Excerpted from R&J lecture
Dickey, TSI 2014
There is, of course, another possibility, which is the one I like to imagine: both plays are on
Shakespeare’s desk in 1595, and he writes a bit of one one day and a bit of the other another, or a bit
of both every day, or one with his left and the other with his right hand simultaneously. This would
be, as it were, the Socratic method. How many of the lines of one play could, with slight twists and
substitutions, fit into the other?
Paris: "Now, fair Juliet, our nuptial hour draws on apace."
Lord Capulet: "Go...Wife/Nurse/Peter/Illiterate Servant/Whoever is in the room to answer my
latest whim....stir up the Veronese youth to merriments. Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.
Turn melancholy forth to funerals."
Nurse to Romeo, expressing something of Juliet's caution: "Thou hast by moonlight at her window
sung/With feigning voice verses of feigning love,/And stol'n the impression of her fantasy...With
cunning hast thou filch'd my [surrogate] daughter's heart."
The Voice of the Feud, filtered through Capulet or any of several questionable authority figures: "I
beg the ancient privilege of Verona:/As she is mine, I may dispose of her--/Which shall be either to
Paris or to her death, according to our law" -- sentencing guidelines only slightly mitigated by
another offer the Friar makes to Juliet to "endure the livery of a nun,/For aye to be in shady cloister
mewed,/To live a barren sister all your life,/Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon."
Romeo: You have her father's love, Paris;/Let me have Juliet's. Do you marry him."
Juliet to Romeo: "I know not by what power I am made bold, /Nor how it may concern my
modesty/In such a presence here to plead my thoughts."
Prince: "But, Capulet, come, and come Montague. You shall go with me./I have some private
schooling for you both."
All of those lines were taken straight or slightly modified from MND 1.1. But it's not a one
way street. Let’s take it in the other direction. Might it not as well be Lysander who says to Hermia
"O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" as she tells him to lie further off on this, their first night lost
in the forest of love? And does she not reply, with Juliet, "What satisfaction canst thou have
tonight?" as Lysander’s ability to work the word “bosoms” into the conversation three times in
seven lines does not have the desired effect. In fact, it's not even a two way street, but more like a
two hours’ traffic circle as lines from the plays seem to merge into a conversation with each other.
Is it Bottom or Juliet who says “God’s my life, stolen hence and left me asleep!” Is it Bottom or
Romeo who says “I have had a most rare vision?” Is it Titania speaking to Oberon or the feuding
fathers with their fatal loins who confess “And this same progeny of evils/Comes from our debate,
from our dissension;/We are their parents and original.”? Is it the formal Chorus in conventional
apologetic mode, or just a rude mechanical repairman who promises “our toil shall strive to mend”?
Or indeed was that Puck speaking at the very end of MND, using a version of this word four times:
mended, mends, amends, amends?
Is it Romeo and/or Juliet who says to the other: "How now, my love? Why is your cheek so
pale?/How chance the roses there do fade so fast?" It is neither: it is Lysander.
And speaking of Lysander, is it to him that Hermia then replies, "And trust me, love, in my eye so
do you. Dry sorrow drinks our blood." It is not; it is Romeo.
Who says that their love is "too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,/Too like the lightning which doth
cease to be/Ere one can say it lightens?" (Juliet).
And who says that love is as "Brief as the lightning in the collied night,/That, in a spleen, unfolds
both heaven and earth,/And, ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!',/The jaws of darkness do
devour it up"? (Lysander). But you asked me off the top of my head to say which of these plays
contained the phrase “the jaws of darkness do devour it up” I’d probably say R&J. It is, after all,
Romeo who vows to cram the “rotten jaws” of the Capulet crypt “with more food” – i.e., himself.