Women in Shakespeare
Also like to point out that when her mother says “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid,” (translation: I had you when I was your age) you have to remember her father’s words: “earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” (translation: all the other children died.) The whole plot point of Juliet being an only child is explained by her mother being a Margaret Beaufort type who had her first child too young and it damaged her past the point of being able to bear more children.
Margaret Beaufort died in 1509. She was a major player in the Wars of the Roses, the swirling on-again-off-again civil wars that consumed England from 1455-1487. Romeo and Juliet was written and first performed in the early 1590s. Your average English person of Shakespeare’s day would probably have had at least a vague understanding of who she was and what happened to her, because she was a key figure in recent history and was still getting passed around as a cautionary tale.
There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.
The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.
You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.
Shakespeare is telling us “yeah, this is fucked up. but even if you’re the kind of awful person who doesn’t think girls marrying too young is morally wrong, it’s also a problem for practical and dynastic reasons, don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”
Interesting
It bears repeating:
don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”
yes, excellent discussion!
another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)
i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?
art history matters.
I've been thinking about this play a lot lately. I really wanna highlight that Lord Capulet asks Paris to wait and get to know her, and to woo her, while Tybalt lives. While Tybalt is alive, Juliet has something of a reprieve, and her wellbeing as his only child matters more to Capulet. But once Tybalt has died, the gloves come off. Lord Capulet was worried about his daughter's wellbeing when he felt he had the space to care, but as soon as his dynasty is at stake, as soon as this becomes larger than Juliet's happiness, his consideration for her health and mental wellbeing get thrown away. Which also is due in part to the fact that Capulet's family is implicated in a brawl that has left several dead after the Prince's family EXPLICITLY told the Capulets and Montagues to stop fighting or face dire consequences, AND Capulet is trying to align himself with the Prince's family by marrying Juliet off to County Paris, a relative of the Prince. So to Lord Capulet, it is now less important that Juliet is happy, and more important than he reminds the Prince of his loyalty via this marriage and aligns his family with the Prince's before it's too late. And he believes this must be done, at any cost...until Juliet kills herself. And that's when he realises the devastating cost of treating his family as chess pieces. He realises his wrongdoing far too late.
Seriously Romeo and Juliet is HEAVY on the dynastic politics, and I think you can't fully understand the play without understanding how that all works, especially because the impact of dynastic marriages on women and girls is like. THE POINT of the play
And I think if it was taught this way, and maybe taught just a couple of years later, not in middle school but in high school, students would actually understand and get a lot more interested. Helping them understand HISTORY through the lens of art? Showing them how it relates to their own lives? Major big deal.
Young folks understand family pressure, the pressure to fill a role...they feel it in different ways, but they feel it. My god the pressure to choose a career and get into college when I had only been driving a car for a year, could not vote, had no control of my finances, and was basically property of my family according to the laws and customs of my culture, that was INTENSE. Pretty much every child goes through that!
These days younger folks usually understand "ew, Juliet was too young". My generation was pretty sexually and romantically rebellious, most other teens I knew were not bothered by it. Teens today are more likely to be. They just need to be told that yes, that is the point. It's a fantastic way to teach how an author's choices to do troubling things is often social commentary, and that all works of art exist in a context. That they can be timeless, but also, sometimes to see those timeless themes we need to know a little about when they were made.
Kids understand not feeling valued by their parents (even the ones treated well at home often feel this way, it's just part of being a teenager, they are becoming new people but their family is slow to adjust and parents especially cling to the child they knew and not the adult that child is rapidly becoming).
They understand family being overly invested in them and their success.
They understand the repercussions they might experience from a family member's actions, often resulting in more pressure to do better somehow, or in rejection because they have been tainted by proximity.
Many do understand that they will eventually be under a lot of pressure to have kids even though they are not allowed deep romantic connections yet. They understand that dismissal as unjust, and the double standard.
And honestly, they usually understand despair and suicidality when what they wanted, the only thing they feel like they actually chose, is taken away. When the tiny bit of agency they scrounge up is destroyed. They get it.
For sure they understand rivalry, throwing shade, and throwing hands, those were my favorite parts.
Futility, the struggle to have something for yourself, the pressure to do what adults want you to do at the cost of you finding out who you are, adults dismissing your feelings, especially romantic ones, struggles with your peers, your decisions isolating you, teens live all of this. Being shown that their stories are not unique, but have been understood so well that a truly great artist devoted a whole play to say how fucked up it is to make kids go through this...that William freaking Shakespeare wrote about this hundreds of years ago. That he told their stories to make people care, and see how their behavior has to change. That is powerful.
It isn't a bad play! But it is not a romance! It is a tragedy! It just isn't usually taught that way.
Yes the protagonists are kind of stupid, and even people their age can see that. You can acknowledge that while also seeing that it wouldn't have mattered if they had been brilliant. It wouldn't necessarily have changed anything. It was the adults who were the fucking problem.
Taught well, it could be extremely validating for young people.
It could also teach adults a thing or two, if we encouraged and helped adults to continue learning and didn't just burn them out and then suck all their life away with debt and two jobs and no time to reflect.
