Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare: Speculation of the Facts

This blog is a continuation of my research into how the bard put himself into his work and how we identify it using what little information we have about him. 

My First Impression

As I mentioned in my last Blog, I recently removed my wisdom teeth so I have been sitting home a lot. Thanks to Netflix’s I can keep up on my Shakespeare homework. Recently I watched the 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet. May I just say that I LOVE new adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays? I also love that our culture is close enough to the past that we can make movies such as this and they are popular. (I wish however, our society would include adaptations from other great authors work of art but I’ll take what I can get) First I must admit that as I watched the movie I was guilty of having a hard time staying focused when the Shakespearean old English rattles on. In my defense, I do appreciate the old English when it is slow and I can understand what is being said. During the majority of the movie I enjoyed identifying things that I have been taught in the class, such as why the bright colors in the dance where Romeo meets Juliet were included. But what really stood out to me in the movie was how much I saw Shakespeare's identity within the main protagonist Romeo. 

The Facts

In retrospect of what I have learned about Shakespeare, the main protagonist of the play Romeo, REALLY shows us the Bards hopeless romantic heart and mind. In the play Romeo is a poet stuck between “feuding houses”. Romeos response to the feuding is that he distances himself from it and longs for true love.

As everyone knows Shakespeare was a poet so it is easy to identify superficial similarity's to Romeo. Shakespeare wrote the play when he was thirty and simultaneously wrote many sonnets about relationships with MANY different characters. Many believe that the sonnets are the key to the mind and heart of Shakespeare. The sonnet XXVII sheds some light on this topic.

XXVII.

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
      Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
      For thee and for myself no quiet find.

The featured sonnet is a fairly start forward. The closing lines, a rhyming couplet, tell us that the speaker spends his days in anguish, living only to visit his love in dreams. The sonnet demonstrates Shakespeare's hopeless romantic heart that is embodied in the play Romeo and Juliet.We do know that he married at a young age and that there are reports that the Bard was seen with other lovers outside of his wife. We know that Shakespeare left very little to his wife and the “second best bed” so it is speculated that Shakespeare did not have the best relationship with his wife. Shakespeare did not enjoy "the marriage of true minds" that he speaks of in his sonnet 116, with his wife.       

The Speculation

With the evidence above one could speculate that Shakespeare longed for true love that he didn't feel for his wife and that Romeo in the play “Romeo and Juliet” was the Bards way of expressing his inner fantasies of finding love. Evidence from Shakespeare's life and the play further that idea. 

Reports of Shakespeare show him as direct and introverted or distant, just like Romeo in the play. The "feuding houses" in the play is the feuding worlds he was forced to live in. After he became a world renown play write he became wealthy and mixed with aristocrats but he never could shake his middle class roots. Shakespeare loved small talk and loved his middle class home life in Stafford so much that he lived there at his death. Just like a tom boy is not a girl and not a boy and never feels comfortable in the world of boys or the world of girls (refer to novel The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers)or a deaf person with hearing aids struggles to find their place in a hearing world and deaf world because they are neither hearing or deaf; Shakespeare’s blue collar birth always clashed with the blue blood he was surrounded. But Shakespeare was socialized by the wealthy and he would lose his stature if he forsook his nobility and why would he? He had been threw so much to obtain that title. Thus he never felt comfortable any place that he went and with any one person, including his wife, so he kept his feelings to himself like Romeo and mingled with those to which he was surrounded. The way this introverted hopeless romantic got his feelings and desires out was like so many other hopeless romantics, in his writings. This may be speculation, but from what I have read, identified, and believe; Romeo is Shakespeare vicariously living out his romantic fantasies. Because we do know that the older he got the more he wrote himself in his plays .(see Seed Blog)