
I think that this is an astonishing scene, so beautiful in its shaping, its ebb and flow (the false ending, for instance), its control of the audience’s focus, which is often both verbal and visual: listen carefully to this; look just at this small part of the stage, these reaching hands; imagine this touch (which might be as soft as feathers); look up. I’m still convinced – I think! – that I don’t want the balcony to be climbed; I think this is one of the problems with the Zeffirelli, because the combination of a real balcony and a lot of close ups – entirely understandable! – means that while there is a lovely intimacy, the sense of reaching and yearning, the vertical dimension, and of the audience always being aware of the lovers’ separation, can be lost. (It’s very sweet though.) The fact of the balcony means that this scene is likely to be played in quite a static way: Juliet probably hasn’t got much room to move, and Romeo’s got to work with that. So the energy and movement, and the sensuality, comes almost entirely from the language: light, sea, falcons (and other birds); cross-rhymes and repetition; the sudden zooms of gaze and imagination. Perhaps this scene is partly a dramatic working out of a sonnet’s intimacy, compression, and dynamism without the sonnet’s formal constraints (or by translating poetics into dramaturgy: space, time, light, an audience). How is a balcony like a sonnet?
And, serious respect to the actors who can both play this intensity and make it new.
