Unto Death: Eros West of Eden
Before death had insinuated itself into Eden, we nonetheless felt something of its presence. While the first conversation recorded in Scripture, that between God and Adam, proclaims the joy of union between man and woman, it is followed immediately by Eve and the serpent’s dialogue on death. Thus we have before us already the moments between which the existential drama of human life unfolds, with on the one hand that marital death of total self-gift and on the other that dissolution whose fear threatens the security of the marriage bed. For those of us beyond the bounds of Eden, the two have joined hands. In erotic desire for another, we hear the next generation calling us to die.
Whether from a Capuchin spirit of meditation, an acute Italian melancholia, or simply the exigencies of plague-ridden, feud-fraught life, the cast of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seems ever to hear the click and rattle of death drawing up behind them. Indeed, the word “death,” not counting verbal variants, appears no fewer than seventy-five times over the course of the play. The Nurse reminds us that “death’s the end of all.” Lord Capulet recalls, “Well, we were born to die.” Juliet longs to die if Friar Lawrence cannot help her. She has already surmised that her “grave is like to be [her] wedding bed.” Lady Capulet has wished “the fool were married to her grave.” And so on.
Rather than dwell on what the New Critics have already thoroughly identified as the erotic connotations of death and dying for the Elizabethans, I wish instead to pass beyond the Shakespearean reflection on death and the marriage bed and to consider the play anew in light of that original Edenic marriage and the banishment it suffered in the fall.
Early in the play Prince Escalus establishes a clear penalty for whoever should break the peace again in fair Verona’s streets: “If ever you disturb our streets again, / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.” His language recalls the Lord God’s prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “in the day you eat of it you shall die.” The remarkable thing is that Adam and Eve do not die on the day they have consumed the fruit. Instead, they are banished. Likewise, Romeo, having killed Tybalt, finds himself sentenced not to death but to banishment.
Our fatal couple’s precipitous love, despite its evident recklessness and Romeo’s inconstancy to Rosaline, nonetheless bears about it that mark of recognition in which Adam saw his longed for helpmate, this one who at last was flesh of his flesh. In their moments of separation, the two lovers’ minds keep curious pace with one another. While Juliet calls “dreadful trumpet, sound the general doom,” Romeo asks, “What less than doomsday is the prince’s doom?” To Romeo’s sentence Juliet proclaims, “There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, / In that word’s death,” just as Romeo says that “exile hath more terror in his look, / Much more than death.” Both their minds likewise leap to hell in the absence of the other. Thinking Romeo slain, Juliet cries “This torture should be roared in dismal hell,” while, reflecting on his being banished, Romeo protests that “the damned use that word in hell. / Howling attends it.”
Absent one another, the lovers’ minds race instantly to the last things. From their love’s first profession in the Capulet orchard they hasten at the first signs of impediment to the brazen trump of revelation. Death in his way obliges their imagining.
Our chorus sets the fault in the stars, yet Friar Lawrence supplies another cause for our couple’s tragedy when he asks Romeo, “art thou changed? Pronounce this sentence then: / Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.” Adam, tasked with keeping the Garden, with protecting it, does nothing against Eve’s temptation by this serpent, this nahash, the Hebrew indicating no mere snake but a monster of the deep. Romeo, inconstant in his affection and intemperate in the face of suffering, turns Juliet’s death-like sleep to death itself. Looking down from her window, she has seen him in the garden below, there where the nightingale “sings on yond pomegranate tree.” This is the tree associated with that of knowledge of good and evil. There in its shade, as day is breaking, Juliet sees Romeo “as one dead in the bottom of a tomb,” and shortly she joins him in that depth.
The flight of Eros, breasting the slopes of Mount Purgatory in its race toward the stars of Paradise (to blend Plato and Dante) draws perilously near the boughs of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. When it is forgotten that the light in a lover’s eyes is not their own but a reflection, the plumes of love wither in the wind of being. The pilgrim Romeo, course altered by the sight of this new Sun Juliet rising in the East, proceeds from the marriage bed to death, his banishment but a moment in between.
If Romeo’s inconstancy, his inability to distinguish loves from idols, must along with the heavens bear some share in his woe, it must be observed that this inconstancy and its concomitant rashness have been bred by his cultural milieu. Both Romeo and Juliet, learning the other’s name, are struck with the doom those names entail, and knowing that their love is societally forbidden, they seek to seize it under the aegis of divine approval. The mutual enmity of their families serves as a catalyst, and the consequent deaths must be taken as precipitate of the chemical reaction that unfolds therefrom.
In this Friar Lawrence serves as mediator. Under the shroud of shrift, the orphans of Verona’s storm are joined at his hand. Their marital consummation is carried out at his suggestion. His apothecary arts secure Juliet’s semblance of death. He offers us a wisdom counter to, say, Iago’s purse-filling existentialism. He is not a sower, but a gatherer of wild things who recognizes that there is
Naught so vile that on the Earth doth live
But to the Earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.
Wisdom notwithstanding, we must ask whether the Friar himself does not, in misapplying his judgments, by his imprudence hasten the lovers’ demise. For he reconciles himself to Romeo’s romantic mutability by reflecting that “this alliance may so happy prove / To turn your households’ rancor to pure love.”
In the assignment of tragic causes, analysis ever founders on the complexity of the human heart. Where the choices of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence and the Nurse, Capulet and Montague mingle, we turn to the stars as arbiters. We shy from placing blame entirely on Romeo, on Capulet, on Friar Lawrence. Of the latter we long to say with the Prince that “We still have known thee for a holy man.”
For all the uncertainty of causes, though, we can see clearly enough of the issue. An undiscerned love, and one which looks to the beloved for light rather than to that light the beloved reflects, will lead to woe. Whereas the eyes of Beatrice reflect the light of the empyrean, the eyes of Juliet reflect Romeo’s image to himself. Our lovers thus mirror one another, giving back, even when separate, each other’s fears and exaltations so finely that finally no scheme can part them from that grave marriage bed foreshadowed from the play’s outset.
Perhaps in this we may discern a pattern for our own approach to marriage, an affair now reliable as a coin toss and one rarely founded on desire for any heaven which might be sought beyond the boundaries of matter. When human happiness, which needs for its fulfillment that heavenly contemplation which Aristotle dimly surmised and Dante divined in his rapturous ascent, is placed in the eyes of another mortal, “the canker death” comes quickly on. It comes all the more quickly for its being the only end we will admit ourselves. Death’s the end of all for those of us made for worm’s meat.
Promotional Brochure, "Thoughts of Prominent Men Regarding Margaret Mather," for her Romeo and Juliet tour, back cover, 1880s.
This misapprehension of the other with respect to the order of being reaches its most poignant moment in Juliet’s fear of what may befall her in the Capulet monument: “[what if] when I am laid into the tomb, / I wake before the time that Romeo / Come to redeem me?” Indeed, that Romeo who comes to the “detestable maw,” the “womb of death” in which Juliet lies entombed. Romeo is no Christ to harrow hell and bear Juliet forth glorious. Mistaking him for one tends to the suicidal tomb.
To put Heaven “here / Where Juliet lives” is to proceed into the dark wood where Dante comes to himself. Would that there, in the dim light, a Vergil, a Dante, a Shakespeare appear to us and beckon, even through hellish tragedy, toward the mystery of human love restored to its original order, directed beyond Eden to the sun and other stars.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings. His new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by sculptor Timothy Schmalz, was published this year in celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.