Where is Romeo? (1.1.107-8)

LADY MONTAGUE     O where is Romeo? saw you him today?

                                    Right glad I am he was not at this fray. (1.1.107-8)

Finally, one of the protagonists is named, and it’s a nice anticipation – to a knowing audience – of one of the most misremembered and misquoted phrases in the play, Juliet’s ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo’: where is Romeo? But it could, more helpfully, startle an audience here, if they’ve forgotten, in the midst of the opening fray, that the title characters have yet to appear. (It’s perhaps an in-joke for the actors, if Romeo was indeed doubling incognito in the brawl.) A modern audience might, anachronistically, be taken aback at the Montagues’ parenting style: not only is old Montague foolishly belligerent, to the point of needing to be restrained by his wife, but Lady Montague doesn’t know where her only child (admittedly a teenager) is.

In comparison with the Capulet parents, the Montagues are underwritten. Yet there’s enough here to differentiate the mothers in particular: Lady Montague is protective and apparently anxious only for her son’s well-being rather than the greater honour of the family. The rhyming couplet here counts for two-thirds of her lines in the play; her single line earlier in the scene also forms half of a couplet, and this perhaps helps to underscore a generational distance and distinction in the play between the limber blank verse of the young and the more formal, artificial rhymes of the older generation. Here, Benvolio’s part / part (in the previous two lines) has concluded a passage in blank verse; Lady Montague’s following it with a true rhyming couplet today / fray suggests a kind of sympathy that doesn’t quite cohere, well-meaning but incomprehending.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *