Sex and Love in Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet deserves a chapter to itself because of its status as one of the greatest love stories of the world, a play in which romantic love reaches sexual fulfillment against high odds but in which the lovers themselves are destroyed by inimical forces of fate and society. Romantic though it is, it is also one of the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s plays, riddled with sexual puns, double meanings, and bawdy innuendo.

The text has often been expurgated in school editions and for both the stage and the screen. Its length causes it often to be shortened in theatrical performance by several hundred lines, sometimes — though less frequently in modern times than in the past — by the omission of bawdy, which in any case is often made obscure for us by the passage of time. Even in scholarly editions editors have often evaded frankness in their explanatory notes, hinting at the presence of innuendo rather than spelling it out. The actor Roger Allam once played Mercutio, who has, as he writes, to speak ‘a string of extremely explicit jokes.’ He goes on to remark that ‘Brian Gibbons, the Arden editor, uses the somewhat understated phrase “with a bawdy quibble” to indicate this. It made us laugh very much in rehearsals. We invented a pastiche Elizabethan song called “with a bawdy quibble” which was sung in cod operatic tones to the guitar. It made us laugh even more.’

Actors will often attempt to help the audience to see the point of sexual references by illustrating them with lewd gestures or even through the use of props. An inflatable banana figured in a production given by the Hull Truck Company. There is also a story about an eighteenth-century actress who involuntarily added to the play’s bawdy:

“There being a fight and scuffle in this play, between the House of Capulet, and the House of Paris; Mrs Holden acting his wife, entered in a hurry, crying, ‘O my dear Count!’ She inadvertently left out, ‘O’, in the pronunciation of the word ‘Count!’, giving it a vehement accent, put the house into such a laughter, that London Bridge at low-water was silence to it.”

Shakespeare’s sources were in no way responsible for the bawdy of Romeo and Juliet. In writing the play he made extensive use of the 3000- line-long poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, by Arthur Brooke, who died young in a shipwreck in 1563 a year after his poem first appeared in print. Brooke’s prefatory address to the reader is heavily moralistic and strongly anti-Roman Catholic. He claims that he wrote his poem:

“to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends, conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips, and superstitious friars — the naturally fi t instruments of unchastity — attempting all adventures of peril for the attaining of their wished lust, using auricular confession — the key of whoredom and treason — for furtherance of their purpose, abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage, to cloak the shame of stolen contracts, and finally by all means of unhonest life hasting to most unhappy death.”

Brooke excuses himself for telling his readers so unpleasant a tale by claiming that he intends ‘to raise in them an hateful loathing of so filthy beastliness’.

In fact the poem that follows is so different from his description of it that one might reasonably wonder if it relates to the same work. Was it perhaps written by someone other than the author?

Romeus and Juliet portrays both the lovers and their friends the nurse and the friar in a largely sympathetic light. The poem’s language is unmitigatedly chaste, and the lovers are motivated entirely by love, not by what the Preface calls ‘wished lust’. All the bawdy language of Shakespeare’s play is spoken either by characters whom he has added to Brooke’s story, such as the servants in the opening scene, or by others whom he has greatly developed, most notably Mercutio and the Nurse. And the bawdy is entirely integral to his artistic purposes, an essential part of the design of an exceptionally carefully designed and highly patterned play.

Shakespeare’s Prologue offers a brief summary of the play’s action, in this resembling the ‘Argument’ of Brooke’s poem, though without adopting a moralistic tone; also like Brooke, Shakespeare casts his prefatory remarks in the form of a sonnet, a poetic form whose conventions pervade the play. His Prologue is entirely decorous, but it is interesting that he speaks of the feud that divides the houses of Montague and Capulet in terms of the lovers’ sexual engendering:

“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes | A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.”

From the start the lovers are associated with the sexual act.

Romeo and Juliet is a self-consciously and elaborately literary play which draws on a full repertoire of rhetorical devices in a manner that makes it not always easy to read or to act. In it Shakespeare deploys his mastery of language to differentiate character with virtuosic skill. And behind it lies a structure of ideas that makes it a landmark in his portrayal and implicit discussion of sex and love.