Editor's note: One enduring mark of summer is the presentation of Shakespearean plays and festivals. With that in mind, we have asked Joseph Pearce, who has written several books about Shakespeare and his plays, to pen a series of articles this summer about the Bard of Avon and some of his key works. And you will find a PHOTO GALLERY exploring the play's enduring popularity at the end of this article.
Many people consider Romeo and Juliet to be the greatest love story ever told or the most famous love story ever written. They are wrong, of course. The greatest love story ever told is the Gospel story of God’s love for humanity. What does the greatest playwright who ever lived say about the greatest love story ever told in the greatest love story that he ever wrote?
In other words, what does Shakespeare say about charity or caritas, self-sacrificial Christian love, in his story of the "star cross'd" lovers, Romeo and Juliet?
In order to answer this question, it is important to know that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic, a fact that has been verified beyond reasonable doubt from the facts known about his life and the truths emergent in his plays. This means that a merely romantic or erotic reading of the play is a misreading of it. The lovers are not redeemed and purified by the passion of their erotic love for each other.
The correct way of reading the play is to read it through Shakespeare’s eyes, seeing it as a cautionary tale in which the freely chosen actions of the characters are seen to have far-ranging and far-reaching consequences.
Let’s now look at a few key facts about the play.
A neglected child
Juliet is only 13 years old. She is a child. She is the same age as was Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susanna, at the time that he wrote the play. Romeo and Juliet is written by the father of a teenage girl of Juliet’s age! Also, and crucially, it is not true, as is often thought or suggested, that women married young in Shakespeare’s time.
On the contrary, the average age for women to marry was in their early to mid-twenties and marriage before the age of 18 was rare. The consensus in Elizabethan England was that pregnancy before 16 was dangerous and that 18 was considered the earliest reasonable age for motherhood.
To put the matter simply, Shakespeare and his audience would have seen Juliet as a child who is neglected by her parents and her nurse and is consequently unprotected from, and unprepared for, the adult world in which she finds herself.
A not-so-romantic hero
As for Romeo, we are not told his age but he is old enough to defeat the fearsome Tybalt in a sword fight and had tried to seduce Rosaline, prior to his meeting with Juliet, being frustrated that she had refused to open her lap to “saint-seducing gold.” The sexual imagery is entirely appropriate considering that Romeo’s intentions seem to be entirely sexual. He scorns Rosaline’s desire to remain chaste and treats with dismissive contempt her apparent claim that her vow of chastity is connected to her Christian convictions. She cannot “merit bliss” by making him despair. She cannot merit heaven by sending him to hell.
In short, Romeo is utterly self-absorbed, desiring to absorb his lover into his desire for self-gratification. Romeo’s contempt for chastity reemerges at the beginning of the famous balcony scene when he expresses his desire that Juliet should cast away the “vestal livery” of chastity because “none but fools do wear it.”
A warning against "violent delights"
Caught up in the madness of erotic passion, unbridled by the virtues of chastity, temperance or prudence, the lovers ignore the warning of Friar Laurence that “violent delights have violent ends.” Heedless and headless, they hurtle towards their mutual self-destruction.
Considering the story that Shakespeare tells and the way it ends, it is strange that the erotic passion of Romeo and Juliet is seen as being synonymous with the very meaning of romantic love. This is because many see the play through the eyes of the self-absorbed lovers, not through the eyes of Shakespeare. Ultimately, the world's greatest playwright shows us that there are two types of “love.” The first, charity or caritas, always desires the good of the other. It is the “no greater love” that sacrifices itself for the beloved. The other type of “love” is the opposite. It sacrifices the beloved for itself.
Eros and caritas
At its deepest, Romeo and Juliet is more than a mere cautionary tale that warns of the dangers of unbridled erotic passion. It shows us the relationship between romantic love, or eros, and the greatest love of all, the love which God has for us, which manifests itself in His giving His only Son as a willing sacrifice for our salvation.
Shakespeare shows us the relationship between eros and caritas, between the romantic love of a man and a woman and the love of Christ for humanity.
If we see Romeo and Juliet through Shakespeare’s profoundly Catholic eyes, we will understand that his famous love story shows us not only a greater love but the Greatest Love that there is.
