“Romeo is coming”: Sex in Romeo and Juliet
The Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet is viewed as one of the greatest love stories ever told. We recognize the story as a romantic portrayal of destiny — the young lovers are star-crossed, forever in love but never together. Their love, though certainly hasty, is glorified as “true love.” In the final double-suicide scene, the audience is to weep for the fallen couple and the relationship that could never be. This is a typical reading. The typical staging echoes this with Romeo depicted as the quintessential male lover who speaks in sonnets and woos with his eyes. Juliet is his mirror; she is a flower ready to bloom into her true self. But this is false. This traditional understanding disregards the ample evidence of queer theory. This play isn’t about true love, it’s about communication and lack thereof. This play isn’t romantic, it’s violent and the violence stems from overlooking questions regarding sex.
There is no visual sex in Romeo & Juliet, and yet the play revolves around sex. I believe this play is filled with different pairs of star-crossed lovers, not just our titular characters, and everyone is constantly worried about who’s sleeping with whom. For brevity’s sake, I focus on Romeo and Juliet’s relationship and their one sex scene. Ultimately, I encourage these two are not victims of fate as we have often been taught, but instead victims of plans gone awry. They are not star-crossed because they’re in love, they are star-crossed because they are each other’s escape. They marry not out of love, but out of need.
Without question, Juliet lives in an abusive home, both physically and emotionally. Physically, we see violence when her father’s “fingers itch” to beat her when she refuses to marry Paris, the nobleman selected to marry her. Then emotionally when her mother demands she never “talk” to her again because she’ll “not speak a word” back. At another point, her father threatens to disown her, a fate worse than death for a young woman. Juliet’s only companion is her older wet nurse, simply referred to as the Nurse, and even then it is unclear if the Nurse has Juliet’s best interests in mind.
Since she has no siblings, Juliet has had to grow up on her own. This has toughened her. Her father says she is a “child” that is “a stranger to this world” but at fourteen, she is far from complicit. When her mother, Lady Capulet, asks Juliet for her feelings towards marriage, Juliet coldly replies, “It is an honor that I dream not of.” She doesn’t dream of marriage, but of freedom, and to be married does not mean to be free. She wisely knows, however, that marriage is the only way out of the house. When she’s perched on her balcony, calling out to Romeo, wondering where he is, she’s not fantasizing about him, she’s dreaming of “no longer [being] a Capulet.” When she’s no longer a Capulet, she is free.
But marrying Paris is not the way out either. Paris is not only far older than her, he is a nobleman and friends with the Prince of Verona. Paris’ high-ranking social status would allow even more authority over her than just her husband. She knows he doesn’t love her and she certainly doesn’t love him. In fact, she’s not looking for true love at all. At her and Romeo’s second meeting, the famous balcony scene, Juliet bluntly asks Romeo “Dost thou love me?” but, before he can answer, she continues “I know thou wild say ‘Ay,’ and I will take thy word” because she can’t bear the alternative. She either marry and flee with Romeo or be a Capulet and controlled by her father forever.
Conveniently, Romeo also sees Juliet as an escape. I do plan on writing a separate piece about this, but, to summarize, I believe Romeo is struggling with his sexual orientation and, quite possibly, has had sex with two of the male characters. Being gay in Elizabethan England was seen as a crime. At best, Romeo would be shunned, at worst he could be put to death (ironically the punishment he receives for killing Tybalt in the play). Knowing this, Romeo must prove his heteronormativity that Verona expects, so he latches onto Juliet. Romeo and Juliet marry for safety. Their “love” manifests out of fear for themselves and so they marry out of this fear. Marriage is not complete, however, without one important expectation: the consummation. Romeo and Juliet must have sex in order to legitimize their marriage, which legitimizes their escape plans. This session of intercourse is critical to the future of these characters but it is, of course, not shown onstage.
As Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, illustrated, “Anything beyond the merest hint of sexual activity would have been unthinkable, or at least illegal, on the English stage until the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s powers of censorship in 1968.” Because of this, this scene is traditionally handled with the utmost dignity and plays heavily into the ideal heteronormativity.
Out of fear for himself, Shakespeare was smart to not share anything incriminating on his stage, but it’s all still there, nestled in between lines and behind scenes. Act 3 is broken up into five scenes and is also the middle of the play, otherwise known as the play’s climax. We can presume that Romeo and Juliet’s critical consummation takes place during Scene 4, though this is not what the audience sees. Instead, Juliet’s father, Capulet, is on stage with Paris and the pair are discussing the upcoming nuptials. Paris wishes “that Thursday were tomorrow.” This entire scene, which is only 37 lines total, is so categorically boring it begs the question of what’s happening offstage. By not staging this critical sex scene, Shakespeare adheres to the censors of his time but still urges us to consider what truly is happening to these young teens.
We herald this play as one of true love, but by doing so we ignore the very real presence and, at times, the necessity of sex. When we ignore Romeo and Juliet’s consummation, we ignore the opportunity to talk about the sex that, whether we like it or not, is happening. The play’s progression revolves around sex, yet we never talk about it. This play isn’t about true love, but a true warning of the dangers that come from a lack of communication. If Juliet could just tell her parents she doesn’t love Paris, if Romeo had anyone to talk to about his orientation issues, and if those around them were receptive, perhaps the two would have been spared.
It should be noted, however, that Romeo and Juliet do not communicate either. But how could they? They’re both children playing an adult’s game. To them, the consummation was the communication — after it, everything would fall into place, as society had them believe. But nothing is different the morning after. In Scene 5, when it’s officially the second half of the play, Romeo and Juliet are aloft and the deed has been done. Juliet softly wakes to Romeo sliding out of bed and attempting to put his pants on.
“Wilt thou be gone?” She asks drowsily and glances at the still-dark window, “It is not yet near day.”
She tries to convince him it isn’t morning: “It was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced…thine ear” she says, therefore it must still be night.
Romeo is not convinced. He believes he has heard the lark sing, the bird that “heralds the morn.” If it is morning, he must “be gone and live” or he will “stay and die.”
Juliet scoffs, “Yon light is not daylight, I know it.”
Romeo throws his hands up in aggravation, “Let me be taken, let me be put to death, for I am content, so thou wilt have it so!” Romeo needs to leave before he is captured and, quite literally, put to death. But because “Juliet wills it so,” because Juliet commands him to stay, he will stay.
Annoyed by his attitude, she declares “It is! It is the lark that sings out of tune!” Tears spring to her eyes. She pushes him towards the window, his only means of leaving, forcing herself to part with him. Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want it to be morning? If it’s morning, then Romeo must leave and her plans to escape will slip away. She scorns the bird, whichever one it is, for playing the “hunt’s-up,” the song used to rouse hunters in the morning and sometimes played to the bride the morning after her wedding. They are now in the after, when their plans fall apart. Romeo climbs out the window.
Juliet watches the sun slowly rise and whispers “O, now begon more light and light it grows.”
Romeo looks over his shoulder, before whispering to the dawn: “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes.” The sun rises and the play hurtles towards its bloody end.
Sex is, at once, ever-present and forcibly absent from Verona. In a sense, sex plays a pivotal role in all the actions of play; everyone is spurred on by something sexual. To these characters, sex is a form of authority, which makes it highly guarded, but is somehow utterly ambiguous. No wonder the sex that was never talked about but always upheld fails these two! Romeo and Juliet believe their marriage (and the subsequent sex) will grant them an opportunity for freedom. Yet in the aftermath of the secret wedding and the secret consummation, nothing changes for our young lovers. The inevitable still happens. The light of tomorrow, once full of hope, dawns and does not save them like they wanted, like they needed.
The missing sex, hidden behind Scene 4, goes undiscussed — it is unessential to the rest of the play. Those conversations don’t need to happen now. Once dead, the two become the children they always were. Their bodies are objects for their parents to mourn over. But the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is not that the lovers die, but that they were silenced from the beginning.
Works Referenced
Brown, Carolyn E. “A Psychoanalytic Reading of Homoeroticism.” Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Theory. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015.
Mendelson, Sara Heller, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England: 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Wells, Stanley. “Sex and Love in Romeo & Juliet.” Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2010.
