The supreme example of love overcoming social distancing
Dominic Cavendish’s great theatrical speeches
Romeo and Juliet: the balcony scene (William Shakespeare)
In the past few weeks, many people have looked to Shakespeare for words to inspire, comfort and move them during lockdown. For some, it’s as if a sonnet-a-day keeps the doctor away. No series about great speeches in theatre would be complete without him, and the Complete Works could themselves furnish months’ worth of commentary. Where to start? “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”; “To be or not to be...”; “Friends, Romans, countrymen…”; “O for a muse of fire”?
I’m sure I will be back for more of the Bard later on, but I couldn’t resist beginning with a speech that, for me, feels like a rejuvenating antidote to the gloom of the past month, and which opens one of the most famous scenes in world drama. Yes, it’s Romeo gazing up at the window where the newfound object of his affection, Juliet, appears: the “balcony scene”, a striking instance of love overcoming social distancing.
The context
The prologue by the Chorus has warned at the start that things will not turn out well for the “pair of starcross’d lovers” whose fate is “the two hours’ traffic [meaning “business”] of our stage”. But here we see the first solitary encounter between the pair (albeit interrupted by the Nurse’s calls within), when everything is peachy and romance blossoms.
A hurtling procession of events has established that Veronese families the Capulets and Montagues are in a state of deadly enmity, that Romeo (Montague) has been fruitlessly in love with an unseen lady called Rosaline – and mocked by his pals for it – and that Juliet (Capulet) is to be married off to Paris, a kinsman to the city’s governor. A feast at the Capulets’, gatecrashed in masks by Romeo and his buddies, changes all that: the interloper falls head over heels for the young lady of the house and she for him. They each glean the other’s identity after their brief encounter. Leaving his friends, Romeo heads to the orchard under Juliet’s window.
What’s in the speech?
If we take it to run from “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” to when Juliet speaks (“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”), sidestepping her brief interjected sigh (“Ay me”), there are just over 30 lines. In them, Romeo is instantly inspired to describe Juliet through playful metaphor as an awe-inspiring, lifegiving being. She’s the dawning sun, banishing night (“night” is used in this play more than in any other in the canon). “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,/ Who is already sick and pale with grief/ That thou her maid art more fair than she.”
The allusions are classical, the thrust is ardent. The allusion to the moon (in Roman religion allied to the chaste goddess Diana) and then mention of the vestal virgins (Vesta was the virgin goddess of hearth and home) give bold indication that Romeo wants to lay siege to Juliet’s chastity. Yet, in contrast to the bawdiness of earlier scenes, the poetry abounds with a tender wonder and innocence:
“It is my lady, O, it is my love!” runs his murmured exclamation, when he first sees her. Anticipating a physical ascent, his analogies become more rapturously ethereal – she’s looking up, and he imagines two stars swapping places with her eyes, but being eclipsed in brightness by her cheek, while her comet-like eyes blaze through the sky, making night day.
It’s overwrought rhetoric yet it works like a dream because it conveys the giddy excess of his yearning. And what a line: “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand,/ O, that I were a glove upon that hand.” Shakespeare’s father was a glover – is there a hint here of the adolescent romantic thoughts of the author in his Stratford youth?
Why is it so powerful?
This is love spilling forth as a boyishly excited, whispered confession, obeying the form of iambic pentameter yet repeatedly conjuring images of boundlessness. By the time Romeo exits – acknowledging that dawn is actually approaching – he will have gone from far-off admirer, gazing at Juliet as at a painting, to her lover in all but deed. The speed of the courtship affirms its unstoppability, not its superficiality. It defeats all cynicism.
In performance
It’s a mighty challenge: this moment of do-or-die impetuosity – the versespeaking must suggest rapid-thinking head as well as fast-beating heart, the chemistry can’t be faked. Ian Mckellen made the language wonderfully coltish and breathless in the 1976 RSC production – pausing dumbstruck on “O, it is my love”.
By contrast, there was something plodding about Richard (Bodyguard)
Madden’s tone in Ken Branagh and Rob Ashford’s West End production of 2016, and when Freddie Fox (previously persuasive in the role in Sheffield) briefly took over to cover for him, that scene with Lily James found the right rebellious spontaneity and spark.
Why it matters now
Though it has had innumerable stage and screen incarnations, Romeo and
Juliet simply cannot be done to death – it’s too fresh-faced and resilient. One poignant recent production was done amid the Syrian conflict, with an injured, pre-teenage Romeo communicating via Skype from a hospital in Jordan with a 14-year-old Juliet trapped in Homs.
As Spring arrives with many love-struck teenagers across the country and elsewhere forced to see each other online only, that speech, with its expression of devotion from afar (followed by a fervent exchange of commitment), feels as achingly timely as it is avowedly timeless.
It works like a dream because it conveys the giddy excess of Romeo’s yearning