Literary criticism 1

Isolation, Miscommunication, and Adolescent Suicide in the Play

Date: 2000

On Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Author: Sara Munson Deats

From: Romeo and Juliet, New Edition, Bloom's Guides.

In Tampa, Florida, in 1986, a high school teacher contacted the local suicide crisis center before teaching Romeo and Juliet and asked for advice in treating the play's delicate subject matter with her students.… In the same year, a psychologist at a Tampa high school where a young man had recently committed suicide in the classroom contacted a university English professor and requested guidance in teaching Romeo and Juliet for the English faculty.… That year in Washington, DC, the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Youth Suicide National Center collaborated to create a program intended to "enable teenagers to experience the high drama of Shakespeare's classic, and, at the same time, to understand its relevance to their lives" (Holmer, "Pedagogical Practices" 192).

These … incidents … reinforce my conviction that Romeo and Juliet, one of our culture's most cherished love stories and the culture's most celebrated dramatization of teenage suicide, has a special resonance for young people today. I find this play significant not because Shakespeare is a writer for all times or because this tragedy embodies essential, universal insights but because in this drama, as in many of his works, Shakespeare brilliantly synthesizes the traditions and customs from which our contemporary mores have evolved. Thus, despite the enormous technological advances and monumental social changes that have occurred during the past four hundred years, the problems confronting Romeo and Juliet—the tensions between parents and children in the nuclear patriarchal family, the pressures within masculine peer groups, and the failure of authority figures to mediate between young people and the establishment—are still a part of our culture.…

Throughout the centuries, this popular and provocative play has evoked a multitude of interpretations. Commentators have read the play as a tragedy of fate and the stars … a tragedy of haste … a tragedy of excessive passion … a tragedy of unawareness … , a tragedy of violated ritual … and the locus classicus of the Liebestod myth.… Other critics have focused on the conflicts of the individual versus the patriarchy … love versus friendship … and subversion versus tradition.… Several intriguing interpretations of the play present Romeo and Juliet as a dramatic oxymoron, a study in contrarieties—love and death, age and youth, high and low spheres, authority and rebellion, love and hate, comedy and tragedy.… To this list of antinomies, I would add the frequently overlooked polarities of communication and alienation, since this play showcases some of Shakespeare's most dazzling rhetoric while dramatizing a radical breakdown in communication on all levels of Verona society. This aspect of the play, enacting a dilemma as old as a cuneiform chronicle yet as current as the six o'clock news, is particularly relevant to the contemporary epidemic of teenage suicide.

The collapse of communication pervades the society of the play. First, and most crucially, parents and children cannot relate to each other; as most of us are aware, Romeo and Juliet is one of the definitive treatments in literature of the generation gap.… Second, and not so frequently recognized, Veronese society's masculine peer group cannot establish a frank and open dialogue. Lastly, societal institutions—the state and the church—are unable to maintain order or mediate between the estranged parents and their children. Ultimately, Romeo and Juliet, alienated from both family and peers, make a total, exclusive commitment to each other while appealing to the church for solace and aid. When the church, in the persona of the bumbling, pusillanimous Friar Laurence, fails them, they cling desperately to each other. Even this support collapses, and each lover, believing the other to be dead, feels isolated and abandoned and sees no recourse but suicide.

The introductions of both teenagers stress the psychic gulf separating parents and children in Verona. Although Juliet makes her debut flanked by her mother and her nurse, Lady Capulet's reluctance to discuss intimate matters of sex and marriage with her virgin daughter without the moral support of the Nurse suggests the strained relationship between mother and child, a relationship foiled by the warm, convivial rapport between Juliet and the earthy Nurse. Lord Capulet initially seems a fonder, more solicitous parent than his rather frigid wife, although he does not engage Juliet in onstage conversation until much later in the play, during a scene in which he violently rejects his daughter. A similar lack of communication typifies Romeo's relationship with his anxious father, who must seek out Romeo's friend Benvolio to inquire about Romeo's bizarre behavior. Romeo's failure ever to appear on stage with his parents highlights this alienation.… Not surprisingly, therefore, when the two adolescents, each an heir of the other's enemy clan, fall head over heels in love, they fail to confide their transcendent passions to their parents. Instead, the lovers marry secretly, embarking on a course that leads to catastrophe.

Although Romeo shares his self-indulgent infatuation for Rosaline with two friends, the skeptical Benvolio and the scoffing Mercutio, he is unwilling to divulge his rapturous love for Juliet to either of his comrades. Mercutio, part phallogocentric icon … part lord of misrule … equates love with sex and makes women the object of bawdy jeers; whereas romantic Romeo elevates women to a pedestal, macho Mercutio shoves them into the ditch. Marjorie Cox, employing the lexicon of Freudian psychoanalysis, explains Romeo and Mercutio as representing familiar antithetical responses to the sexual stresses occurring during adolescence. Romeo responds to the revival of libidinal energy by seeking an appropriate non-Oedipal love object to satisfy his desires, whereas Mercutio channels this upsurge of libido into mocking and avoiding women while seeking the exclusive company of his own sex (381–82, 385). The difference in psychological response erects a barrier that renders meaningful dialogue between the two friends virtually impossible. Understandably, therefore, Romeo hesitates to subject his ecstatic, private passion for Juliet to the ribald locker-room jests of his cynical sidekick Mercutio or even to the remonstrations of the more sympathetic but still skeptical Benvolio. However, Romeo's reluctance to confide in his friends proves fatal.…

Returning from his secret wedding to Juliet, Romeo encounters Benvolio, Mercutio, and Romeo's nemesis, Tybalt, in the sweltering town square, and impeded communication again serves as a catalyst to calamity. Furious that the scion of the enemy clan crashed the Capulet family's celebration and still smarting from Lord Capulet's stern rebuke, Tybalt has sent Romeo a written challenge, a missive obviously not received, because Romeo has not been home since the night of the ball.… Romeo, knowing nothing of Tybalt's challenge, hopes for reconciliation (had he known of the challenge, he might have been more cautious); Mercutio and Tybalt, knowing nothing of Romeo's private nuptials, misconstrue Romeo's attempts at peacemaking as cowardice. The result is a melee of misrecognition that leaves Mercutio and Tybalt dead and Romeo banished. The racking scene dramatizes the deleterious effect of masculine peer pressure on a sensitive adolescent, as Romeo allows his concern for masculine honor to overwhelm his love for Juliet and, unmanned by folly, kills his newly made cousin Tybalt. Escalus, the prince of Verona, arrives—as always, too late—and the state, which is unable throughout the play to maintain order, can only inflict punishment. The death of Tybalt unleashes the heretofore precariously restrained hostility between the two warring houses and combines with the demise of the far from "grave man," Mercutio, to signal the play's reversal from comedy to tragedy (3.1.97).¹ …

Commentators have traditionally interpreted Romeo and Juliet as either the pharmakos (scapegoats) of Verona society or the victims of fate, chance, or even providence. Yet despite the monumentally bad luck suffered by the lovers, almost every circumstance leading to the tragedy can also be traced to an instance of impaired communication. Like the refrain of a poem linking stanza to stanza, the motif of occluded communication pervades the play, linking episode to episode. Had Romeo confided in Mercutio the details of his secret nuptials, his friend would certainly not have intervened in the altercation between Romeo and Tybalt. If either of the surrogate parents, the Friar or the Nurse, had possessed the nerve to confront the biological parents to confess their complicity in the concealed marriage, tragedy would doubtlessly have been averted. Had the eminently eligible Paris been told of Juliet's clandestine wedding, he would certainly not have pursued a married woman. Even the most salient example of fortune's animus, the quarantined messenger and the undelivered letter, results from failure to suit action to word and to provide necessary information. In a crucial epistle to Romeo, Friar Laurence outlines his harebrained scheme to give Juliet a potion that will simulate her death. This plan goes awry because Friar Laurence makes two major errors. First, he forgets his promise to entrust the letter to Romeo's servant Balthasar; and, second, he neglects to explain the importance of the missive to his surrogate messenger, Friar John. Thus Friar John meanders to a plague-ridden area in search of a companion for his journey, becomes quarantined, and never delivers the letter, whereas Balthasar, the expected messenger, rushes to Mantua with false information concerning Juliet's death. Through these many episodes of short-circuited communication, the play consistently reminds the audience that the calamitous deaths of five young people—Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Romeo, and Juliet—could all have been prevented had the citizens of Verona been able to talk candidly to one another. But the five youths and their bereaved parents, friends, and confidants all become victims of a conspiracy of silence.

The question has frequently been asked, Why do Romeo and Juliet commit suicide? …

Hostility toward both society and fortune, guilt over Tybalt's death, thwarted dreams and hope, and the loss of Juliet—all these contribute to Romeo's final hopelessness. Conversely, Juliet's self-murder lacks the anger, guilt, or even frustration characteristic of Romeo's last desperate hours. Rather, her suicide is rendered virtually inevitable by her progressive isolation resulting from the series of physical and psychological bereavements Juliet suffers in the last days of her life: the death of a cherished cousin; alienation from her father, mother, and nurse; desertion by the Friar; and, finally, the devastating loss of her beloved Romeo. Edwin Shneidman, a leading authority on suicide, insists that psychological pain, no matter how severe, "is endurable if the individual feels that he is truly not alone and can evoke some response in a significant other" (Definition 215; see also Farberow 391–92). But Juliet is ultimately stripped of all significant others, her total isolation symbolized by the hermetically sealed tomb in which, abandoned and alone, the adolescent girl takes her life.

Jerry Jacobs, in his analysis of adolescent suicide, follows Shneidman in speculating that persons commit suicide primarily because they encounter non-shareable problems. Jacobs further hypothesizes that adolescent suicide attempts result from "a chain reaction dissolution of any remaining meaningful social relationships in the days and weeks preceding the [suicide] attempt which leads to the adolescent's feeling that he has reached the 'end of hope' " (28). As I have tried to demonstrate, Shakespeare, that shrewd recorder of human behavior, anticipates in Romeo and Juliet the very factors identified by Jacobs and other prominent authorities on youth suicide … , factors that appear over and over again in clinical case studies on the subject: confused teenagers who seek to resolve conflicting psychosexual instincts; cold and authoritarian parents who impede the turbulent drives of adolescents toward individuation and fulfillment; impotent counselors; insensitive, often belligerent, peers; aggravating circumstances, particularly the loss of a loved one; frustration of primary needs; rage and defiance toward an environment perceived as hostile; helplessness and hopelessness; and, most agonizing of all, progressive isolation of the adolescents from meaningful social relationships. To a large degree, both in contemporary case studies of youth suicide and in Romeo and Juliet, this isolation results from the total severance of communication between the desperate teenagers and the narcissistic (selfish) society that fails to heed their cry for help.

David Lucking remarks that not a single one of the written messages sent in the play arrives directly at its intended destination ("Balcony Scene" 6; see also Whittier 30–31n8). I further suggest that the letters that never arrive provide poignant emblems for the ubiquitous failed communication dramatized by the play—the spoken words that cannot be delivered, at least partially because the characters have quarantined their affections.… On the one hand, despite the blatant commodification of Juliet by her authoritarian parents, Capulet eloquently expresses his deep affection for Juliet (1.2.14–15), and both parents respond to their daughter's death with hyperbolic lamentations (4.5). Furthermore, although Romeo never appears in a domestic setting with his parents, his perplexed father seems genuinely concerned over his son's behavior, and Lady Montague dies of grief as a result of her son's banishment. On the other hand, the play clearly dramatizes a society plagued by alienation on all levels—the family, peer groups, the church, the state. Since the complex relation between Shakespeare's great love story and the society that produced it remains outside the purview of this essay, I will simply conclude by observing that the newspaper headlines daily assaulting and shocking even the most desensitized twentieth-century reader indicate that a similar alienation infects our contemporary society. No cure has yet been found for this dread disease, and this may be one of the reasons that, despite the gap of four hundred years, Romeo and Juliet speaks so urgently today to both young and old.

Note

• 1. Citations to Romeo and Juliet in this essay are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington.