The love for Rosaline is different altogether from the love for Juliet.
‘O heavy lightness! serious vanity!’
is artificial.
Shakespeare also follows Brooke in Juliet’s momentary outburst against Romeo when she hears of Tybalt’s death, but the contradiction of the echo by the nurse is Shakespeare’s own:
‘Blister’d be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.’
Apart from the quarrel between the Montagus and Capulets, we feel that the love between Romeo and Juliet could have no other than a tragic end. This world of ours conspires against such passion.
I Henry IV. v. 4—
‘O Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:
But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.’
The last three lines are not melancholy philosophising. As such they would be out of place coming from Hotspur. They are consolation and joy. Death will extinguish for us the memory of certain things suffered and done. That is a gain which is not outweighed by the loss of any pleasure life can give.
Luders’ essay three parts of a century ago showed conclusively that Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Prince of Wales, as we see him in the play of Henry IV., wild and dissolute with ignoble companions, is a legend which is disproved by documentary history, but Shakespeare’s Prince is nevertheless dramatically true. Johnson says, ‘He is great without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. The character is great, original, and just.’ Johnson’s criticism is true. There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day. He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior under whom he had been serving.