"Romeo and Juliet" and the Shakespearean Mythos
A myth is a lie that speaks the truth, a fictional story about fictional characters but which also reveals something essential and universal about the human condition. I’m a philosopher by day but a romantic and (among other things!) a classicist by night. Thus, in addition to my pull toward rational discourse as a philosopher, I also spend time thinking about the lessons that can be learned not only from mythology in the narrow sense but from mythos in the broader sense of stories that reveal some special insight into human nature.
Although we often think of Greek, Roman, Norse, or Egyptian mythology when we think of myths, any student of William Shakespeare knows that Shakespeare also had a special insight into human nature, rivaling that of the Greek or Roman epic poets. Like when we read the works of ancient epic poets, when we read (or, ideally, watch!) Shakespeare, we aren’t just reading about Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet, or Henry the Sixth as mere fictional characters; we are reading and learning about ourselves, with all of our fears and flaws, our hopes and ambitions, our triumphs and failures.
As a romantic, I’m naturally drawn toward Romeo and Juliet, not just for the romance of the story but also as archetypes. What, after all, could be more universal and archetypical than love itself and the human quest for love? Readers seem to differ greatly, however, in their opinions about whether Shakespeare was idealizing or critiquing romantic love, with the transcendence of love being advocated for out of one side of Shakespeare’s mouth and with the foibles and folly of love being warned against out of the other side of his mouth. Thus, it isn’t clear whether Romeo and Juliet should be considered a comedy—for Romeo and Juliet, the characters, do indeed find love, however briefly—or a tragedy, given that tragedies traditionally end in death while comedies, in the classical sense, typically end in marriage.
Let’s look at Romeo. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is lamenting the end of his brief relationship with Rosaline, Juliet’s cousin and fellow Capulet, to the great worry, care, and concern of Romeo’s cousin Benvolio for Romeo’s sake, and to the great annoyance of his friend Mercutio. Such is the nature of friendship in such circumstances; some friends show concern and empathy, while others just want to take you to a masquerade to help you forget your troubles! Human nature is replete with these sorts of dualities, and it is to Shakespeare’s great credit that he gives every possible reaction and personality its own room for expression—including the friar who points out, most irreverently and cynically in light of Romeo’s newfound love for Juliet, that Romeo was just as in love with Rosaline a few short days beforehand!
It’s under-appreciated that the root of Rosaline’s name is itself “Rose,” given Juliet’s declaration that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet: “What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II) Less romantically-inclined readers may interpret this to mean that Juliet herself is the rose—or the Rosaline—by any other name in the eyes of Romeo, which can serve only to undermine the romantic’s view that Romeo’s love for Juliet is quantitively greater and of a qualitatively different sort than Romeo’s false and fleeting love for Rosaline. It’s a good test for whether one is a romantic or a cynic about romantic love itself. If you are a romantic, Romeo’s love for Juliet is something special: true love, revealing his false love for Rosaline to have been a mere precursor to his truer love for Juliet. If you are a cynic, in the broad sense, however, Romeo’s endless gushing over Juliet is but another round and another form of his very same endless gushing for Rosaline, albeit with a new shiny object of his affection.
Regardless of one’s romantic or cynical inclinations, however, it’s undeniable that Shakespeare has captured something essential about the nature of love and romance: its ability to make us soar on the wings of anticipation and to come crashing down into the depths of despair (to quote Anne of Green Gables) when it doesn’t work out as planned. As a romantic, Romeo lives or dies, breathes or suffocates, sinks or swims with the ebbs and flows of romantic love. And while one might easily romanticize the romanticism itself as contemporary interpretations of Romeo and Juliet sometimes do (e.g., the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love), it does strike me as plausible that Shakespeare is offering a kind of morality play, a fable warning of the dangers of excessive romanticism and its potentially tragic ends.
What we don’t get from Shakespeare is a logical argument for some inevitable conclusion. Shakespeare sets the stage, placing characters in some setting that reveals the full gamut of possible emotional and physical reactions to some circumstance, and then he sets the characters in motion toward their own inevitable conclusions as a consequence of their own unique and diverse natures. Thus, Shakespeare is something of pluralist about human nature. There isn’t so much one human nature as philosophers of human nature, especially modern philosophers—the Hobbeses and Lockes and Humes in the history of philosophy—have often held, as there is a plurality of human natures, each of us with our own necessary drives, desires, passions, motivations, and reactions to the ebbs and flows of life and its vicissitudes.
As it turns out, this is also the fundamental challenge of love itself, to find even one other person with whom you share the essential things about life and love that are most important to you, so you can get busy with living and loving and gushing instead of continually banging your head against the hermeneutic wall of another person’s (often quite different) innate qualities, assumptions, and Shakespearean drives and temperaments. Rosaline is simply a bad fit for Romeo, whereas Juliet gets swept away on the very same wings of anticipation that Romeo does. And, thus, whether one is a romantic or a cynic, Juliet is, universally and objectively, simply a better match for Romeo’s temperament, for his longings, and for his needs. Juliet is willing to soar to romantic heights alongside Romeo, whereas Rosaline served only to drag Romeo back down to Earth against his very nature. As a romantic, I can’t help but think that we should all be so lucky as Romeo, to find that one other person who is not just willing to soar with us, or to merely tolerate soaring with us, but who can’t help but do so, inevitably and irrepressibly, because of a shared essence and shared nature.
Aside from these universal lessons about the nature of love itself, Shakespeare has much to say about fate, in the classical tradition of Greek and Roman mythology as well. Romeo and Juliet simply cannot avoid their fate. Whether caused by their own hubris as lovers, by the God of the Old Testament capriciously as in the Book of Job, or by some classical notion of fate itself as mere sport for the gods’ amusement, Romeo’s and Juliet’s joint fate is as inevitable as the heat death of the universe once the consummation of their love is set in motion. Such is the situation for all romantics and lovers: we set our hearts in motion, consequences be damned, in one grand, undeniable moment of change—our own personal and romantic Martin Luther moment: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” This radical lover’s authenticity in setting one’s fate in motion perhaps reveals Shakespeare to be a kind of proto-existentialist, with authenticity and passion outranking both consequences and principles in matters of the heart and in the necessary pull between lovers, with a romantic refutation of both consequentialist and Kantian ethics.
Such is the nature of Shakespearean mythos: Shakespeare aims to teach without teaching, to argue without arguing, to warn without warning, to reveal without judging, to inspire without preaching, to lay human nature bare for all to see in its messiness and incoherence, and to reveal something universally true about ourselves and each other, and about the nature of romantic love itself in the case of Romeo and Juliet, all in the guise of a fictional story about merely fictional characters. It is also a kind of litmus test for one’s own personality and drives, just as the way one interprets Achilles in Homer’s Iliad or Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey is a kind of litmus test for one’s own degree of self-styled heroism. From a philosophical standpoint, one might want Shakespeare to simply state his opinion on love—and on lovers—more directly. Such is the nature of mythos, as opposed to philosophical logos, however: in the Shakespearean mythos contained within Romeo and Juliet, the story—with its conflicting lessons, its competing morals, and its open interpretations—stands alone without justification while revealing something as essential about human nature as the insights of any philosophical treatise, any Platonic Symposium, or any scientific or psychological study on the nature of love.
