And “love-devouring death” accepts the challenge, but the agony of death does not “countervail the exchange of joy” that one short minute gives him in her presence. Here Shakespeare’s treatment of the love-episode differs from that of Brooke’s in his tolerance for the children’s love, though it be carried out in defiance of the parents’ wishes, and in his recognition that love, so long as it be strong as death, has an ennobling and not a debasing influence on character: we are made to feel that it is better for Romeo to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. For the hatred of the two houses Shakespeare shows no tolerance. Juliet’s death is carried out with the greatest simplicity, and within a few moments of her awakening. There is neither time for reflection nor lamentation; the watch has been roused, and is heard approaching. She has hardly kissed the poison from her dead husband’s lips before they enter the churchyard, and nothing but the darkness of the night screens from them the sight of the steel that Juliet plunges into her breast. It is the presence of the watch, almost within touch of her, that goads her to lift the knife, just as it is the vision of Tybalt’s ghost pursuing Romeo that nerves her to drink the potion. The dramatist’s intention is clearly indicated in the stage-directions of the two quartos and the folio, but the Irving-version retains in this last scene the modern stage-directions.
Professor Dowden is of opinion “that it were presumptuous to say that had Shakespeare been acquainted with the earlier form of the story (in which Juliet wakes before Romeo dies), he would not have altered his ending.” But an ending of this kind is inartistic. It is bringing the axe down twice instead of once. It is introducing a new complication and a new movement at a moment when none is wanted. The catastrophe should be and always is, by Shakespeare, carried out with simplicity and directness. After Juliet’s death other watchmen enter with the Friar in custody, while from afar we hear for the third and last time the cries of the citizens:
“Downe with the Capulets, downe with the Mountagues!”
the only child of each of the two rival houses lying dead before the spectators. Nature had done her best to effect a reconciliation, but man thwarted her in her purpose. Then the Prince and the heads of the two houses enter and learn for the first time that
“Romeo there dead, was husband to that Iuliet,
And she there dead, that’s Romeo’s faithfull wife.”
Well may the Prince say—
“Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laide upon your hate
That heauen finds means to kill your joyes with loue.”
All this last scene is full of animation, and presents a fine opportunity for the régisseur. I am obliged to use the French word, for we have no similar functionary in this country. Our public is sufficiently indifferent to the welfare of dramatic art to allow its leading actors to be their own stage-managers and often their own authors. As a consequence the public gets no English plays worthy of being called plays, and no guarantee that a dead author’s intentions shall be respected. Human nature has its prejudices, and the actor is seldom to be found who can look at a play from any other point of view than in relation to the prominence of his own part in it. It is owing to the despotism of the actor on the English stage, and consequently to the star system, that I attribute the mutilation of Shakespeare’s plays in their representation. The closing scene of this play might be made very effective in action. The crowd hurrying with “bated breath” to the spot; its horror at the sight of the dead children, who for all it knows are murdered; its amazement at finding they are man and wife; the Prince’s stern rebuke; the bowed grief and shame of Montague and Capulet; the reconciliation of the bereaved parents, and joining of hands across the dead bodies. The Irving-version omits all but the entrance of the citizens with Montague, Capulet, and the Prince, who at once ends the play with the couplet—
“For neuer was a Storie of more wo
Than this of Iuliet and her Romeo.”
But if the Prince hears no story, he and those who enter with him cannot be aware that Romeo and Juliet are man and wife, or that they died by their own hands, and are not victims to an act of treachery. Then why open your play with the quarrel of the two houses if you do not intend to show them reconciled? Why not follow the Cumberland acting-version, and take out the crowd scenes altogether? It is a more intelligible proceeding than this compromise of the Irving-version.