#pepys

after an hour or two’s talk in divinity with my Lady, Captain Ferrers and Mr. Moore and I to the Theatre, and there saw “Hamlett” very well done,

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a play of itself the worst that I ever heard in my life.

- Samuel Pepys in 1662

Knowing it was Shakespeare’s birthday (23 April) this week gave me a good excuse to re-visit Romeo and Juliet after an interesting discussion about a homework assignment to a teen cousin who was confined at home from boarding school. Quite the precocious girl is this teen cousin of mine and we had a good chat on Zoom on Shakespeare and especially about this play.

Was Pepys correct? Worst ever? No. Overexposed, most certainly. 

I suspect that is so because it’s performed by generations of schools because it speaks to them as they rockily navigate the tribulations of adolescence.

In the UK I went with this teen cousin to see her school play of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet - months before the Covid pandemic. The girls performed admirably but to be honest I was at the time  unenamoured at the prospect of sitting through hours of soppy teenage angst especially because it was written by the great Bard himself. Probably because I find chocolate box sentimental romanticism so off putting and also because I know Shakespeare could write something much more dramatically challenging in his Hamlet, Othello King Lear, or Macbeth. Romeo and Jullet feels like a waste of ink.

My cousin could see this and upbraided me for feeling so indifferent. On the Eurostar ride back to Paris I had occasion to revisit my feelings and realise perhaps I was mistaken about the play and its intended audience. Over our more recent Zoom discussion I felt I really had misjudged the play.

Despite naysayers mocking it as a tragedy of circumstance, the play is in fact a tragedy of character. That the character in question is very young (probably 16–17 if Juliet is going on 14) means the tragic flaw is not going to be the same as one suffered by a Macbeth, an Othello, or even a Hamlet. It will be a flaw appropriate to the protagonist’s age.

And what is the single most characteristic flaw of adolescence? Impetuous rashness, of course. And that is Romeo’s hamartia. More important, it is a flaw that, with tragic results, taints virtually every character except perhaps the other three Montagues. None of the significant characters seems ever to stop to think before choosing and carrying through some decision.

Shakespeare’s greatness is above all in the representation of the “luminously human,” from “wholly understandable” desperate fantasies like this one, mouthed by a realist who cannot bear what reality has forced on her heart, to wholly occluded things, like the unblinking rancors that drive generations of Capulets and Montagues in hate taken so thoroughly for granted that it results in the deaths of their cherished offspring, and ensures that “all are punished” by a tragic outcome when even a fraction of the willingness to embrace the other the youngest characters have displayed throughout might have saved those children, ended the feud, and united the houses in amity. This future evanesces in the inscrutable cruelty of ancient prejudice, and takes not only comedy, but what the comic represents for the feuding families and for us, the spectators — the renewal of life and reconstitution of societies across generations — away, replacing it with the blank, uncertain future in which grieving parents mourn not only their dead children, but the absence of any clear progeny to continue their families, whether in hostility or amity. The pox has well and truly fallen on both houses; in destroying the youngest and bravest and kindest among them, they have brought their ancient edifices down on their own heads.

And all of this not as told by some ham-handed weaver of fustian, but by William Shakespeare, growing toward the fullness of his powers, and firing on all cylinders at a level of cognitive density and richness that too easily eludes modern high school students, who are the wrong audience for this play. This is a play for adults, not for the kiddies who, pedagogues seem to think, will be interested in its libidinous content. Give kids Macbeth; they’ll like the magic, the blood, the spectacle of watching a real writer make Harry Potter look like the subliterary trifle it is in five short acts. Romeo and Juliet is for adults. It’s for people who have seen and suffered the stupidity of the world and looked on in amazement at our species, and how little it learns from itself — how easily its basest emotions and irrational prejudices lead it by the nose to perdition, as if there were a fate in it.

That the play continues to engage audiences today, despite being so thoroughly familiar to so many, is a sign that it may not be the best ever but certainly it’s not the worst ever either. Of course it’s not as great as his other plays like Hamlet or King Lear or Macbeth or Othello. In comparson R&J lacks their titanism, their uncanny universality, and the full vent they give to the mature Shakespearean style. But that doesn’t mean it can’t and won’t beat up and take the lunch money of whatever it is any of us is likely to be reading right now.

The Wedding Cake Church

St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street is the eighth place of worship to be built on the site. The current building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire destroyed the previous church. His multi-tiered steeple is said to have inspired a local cake maker to create a replica in icing, and thus the modern wedding cake was born.

The church today could possibly be considered number 8.5, as it was badly bombed in the Second World War; the outer walls survived and the building was restored to Wren’s original designs. Before the reconstruction, an archaeological excavation took place, revealing Roman remains at the site, and smaller finds including fire-warped fragments of bells from the Great Fire and the Blitz. These are all on display in a museum in the crypt.