Jody Walshe
Examine the destructive power of love in Romeo and Juliet and Othello
In Troilus and Cressida, Cressida claims that “to be wise and love / exceeds man’s
might” (III.ii.151-2) and this assertion appears to be borne out by Romeo and Juliet
and Othello. The focal relationships of these plays all end in devastation and tragedy.
Othello, in a jealous rage, murders his innocent and devoted wife. Romeo and Juliet
take their own lives as a result of terrible chance, when they are faced with a world of
social convention to which their love does not conform. Both of these supposedly
happy marriages result in suffering and pain, leading ultimately to death. Is the
reason for the final destruction of these characters an overwhelming and excessive
love?
Although Romeo and Juliet is often said to encapsulate an ideal of romantic love, this
is not necessarily how early modern readers and audiences considered their
relationship. This can be found clearly in the discrepancy between the source on
which Shakespeare based his play (the Brooke translation of the European novelle)
and the drama itself. Brooke’s moral judgement on the pair is made clear in the
following extract:
“a coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire,
neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and frendes, conferring their
principall counsels with dronken gossypes, and superstitious friers... abusyng
the honorable name of laweful mariage, to cloke the shame of stolne
contractes, finally, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye
deathe.”1
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The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet Brooke (1562)
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Jody Walshe
In this passage, Brooke implies that the lovers die as a punishment for their
transgression of the expected social codes. Contrary to this, Shakespeare
unquestionably makes the plight of this couple sympathetic. Interestingly, this does
not result in him shying away from the controversy attached to their clandestine
marriage. Indeed, Shakespeare makes his Juliet a mere thirteen2, to Brooke’s sixteen
year old protagonist, making their relationship all the more controversial.
Shakespeare challenges us to sympathise with a very young couple who turn their
backs on family allegiance and the force of their love is what provides us with the
vehicle to do so.
The other shocking aspect of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship is the immediacy and
violence of their passion. In the play their love is an overpowering and fierce force
that supersedes all other emotions, social values and familial loyalties. “Deny thy
father and refuse thy name,” Juliet asks, “Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love /
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet” (II.ii.34-5), instantly putting the love of a man she
has known for several hours above her family honour. Similarly, her lover claims he
is neither “Romeo” nor “Montague” if “either [she] dislike” (II.ii.61). The force of
his love, though, is clearest when he returns to Verona to see Juliet despite having
been exiled by the Prince on pain of death. Knowingly putting his life in danger, the
implication is, his life has no value without her.
A similar sentiment is implied by Othello when he cries out:
“But I do love thee! And when I love thee not
Chaos is come again” (III.iii.91-2)
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“She’s not fourteen” (Romeo and Juliet I.iii.13)
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Jody Walshe
His world is thrown into disorder when it is not sustained by the love of his wife. In
this speech he also makes an allusion to the classical legend that Love was the first of
the gods to spring out of the original chaos, indicating that this emotion is paramount
to him. In Jonson’s Love Freed from Ignorance, Love makes the claim: “without me /
All again would Chaos be” (26-7) and this certainly seems true of Othello: when his
love for his Desdemona warps into uncontrollable jealousy he becomes vicious and
cruel as his sanity ebbs away.
Shakespeare’s portrayal of love in Romeo and Juliet is of a similarly all consuming
emotion which hurtles the individuals it has captured against the world that they know
and overrides all of their other feelings. Romeo notes the supreme importance of his
bond to Juliet when he states:
“Come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.” (II.vi.3-5)
The power of Romeo’s love is obvious since he believes that the smallest moment
with Juliet will expunge all his “sorrow.” Friar Lawrence observes the excessive
quality to the couple’s devotion and warns against it:
“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite
Therefore love moderately” (II.iv.9-14)
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Jody Walshe
The juxtaposition of “delights” and “ends,” and “loathsome” and “deliciousness”
indicate the tension created when one emotion takes precedent over all other feelings
and values. The repetition of “violent” on the first line also builds a sense of the force
of the emotion, indicating that the intensity of the pleasure will result in similarly
extreme pain.
This passage also links the notions of love and death, since these “violent delights
have violent ends.” These two themes have been inextricably linked since the instant
of Romeo and Juliet’s meeting. The moment at which Romeo first beholds Juliet and
instantly falls in love with her, Tybalt observes the uninvited guest and resolves to kill
him. Both Romeo and Juliet are beset with thoughts of death, express a readiness to
experience it, and as their situation becomes more desperate, both threaten suicide.
Act III scene iii sees Romeo brandish a knife when he discovers that he has been
banished from Verona and his wife. Just three scenes later, Juliet threatens to kill
herself with a knife when faced with the prospect of bigamy. Suicide has always been
an option open to them and Juliet acknowledges this when her father decrees that she
will be Paris’ bride and she declares: “if all else fail, myself have power to
die.”(III.v.242) Tragically, images of death haunt even their most intimate moments.
For example, the night after their first and only sexual encounter, Juliet imagines that
she sees her new husband dead:
“Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low
As one dead at the bottom of a tomb” (III.v.55-56)
In fact, Juliet has already anticipated this terrible juxtaposition of the wedding bed and
the deathbed: “My grave is like to be my wedding bed” (I.v.134) in the first act of the
play. The double suicide that concludes this drama is unsurprising when considering
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Jody Walshe
that from the outset of their love they have been pushed towards violence. It is the
inevitable conclusion when they are in the grip of a love so powerful that it hurtles
them as much towards destruction as towards joy.
This linking of love and death can also be found in Othello. Distressingly, it seems
that Desdemona is aware of her impending demise at her husband’s hand. The
clearest indicator of this is when she instructs Emilia to “lay on my bed my wedding
sheets” (IV.ii.107) which has distinct sinister connotations since wives were often
buried in their wedding sheets. Webster’s Duchess of Amalfi similarly draws the
parallels between her wedding sheet and her “winding sheet.” This supposition is
supported by the fact that the last time we see Desdemona before the scene where she
is murdered by Othello, she is singing a song taught to her by her mother’s maid,
Barbry:
“She was in love and he she loved proved mad
And did forsake her. She had a song of ‘willow’
An old thing ‘twas, but it expressed her fortune
And she died singing it” (IV.iii..25-8)
In this tragic parallel between Barbry’s relationship and her own disintegrating
marriage, Desdemona indicates her love for Othello and possibly a realisation that her
own death is imminent. Because in this passage Desdemona only uses pronouns
instead of naming the characters she is talking about, it is even easier to make this
comparison. Desdemona is trapped in the same position as the audience, only able to
watch from a distance as Othello is driven wild with jealousy.
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Jody Walshe
The terrifying violence of Othello’s jealousy is so forceful because of the passion of
the love it has replaced. Othello and Desdemona are newly married and their
relationship begs time to build trust and stability, which it is denied. The passion of
their immediate attraction evolves, for Desdemona, into steadfast devotion, but her
husband cannot equal her in the strength or the pace of her love. It is this
vulnerability that is noticed and manipulated by Iago. Othello’s passionate intensity is
what allows his character to be warped and destroyed by Iago’s suggestions.
Ironically, Desdemona and Othello’s relationship survives all the large obstacles of
racial difference, social standing and the denial of familial acceptance, only to be
corrupted by unfounded insinuations and misplaced linen. In Othello and
Desdemona’s relationship Shakespeare appears to be illustrating that although love is
eternal (she forgives him and even attempts to claim her death as suicide), the
irrational passion with which it is felt can be abused and corrupted to be replaced by a
hate just as powerful.
In Othello, Desdemona’s murder epitomises the danger of love since it is such an
extreme and irrational emotion that it can lead to destruction. Interestingly, for
Romeo and Juliet, who found it impossible to have sustained happiness with each
other in life, suicide provided a way for them to be symbolically united in death. The
sanctity of the tomb has replaced that of the marriage bed, as Romeo's final speech
suggests:
“Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
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Jody Walshe
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee
And never from this pallet of dim night
Depart again” (V.iii.102-8)
Romeo foresees an eternal life with his beloved, beyond the material world. By
ending their lives while their love is in its prime, Romeo and Juliet transcend the
corrupting influences of time and circumstance. Their love becomes untouchable and
perfect, liberated from what Romeo calls “this world-wearied flesh.” (V.iii.113)
Othello depicts a bleak world in where love leads to insanity and murder. Despite
this, Desdemona remains true to her husband, even attempting to shield him by
claiming to have committed suicide. After Othello has accused her of being “that
cunning whore of Venice” (IV.ii.91) she claims:
“Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love” (IV.ii.161-3)
Even in the face of vicious verbal attack from a husband of only several days,
Desdemona considers her love to be something wholesome and eternal, made clear in
her observation that although Othello’s cruelty can destroy her “life” her love is pure
and cannot be corrupted by it. In this sense she portrays her love for Othello as
something so powerful it cannot be destroyed, even by him.
The force of love in Romeo and Juliet is not only emphasised by the depiction of the
couple, united in death, but also in the good it does for those they leave behind. The
play concludes with the Prince’s judgement on the families of Montague and Capulet:
“See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
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That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love” (V.iii.291-2)
It explicitly states that Romeo and Juliet have been killed “with love” as punishment
for the feuding of the families, alluding to the inherently destructive nature of love.
But for all this, the redeeming quality of their love is ultimately focused on and made
clear from the opening lines of the Prologue:
“Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love” (O.8-9)
It is apparent from the start that these deaths will not be in vain. Although two young
lives perish, they are united in death and able to draw their families out of the spiral of
revenge that has resulted in the spilling of “civil blood.”
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