Shakespeare

86Harold C. GoddardShakespeare show any tendency to believe in fate in this sense. The integrity ofhis mind makes it highly unlikely that in just one instance he would have let theplot of the story he was dramatizing warp his convictions about freedom.The theme of Romeo and Juliet is love and violence and their interactions.In it these two mightiest of mighty opposites meet each other squarely—and onewins. And yet the other wins. This theme in itself makes Romeo and Juliet anastrological play in the sense that it is concerned throughout with Venus andMars, with love and “war,” and with little else. Nothing ever written perhapspresents more simply what results from the conjunction of these two “planets.”But that does not make it a fatalistic drama. It all depends on what you mean by“stars.” If by stars you mean the material heavenly bodies exercising from birth apredestined and inescapable occult influence on man, Romeo and Juliet were nomore star-crossed than any lovers, even though their story was more unusual anddramatic. But if by stars you mean—as the deepest wisdom of the ages, ancientand modern, does—a psychological projection on the planets and constellationsof the unconsciousness of man, which in turn is the accumulated experience ofthe race, then Romeo and Juliet and all the other characters of the play are starcrossedas every human being is who is passionately alive.In tragic life, God wot,No villain need be! Passions spin the plot,We are betrayed by what is false within.The “villain” need not be a conspicuous incarnation of evil like Richard III orIago; the “hero” himself may be the “villain” by being a conspicuous incarnationof weakness as was another Richard or a Troilus. Or the “villain” may consist ina certain chemical interplay of the passions of two or more characters. To seek aspecial “tragic flaw” in either Romeo or Juliet is foolish and futile. From pridedown, we all have flaws enough to make; of every life and of life itself a perpetualand universal tragedy. Altering his source to make the point unmistakable,Shakespeare is at pains to show that, however much the feud between Capuletsand Montagues had to do with it incidentally, the tragedy of this play flowedimmediately from another cause entirely. But of that in its place. Enough now ifwe have raised a suspicion that the “star-crossed” of the Prologue should be takenin something other than a literal sense, or, better, attributed to the Chorus; notto the poet. The two are far from being the same. 1In retrospect, Shakespeare’s plays, which in one sense culminate in KingLear and in another, in The Tempest, are seen to deal over and over with the sameunderlying subject that dominates the Greek drama: the relation of thegenerations. Romeo and Juliet, as the first play of its author in which this subjectis central, assumes a profound seminal as well as intrinsic interest on thataccount. It points immediately in this respect to Henry IV and Hamlet, andultimately to King Lear and The Tempest.