60
Popular Culture Review
the audience’s awareness of the “inevitable outcome, affects pathos, not
tragedy.” H.C. Wilson (167) contends that the tragedy in the play springs from
the implacability of the family feud, not the character flaws of the lovers. B.
Stirling, on the other hand (187), argues that the play is a “true” tragedy, since
the lovers’ immaturity is their character flaw in the Aristotelian sense. J.H.
Seward (211-16) maintains that if the so-called “flaws” in this early tragedy
“are properly understood, that is when we understand what Shakespeare was
trying to accomplish, they become arguments in favor of granting Romeo and
Juliet a legitimate place in the canon of his great tragedies.” A. Oz (133-42)
calls the play “a successful melodramatic masterpiece,” but goes on to say that
“those who are too ready to defend Romeo and Juliet's tragic integrity harm the
greatness of the later, more profound dramatist.” J. Lawlor (141-2) argues that
there is no clear “line of development from Romeo and Juliet to the later
tragedies,” averring that the play has greater kinship to Shakespeare’s later
romances like Winter’s Tale than to his great tragedies.
In response to these criticisms, all of which imply a flawed unity of theme
and action, T.J. Cribb (93-104) asserts that the unity of the play is to be found in
“Shakespeare’s comprehensive espousal of the Ficinan tradition of an essential
unity in all human activity.” Seeming paradoxes, therefore, really are “a
metaphysic of opposites” in which “the bawdry for which the play is noted is not
so much antithetical to the elevated lyricism for which it is famous as a lower
version of the same thing.” Therefore, “aesthetic and intellectual
coherence . . . is something that exists at a poetic level that may not be fully
appreciable on stage. In other words, in this play poet and playwright are not
perfectly united.” In short, according to Cribb, you can only appreciate the
“tragedy” of Romeo and Juliet when you read it, not when you see it on stage.
T. McAlindon (17) argues that the unity of the play, and its tragic theme, are
achieved from the Petrarchan notion of “noble death”; the suicides of Romeo
and Juliet show the triumph of love over death, and will bring peace and
harmony to strife-tom Verona and to their respective families. Closing the loop,
F. Kiefer (184) blames the play’s “shortcomings” on Shakespeare’s “little
experience in writing tragedy.” Kiefer asserts that Shakespeare was as yet
“lacking the skill to combine such disparate materials as love, fortune, death,
and a juxtaposition of cosmic forces.” Perhaps, then, in order to understand just
what it was that “Shakespeare was trying to accomplish” (Seward 216), we need
to approach the play from perspectives other than tragic theory, or Romeo and
Juliet's chronological relationship to Shakespeare’s other tragedies.
Shakespeare’s source story, Arthus Brooke’s The Tragical History o f
Romeus and Juliet, is just that; from beginning to end, the narrative poem
portrays a serious story heading toward a tragic ending. To the contrary,
Shakespeare’s “tragedy,” when played well, can be quite funny (Cribb 100-01).
Ofitimes excessive amounts of comic relief is cited as one of the “tragedy’s”
greatest flaws (Eastman 12-34), and more recent criticism has emphasized, and
attempted to grapple with, the juxtaposition of substantial amounts of comedy,