Inevitable Time in Romeo and Juliet
There is no shortage of tragic poetry in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. From Mercutio’s harrowing Queen Mab speech to Juliet’s fearful questions contemplating what death might feel like right before she drinks the sleeping potion, the play is deeply invested in exploring new ways to think about the “tragic experience.” Every time I watch or read this play, though, I dread hearing one particularly vital, miserable line Juliet utters after she wakes to find Romeo dead beside her:
Thy lips are warm.
This single line has inspired some of the most memorable Juliet performances in the play’s recent performance history. In Franco Zeffirelli’s 1964 film, Olivia Hussey tilts her head back in anguish as she cries the line, realizing that Romeo’s death happened mere moments before her own reanimation. She bursts into loud sobs and falls onto his chest, screaming “no, no, no!” as she grips his hair and kisses his face, consuming herself in the quickly fading evidence of his life.
In Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Claire Danes’s Juliet wakes in time to watch Romeo drink the poison before she can stop him. She whispers this line directly to her dying lover in disbelief that his life will soon leave him. It’s the last thing he ever hears her say, and she momentarily can’t do anything but gaze tearfully at his body.
In Simon Godwin’s National Theater production from last year, Jessie Buckley, playing Juliet, kisses her dead Romeo over and over before quickly uttering the line into his lifeless body. With each kiss, she gradually discovers what has happened, piercing together how this happened, what went wrong, and what she will do next.
This line (and specifically these performances) reveals how self aware this play is of its own tragedy. This moment—cruel and stupid—denies the edification or catharsis audiences expect to experience when they watch a tragedy. Rather, Romeo and Juliet forces us to stew in our discontent. At the end of the play, instead of offering an emotional resolution or pointed lesson, the Prince encourages us to “Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.” In other words, Romeo and Juliet is explicitly unresolved and meant to stay with its audience beyond its performance. Here, the Prince is extending the tragedy beyond the performance itself, and challenging the popular idea that the value of performance lies solely in its ephemerality. This line asserts that performance can also exist within the thoughts and conversations audiences will have about the play long after the curtains close.
In fact, part of the play’s tragedy is that it never offers us those cozy feelings of catharsis or lesson-learning during the action. Because Romeo and Juliet isn’t a tragedy of fate, young love, or even ancient grudges: Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of time. When Juliet says “Thy lips are warm,” we understand how opaque time is in this play. This line is thick with both life and death, with past and present. Time collapses on itself as Romeo’s lingering warmth betrays the truth of his death. He lived only moments ago. And now, Juliet is only moments away from ending her own time in this world.
Even speaking of the plot as a whole, you could write out the timeline of Romeo and Juliet’s four-day romance almost to the hour: it is so tightly plotted that it is probably one of Shakespeare’s most precise temporal frameworks. However, nothing in this play happens when it’s “supposed” to happen. Romeo falls in love before he meets Juliet, Romeo and Juliet come together right in the middle of their family’s unyielding feud (“Too early seen unknown, and known too late!”), Juliet becomes betrothed after she is already married, and Romeo dies seconds before Juliet awakens. Everything in this play happens off-beat, and thus tragedy becomes inevitable.
And of course it’s inevitable. Shakespeare tells us from the start what to expect, and the end of Romeo and Juliet is no more a surprise to us than it was to the early modern audiences who first saw it. The play’s rich afterlife also means it’s nearly impossible to make the story feel unfamiliar. This begs the question: though the play doesn’t teach us a specific lesson or relieve us of our strong emotions, does our cultural familiarity with the play take away from its emotional impact? How do performances reckon with this tragedy about time in a world where everyone knows when things will happen in the play? And how does the continued repetition, reenactment, and re-performance of Romeo and Juliet change how time works in this devastatingly “inevitable” play?
These questions are at the core of Simon Godwin’s 2021 National Theater production of Romeo and Juliet. Originally conceived as a theatrical performance, until the pandemic hit, Godwin reconceptualized the play into a film that deliberately muddies the line between the stage and cinema. Filmed over only seventeen days at the Lyttelton Theatre and clocking in at a clean ninety minutes (performing the play in its entirety is usually closer to three hours), this production feels urgent and unindulgent.
Godwin recycles old National Theater sets and costumes, which creates a sense that the production is timeless and placeless. Neither only a play or a film, the setting for this production is simply “a theater,” and the cast performs their scenes behind the stage’s curtain, in rehearsal rooms, or on a virtually naked stage. Even though this is a film, we’re always aware we’re in a theatrical space, which emphasizes the iterative nature of not only the stage, but also of Romeo and Juliet itself. It is a play that transcends the time and place it was written so completely that it has become mythic: Romeo and Juliet doesn’t need a specified setting for its tragedy to remain both inevitable and effective for audiences.
With that being said, the cultural mythos of Romeo and Juliet paired with this production’s extensive textual editing (done expertly by Emily Burns) produces a dialectical performance that makes the play’s rhythms just unrecognizable enough to a modern audience. The heavy editing means audiences can’t easily anticipate all the play’s most famous lines and scenes, producing a slightly unfamiliar pace that gets us closer to the play’s inherent off-beat rhythm. This production is a demonstration of performance scholar Diana Taylor’s assertion that performance is “a doing, a done, and a redoing” in that we are being asked to consider the play’s performance history, Godwin’s production, and how performance itself is an act of reframing and transforming what is already so familiar to us.
Godwin’s clever use of intercutting and flash-forwards, for example, demonstrates how the actions of the play problematically exist within the past, present, and future, thus creating a totalizing and inescapable tragedy. In the film, right before Romeo meets Juliet at the Capulet house, he expresses a feeling of impending doom, worried that the night’s revels will end in his own “untimely death.” Here, Godwin inserts a quick shot of the poison that Romeo will eventually take. Later, while Juliet recites her passionate “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” speech, we are simultaneously shown Romeo murdering her cousin Tybalt, his hands bloody and still. Even later still, after Juliet says goodbye to Romeo for the last time—in a scene where they repeatedly deny what time of day it is—there is a quick intercut of Juliet taking the sleeping potion.
These intercuts and flash-forwards depict Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy as being at once imaginative and prescriptive. In depicting both the action and the consequences of the action together, performances become slower, more rhythmically unstable, and less linear. In other words, our modern familiarity with Romeo and Juliet can get in the way of actually noticing the pressures of time in the play, but Godwin’s production makes the familiar unfamiliar to reacquaint audiences with the off-beat tempo of the play’s action.
And so we return to the tragedy of the line, “Thy lips are warm.” It’s a line that captures so much more than just tragedy. It is a line that intervenes in the iterative and ephemeral qualities of Romeo and Juliet’s story and its performances. It is a line that transmits memory and knowledge. It is one of the most pivotal lines in the play precisely because of how time works upon it.