Romeo and Juliet: A Postmodern Play?
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Paris and himself because he just happens to get to the graveyard before Friar
Lawrence arrives and Juliet wakes up. Juliet just happens to wake up after
Romeo’s suicide. And even this last scene—the only one in the play that seems
to lack any so-called comic relief—employs what Cartwright describes as
“comic stage business and paraphernalia, at least fourteen entrances . . . at least
five exits . . . four offstage sounds . . . a sword fight, a body-dragging . .. one
tomb opening . . . one probable pratfall. . . and the handling of an unusual
quantity of props” (Cartwright 86-7). All of this action has occurred in rapid
fire, so quickly that perhaps Shakespeare penned the exchanges among the
Prince, Romeo’s servant Balthazar, and Paris’s page at the end of the scene to
reiterate the scene’s action to the audience because author himself believed the
audience might have become lost in the flurry of activity it had just witnessed.
And in a gallows-humor sort of way, the last scene fulfills the “Happy
Idea.” Totally oblivious of anything that has transpired between their offspring,
totally unaware that their offspring even knew one another, totally unaware of
how underlings have manipulated situation after situation, now Father Capulet
and Father Montague “bury the hatchet.” As the Prologue, two hours previously,
had said that now Romeo and Juliet “Doth with their death bury their parents’
strife.” And even though Romeo and Juliet are gone, now, under the watchful
eyes of their golden statues, Verona, at least, wil l live happily ever after.
But, you say, the Prologue promised tragedy. Three young men, and the
title-characters Romeo and Juliet die during the course of the play. Yet why did
they die? And in the Aristotelian, or any other tragic sense, did any of them
realize the inevitability of their respective deaths? And what do their deaths
teach us? Mercutio dies cursing the friend and family whose honor he thought
he should protect. Tybalt dies at the hands of the adversary he sought to
provoke, but not because of Romeo’s desire to preserve his Montague family’s
honor, but because Romeo gets angry. Paris dies protecting a dead body. Romeo
dies because he is ignorant that Juliet is alive, and, except for the recent film
version, and Colley Cibber’s and David Garrick’s eighteenth-century
adaptations, dies before he knows his death is senseless. Juliet dies, almost it
seems, because she can’t think of anything else to do. If one thinks about it, in
yet another gallows-humor sort of way, the deaths are comic, and they certainly
are based more on accidents of timing and happenstance than upon inevitability.
In short, this play seems easier to explain if comic vision is used to explain
its twists and turns rather than tragic theory. When that comic vision is coupled
with aspects of postmodern theory, perhaps some of the ambiguity about the
genre of Romeo and Juliet disappears.
One aspect of postmodernism, so critics say, is that it “derides any univocal
vision” (Olsen 24). Bakhtin, Problems o f Dostoevsky's Poetics (88) points out
that in Dostoevsky’s works: “Here voices—each representing a unique point of
view—are allowed to speak for themselves.” Surely Romeo and Juliet seems to
fit that description. Unlike the univocality of the title-characters in Richard III or
Hamlet, Romeo’s perspectives are expressed and explored, as are Juliet’s, as are