UK Oxford & ASU’s Sir Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet & Love

The Learning Curve Sir Jonathan Bate

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back guys to the learning curve podcast. I’m your cohost, Alisha Thomas Searcy and joined this week again, of course, by Dr. Albert Cheng. Welcome Albert. How are you?

[00:00:25] Albert Cheng: Hey, doing well. Good to do this special episode with you, Alisha. It’s Valentine’s Day. So happy Valentine’s Day to you and to all the listeners out there.

[00:00:35] Um, anyway, we’re excited about this show. Got a treat, I think coming up.

[00:00:39] Alisha Searcy: We do, Sir Jonathan. I’m looking forward to that and how appropriate that we’ll be talking about Romeo and Juliet on Valentine’s Day the ultimate love story, right?

[00:00:48] Albert Cheng: That’s right. That’s right. The love story that and I mean heck it’s inspired lots of other ones I mean all these new renditions we have of the Romeo and Juliet archetype, you know West Side Story and I’m sure many other ones.

[00:00:59] Alisha Searcy: Yes indeed. Well, we want to do something a little bit different. Normally we have our stories of the week But because it’s Valentine’s Day, we’re going to do something a little different. I have a poem that I’d like to read, if I can do that, and then I would love to toss it to you. I think our goal for the listeners is to talk about love.

[00:01:19] We want to think about young people and Just the importance of, you know, kind of demonstrating the beauty of those romantic type relationships, healthy love, etc. What do you think? Yeah, sounds like a great idea. Good. Well, in the spirit of Black History Month, I’ve decided I’m going to cite a poem written by Maya Angelou.

[00:01:40] And of course, people know who she is, hopefully, but she’s thought of as one of the greatest American writers of all time. And she was the first black woman featured on the United States quarter and was honored with a presidential medal of freedom in 2010. And so the poem that I’m going to recite or read, I should say, is written by her and it’s called Touched by an Angel.

[00:02:05] We, unaccustomed to courage, exiles from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness, until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight, to liberate us into life. Love arrives in its train, come ecstasies, old memories of pleasure, ancient histories of pain. Yet, if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.

[00:02:31] We are weaned from our timidity in the flesh of love’s light. We dare be brave, and suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be, yet it is only love which sets us free.

[00:02:47] Albert Cheng: Beautiful, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I mean, I just love some of the imagery that, you know, weaned from fear. I think I heard you read, um, to think about, yeah, love has, there’s like this magic that kind of unlocks you to be courageous and to let your shame drop.

[00:03:04] I think that’s right.

[00:03:05] Alisha Searcy: It does. And, you know, Albert, over the weekend, I spent. Time up in the Tennessee mountains with about 10 other couples, married couples, my husband and I, and it was a beautiful time. And so as I’m thinking about Valentine’s day and thinking about the weekend that we had, I also posted this video because all of the couples, there’s one couple that is not married.

[00:03:30] But then the longest couple of years of marriage was 36 or 39 years of marriage. And so it ranged anywhere from three years all the way up to 39. And so how beautiful it was to spend time with folks who, you know, believe in marriage, believe in love. And to your point, for me, I know in my marriage and relationship, when you’re married to the right person and you’re married to your life partner, you feel like you can do anything in the world.

[00:04:00] person, you know, your best friend kind of holding your hand, supporting you, giving you those words of encouragement if you need them or the shoulder to cry on. And so just as in this She talks about that love costs all that we are and will ever be, but it’s only love which sets us free.

[00:04:19] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. That is my And actually, was there a line in there that liberated to life, I think was something that was one of the phrases, I think. I mean, what you were just sharing there just reminded me of that. I think just another part of that. That, that poem.

[00:04:31] Alisha Searcy: Yes, that’s exactly what it says and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.

[00:04:36] Albert Cheng: Yeah, just that, that, that freedom and lightness that comes in from a healthy relationship there. Yes. Yeah.

[00:04:42] Thanks for sharing that. I rummaged my around my mind to think of a poem and a few came to mind. You know, I think that there is this broader question. You know, we talked about education on this podcast, Alisha, you know, one of the things I think we keep hitting on is. Exposing our kids to content rich knowledge.

[00:05:00] And that’s not just so they know stuff, but because, you know, a lot of texts out there, you know, poems that have been written millennia ago, even they’ve been around for a while because they have something to teach us. And when it comes to love, you know, I’m just thinking through like, yeah, what are some of those enduring?

[00:05:17] Poems, you know, we’re gonna talk Shakespeare in a little bit. So, so mainly went to poetry, but what are some of those poems? And, you know, I thought about some of the ones from some religious traditions, right? So, you know, the song of Solomon, I think are for those, you know, who know about the Jewish tradition and certainly.

[00:05:34] In the Christian tradition as well, you know, it’s not just called the song of Solomon, but the song sometimes, because it’s the song of romantic, erotic love. And I was drawn just thinking through some of the metaphors that are in some of these poems. And, you know, Alisha, I think sometimes we need metaphors to help us understand things that we otherwise couldn’t understand very well.

[00:05:56] So, you know, in the, in the song of Solomon, I. At one point he likens his bride to a lily among brambles, you know, and I just have that image of brambles and thorns and there’s this one lily there. I think that kind of captures a little bit of the gaze of love, right, that the man has here. But you know, there’s others.

[00:06:16] I think of one by a Christian poet. He was actually a Christian preacher in the, I think, 17th century, George Herbert. He has a poem about the passion of the Christ. And at the end, the poem ends as love is that. Liquor, sweet and most divine, which my God feels as blood, but I as wine. And that’s always struck me because that juxtaposition of sacrifice for somebody, but then for the recipient, the beneficiary of that inherits, it’s likened to wine.

[00:06:48] Blood and wine. Love is both blood and wine. So, I don’t know, I think we need to plumb the lines of poetry to really get at these metaphors. But, I want to end with the one I settled on, and I think this is, this is for my wife, and I think it’s a poem that I think many of our listeners might be familiar with.

[00:07:04] Robert Burns, A Red Red Rose to the beginning, Oh My Love Is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June. Oh, my love is like the melody that’s sweetly played in tune. And I’ve lately been reminded of that because I’ve been working on a few piano sonatas by Beethoven, and there’s some ones that are.

[00:07:27] Very elegant and beautiful. And I found that the way for me to evoke the proper ethos and feeling and sound is to think about my wife. You know, every time I see her at a, like I’ve told her, I don’t know, Lydia, if you ever listened to this, you know, you, when I see you walking around, I hear music. So you are really like melody that’s sweetly played in tune.

[00:07:52] So I will end with that.

[00:07:56] Alisha Searcy: Now, I hope you will send her this episode to make sure she hears it. How absolutely beautiful. What a wonderful tribute.

[00:08:03] Albert Cheng: Well, thanks. But yeah, look, poetry’s got a lot of magic in it. I think we’ve got a lot to learn.

[00:08:09] Alisha Searcy: Yes, it does. And speaking of poetry and a lot to learn from it, I’m very excited about our.

[00:08:15] We have Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, and he’s going to talk to us about Romeo and Juliet. So stay tuned.

[00:08:36] Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL is Regents Professor of Literature at the College of Liberal Arts and College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. He’s also a Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow. of Worcester College, Oxford, where he was provost from 2011 to 2019.

[00:09:02] Well known as a biographer, critic, broadcaster, and scholar, he was also Gresham Professor of Rhetoric from 2017 to 19, delivering six public lectures per year at Gresham College in the City of London. Sir Jonathan is the author of several acclaimed books, including How Classics Made Shakespeare, Soul of Age, A Biography of the Mind, William Shakespeare.

[00:09:28] The genius of Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Ovid. He has served on the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company broadcast for the BBC, written for the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the TLS. And has held visiting posts at Yale. UCLA and ASU. In 2006, he was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 80th birthday honors for his services to higher education.

[00:09:57] And in January, 2015, he became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship. Sir, Jonathan, welcome to the show. We are honored to have you. We want to jump right in with our first question. You’re regarded as the world’s foremost scholar on William Shakespeare. And as we celebrate Valentine’s Day this week, we’d like to focus on his tragic love story, Romeo and Juliet.

[00:10:23] Would you share with us what educators and students alike should remember about this play and why its enduring greatness exemplifies Shakespeare’s genius?

[00:10:34] Sir Jonathan Bate: Absolutely, uh, and no better time to talk about it than on St. Valentine’s Day. Well, there are some Shakespearean names, characters, plays, that even if you’ve never read the plays or seen the plays, you kind of know what the characters stand for.

[00:10:54] Hamlet, I suppose, is the famous one. Hamlet, the intellectual, the scholar. Everybody sort of knows what Hamlet stands for. But of all those characters The ones whose names are most sort of indelibly linked in the global imagination are Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet are synonymous with love, with falling in love, with joy, but also the pain of love.

[00:11:20] Their reputation has been greatly enhanced down the ages by performances of the play, by great actors, movies, that two famous movies, one by Franco Zeffirelli, more recently one by Baz Luhrmann, also by the way that The Romeo and Juliet story in Shakespeare has inspired other works of art. Tchaikovsky, for example, wrote a Romeo and Juliet symphony, and it’s been turned into ballets, it’s been painted.

[00:11:48] So it is a, it is a universal story. One of the things I’m sort of quite proud of as a Shakespeare fanatic is a moment when, on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, I was invited by the BBC radio programme Radio 3 to go on a programme called Private Passions, where you talk about your favourite classical music.

[00:12:08] And they asked me to do it specifically on music inspired by Shakespeare. So I did it for kind of famous pieces, Ballet Oasis, Renu and Juliet, Overture and so on. But at the end, I, uh, I managed to sneak in Taylor Swift’s song, Love Story. Or was the Rome on Juliet’s story or a version of it? And I think that’s probably the only time Taylor Swift has been played on the BBC very serious classical radio program.

[00:12:33] But that song is sort of testimony to the absolute universality and endurance of this story of the star CROs, lovers of Verona. And of course, if you go to Verona, you can go into a little courtyard and see Juliet’s balcony and lovers have been wow. By the ages. Although, as we’ll discover subsequently, in the original script, there wasn’t actually a balcony.

[00:13:00] Alisha Searcy: Really? Wow. Well, I have to say, as we were preparing for this, I did not expect that Taylor Swift would be coming up. So, thank you for sharing that little tidbit.

[00:13:10] Sir Jonathan Bate: That’s, uh, as I say, a mark of the, uh, the extraordinary high culture, low culture, every culture aspect of the story. Who hasn’t heard of Romeo and Juliet?

[00:13:19] That’s right.

[00:13:21] Alisha Searcy: I love it. So in your book, how the classics made Shakespeare, you write, quote, it was probably Shakespeare’s immersion in Ovid during the closure of the theaters in 1593 to 94 that led him to the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers from rival households. In book four of the metamorphosis, end quote, could you tell us about the classical Roman poet Ovid and how the classic shaped Shakespeare and his Romeo and Juliet in ways that speak to audiences across centuries?

[00:13:54] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a, that’s a great question. So, Shakespeare studied the Roman classics at school, and of all the Roman poets, the one that he loved most was Ovid, who wrote this extraordinary collection of stories called the Metamorphoses, written in verse, and it was translated into English.

[00:14:09] Shakespeare kind of cribbed from an English translation. He didn’t really bother with Latin most of the time. But it contains all the great myths of ancient Greece and Rome. And one of them is a story called Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus and Thisbe come from rival households. Thisbe’s father doesn’t want her to marry Pyramus, he wants her to marry someone else.

[00:14:32] And so Pyramus and Thisbe escape from the city, they go out into the woods. But then there’s a tragic misunderstanding and it ends with death and suicide. And it’s a great story of the idea of ill fated lovers. Lovers who want to come together but the conventions of society and the force of their parents means that they can’t.

[00:14:55] They have to rebel and it eventually leads to death. Shakespeare, so he was a great reader of Ovid, but then there was a period quite early in his career, 1592 93 94, where he’s making his reputation as an actor and a dramatist, but the theatres get closed because there’s an outbreak of plague in London.

[00:15:13] Obviously, it’s a bit like Covid, isn’t it? First thing you close down when there’s a pandemic are the public spaces where people jostle together and there’s a high risk of infection. While the theatres were closed, Shakespeare seems to have gone into the country and he wrote some poems, one love poem called Venus and Adonis, and another more sinister poem about desire called Rape of Lucrece, which are directly based on Ovid, so he’s reading Ovid at this time.

[00:15:38] So when the theatres reopen, he’s kind of thinking, what about putting an Ovidian love story on stage? And he writes two plays. One of them is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another about lovers where the father wants for daughter to marry someone else, they go out into the woods, and he embedded within Midsummer Night’s Dream the wonderfully comic scene of the so called rude mechanicals, the working class characters, putting on their play of Pyramus and Thisbe.

[00:16:08] So that’s kind of a comic version of the story, but then he thinks, right, it is a tragedy, a tragic story, these young lovers do die. Let’s dramatize that. So he turned to a rather boring poem, by an Elizabethan writer, called Arthur Brooke, that told the story of Romeo and Juliet, which was a story that had been around for a while, it was ultimately an Italian story, obviously, a version of it had also been dramatized by Lope de Vega, the great Spanish dramatist, but Shakespeare took that story and kind of turned it into something much more like of it with a kind of magic associated with the love and the poetry.

[00:16:47] Thank you for that.

[00:16:48] Alisha Searcy: So a phrase such as I’m in love with you has in some sense to be learned. You’ve said when we say it, we are imitating the archetypal lovers from page and screen who said it before us. Would you discuss the theatrical and written sources from Elizabethan England and elsewhere that shape Shakespeare’s understanding of love and portrayal of lovers?

[00:17:13] And then what can Shakespeare and his sources teach us about the nature of romantic love?

[00:17:19] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, so I mean, I’ve mentioned the, as it were, the direct source, which is this not very good perfume by Arthur Brooke, and then Oved in the background. But you also have to understand the play in the context of Renaissance Elizabethan ideas about love expressed in poetry.

[00:17:40] Tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, and of which the great exemplar was the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, who wrote all these sonnets in the voice of a lover seeking this beautiful but unobtainable lady. And the poetry would praise every aspect of her, her beauty, her chastity, even her body parts that be Poems that would enumerate, you know, her golden hair is like the sun, her eyes shine like diamonds, her lips are like rubies and so forth.

[00:18:16] This kind of, we call it Petrarchan poetry, courtly poetry, idealizing the lover. In Shakespeare’s time, it was incredibly fashionable to write sonnets in that style, and Shakespeare indeed wrote such sonnets himself, although sometimes, being Shakespeare, he writes sonnets that parody those conventions of praising the body parts of the beautiful girl.

[00:18:43] By Mistress Eyes, he writes in one of his sonnets, a nothing like the sun, and he describes her hairs as being like black wires, rather than, you know, golden cornfields. So there is a, there’s a real sort of convention of love poetry. And what we see in Romeo and Juliet is that Shakespeare uses that convention, but subverts it.

[00:19:05] You remember at the beginning of the play, Romeo is not in love with Juliet. He’s in love with the fair Rosaline. And we never see and the language that he uses to describe Rosaline and his love for her is entirely conventional. It is that language of courtly desire. A lot of the poetry in the early part of the play is written in very simple rhyming couplets.

[00:19:30] But then what happens when he sees Juliet, is there’s this extraordinary transformation. The poetry loosens up, it becomes more blank verse, and the way in which he writes about his love moderates, modulates, from the conventional courtly poetry into something much richer, stranger, more powerful, and very, very new.

[00:19:57] Hmm.

[00:19:57] Alisha Searcy: Very beautiful. So you mentioned Verona, Italy, and we know that Romeo and Juliet is set there and begins with the street fight between Montague and Capulet servants who, like their masters they serve, are sworn enemies. So can you talk about the significance of Shakespeare setting a story about lovers in the middle of this strife, and also tell us about the relationship between passion, love, and violence in the play?

[00:20:25] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Again, Shakespeare always wants a strongly dramatic situation, a sense of conflict. And so obviously having the two rival households of Montague and Capulet gives him that. And at the beginning of the play, he wants to dramatize that. through the street violence. And I think it’s a deeper sense in which he’s exploring the way that when we are young, we have very strong emotions.

[00:20:52] There’s a line in the play, isn’t there? These violent delights have a violent ends. And there is a lot of violence in the play. But if you think about young people, you know, what do young people do? They have hormones. They have testosterone. What does that lead to? It leads to passionate love, but it does also lead to fights.

[00:21:14] And the play is very kind of realistic about them. It’s a real kind of tribal sense of rival gangs. You remember, of course, the musical West Side Story is a kind of updating of Romeo and Juliet into a kind of idea of New York rival gangs. And there have been recent productions of it that sort of set it in the context of, you know, the problems of gang violence and knife crime in contemporary cities, and that’s absolutely as it should be, because there were those kinds of problems in Shakespeare’s London that, That sort of idea of violent passion was also particularly associated with Italy.

[00:21:49] Italy was thought of as a place of passions. It still is perhaps today. There’s great belief in Shakespeare’s time that national character was partly shaped by climate. And there’s something about the hot climate of the Mediterranean that in Shakespeare’s view and that of his audiences leads to hot passions.

[00:22:06] So yeah, the violence does play a role. And I think the other kind of A crucial aspect of this is that it allows Shakespeare to explore the tension between male male relationships. It’s often a phenomenon nowadays when you speak to teenagers, they’ll say, Oh, you know, so and so, he was, he was great mate of mine, but then he fell in love and just spent all his time with his girlfriend and, uh, he no longer bothers sort of, you know, coming out to the movies or going to the pub with his gang of friends.

[00:22:40] And that is a definite theme in the play, isn’t it? That Mercutio in particular, He mocks Romeo for being in love with Rosaline and then they get a little bit annoyed that Romeo sort of goes mooning off after, after girls rather than being one of the lads. Mm hmm.

[00:22:58] Alisha Searcy: I love that. So you mentioned Rosaline earlier, and I want to keep this theme of the initial love that Romeo had for Rosaline, but then also these emotions that teenagers are experiencing and still do.

[00:23:12] And so, quote, the Romeo who is superficially in love with Rosaline in the first act suffers from the symptoms of the infirmity named infirmity Heros, you’ve written. But the love of Juliet and her Romeo is both sexual and intensely spiritual, end quote. So would you share with us how Romeo and Juliet fall in love and help us better understand the nature of their attraction and love?

[00:23:37] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, that’s right, hereios, it was, it was a Greek word and it means kind of mad, deranged passion, which, you know, obviously can be pretty unhealthy. So, I think we see this very, very clearly in this change of language that I was talking about. That the representation that we have of Romeo’s love for The fair Rosaline, whom we never see.

[00:24:01] It’s highly conventionalized. It’s almost that he’s in love with the idea of being in love, rather than with a real flesh and blood girl. But that changes with Juliet. They meet at the ball, and there’s instantly this, this kind of magnetic attraction between them, but they control it through their language.

[00:24:18] There’s that fantastic scene, that they actually kind of speak. Speak a kind of interwoven sonnet between them, and it ends up with their hands coming together. And the language, the language of a pilgrim, the language begins to become religious, to become spiritual, and not just to do with physicality and the body.

[00:24:39] There’s a really interesting kind of variation on convention here. What we see when Romeo has fallen in love with Juliet at the ball, and then he goes off into the night, and his friends come and meet him. Mercutio starts ribbing him about being in love, and Mercutio at this point doesn’t realize Romeo’s fallen in love with Juliet.

[00:25:03] He’s still thinking about Rosaline, and Mercutio uses really obscene sexual language, not to be repeated on a family podcast such as this, but it’s as dirty as Shakespeare ever gets. But then Romeo responds. with a completely different sort of language, a language of extraordinary beauty and spirituality.

[00:25:28] And that’s the kind of transformation that the play seems to dramatize so, so powerfully. It’s, you know, within literally a matter of, um, a few lines within the play, we go from This, as I say, really filthy sexual innuendo, explicit sexual language of Mercutio, to Romeo seeing the light break through the window and saying, but soft, that light through yonder window breaks, it is the east, and Juliet is the sun, arise fair sun, and then off he goes into this.

[00:26:08] Extraordinary language of beauty, the brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp. Her eye in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing and think it were not night. I have lost you or silenced you ever, haven’t I?

[00:26:28] Albert Cheng: Oh, yeah. I mean, that that is the only appropriate response after yes, this captivated, but let’s actually, let’s continue down this and let’s get into the balcony scene.

[00:26:38] I mean, earlier, you mentioned the interwoven sonnet, but let’s get to the balcony scene. And so he sneaks into the Capulets yard over here’s Juliet. This is Romeo. Here’s over. Here’s Juliet vowing her love to him in spite of her family’s hatred of his family. And there, you know, as you say, Romeo reveals his love for Juliet.

[00:26:57] And they agreed to marry in secret, which we can unpack the rest of the story with the help of Fire Lawrence. But talk about that scene, say more about the poetic language that Shakespeare uses in that particular scene to create the intimacy that’s really captured our imagination for all time.

[00:27:13] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah. Now, as I say, first thing to say, as I said before, the line I’m just quoting, the light breaks through the window.

[00:27:20] It’s clear that Juliet appears at her window. In the original Elizabethan theatre, it was a kind of opening above the stage for so called above space. But there isn’t actually any reference to a balcony in the text. This idea of The balcony scene only actually emerged about 150 years after Shakespeare’s death in the 18th century when the great actor David Garrick played the role of Romeo.

[00:27:46] And by that time in the mid 18th century when the theatres had moved indoors, you know Shakespeare’s original theatre was an outdoor theatre, moved indoors and the scene building was much more realistic and elaborate. Garrick had an elaborate stage built with a balcony to which he could then climb up and this became a very famous scene in David Garrick’s, he was a great Shakespearean actor at the time in his version of the play and it was engraved many times and that was really what created this idea of the balcony, but anyway, that’s a trivial pedant’s point, a pub quiz point, was there really, is a balcony ever mentioned in the text?

[00:28:20] No, the really interesting thing as you say is the language and I think in particular. Juliet’s language. If we go back for a moment to this idea of the so called patriarchal or courtly tradition of love, the position is always the boy wants the girl, he wants the girl’s body, ultimately. And he says he has to be blunt about it.

[00:28:46] And the girl will resist. She will not yield. There’s a sense in which part of her attraction is her unobtainability, but also that is associated with, with her purity. The girl’s not really supposed to feel that level of sexual desire that the boy feels. That’s how it is in the convention. But Shakespeare really and convention in the character of Juliet.

[00:29:13] So, you know, Juliet’s problem is, of course, that she’s a Capulet and Romeo’s a Montague. Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name. The problem is his name, his lineage. Then, though, she goes on in a speech that really inverts the poetic conventions of the time by saying, it’s not your hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man, it’s your name that is the problem.

[00:29:42] So there she’s beginning to enumerate the parts of his lovely body, inverting the convention that it’s the man who enumerates the body parts of the girl. And then at the end of that speech, she says, Romeo, doth thy name, get rid of your name, and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all myself, take all myself.

[00:30:06] She’s wanting a complete union of body and soul. Romeo replies, I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptised, henceforth I never will be Romeo. So, take all myself. At that point, even though they’ve only just met and they’re not yet married, she is effectively offering herself. to him.

[00:30:28] She then backs off a little bit and says, well, hang on, wait a minute. We better get married first. And of course the next day they do get married. But then after they’ve got married, we see the scene where she can’t wait for Romeo to arrive in her bedroom. Fantastic scene where she’s willing the night to come on.

[00:30:47] And again, this, this idea that a woman has sexual desire, just as a man has that she’s not. ashamed of her own sexuality. This is extraordinary and new. And of course, for us, perhaps slightly troubling because Juliet is only 13 years old.

[00:31:06] Albert Cheng: Thank you for elaborating on just the richness of that whole scene and this love story now.

[00:31:11] You know, I think listeners are familiar with the tale of the play, know that this turns into a tragedy at some point. So everything you’re saying seems like it should go very well. So let’s talk about where the play takes a turn. And in particular, Act 3, Scene 1, Mercutio is killed by Juliet’s cousin Tybalt.

[00:31:29] And as Mercutio dies, he famously curses the Montagues and the Capulets. I think many are familiar with the line, A plague on both your houses, right? And then before he dies, he says, Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man. Tell us about that scene and how Shakespeare uses this scene to change the entire tone and trajectory of this play into the tragedy that it is.

[00:31:53] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, absolutely. It is the turning point because in revenge for Tybalt killing Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt and as a result of that he’s exiled. So he only gets his one secret night with Juliet and then he’s sent off out of town, sent into exile. And this is exactly the moment where a love story turns into a tragedy.

[00:32:14] And it’s a moment where. Going back to that line, violent delights have violent ends, the extremity of the passion that we’ve seen in the love is sort of reflected in the extremity of the violence of the young men fighting each other in the street because they come from the rival household’s rival gangs.

[00:32:30] I think the other really interesting The most interesting aspect of this is, as you say, the death of Mercutio. There was a tradition in the 17th century theatre that, according to an actor who had worked with Shakespeare, Shakespeare said that he had to kill off Mercutio halfway through the play because Mercutio was Kind of stealing the show that, um, which is so rich.

[00:32:56] Remember that fantastic speech about Queen Mab and dreams, lovers and dreams. And Mercutio, I’ve also mentioned, you know, he has this really filthy, ribald, bawdy language, but he’s also You know, he’s incredibly charismatic. I mean, even that kind of joke that he dies on, you’ll find me a grave man. Yeah, that’s right.

[00:33:15] In my grave. I mean, somebody who can make a pun just as their last words is, is obviously quite a character. But I think the other aspect of sort of the killing off of Mercutio, again, goes back to this thing of the male bonding on the one hand versus the erotic love on the other. I mean, some recent critics have argued, well, maybe Mercutio’s gay, and that’s what’s going on there.

[00:33:38] I don’t buy that. I don’t find textual warrant for that. I can find you other characters in Shakespeare who are certainly gay, but I don’t think Mercutio is. But what Mercutio relishes is that sense of the lands all out together, partying, joking, bantering. Maybe getting into a fight and that’s the thing that, you know, he comes to an end at that point and from henceforth, the second half of the play turned very, very different.

[00:34:06] Indeed. It’s that real sort of sense of desperation. Um, as I say, Rennie and Judith thereafter, they just get this. Right together. We don’t actually see them making love, but we see them waking up in the morning and again It’s Juliet who who seems to have the kind of the erotic drive if you like because they hear birdsong and Romeo says oh, it’s the Lark.

[00:34:28] That’s the herald of the dawn That means I’ve got to go because I’ve got to go into exile if I stay here You know, I’m gonna be executed or imprisoned and she says no. No, no, it’s not the Lark. It’s the Nightingale We can have a little bit more time together But they can’t, and off he goes, and then the kind of spiral of the tragedy begins to affect itself.

[00:34:48] Albert Cheng: Let’s talk about that spiral, because a lot happens within that short time. So, you know, after that night where they consummate their marriage, Fire Lawrence, who has his hand in this as well, starts to execute. His elaborate but ultimately doomed plan to unify the young couple. So discuss the elements of that.

[00:35:05] So how does Shakespeare use miscommunication, hasty action, and ultimately this is like a, you know, tragic fate, really, that is having his way there to deliver this heartbreaking ending for the star crossed lovers.

[00:35:18] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, star crossed indeed. It is very much a sense of fate operating, so, you know, they have this seemingly clever plot that in order to avoid making the marriage that she doesn’t want to make, the marriage to the Count of Paris, Juliet will take the sleeping potion, everybody will think she’s dead, and then Romeo will come back to her tomb, and she’ll wake up and they’ll escape together.

[00:35:41] Sounds great. But it depends on communicating to Romeo the information that she’s not really dead. It’s only a sleeping potion, not a, not a poison. But the friar commissions another friar to send that message to Mantua, to the place where Romeo’s been exiled to. But he can’t go. Why can’t he go? Because There’s been an outbreak of plague and the city is on lockdown, and so the message can’t be delivered, and that’s, and it’s very interesting.

[00:36:17] This is something that the play written very shortly after this period of plague in London. So the idea of lockdown and the unfortunate consequences that you can have is something that was really light to Shakespeare’s audience. And indeed, there’s a sort of further irony, isn’t it? That you think of in a time of plague, people are going to die of the plague.

[00:36:37] But here, they don’t, nobody dies of the plague. What they die of is The unfortunate moment when Romeo, not realizing that Juliet really is dead, kills himself. And then seeing that she kills herself. All because of this failure of communication. It always slightly reminds me of, do you remember in the novel by Thomas Hardy where a key Letter is delivered, but it goes underneath the carpet.

[00:37:05] And so it’s never seen in Thomas Hardy, a great, who was crazy about Shakespeare and in his novels. It’s always that sense of the Gods being a little bit malicious and there being these tiny, tiny little events, little misadventures that have hugely tragic consequences.

[00:37:22] Albert Cheng: Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, with.

[00:37:24] The way things unfold in this play, I mean, the last couplet, if you will, of the entire play sums it all up, right? For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo. So, summarize this play, and in particular, explain Shakespeare’s use of, or at least, Shakespeare’s overarching themes of love, sex, and death, and how the seeds of tragedy are often sown in seemingly minor feuds.

[00:37:50] Sir Jonathan Bate: Yeah, that’s, I mean, I think, in a way, just to sort of slightly step back from that question, I mentioned earlier that the direct source of the play, this poem about the Romeo and Juliet story, by this writer, Arthur Brooke, he wrote the poem and sort of appended the moral to it, saying the moral of this tale is that children should do what their parents say.

[00:38:14] The reason that everything goes wrong. is because they marry against their parents will. If daughters obeyed their fathers, we wouldn’t have any problems. And that is so not the moral that Shakespeare takes from the story. The fact that it’s not what Old Capulet and Lady Capulet. Old Capulet is a vicious character at times.

[00:38:40] When Juliet resists his will, he becomes a real abusive father. So I think what Shakespeare is doing is saying, look, there are these violent emotions within us, these extreme emotions, especially when you are young. And they lead to the best and the worst. They lead to, you know, this extraordinary flowering of love described in the most beautiful poetry Shakespearean written up to that point, creating this archetypal sense of the lovers against the world.

[00:39:15] That’s what young lovers always say, you know, it’s us against the world. But at the same time, those. Extreme passions of youth also lead to violence and you can’t control the outcome and that’s where chance misadventures like the business of the letter not being delivered can lead to tragic sequences.

[00:39:37] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s bring in your book, um, or I guess I’ll quote from you in your book How the Classics Made Shakespeare. I mean, you’ve been explaining a bit about this. So you wrote, quote, The man who wrote the sonnets clearly believed that love is a powerful and complicated thing, and that poetry is an effective way of exploring its many dimensions.

[00:39:57] Okay, so on Valentine’s Day, What should we learn from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and his poetry that can help us better understand the human desire for love?

[00:40:08] Sir Jonathan Bate: Well, all I would say is watch the play. Because if I help you to understand that, I think what I’d like to do to answer that question in a way is tell you a little story and read a little passage from my more recent book, which is a more personal book called Mad About Shakespeare, which is really the story of Shakespeare.

[00:40:33] My life with Shakespeare, how I began to fall in love with Shakespeare, and then my life as a, not only a scholar and a teacher of Shakespeare, but someone who’s worked on Shakespeare in the theatre and has been to the theatre. So, I want actually to sort of go back to my own teenage years, as if this is the great play about teenage love, and just read you a little bit from this book of mine, Mad About Shakespeare, and I hope, in a way, it might help to answer the question.

[00:41:01] Albert Cheng: Okay, please, please.

[00:41:02] Sir Jonathan Bate: Off we go. I wondered, this is me as a teenager, I wondered whether Shakespeare invented the idea of the teenager in love. He wasn’t the first to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet, but he was the first to make Juliet so young. Not quite 14. And to get inside her head, to find words for the dizzy yearning of first love.

[00:41:29] Come night. Romeo, come thou day in night, for thou wilt lie upon the wings of night, whiter than new snow on a raven’s back. Come, gentle knight, come, loving, black browed knight, give me my Romeo, and when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with knight and pay no worship to the garish sun.

[00:42:02] In a culture where young women were thought of as passive objects to be handed from father to husband, Shakespeare makes Juliet into a hot blooded subject. Where her father wants to sell her as a wife, she speaks here of buying the mansion of love, and she can’t wait to possess it to enjoy sex. In a previous lesson in school, we had learnt that a central conceit in the poetry of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne was the double entendre, the double meaning, whereby an orgasm was perceived as a little death.

[00:42:37] Here, Judith is suggesting that when she comes, dies, she literally sees stars. In a poetic tradition where the beautiful attributes of the female body were customarily surveyed and enumerated by the rapacious male eye, here the imaginative gaze falls on the lovely white body of the boy. In Donne, it was always the man’s voice.

[00:43:02] Hungry for the woman’s body. In Shakespeare, even though the lines were written to be spoken by a boy actor, the girl has a voice. She shares both the love and the desire. That summer, I taught in a summer school for Greek children, teaching them English as a second language. To finance my own railway excursions into the Italian Renaissance later that summer, I worked there through July.

[00:43:30] There was chatter at the time about whether teenagers are put off Shakespeare by having to study him from the age of 14. I thought that it was a question of how you introduce him. Choose the right play, Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and begin with a performance. Then set the class to work on a few key passages, not worrying about the meaning of every word.

[00:43:52] I tested my approach. Those were the days when VHS cassettes had just become available, so I was able to show the Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet. Now, of course, I’ll begin with Baz Luhrmann. And then, with the Greek children, we spent an hour discussing Juliet’s speech and Romeo’s response to the light of her window.

[00:44:12] I asked for class. What do you think is conveyed by the line, It is the east, and Juliet is the sun? Juliet is bright as the sun, an angel, one of them said. The directing light of Romeo’s life, said another. The life giving force of Romeo, said a third. This was a class of thirteen and fourteen year olds, English their second language.

[00:44:37] One of them even cried out, I am boss. She had recognized the iambic pentameter.

[00:44:44] Albert Cheng: That is wonderful to hear the magic you’ve brought into that classroom. Well, sir, Jonathan Bate, thank you so much for your time. Yes. And having you on to discuss Romeo and Juliet with us.

[00:44:55] Sir Jonathan Bate: It was an absolute pleasure. Happy Valentine’s Day to you and all your listeners.

[00:44:59] Albert Cheng: Likewise.

[00:45:01] Sir Jonathan Bate: Thank you.

[00:45:14] Alisha Searcy: Well, Albert, that was quite a fascinating interview from an even more fascinating person, wouldn’t you say? Yeah,

[00:45:22] Albert Cheng: I, oh yeah, you bet. I, I really, that was a real treat. Glad we have, I guess, this special episode to make this possible.

[00:45:28] Alisha Searcy: Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day, so of course, and I’ll have to share this with you.

[00:45:32] My mom happens to be with me visiting and she sat in on this interview and you know, we do these all the time, but I was not expecting some of the content to come up as it did. So I was squirming just a little bit watching my mom. But here we are. It was a great interview. And I don’t remember all of that content reading Romeo and Juliet in high school.

[00:45:53] Do you?

[00:45:54] Albert Cheng: Oh, you know, there’s, there’s parts that I remembered and parts I got to say I had to be reminded of. And so that was great to revisit that. And to now look at that play with, you know, shall I say, you know, eyes that are, you know, a little older and maybe hopefully

[00:46:07] Alisha Searcy: wiser. Exactly. And I think the most fascinating part for me was learning the history of the balcony, right?

[00:46:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very cool. Well, it was wonderful to hang out with you for this special Valentine’s Day episode. And I’m looking forward to next week as we’ll continue our celebration of Black History Month. We’ll have Margaret Washington on. She is the Marie Underhill Knoll Professor of American History Emerita at Cornell University and author of definitive biography Sojourner Truths America.

[00:46:41] So that should be a really interesting show. Yeah, looking forward to hanging out there and then doing that interview. Yes. Well, as always, Dr. Albert Cheng, thank you for being the best co host ever. It was great to be with you again this week.

[00:46:54] Albert Cheng: Oh, well, thanks. Always a pleasure being with you, Alisha.

[00:46:57] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And of course, happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.

[00:47:02] That’s right. Happy Valentine’s Day. Yes. We’ll see you all next week. Hey, this is Alisha. Thank you for listening to The Learning Curve. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we invite you to donate at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.