Juliet Capulet is a young noblewoman who is in a feud with her own family, and Romeo is a noble nobleman who is not only her husband, but her true love. And yet, despite all of their wealth and power, she can't seem to find the time to commit to him. And so she sets out to find a way to do just that.
00:00:00.000Now, the balcony scene is an absolute tour de force.
00:00:19.000It has some of the most remarkable writing I've ever read in any play.
00:00:27.000It's genuinely charged with such incredible imagery and language that I think it's a truly staggering achievement and very well worthy of its fame.
00:00:42.000So when Romeo arrives, of course, Juliet is out in the balcony and we begin to get her very, very famous monologue.
00:00:51.000The sort of words that even the most drunken, uncultured boozer in your tavern knows.
00:00:58.000Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo, as they drunkenly will knock.
00:01:04.000Or at least they did in my local pub. Maybe that's just a me thing. I don't know.
00:01:09.000But yes, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
00:01:14.000You can see Juliet in this moment all of a sudden, who was once before entirely the instrument of her own family,
00:01:22.000trying to deconstruct this feud, trying to reason herself into why can't she love this man?
00:02:39.000And Juliet has to weigh up whether she looks at all of those things
00:02:45.000and whether or not they hold up and should be chosen over love.
00:02:52.000I think it's also important to point out that during the balcony scene, for a girl who is just about to become 14, Juliet shows a remarkable amount of maturity for someone of her age.
00:03:08.000And, of course, Juliet's language and level of maturity is very unnatural in someone who is just 13 years old.
00:03:19.000In the poem that Shakespeare is adapting from, in Arthur Brooks' poem, Juliet is actually older.
00:03:27.000It is Shakespeare's choice to make her a younger character, to make her nearly 14.
00:03:33.000And what's more as well, unlike Brooks' poem, which takes place over the space of nine months, Shakespeare compresses all of this down into something that takes place over merely about five days.
00:03:46.000In fact, it's a very tightly time-kept play where there are constant references, both to the dawn and the night, to the sense that you can actually track the goings-on day by day throughout the play in a way that simply isn't possible in some of his other plays where the timekeeping, such as in Othello, is clumsier, let's say.
00:04:12.000But even though Juliet is young, she is not unaware of the things that young men will say to take advantage of women and manipulate their feelings to satisfy their more lusty desires.
00:04:27.000And it's a remarkable sign of maturity that Juliet basically tells him that he must marry her, that she's not going to surrender herself to him that night.
00:04:40.000And what's more as well, she wishes for an actual vow from Romeo that this will be everlasting.
00:04:49.000O swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
00:04:58.000And if there's one thing that seems to be the case about Romeo at this point in the story, it's that his love does seem to be very variable.
00:05:11.000Although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract tonight.
00:05:15.000It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning which doth cease to be, ere one can say it lightens.
00:05:25.000Sweet good night, this bud of love by summer's ripening breath may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
00:05:33.000So, of course, the intention is that this can become a genuine courtship and that the two can continue to see one another.
00:05:43.000And so let's not vow on things just yet.
00:05:47.000Let us rather prove to one another that this is not merely something fleeting and that it is made to last.
00:05:54.000But Romeo does want the exchange of her vow for his.
00:05:59.000And of course, once again, Juliet remarks, Well, you actually already had my vow when you heard me speaking my thoughts into the night before I knew that you were even there.
00:06:11.000And so you see the two of them have this remarkable connection with one another.
00:06:17.000And the fact that the nurse in the scene keeps calling her, drawing her away from the balcony is a wonderful physical representation of how the family keeps drawing Juliet away, distracting her, taking her out of this moment and away from this celestial love.
00:06:42.000And so before they depart one another for the night, they're told that Juliet will send someone to him at nine o'clock the next morning.
00:06:51.000From there, they can, of course, speak to one another further.
00:06:55.000And so Romeo goes to visit Friar Lawrence.
00:06:59.000Now, Friar Lawrence is, I think, a fantastic character again, to the surprise of no one.
00:07:04.000Just to say, I don't actually think there is a bad character in this entire play.
00:07:08.000I think it has really, really strong character presences.
00:07:12.000And the nurse is another one who I've just remembered I didn't really talk about at the time of her introduction.
00:07:19.000So I will talk about her after Friar Lawrence, because in many ways they represent similar things.
00:07:26.000You have Friar Lawrence, who works as a sort of surrogate father figure.
00:07:32.000And what's more as well, when Romeo comes to meet Friar Lawrence in act two, scene three, I believe it is, where Lawrence is introduced,
00:07:43.000Lawrence already knows about Rosaline, which means that Romeo has told Friar Lawrence more about the affections of his heart and his emotional state than he has to his own father.
00:08:06.000One of the things that the nurse alludes to in one of her first scenes is that she once had her own daughter, who seems to have gone by the name of Susan.
00:08:17.000And it's only mentioned briefly in passing.
00:08:20.000But it's inferred that this daughter passed away from when she was also very young.
00:08:26.000In having this young girl, Juliet, who was of a similar age, you can see the nurse taking on this very, very maternal, very protective role where she is more loyal to the happiness of Juliet than she actually is to the Capulet family itself.
00:08:45.000And obviously, a lot of this seems to be born out of perhaps some emotional trauma that she never got to experience this stage of life with her own daughter.
00:08:56.000And so it goes some way to explaining the extraordinary lengths that the nurse goes to and the risk that she takes and basically becoming the messenger and the go between for these two young lovers because she cares about Juliet's happiness so dearly.
00:09:13.000Friar Lawrence is a man of great wisdom and he understands people very well.
00:09:19.000When he's introduced, he's gardening, he's taking weeds and flowers and plants and putting them into his basket.
00:09:25.000And he gives these few lines where he says, in man as well as herbs, grace and rude will.
00:09:31.000And where the worser is predominant, full soon the canker death eats up that plant.
00:09:37.000And so Friar Lawrence understands not to deal in absolutes.
00:09:41.000He understands that things are complicated and good can often get intertwined up with evil.
00:09:46.000And that just because something seems bad, it doesn't mean that there isn't something of value within to take from it.
00:09:54.000And that is exactly how he approaches Romeo's confession about his new found love for Juliet, though he understands that and is very skeptical of the fickleness of Romeo's nature,
00:10:08.000given that he was just simply saying obviously mere days ago about how he loves Rosaline and Rosaline's the one for him.
00:10:15.000He also understands that there is something kind of natural and sweet about all of this.
00:10:21.000And the fact that Romeo is at the end of the day, just a young man and the fact that his love can be put towards some practical good,
00:10:29.000because this love will be capable of healing the feuds that currently upsets all of Verona.
00:10:38.000And so he is a figure of both moral and spiritual authority within the play.
00:10:44.000However, he is also not immune to his own diagnosis.
00:10:49.000And one of his great flaws is that everything that he does within the play is done in secret.
00:10:55.000And ultimately, this secrecy ends up compounding upon the ambitions of the actual family.
00:11:03.000And the two become inconsolable with one another because he is married off Romeo and Juliet in secret,
00:11:10.000while Capulet the father is also trying to marry off Juliet to someone else.
00:11:15.000And this therefore creates the process where he needs to create even further plans on top of these secret plans in order to get Juliet to drink the sleeping potion.
00:11:26.000And therefore, of course, in the end, that plan backfires.
00:11:30.000So if you wanted to, I think you could read into the fact that perhaps he overreached and overplayed his hand in all of this.
00:11:38.000That does seem to be something that he comes to understand himself at the very end,
00:11:43.000when he has his monologue explaining everything to the surviving characters within the play.
00:11:50.000But nonetheless, he is a very good source of moral guidance.
00:11:54.000And also his maturity and wisdom and level-headedness actually does create some quite comical moments when put up against Romeo's volatility
00:12:07.000and when Romeo's thrashing on the floor during the banished speech.
00:12:12.000I can't help but laugh at it for whatever reason.
00:12:18.000Fry Lawrence's overall ambition to create peace in Verona is, of course, virtuous.
00:12:26.000And actually, though not perhaps in the way that he intended to, it does work.
00:12:33.000Through the marriage of Romeo and Juliet and through their deaths, peace is brought to Verona.
00:12:41.000And I do believe in Brook's version of the story that Lawrence actually goes on to live in a hermitage after the death of the lovers.
00:12:51.000But that's absent from Shakespeare's telling of it.
00:12:54.000And so his fate after and what consequences he faces for his hand in it all is left unknown, really.
00:13:04.000You also have this moment where Romeo, after having this balcony scene, goes and meets with Benvolio and Mercutio again.
00:13:14.000And you see that now that he has all of this love in his heart and his melancholy is lifted,
00:13:20.000you see a very, very likeable young man, right?
00:13:23.000He japes and he jokes and he banters with Mercutio.
00:13:27.000And though Mercutio still endlessly mocks him for his seemingly ever-changing loves,
00:13:35.000it's obvious that the two have a very, very strong and somewhat unbreakable friendship with one another.
00:13:41.000Though Mercutio is also very, very rude when the nurse turns up.
00:13:46.000Well, he just bombards the nurse with sexual innuendos, which is just not a very gentlemanly thing to do.
00:13:53.000And what's more, Mercutio mocks her relentlessly for the fact that she uses the wrong words continually throughout her time when she's speaking to them.
00:14:03.000She'll say something like confidence instead of conference and other such examples.
00:14:09.000And this is a literary device known as malaparatism that Shakespeare is employing,
00:14:14.000where you get characters to say words that sound like other words, but they're doing it mistakenly.
00:14:20.000And so this is a device that is supposed to convey to the audience the lower birth and status and education of the nurse herself
00:14:30.000and her insecurity, the fact that she's an insecure speaker compared to characters like Mercutio,
00:14:37.000who is absolute and very, very certain about the things that he says.
00:14:41.000You can tell that the nurse is somewhat uncomfortable and feels out of place in the company of these more noble men.
00:14:49.000And so it's a wonderful little literary device just to signal something about the nature of her character.
00:14:56.000You also see here with the way that Romeo then speaks with the nurse,
00:15:01.000that the nurse herself, though she has been sent on an errand by Juliet to convey her love for him
00:15:08.000and the fact that obviously she wishes to speak with him again,
00:15:12.000that the nurse inserts herself in as kind of the gatekeeper to Juliet.
00:15:18.000And she wants to hear herself from Romeo that his intentions are honourable, that they are true.
00:15:27.000And so Romeo says that they are. He says that, in fact, he means to wed her that very afternoon.
00:15:33.000And you get a very, very funny moment where the nurse goes back to Juliet and she just drags out his answer.
00:15:42.000And Juliet's giving her back rubs and she's just panting on getting this news.
00:15:48.000And eventually, of course, she's told that the two will marry.
00:15:52.000And so the two go to Friar Lawrence's cell and the two arrive and then they're married off page in a secret ceremony.
00:16:00.000Let's just begin to talk about the tone of the play itself, because actually for a play that is a tragedy,
00:16:07.000you see here that this is not the same type of tragedy as Shakespeare's Macbeth or his King Lear.
00:16:17.000The entire first half of Romeo and Juliet has a remarkably lighter tone to it than his other tragedies.
00:16:25.000In fact, it is quite funny. If I were to be provocative, I would say that the first half of Romeo and Juliet
00:16:32.000is actually funnier than some of Shakespeare's entire comedies.
00:16:36.000But nonetheless, you have this very light tone and the story, of course, seems to be bending towards this world of reconciliation,
00:16:48.000where their world of love will overpower and win out over this this world of feuds.
00:16:55.000But of course, as we know from the prologue itself, this is not the way that things are destined to go.
00:17:02.000So we get to the beginning of act three and here we have a dramatic tonal shift after the death of Mercutio,
00:17:11.000where from then on the entire tone is much more grave, much more stark and exhibits much more foreboding.
00:17:20.000It's in this moment as well that we have our last bit of time with Benvolio.
00:17:26.000And you see here, once again, a man of great practical wisdom.
00:17:31.000He talks about the fact that Capulet's men are about and he suggests that they get off the streets, that they go indoors,
00:17:38.000that they protect themselves from the temptation of fighting within these feuds.
00:17:44.000But then comes Tybalt. And Tybalt, as I've said before, represents everything bad about these feuds.
00:17:54.000It's the irrationality. It's the unnecessary provocation.
00:17:59.000It's the haughtiness and pride and ego.
00:18:04.000And what's more as well, even though Shakespeare, I'm not going to say, is a total doomer
00:18:11.000when it comes to the virtues of honour and chivalry and his heart and affections do undoubtedly lay with the nobility.
00:18:21.000That seems to be something that is present throughout many of his works.
00:18:26.000There is also this idea within it that you can see where he understands where some ideas, some higher ideals go too far.
00:18:35.000And these, I feel like, are all put into the character of Tybalt, who doesn't really seem to have many redeeming qualities whatsoever.
00:18:46.000He's not a likeable man, even though he carries himself like the archetypal gentleman.
00:18:52.000Tybalt wishes to duel and obviously kill Romeo because of Romeo's transgression in turning up to the masquerade.
00:19:01.000Romeo, when he finally arrives, refuses this.
00:19:05.000And so it's a remarkable moment of writing because, again, Shakespeare gives you this brief moment of hope
00:19:13.000where it seems actually like the plan worked.
00:19:18.000That actually, now that Montague and Capulet have been forged in union with one another,
00:19:24.000you see Romeo say that for reasons that Tybalt doesn't understand, Romeo now looks on him and loves him, right?
00:19:34.000He loves him as much as he loves his own family.
00:19:37.000He loves Capulet as well as he loves Montague.
00:19:40.000And Tybalt is, of course, very bemused by all of this
00:19:44.000and cannot comprehend why Romeo would be saying all of these things.
00:19:49.000Because Romeo cannot tell him about the secret marriage just yet,
00:19:54.000clearly meaning that the truth may well play out in time, but he has only been married about an hour ago.
00:20:01.000Romeo says that even though Tybalt calls him villain, he is not a villain, but he isn't going to rise to Tybalt's provocation.
00:20:10.000So you see this hope that actually the younger generation will rise above this feud and create an everlasting peace.
00:20:18.000But of course, it all goes dramatically wrong.
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