"What said my man when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode?"
He has come like an arrow, his mind closed to the external world, himself in the blind clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on towards its fulfilment. Only at the end, when he stands before the bier of Juliet, sure of his will, beyond the reach of hindrance, alone for the first time,—only then is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; then does his triumphant purpose break into speech, and his words soar up like the flames of a great bonfire of precious incense streaming upward in exultation and in happiness.
The whole course of these last scenes of Romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than this description of them, is in the highest degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in the nature of things so difficult to present on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The very long, the very minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose heart has stopped beating, but whose mind is at work more actively and more accurately than it has ever worked before, is a thing highly sane as to its words. It must be done quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must be created, which is created upon Balthasar, that Romeo is not in his right mind. A friend seeing him would cross the street to ask what was the matter.
The whole character of Romeo, from the beginning, has been imagined with reference to this self-destroying consummation. From his first speech we might have suspected that something destructive would come out of this man.
There is a type of highly organized being, not well fitted for this world, whose practical activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. Egoists by their constitution, they become dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or thwarted by society. Their fine energies have had no training in the painful constructive processes of civilization. Their first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of destruction. They know no compromise. If they are not to have all, then no one shall possess anything. Romeo is not suffering in this final scene. He is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. He glories in his deed. It satisfies his soul. It gives him supreme spiritual activity. The deed brings widespread desolation, but to this he is indifferent, for it means the destruction of the prison against which his desires have always beaten their wings, the destruction of a material and social universe from which he has always longed to be free.
"O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."
How much of all this psychology may we suppose was rendered apparent to the motley collection of excitable people who flocked to see the play—which appears to have been a popular one—in the years 1591-97? Probably as much as may be gathered by an audience to-day from a tolerable representation of the piece. The subtler truths of Shakespeare have always been lost upon the stage. In turning over the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, we may see that many such matters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. The early audiences, like the popular audiences of to-day, doubtless regarded action as the first merit of a play, and the stage managers must have understood this. It is noticeable that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince. The reporter gives a few words only to a description of the scene. No doubt, in Shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly or all at once. It is impossible that the longer plays, like King Lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure with which our actors move from scene to scene. To make plain the course of the story was evidently the chief aim of the stage managers. The choruses are finger-posts. It is true that the choruses in Shakespeare are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle to which the play is the answer. One might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by Shakespeare's choruses. They play variations on the theme. They instruct only the instructed.
If interest in the course of the story be the first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest in seeing a picture of contemporary manners is probably the second. Our chief loss in reading Shakespeare is the loss of the society he depicts, and which we know only through him. In every line and scene there must be meanings which have vanished forever with the conditions on which they comment. A character on the stage has need, at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of something we know in real life. The types of Shakespeare which have been found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in intensity, very different from their interest to us. The high life depicted by Shakespeare has disappeared. No one of us has ever known a Mercutio. Fortunately, the types of society seem to change less in the lower orders than in the upper classes. England swarms with old women like Juliet's nurse; and as to these characters in Shakespeare whose originals still survive, and as to them only, we may feel that we are near the Elizabethans.
We should undoubtedly suffer some disenchantment by coming in contact with these coarse and violent people. How much do the pictures of contemporary England given us by the novelists stand in need of correction by a visit to the land! How different is the thing from the abstract! Or, to put the same thought in a more obvious light, how fantastic are the ideas of the Germans about Shakespeare! How Germanized does he come forth from their libraries and from their green-rooms!
We in America, with our formal manners, our bloodless complexions, our perpetual decorum and self-suppression, are about as much in sympathy with the real element of Shakespeare's plays as a Baptist parson is with a fox-hunt. Our blood is stirred by the narration, but our constitution could never stand the reality. As we read we translate all things into the dialect of our province; or if we must mouth, let us say that we translate the dialect of the English province into the language of our empire; but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspection, would turn out to be not a gentleman,—and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most extraordinary young person; Tybalt, a brute and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and the only man with whom we should feel at all at ease would be the County Paris, in whom we should all recognize a perfectly bred man. "What a man!" we should cry. "Why, he's a man of wax!"