Grace & Peace!
But it’s a tragedy. The fool in that play is not Romeo or Juliet but the Friar, who tries to get them married by stealth instead of standing up to the feuding families like a man. Clearly, the two young lovers have Shakespeare’s sympathy.
And I could list dozens of Shakespeare comedies where love is clearly an object of intense and sincere praise, and obviously connected to marriage. Pretty much all Elizabethan theater was pro-love; this was why the upper classes thumbed their noses at the theater.
The gist of Joie’s critique, though (and it’s one with which I agree), is that people in love couldn’t just do whatever they wanted: marriage was a social institution, bound by social rules regarding class, power, money, etc. A couple didn’t get married because they were in love and wanted to get married–they were married because that’s what was expected, needed or allowed by their families and by their social conditions. If they were in love before their marriage: terrific! If they weren’t, the hope was that love would grow. But whether or not there was romantic love in a marriage, the keynote of marriage was
responsibility, not romance: responsibility to society, to family, to children, to spouse. Marriage was an outward-facing institution. It is now completely inward-facing.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy in a very Schopenhauerian sense: they thought they were free to do whatever they liked and suffered for it. But the structure of R&J is actually that of a classic marriage comedy–but as Schopenhauer tells us, the curtain must fall fast at the end of a comedy, otherwise we would see the will of the universe against which our protagonists fought crash with tremendous force on the characters of the play, brutally and violently crushing them all. R&J refuses to let the curtain fall when it should in order to be a comedy–we therefore see the universe come crashing down. At any rate, R&J may have been in love, but they were supremely irresponsible. The Friar may be a fool, but what he should have done when Romeo came to him was say, “NO.” That’s wherein his foolishness lies. But another real fool is in fact Romeo who, from the beginning of the play, is portrayed as a mere lovesick puppy, flirting with disaster even in his attraction to Rosaline who, like Juliet, is also a Capulet. Romeo and Juliet may have Shakespeare’s sympathy, but it would be difficult to argue that they have his approval.
Regardless, there was much in Renaissance drama and literature about love, romantic and otherwise, you’re absolutely right. But even the greatest example of Renaissance love, that between Dante and Beatrice, is not the love of husband and wife, and the many texts related to courtly love have as their ideal a Platonic notion of what being-in-love was supposed to be, and rarely did it involve a wife (or rather, if it did involve a wife, it was a pleasant surprise).
But as class barriers break down, power structures re-arrange themselves, and major social shifts occur in the 17th through 19th centuries (American revolution, French revolution, industrial revolution, the “Enlightenment,” the Age of Reason), romantic love and marriage become more and more entwined and marriage becomes more and more about the couple and not about the society in which the couple is embedded. This modern notion of marriage is pretty new as a practice (only about 250 years old, as Joie states), but you can see traces of it earlier. It wouldn’t be too hard to see it’s real beginnings in the end of the feudal era with the rise of the middle class, the beginnings of the Reformation, and the development of a notion of an individual self (see Pico della Mirandola and Luther) that is conceived of as at least
potentially independent of (or even at odds with) the socio-cultural milieu in which it lives.
Also, the upper classes of Shakespeare’s day didn’t thumb their noses at the theater–many acting companies received patronage from a noble, a fact which was often reflected in the company’s name (i.e., The Lord Chamberlain’s Men). The ones who objected to the theater (and who succeeded in shutting it down for a bit in England) were the Puritans. With the Restoration of Charles II, theater came back with a vengeance…and at least in the person of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, the Puritans’ fears regarding the impropriety of the theater were proved to be absolutely on point (particularly if we believe the attribution of “Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery” to him to be correct. I tend to, based on his flabbergastingly debauched poetry–the Marquis de Sade has little on the Earl with regard to shock value, though the Earl has a much more developed sense of humor which makes him that much easier to read).
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
