Putting the Fun Back into Funerals: Dealing/Dallying With Death in Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

For last fifteen years or so, I have been teaching a university course at Lund University, Sweden, which combines academic study of one of Shakespeare's plays (through lectures, submission of essays, and so on), with a more practical approach: students are cast in, rehearse (with me as their director), and finally perform a slightly abridged version of play, in English, in full period costume, before an audience. The performance constitutes students' oral exam although grading is based on their written work. This hands-on approach is engrossing, exhausting, and enjoyable in equal measure, and surprisingly often it yields substantial food for thought. As anyone who works on Shakespeare from a practical angle knows, seeing a play through fresh young eyes almost invariably proves to be a way of discovering brave new worlds within it. Recently, after two productions of The Winter's Tale--surely saddest of Shakespeare's comedies--I felt that logical next step had to be exploring Romeo and Juliet, funniest and most farcical of his tragedies. Not that there is anything essentially new or original in regarding Romeo and Juliet as a play that thinks it is a comedy, of course; it is an idea that has been exploited by many directors and thoroughly analyzed by academics. But as my students studied, rehearsed, and ultimately performed Romeo and Juliet (or Four Funerals and a Wedding as it was occasionally referred to in group), comedy element spontaneously came to be a core part of our stage work, and on whole, this approach originated with them (although I was very willing to go along with it). Thus, in our work, one of main concerns somehow became how to confound audience expectations and avoid playing tragedy before it actually happens, and how to achieve an encounter with it as unprepared, perhaps, as that of a sixteenth-century penny-stinkard sneaking into playhouse late and missing Prologue. As a consequence, we wanted our Verona to be a comfortably ordinary place for as long as possible, and for as many sublunary citizens as possible--a place full of people busy playing leads in their own lives rather than attendant lords in someone else's, intent on their own joys and cares, most of time treating Montague/Capulet brawls as so much white noise. In rehearsals, discussions, and analyses, we repeatedly found ourselves exploring boundary between comedy and tragedy, our question being this: exactly when, and how, are we allowed, or even encouraged, to laugh at tragedy and death in Shakespeare's plays--and are we able to laugh at dead bodies onstage today? I have no definite answers to offer, only solutions we found for ourselves in our staging; and in this paper, I want to discuss them further. Most people--be they scholars, spectators, or those involved in performance--would probably agree that transition from comedy to tragedy happens in 3.1: bewildering reversal comes with almost accidental, almost incidental, stabbing of Mercutio. (1) This is where Mercutio finally (in Robert Maslen's words) attests to the proximity between rapier wit and violence with rapiers. (2) Following Coppelia Kahn, Maslen sees tragedy as a result of clash between violent masculinity and heterosexual desire and claims that the lightness with which he undertakes quarrel stakes Mercutio's claim to manhood. (3) There is no question that there is plenty of testosterone in this scene, of course, but to me, it seems that main reason that Mercutio undertakes quarrel so lightly is that it is at that point a light, almost playful fight, reminiscent of wrestling and biting of young puppies, which nobody, least of all Mercutio, expects will have a fatal outcome--and that this is also what makes reversal so shocking. Even Romeo, who tries to stop fight, does so invoking not physical danger but law (the Prince expressly hath/Forbid this bandying in Verona streets). …