1 00:00:00,540 --> 00:00:07,860 So today, let's talk about Romeo and Juliet. One of the two tragedies, the other is Titus Andronicus. 2 00:00:07,860 --> 00:00:12,460 The Shakespeare right near the beginning of his career in the early 50s, 90s. 3 00:00:12,460 --> 00:00:17,880 Then, as you well know, as he moves away from tragedy to comedies and English histories, 4 00:00:17,880 --> 00:00:22,860 comes back to tragedies with Hamlet around the time of the 17th century. 5 00:00:22,860 --> 00:00:30,910 So these are romaji that with titles ironic cause he's a bit of a kind of generic chronological kind of misfit. 6 00:00:30,910 --> 00:00:39,390 It's it comes within it at the time of comedy writing, and that may come up later in the lecture. 7 00:00:39,390 --> 00:00:49,350 So most critics would that romaji let to about 15, 1945, somewhere in between Midsummer Night's Dream and which is the second Midsummer Night's Dream, 8 00:00:49,350 --> 00:00:53,220 has obviously got the kind of Romeo Juliet parody in the pyramids. 9 00:00:53,220 --> 00:01:03,060 And this big plot, either a pre-emptive parody, if it comes before, or a kind of afterwards, parody if it comes afterwards. 10 00:01:03,060 --> 00:01:07,340 But we don't we don't exactly know. It's quite interesting to think about Romney. 11 00:01:07,340 --> 00:01:13,210 And you get formal linguistic structures, though, I think in relation to those two adjacent plays that cluster plays together. 12 00:01:13,210 --> 00:01:15,810 Midsummer Night's Dream. Romeo and Juliet. Richard. 13 00:01:15,810 --> 00:01:21,810 The second are in some ways the most formal or the most formally kind of inflected of Shakespeare's plays, 14 00:01:21,810 --> 00:01:27,780 the most obvious use of the rhyming sonnet for with Romeo Juliet, 15 00:01:27,780 --> 00:01:37,090 for instance, all the different kinds of language that the different characters use in Midsummer Night's Dream. 16 00:01:37,090 --> 00:01:42,520 And just as a sideline, maybe you think that putting plays together because of something about their poetry or something 17 00:01:42,520 --> 00:01:49,960 about how they sound might be an interesting way to group plays as opposed to what we generally do, 18 00:01:49,960 --> 00:01:56,950 which is to group them by plot broadly or by character, because we're usually in these lectures. 19 00:01:56,950 --> 00:02:03,930 I begin by giving an outline in the play of the play in the expectation that at least some of you won't have read it or seen it. 20 00:02:03,930 --> 00:02:07,190 It seems a bit pointless with Romeo and Juliet. 21 00:02:07,190 --> 00:02:13,270 And in some ways, that pointlessness, the pointlessness of some random plot, I guess, is what I want to try and talk about today. 22 00:02:13,270 --> 00:02:17,510 Would it be possible in the educated, English speaking world, not even beyond, 23 00:02:17,510 --> 00:02:26,770 I guess not to know in outline the tragedy of doomed love, as well as some of its most iconic visual and verbal moments? 24 00:02:26,770 --> 00:02:35,760 Juliet Balcony, perhaps so carefully reconstructed, and Mussolini's Italy on a likely looking mediaeval building in Verona to encourage tourism. 25 00:02:35,760 --> 00:02:38,710 It's a wonderful back projection. The invention of Verona. 26 00:02:38,710 --> 00:02:48,250 That's as the as the President and Juliet very much post states, a level that predates the plane or perhaps the famous Romeo Romeo. 27 00:02:48,250 --> 00:02:54,700 Wherefore art thou, Romeo. Amongst the thousands of parodies of this just in brackets. 28 00:02:54,700 --> 00:03:03,970 I think Southsea gay friend on YouTube is the best. If you don't know these, you should se gay friend. 29 00:03:03,970 --> 00:03:07,370 And there are imitations. But isn't there is great sassy gay friend interrupt Juliette. 30 00:03:07,370 --> 00:03:12,820 Just as she is about to kill herself over the body of Romeo asks her What are you doing? 31 00:03:12,820 --> 00:03:22,930 And gives us some home truths that this guy on Sunday, he says you're 14 years old in a mindset and gloriously he glosses her most famous line. 32 00:03:22,930 --> 00:03:29,230 It sounds to me like desperate, desperate. I'm really, really desperate. 33 00:03:29,230 --> 00:03:34,560 So Romeo and Juliet is a play we somehow already know before we encounter it. 34 00:03:34,560 --> 00:03:38,200 When we talk in a minute about whether that was always the case, 35 00:03:38,200 --> 00:03:45,610 but the play itself emphasises this quality that we already know what's going to happen in one form or feature, 36 00:03:45,610 --> 00:03:53,130 which is unique in the Shakespearean canon. That's a prologue which tells us what's going to happen. 37 00:03:53,130 --> 00:03:59,230 A spoiler in movie speak of relapses in narrative theory speak. 38 00:03:59,230 --> 00:04:04,600 So let's start by him in two households, both alike in Dignity in Fair Verona, 39 00:04:04,600 --> 00:04:13,060 where we lay our scene from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. 40 00:04:13,060 --> 00:04:15,940 From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, 41 00:04:15,940 --> 00:04:25,230 a pair of star crossed lovers take their life whose misadventure piteous overthrows duffed with that that bury their parents strife. 42 00:04:25,230 --> 00:04:29,440 The fearful passage of their death marked love and the continuance of their parent's rage, 43 00:04:29,440 --> 00:04:37,000 which put their children's and not could remove, is now the two hours traffic of our stage, 44 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:42,790 which if you with patient ears attend what here shall miss our toil, 45 00:04:42,790 --> 00:04:49,870 shall strive to mend the question, or to try to organise this lecture around is why? 46 00:04:49,870 --> 00:04:52,780 Or perhaps more importantly, to what effect? 47 00:04:52,780 --> 00:04:59,440 What does it do to our experience of the play to have this clear statement of what will happen before it begins? 48 00:04:59,440 --> 00:05:07,270 I want to kind of think about this question in terms of genre, in terms of sources, in terms of the place text to history and in terms of performance. 49 00:05:07,270 --> 00:05:15,880 In some ways, the kind of vector's I guess I always tend to. Firstly, let's think a little bit about Corrick Prologues to Shakespeare's plays. 50 00:05:15,880 --> 00:05:22,120 We get one Ed Henry, the fourth part two one in Henry, the fifth one in Troilus and Cressida, 51 00:05:22,120 --> 00:05:29,980 one in parallelise writing in their book Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre, 52 00:05:29,980 --> 00:05:37,780 Doug Forrester and Robert Wyman identify the function of the prologue as a kind of ritualised transition. 53 00:05:37,780 --> 00:05:43,840 They say it helps us transition between the turbulent world of the playhouse. 54 00:05:43,840 --> 00:05:53,190 So I guess the noise and come kerfuffle of people before they settle down and the representational world of the performers play sets, 55 00:05:53,190 --> 00:06:00,490 let alone the housemates or something like that. It warms the audience that things are about to kick off. 56 00:06:00,490 --> 00:06:05,140 About a third of extant plays in the 15 nineties have a prologue. 57 00:06:05,140 --> 00:06:09,970 And certainly by this quality evidence that by the next decade or so, the decade from say, 58 00:06:09,970 --> 00:06:14,560 sixteen hundred sixty ten prologue looks a pretty old fashioned thing to have no jokes about. 59 00:06:14,560 --> 00:06:20,200 How prologue is a sign of an old fashioned kind of a play in the fifty nineties. 60 00:06:20,200 --> 00:06:22,240 About a third of it someplace. 61 00:06:22,240 --> 00:06:30,130 Have a prologue and the other one's in Shakespeare tend to work to establish the scene to tell us about the Trojan wars, 62 00:06:30,130 --> 00:06:35,630 for example, to introduce us to to the incestuous cult of King Amchok. 63 00:06:35,630 --> 00:06:41,450 Imperatives via the mediaeval writer Galla Henry, 64 00:06:41,450 --> 00:06:50,510 the fourth part to subvert this function a little bit by making a game about what really did happen before the play begins. 65 00:06:50,510 --> 00:06:56,780 It characterises the prologue as the figure of rooma dressed in a cloak decorated with eyes and ears. 66 00:06:56,780 --> 00:07:02,870 So it kind of sets up the difficulty of knowing the historical past. 67 00:07:02,870 --> 00:07:09,010 Henry the Fifth takes up another function of both prologues and epilogues to the old movie theatre, 68 00:07:09,010 --> 00:07:13,490 a kind of negotiation with the fact of stage representation, 69 00:07:13,490 --> 00:07:21,020 a consciousness of its power and its limitations, or perhaps its power in its limitations. 70 00:07:21,020 --> 00:07:27,440 So there are a lot of different things Shakespearean purp prose can do. That's to say. But none of it does what Romeo and Juliet does. 71 00:07:27,440 --> 00:07:33,650 Preview the plot, broadly speaking, in its entirety. So one thing is clear. 72 00:07:33,650 --> 00:07:37,400 We all already know Romeo and Juliet before we come to watch it. 73 00:07:37,400 --> 00:07:46,820 We know what's coming. The play is strongly teleological, heading inexorably to a conclusion that is already strongly written and necessary. 74 00:07:46,820 --> 00:07:52,220 The chorus tells us it's only through the death of the children that the parents feud will be ended. 75 00:07:52,220 --> 00:08:01,400 So we've got to get to that point. The lovers are dead in terms of our experience of the play even before we meet them. 76 00:08:01,400 --> 00:08:06,890 They they're introduced to us only to further this fatalistic plot. 77 00:08:06,890 --> 00:08:11,420 Not only does the chorus tell us the plot outline, but it's sonnet form. 78 00:08:11,420 --> 00:08:16,940 It's forming the Shakespearean sonnet heads relentlessly towards a closing couplet 79 00:08:16,940 --> 00:08:23,990 that's full of the language of determinism and it's kind of formally deterministic. A sonnet form is not something that we expect. 80 00:08:23,990 --> 00:08:34,320 Something surprising happened at the end. So the fatal loins of the families has the idea of fated as well as fatal, meaning deadly. 81 00:08:34,320 --> 00:08:45,470 The lovers are starcrossed, their astrological fated, their misadventures meaning unlucky, their love is death market even before it begins. 82 00:08:45,470 --> 00:08:52,970 So the language, therefore, and the worldview expressed in this chorus stress, the inevitability, 83 00:08:52,970 --> 00:09:00,800 the prescriptivist, the already happen ignace of the events in the playhouse that is still to come. 84 00:09:00,800 --> 00:09:11,390 It's a clever trick of Basilone and one of a number of clever tricks. In that 1996 film to have the prologue delivered by a newscaster, the bland, 85 00:09:11,390 --> 00:09:18,650 almost formulaic structure of Shakespeare's first here and the absolute unwillingness to apportion blame, 86 00:09:18,650 --> 00:09:23,270 which is something we'll come back to, fits the reported after the fact. 87 00:09:23,270 --> 00:09:34,340 Too late to be different. Format of broadcast news. What's on the news is by definition, what's already happened and the sonnets rhythmical structure. 88 00:09:34,340 --> 00:09:37,010 Also Same's serves the same purpose. 89 00:09:37,010 --> 00:09:46,670 Those alternate and rhymes form a kind of microcosmic version of inevitability at the level of the syntax over the level of the form of the lines. 90 00:09:46,670 --> 00:09:51,380 We've got something inevitable once the pattern has been established. We're just waiting for the rhyme. 91 00:09:51,380 --> 00:09:53,900 It's like waiting for the shoe to drop. 92 00:09:53,900 --> 00:10:01,850 The rhyme comes inexorably and each positive or relatively neutral term turns bad when it's completed in the rhyme. 93 00:10:01,850 --> 00:10:11,630 Dignity becomes Mutiny's scene becomes unclean, foam's overthrows, life strong. 94 00:10:11,630 --> 00:10:18,800 So I guess what I'm saying here is that the language of the prologue, both in its formal structure and in its fatalistic content, 95 00:10:18,800 --> 00:10:25,120 serves to underline that prolacta or spoiler like presence of the opening Sunit. 96 00:10:25,120 --> 00:10:31,490 And it of course, anticipates later elements of the play which have a prophetic or practic element. 97 00:10:31,490 --> 00:10:35,990 Romeo's premonition, for example, just before the Capulet board. 98 00:10:35,990 --> 00:10:40,780 I fear too early. I think I fear too early as a sort of headline for this. 99 00:10:40,780 --> 00:10:44,830 But this play somehow I fear too early for my mind, misgauged some consequences. 100 00:10:44,830 --> 00:10:51,050 Yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin his fearful date with this night's rebels and expire. 101 00:10:51,050 --> 00:10:58,520 The term of a despised life. Close it in my breast. Quite some vile forfeit of untimely death. 102 00:10:58,520 --> 00:11:05,030 That would be wholly untimely comes, I think, about six times in this play. 103 00:11:05,030 --> 00:11:11,660 It's a play about, um, timeliness is going to go on to see. So what do we make of that? 104 00:11:11,660 --> 00:11:16,800 I guess early modern audiences and early modern readers more generally seem to 105 00:11:16,800 --> 00:11:22,340 have been less interested in shock endings or surprise fictions than we are, 106 00:11:22,340 --> 00:11:31,130 or at least and we think we are a humanist education system suspicious of novelty or invention, 107 00:11:31,130 --> 00:11:35,450 or in some ways even fiction itself was morally compromised. 108 00:11:35,450 --> 00:11:46,340 Fourth, generations of playwrights and poets that reworking translation and rewriting existing texts were the sign of the poet. 109 00:11:46,340 --> 00:11:54,920 So instead of those terms, which we might think that we we rate in our literary fiction, novelty or invention, 110 00:11:54,920 --> 00:12:02,650 we've got instead reworking translation and rewriting the intellectual environment known, of course, as in the top tier. 111 00:12:02,650 --> 00:12:04,640 And the context of imitative, 112 00:12:04,640 --> 00:12:14,660 the idea that texts were based on a whole network of other texts that you also would know was part of reader's pleasure or audience pleasure. 113 00:12:14,660 --> 00:12:23,840 Spotting the sources, feeling that you understood the kind of intellectual inheritance of a piece seems to have been what people enjoyed. 114 00:12:23,840 --> 00:12:28,280 When John Manningham goes to see Twelfth Night at Middle Temple, for instance, 115 00:12:28,280 --> 00:12:35,030 in February 16 to one of very few reference, we have references we have to a Shakespeare play in performance money. 116 00:12:35,030 --> 00:12:40,400 Description of the play is that it's like comedy of errors. Um, Plautus is Macnee. 117 00:12:40,400 --> 00:12:44,870 So the tone of the diary entry doesn't seem to be Yerby. Are you all that before? 118 00:12:44,870 --> 00:12:51,050 Seems to be that that's a source of pleasure and reinforcement for him and for the play that it's got this inheritance, 119 00:12:51,050 --> 00:12:59,990 it's got this legacy, and he can recognise it longer narratives in this period often had Intermedia plot summaries. 120 00:12:59,990 --> 00:13:04,430 Think of those short verses that precede the cantos of Spenser's fairy preened, 121 00:13:04,430 --> 00:13:08,240 for instance, suggesting that the pleasure of reading was not in the surprise, 122 00:13:08,240 --> 00:13:16,040 surprising fulfilment of seeing how things might turn out, but enjoying the variations on an established theme. 123 00:13:16,040 --> 00:13:21,860 Maybe we're not actually so far from this ourselves. Watch any movie trailer and it's pretty self-evident. 124 00:13:21,860 --> 00:13:28,190 What is going to happen? And those Internet lists of movie clichés show how much of our own mass entertainment 125 00:13:28,190 --> 00:13:33,620 is enjoyable precisely because it operates within existing narrative paradigms. 126 00:13:33,620 --> 00:13:39,710 If a movie hero has a sidekick and he mentions his family in the first two minutes of the film, the sidekick will be killed, 127 00:13:39,710 --> 00:13:46,280 especially if he has a picture of his family on his desk, and especially if there is a golden Labrador involved. 128 00:13:46,280 --> 00:13:50,960 This is one of my favourites. A hero will show no pain even during the most horrific beating. 129 00:13:50,960 --> 00:14:00,350 Yet he will always wince when a woman attempts to clean a facial wound. 130 00:14:00,350 --> 00:14:07,220 But in larger plot points to how often do you really go to a forum or read a novel when you can't imagine how it's going to end? 131 00:14:07,220 --> 00:14:14,990 So the spoiler of Romeo and Juliet is related to ideas about the low cultural status of originality and surprise in the early modern period. 132 00:14:14,990 --> 00:14:20,900 But we might feel that those elements are not so common in mass entertainment anymore. 133 00:14:20,900 --> 00:14:27,440 The second point, perhaps about spoilers is more specifically generic is something about tragedy. 134 00:14:27,440 --> 00:14:33,080 And I want to spend a little bit of time with a French playwright of the mid 20th century. 135 00:14:33,080 --> 00:14:45,440 John onWe only wrote a version of the Greek tragedy Antiquity, which was presented in occupied Paris in 1944. 136 00:14:45,440 --> 00:14:53,100 He adds into the play in the voice of the chorus, something which is not at all present in Sophocles is original, 137 00:14:53,100 --> 00:14:59,120 a kind of disquisition on the nature of tragedy. So here he is. 138 00:14:59,120 --> 00:15:03,050 I've accepted it, but it's still quite long. But you'll get you'll get the drift of it. 139 00:15:03,050 --> 00:15:07,610 Here's only on tragedy. The spring is wound up tight. 140 00:15:07,610 --> 00:15:14,000 It will uncoil of itself. This is what is so convenient in tragedy. 141 00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:19,010 The leaves little turn of the rest will do the job. Anything will set it going. 142 00:15:19,010 --> 00:15:24,590 The rest is automatic. You don't need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order. 143 00:15:24,590 --> 00:15:30,290 It has been oiled since time began and it runs without friction. 144 00:15:30,290 --> 00:15:34,820 Tragedy is clean. It is restful. It is flawless. 145 00:15:34,820 --> 00:15:41,120 It has nothing to do with melodrama, with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, Avengers, 146 00:15:41,120 --> 00:15:51,320 sudden revelations and eleventh hour repentance is death in a melodrama is really horrible because it is never inevitable. 147 00:15:51,320 --> 00:15:58,830 The feel of father might so easily have been saved. The honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier. 148 00:15:58,830 --> 00:16:05,300 Interesting thing about that distinction only matters between melodrama and tragedy and whether that's useful for thinking about Romeo and Juliet. 149 00:16:05,300 --> 00:16:11,300 This is only just finished. In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. 150 00:16:11,300 --> 00:16:16,880 That makes for tranquillity. There is a sort of fellow feeling amongst characters in a tragedy. 151 00:16:16,880 --> 00:16:22,820 He who kills is as innocent to see who gets killed. It's all a matter of what part you're playing. 152 00:16:22,820 --> 00:16:29,690 Tragedy is restful. And the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing has no part in it. 153 00:16:29,690 --> 00:16:37,010 There isn't any hope. So I think what's interesting about this part of this play in relation to our discussion 154 00:16:37,010 --> 00:16:42,440 of Romeo Juliet is clearly that it's heavily invested in tragedy as inevitable, 155 00:16:42,440 --> 00:16:50,330 inexorable, unstoppable. There's something mechanical about it, even in the language whose only use is the spring on coils. 156 00:16:50,330 --> 00:16:56,420 The machine has been oiled. It's like one of those elaborate patterns of dominoes set up by a single nudge. 157 00:16:56,420 --> 00:17:01,100 There's nothing you can do. What to do its thing. Nothing is in doubt. 158 00:17:01,100 --> 00:17:05,570 Everyone's destiny is known as only. That makes tragedy restful. 159 00:17:05,570 --> 00:17:10,910 There's no striving, no uncertainty, none of the stress of hoping it might actually turn out for the best. 160 00:17:10,910 --> 00:17:17,390 Sit back and enjoy it. They're all going to die and there's nothing anyone can do. 161 00:17:17,390 --> 00:17:23,660 No sense that tragedy is somehow streamlined. Li Inevitable is one of the things which is often said about it as a genre. 162 00:17:23,660 --> 00:17:26,910 So it's an ideological as well as a formal construct. 163 00:17:26,910 --> 00:17:33,830 It's a view of the tragic world in which human agency is so reduced as to be almost non-existent. 164 00:17:33,830 --> 00:17:40,910 You've got this machine. You've got some kind of machine like world where there's absolute tranquillity and nothing for people to do. 165 00:17:40,910 --> 00:17:44,940 It's a very passive kind of manifesto. 166 00:17:44,940 --> 00:17:54,980 I think on these Antigonish Susan Snyder has a great take on this in her book, The Cosmic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies. 167 00:17:54,980 --> 00:18:01,610 This is the balance book pick out of that book. She argues that the tragic world is governed by inevitability. 168 00:18:01,610 --> 00:18:09,110 The conflict between human and cosmic law. The contradictions inherent in the individual and or his or her circumstances. 169 00:18:09,110 --> 00:18:13,220 So that's that's a principle of inevitability. There's no turning back. 170 00:18:13,220 --> 00:18:20,840 There is no alternative. There is no path not taken. There's no this this is a view of tragedy which doesn't really allow for one of those kind of 171 00:18:20,840 --> 00:18:25,670 moments of choice where you choose you choose to be tragic or you could turn away from it. 172 00:18:25,670 --> 00:18:29,740 It's a sense that tragedy is tragedy right from the beginning. 173 00:18:29,740 --> 00:18:37,760 And Snyder gives us the useful contrasting principle of equitability as the condition of comedy. 174 00:18:37,760 --> 00:18:42,020 Comedy, she notes, rewards, opportunism and pragmatism. 175 00:18:42,020 --> 00:18:51,530 Comedy twists and turns to avoid obstacles and to come to a redemptive or a procreative conclusion. 176 00:18:51,530 --> 00:18:58,190 So inexorability, therefore, the already nowness, that identifying is one major feature of romantic lietz chorus. 177 00:18:58,190 --> 00:19:08,380 Is in fact, the hallmark of tragedy. So. Now, it's easy to see the appeal of this for only in the context of occupied France in 1944. 178 00:19:08,380 --> 00:19:13,590 The lot at stake and say bad things happen and there's nothing humans can do about it. 179 00:19:13,590 --> 00:19:18,690 But there are a number of important modern takes on Shakespearean tragedy which do something similar, 180 00:19:18,690 --> 00:19:27,300 which really stress inevitability that the impossibility of turning this tragedy into anything different right from the start. 181 00:19:27,300 --> 00:19:32,160 Top of my list, I guess, would be the opening sequence of Orson Welles film of Othello, 182 00:19:32,160 --> 00:19:36,600 which begins with the funeral march of Othello and Desdemona on the Cyprus battlements. 183 00:19:36,600 --> 00:19:43,050 And he Argo captured and taken off the punishment. It's all over before it's begun, says Welles. 184 00:19:43,050 --> 00:19:47,130 Just like the Romeo and Juliet chorus. Don't get your hopes up that it can be any different. 185 00:19:47,130 --> 00:19:51,150 Now settle down. Watch it unfold in horrific car crash. 186 00:19:51,150 --> 00:19:55,140 Car crash. Slow motion. So Welles is Othello like Romeo and Juliet? 187 00:19:55,140 --> 00:20:01,280 Chorus clearly sees tragedy within an entirely fatalistic working. 188 00:20:01,280 --> 00:20:08,570 So is tragedy, John, in which the human capacity to affect his or her situation is undermined? 189 00:20:08,570 --> 00:20:13,250 I think questions of agency, human agency and tragedy are really important. 190 00:20:13,250 --> 00:20:21,470 Electrum Beth really goes into that theme. And perhaps the popularity of tragedy as an early modern form reflects a cultural, 191 00:20:21,470 --> 00:20:26,130 historical interest from the question of agency philosophies of causation move 192 00:20:26,130 --> 00:20:32,180 in this period from providential geocentric ideas of mediaeval Christianity. 193 00:20:32,180 --> 00:20:39,740 Things happen because God makes them happen via Machiavelli, unflinching stress on human ingenuity and significance, 194 00:20:39,740 --> 00:20:48,560 and come out somewhere around the philosopher Thomas Hobbes writing his theory of the social contract and Leviathan in the Civil War. 195 00:20:48,560 --> 00:20:58,070 Things happen because humans individually and collectively behave in particular self-interested ways. 196 00:20:58,070 --> 00:21:04,250 Perhaps the Romeo and Juliet prologue also has an agenda for its own fatalistic world view. 197 00:21:04,250 --> 00:21:10,700 At the end of the play, the prince announces some shall be pardoned and some punish, 198 00:21:10,700 --> 00:21:17,450 and some shall be pardoned and some punish and not really clear who is in which camp. 199 00:21:17,450 --> 00:21:22,810 But the suggestion that one of the important things to do at the end of the play is to mete out temporal 200 00:21:22,810 --> 00:21:29,930 judicial punishment does suggest that human agents can be held responsible for what has happened. 201 00:21:29,930 --> 00:21:36,760 There is lots to say, less of a star crossed lovers faithful Loynes misadventure, Pythias overthrow by to the end of the play. 202 00:21:36,760 --> 00:21:41,450 Than there is to the beginning. If it was always going to be like that. 203 00:21:41,450 --> 00:21:48,680 It's hard to blame any particular and probably minor character for making it happen in a story written in the stars. 204 00:21:48,680 --> 00:21:54,510 Can you really blame the apothecary for bringing the poison? 205 00:21:54,510 --> 00:22:00,160 So Romeo and Juliet is already written in some metaphysical sense because that's the genre of tragedy. 206 00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:07,420 And in a more local sense, it's already written. Because as these lectures always end up saying, the story pre-exist Shakespeare, 207 00:22:07,420 --> 00:22:14,980 there are undoubtedly stories of lovers on opposite sides of some human divide, which means they are doomed in cultures across the world. 208 00:22:14,980 --> 00:22:21,850 And long before the Renaissance. But the direct saw Shakespeare is using is the long poem by Arthur Brooke. 209 00:22:21,850 --> 00:22:31,390 Translated from the Italian under the title The Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet, published in 50 62. 210 00:22:31,390 --> 00:22:38,230 Brooks poem also starts with a sonnet. That's quite a useful time to put alongside Shakespeare's chorus. 211 00:22:38,230 --> 00:22:47,830 Here's Brooke. Love hath inflamed Twain by sudden sight and both to grant the thing that both desire. 212 00:22:47,830 --> 00:22:51,220 They wed in shrift by counsel of a friar. 213 00:22:51,220 --> 00:23:01,060 Young Romeos climbs fair Juliet bar by night three months he doth enjoy his chief delight by Tebartz rage provoked and ire. 214 00:23:01,060 --> 00:23:07,270 He paid death to Tybalt for his higher banished man escapes by secret flight. 215 00:23:07,270 --> 00:23:12,280 New marriages offered to his wife. She drinks a drink that seems to relieve her breath. 216 00:23:12,280 --> 00:23:18,100 They bury her that sleeping yet half life. Her husband hears the tidings of her death. 217 00:23:18,100 --> 00:23:26,170 He drinks his Baim and she with Romeo's knife. When she awakes herself, alas, she slay. 218 00:23:26,170 --> 00:23:30,610 Perhaps this helps us to see two things more clearly about Shakespeare's version. 219 00:23:30,610 --> 00:23:35,890 Firstly, Brooke gives a lot more detail about how how this plot is going to happen and the order of events. 220 00:23:35,890 --> 00:23:43,960 And still some of the details are different from Shakespeare. But he makes it pretty clear that the blame for this is really on the couple themselves. 221 00:23:43,960 --> 00:23:55,330 Their behaviour leads to their downfall. It's the twain who have done certain things which then has consequences. 222 00:23:55,330 --> 00:24:01,990 But none of that fated or starcrossed language of Shakespeare's opening chorus. 223 00:24:01,990 --> 00:24:09,610 Even the two different sonnet forms point this out. You see, Brooke is writing a kind of sonnet with no final couplet. 224 00:24:09,610 --> 00:24:13,510 So there's even in the form of that poem. 225 00:24:13,510 --> 00:24:21,280 It's less inexorable, is less teleological. So while Shakespeare may have taken the idea of having an argument, 226 00:24:21,280 --> 00:24:28,350 an outline from Brook, he changes the motivation for this tragedy quite distinctly. 227 00:24:28,350 --> 00:24:35,620 Broks prefatory material to Romeo and Juliet is all moralistic, largely anti Catholic. 228 00:24:35,620 --> 00:24:43,030 The message is that young people should do what their parents say and they should have nothing whatsoever to do with Fryer's. 229 00:24:43,030 --> 00:24:47,800 Brooks poem as a whole is more sympathetic to the lovers than the initial framework. 230 00:24:47,800 --> 00:24:51,610 But we can see that Shakespeare throws out this didactic notion. 231 00:24:51,610 --> 00:24:55,450 It would be it would be pretty perverse to generate from the plot of Romeo and Juliet. 232 00:24:55,450 --> 00:25:06,310 The message. Do what your parents tell you. The unexplained and therefore unjustified family feud, not the changeable and distant parents sorry, 233 00:25:06,310 --> 00:25:10,300 the unexplained and therefore unjustifiable and unjustified family feud, 234 00:25:10,300 --> 00:25:16,160 nor the changeable and distant parents are not presented by Shakespeare as sources of moral authority. 235 00:25:16,160 --> 00:25:20,560 This is not a play which says your parents no backs the parents, their best friend. 236 00:25:20,560 --> 00:25:26,350 Quite the opposite. But it's interesting to see that Shakespeare can change the framework for the tragedy. 237 00:25:26,350 --> 00:25:28,600 He can take out that moralistic element, 238 00:25:28,600 --> 00:25:34,930 but he can't transform it so completely that the lovers escape their families and live happily ever after in Mantua. 239 00:25:34,930 --> 00:25:40,810 Perhaps the tragedy retains its own inexorable shape. 240 00:25:40,810 --> 00:25:47,620 The fatal law here is not just one of genre in general, but of the source in particular. 241 00:25:47,620 --> 00:25:55,480 The standard line on how Shakespeare uses his sources is that he transforms them from present dross into poetic gold. 242 00:25:55,480 --> 00:26:02,470 And what this may often be true, it's also the case that he is rarely able majorly to reshape them. 243 00:26:02,470 --> 00:26:07,270 The source seems to already trace out the narrative arc in a way that's irresistible. 244 00:26:07,270 --> 00:26:17,080 He gets King Lear is the only important exception to that. So Romeo and Juliet is overdetermined by many proceeding's structures of both genre. 245 00:26:17,080 --> 00:26:26,290 The idea of tragedy and of source. The outcome of the young love in Brooks, Romeo and Juliet. 246 00:26:26,290 --> 00:26:35,140 Maybe it starts to look as if this issue of hobbled or compromised agency is as much a feature of the playwright as all of his characters. 247 00:26:35,140 --> 00:26:46,420 They are all playing out to cosmically preordained script with none of that equitability that Snyder identifies as the roadmap for comedy. 248 00:26:46,420 --> 00:26:50,290 So the chorus follows the source and diverts from it in some interesting ways. 249 00:26:50,290 --> 00:26:57,910 Maybe we can think about the relation between the if the source and the play as parallel to that between the chorus and the play. 250 00:26:57,910 --> 00:27:03,910 Each of the first terms, Saltum and chorus is prolific, anticipatory, pre-emptive. 251 00:27:03,910 --> 00:27:09,720 It sets out the ground that the following term the play has to follow. 252 00:27:09,720 --> 00:27:18,610 Maybe we could think about this rhetorically. The great rhetorical term, which is called History on Protozoan, is still on the programme. 253 00:27:18,610 --> 00:27:23,410 That's your task to this week. It can find an opportunity to up. 254 00:27:23,410 --> 00:27:32,080 So historian Protozoan George Putnam, who is the most interesting early modern anatomist and rhetorical figure, 255 00:27:32,080 --> 00:27:37,000 defines it in fifteen eighty nine in this way. Another man of disordered speech. 256 00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:42,850 We call it in English proverb the cart before the horse. 257 00:27:42,850 --> 00:27:46,720 The Greeks call it historian protoje wrong. We name it that. 258 00:27:46,720 --> 00:27:55,150 Preposterous, as he said. My dame that bred me up and bammy in her womb, whereas the bearing is before the bringing up. 259 00:27:55,150 --> 00:27:59,080 So historian Protozoan is the cart before the horse. 260 00:27:59,080 --> 00:28:07,380 Putting something that should come afterwards before her. 261 00:28:07,380 --> 00:28:12,120 Shakespeare later plays with the old patriarchs like Lear or Pericles or Prospero. 262 00:28:12,120 --> 00:28:14,070 And the sense of looking back over a long, 263 00:28:14,070 --> 00:28:21,360 perhaps too long life both within the plays and in the kind of retrospective these plays cast on Shakespeare's previous plays. 264 00:28:21,360 --> 00:28:26,040 These are often discussed in terms of relatedness. 265 00:28:26,040 --> 00:28:34,140 Perhaps we could use that same chronological model to see Shakespeare's early plays as being about earliness or about something premature. 266 00:28:34,140 --> 00:28:37,620 Something that doesn't yet have the chance to develop. 267 00:28:37,620 --> 00:28:46,470 Let's take earliness like lateness as a theme of the plays rather than just a factual condition of their writing. 268 00:28:46,470 --> 00:28:52,560 Some of the ideas that later literary shocked the errors have generated about the concept of juvenilia might be helpful here. 269 00:28:52,560 --> 00:28:59,430 Shakespeare isn't a juvenile writing this play. Probably about 30. He is new to the theatre, relatively speaking. 270 00:28:59,430 --> 00:29:09,930 And he is writing about very young people. Those are the elements of this play are about being premature, about coming too soon. 271 00:29:09,930 --> 00:29:16,800 The pun is somehow unavoidable. This is a play with a kind of structural premature ejaculation. 272 00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:23,640 Consummation is too quick, wrongly placed. Actually, having sex in Shakespeare's plays is pretty fatal. 273 00:29:23,640 --> 00:29:31,440 It's hard to think of a single character, particularly a female one who has sex in Shakespearean, doesn't quite quickly die of it. 274 00:29:31,440 --> 00:29:33,930 And so we can see that that is a problem in the play. 275 00:29:33,930 --> 00:29:40,170 Comedies work as comedies by sublimating sex into wordplay and leaving us at the door of the bedchamber, 276 00:29:40,170 --> 00:29:43,800 which is my measure for measure and all's well, which don't conform to that. 277 00:29:43,800 --> 00:29:49,080 So challenging here in Romeo and Juliet. What should be at the end of the play? 278 00:29:49,080 --> 00:29:55,270 Its confirmation is brought into the middle and so there's no way good for the plate to go. 279 00:29:55,270 --> 00:29:59,160 We might compare this briefly to that contemporaneous play, Midsummer Night's Dream. 280 00:29:59,160 --> 00:30:02,940 I mentioned to start at the beginning of Midsummer Night's Dream. 281 00:30:02,940 --> 00:30:10,610 Theseus is impatient to be married and the whole play is a kind of pretext or time filler so that the time of his marriage, 282 00:30:10,610 --> 00:30:16,020 Hippolyta and the night time when that marriage will be probably consummated can be filled up. 283 00:30:16,020 --> 00:30:22,640 This is all time-wasting before Theseus can get his marriage and half his marriage night. 284 00:30:22,640 --> 00:30:31,230 So that's a play about waiting and remind you that I guess as a player around the same time is about being unable to wait. 285 00:30:31,230 --> 00:30:37,770 Romeo Juliet is a play that can't wait. The chorus already spills out the story even before we settled into our seats. 286 00:30:37,770 --> 00:30:43,620 Juliet is only 13, even though she's talked about and has not yet been 14. 287 00:30:43,620 --> 00:30:50,640 Even that's the kind of anticipatory youth are kind of trying to get to 41 when the point is that she's not. 288 00:30:50,640 --> 00:30:58,050 Her father tells Parish First House Parish she won't be married until she's older, then reconsiders and arranges that she'll be married within days. 289 00:30:58,050 --> 00:31:03,390 The play's timescale escalates. What day is it? Juliet's father asks Paris Monday. 290 00:31:03,390 --> 00:31:09,000 Well, Wednesday is too soon, says Capulet, before setting the marriage date for Thursday. 291 00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:14,150 Do you like this? Everything in this place in a rush. 292 00:31:14,150 --> 00:31:19,530 Juliet cannot wait for Romeo to arrive. Famous soliloquy of hers gallop apace. 293 00:31:19,530 --> 00:31:29,890 You fiery footed steeds towards Phoebus. Lodging such a wagoner as fate would whip you to the west and bringing cloudy, cloudy night immediately. 294 00:31:29,890 --> 00:31:34,800 The rhythms here are clearly impatient and breathless. The inverted footprint begins. 295 00:31:34,800 --> 00:31:40,700 The soliloquy with a Trocaire is not an item, so it's stressed, unstressed rather than unstressed, 296 00:31:40,700 --> 00:31:44,870 stressed, which we associate with their are and stretches on the first syllable. 297 00:31:44,870 --> 00:31:54,750 Gallop Kievan. The language is in a hurry, and Juliet's own image for her impatience understands that it is not just that she is too eager 298 00:31:54,750 --> 00:32:01,470 for Romeo's arrival there and then but there she is actually too eager for this adult experience. 299 00:32:01,470 --> 00:32:07,350 So tedious is this day, as is the night before some festival to an impatient child. 300 00:32:07,350 --> 00:32:14,790 The tough new robes and may not wear her hurts her kind of go to image for what it's like to want 301 00:32:14,790 --> 00:32:20,340 something and not be able to have it yet is that you've got new clothes and you can't wear them. 302 00:32:20,340 --> 00:32:26,900 Similarly, it's from childhood experience and it movingly captures the gap between the present and the hurried future, 303 00:32:26,900 --> 00:32:31,620 the kind of foreclosed future to which Juliet is committing herself. 304 00:32:31,620 --> 00:32:37,860 We used to assume that because Shakespeare must have intended this play to represent high romantic love, 305 00:32:37,860 --> 00:32:42,450 early teen age was a normal time to be married. 306 00:32:42,450 --> 00:32:52,460 That was an assumption based on a few the evidence of a few very young betrothal in noble families as a sign of long term dynastic alliances. 307 00:32:52,460 --> 00:32:58,560 But in fact, the average age for marriage in the fifty nineties was probably only slightly lower than it is now. 308 00:32:58,560 --> 00:33:05,560 Around the mid twenties. It's clear that everyone who was watching this play would have thought that Juliet. 309 00:33:05,560 --> 00:33:09,650 And we don't know Romeo's age, but there's no sense of a particular age gap. 310 00:33:09,650 --> 00:33:14,030 Everybody would have thought, too, that he's too young for this. 311 00:33:14,030 --> 00:33:21,050 And it's also clear that her age is really emphasised, which is really important to the play, that we know how old she is. 312 00:33:21,050 --> 00:33:29,790 And you can count the number of characters in Shakespeare whose age is told to us probably on the fingers of one hand. 313 00:33:29,790 --> 00:33:36,150 Her age is emphasise course by that great comic monologue by the nurse about her weaning and the earthquake. 314 00:33:36,150 --> 00:33:43,240 So Putnam's term historian approach Iran is developmental as well as rhetorical and structural. 315 00:33:43,240 --> 00:33:49,320 The cart has come before the horse. It's psychological or psychosexual development as well as in structural ways. 316 00:33:49,320 --> 00:33:54,000 The chorus's spoiler serves as a Mårten improv play, which is always ahead of itself. 317 00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:58,830 Always precocious, too much, too soon, too impatient. 318 00:33:58,830 --> 00:34:04,830 Even that two hours traffic of our stage sets the clock ticking. 319 00:34:04,830 --> 00:34:11,610 It's hard to think that the play could ever have been over quite so fast. That adds to its hectic quality. 320 00:34:11,610 --> 00:34:15,900 Maybe this gives us a way to see the play as a whole. The chorus doesn't just tell us what's going to happen. 321 00:34:15,900 --> 00:34:23,790 It enacts that tumbling forward. It is the hysterically stare on protozoan that is endemic to this play in Merman's film. 322 00:34:23,790 --> 00:34:33,630 In other, DiCaprio plays in Romeo, who likably Gorki and Clumsy, running around in an overgrown, uncoordinated adolescent kind of way. 323 00:34:33,630 --> 00:34:39,390 It's a good cinematic attempt to humanise a character who can seem a bit two dimensional more than a bit. 324 00:34:39,390 --> 00:34:45,000 But it's also a way to humanise the plot or to embody the plot in physical action. 325 00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:49,230 The plot is Helter-Skelter too quick. It needs to slow down. 326 00:34:49,230 --> 00:34:53,340 Friar Lawrence says sagely, wisely and slow. 327 00:34:53,340 --> 00:35:01,840 They stumble that run fast, even though, unfortunately, in his other hand, he has the starting pistol tragedy. 328 00:35:01,840 --> 00:35:03,450 OK, so so far we've talked about haste. 329 00:35:03,450 --> 00:35:13,020 Anticipation collapses as part of the play's incorporation of or reflection on its own relation to its sources and to its metter story. 330 00:35:13,020 --> 00:35:18,780 The genre of tragedy. There are a couple of other points to try make before the end of the lecture. 331 00:35:18,780 --> 00:35:26,070 The first is about comedy and the second is about what the play's like without the chorus. 332 00:35:26,070 --> 00:35:33,690 It's a bit of a critical cliché to say that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that fails to be accommodated by a matter of minutes. 333 00:35:33,690 --> 00:35:37,000 Although it is appropriate to the rush that I've been describing, 334 00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:45,150 that Romeo kills himself just a bit too quickly to realise that Juliet is not actually dead. 335 00:35:45,150 --> 00:35:51,690 Susan Snyder argues, though, that this is a play that becomes rather than is tragic. 336 00:35:51,690 --> 00:36:00,930 It becomes rather than is tragic. And there are lots of ways in which women, Juliet, seems to be built on a comic frame. 337 00:36:00,930 --> 00:36:09,980 Young people programme towards romantic love coupledom and ultimate reproduction are figures from comedy. 338 00:36:09,980 --> 00:36:16,110 Their disapproving parents in Romeo Juliet take up the archetypal role of blocking figures, 339 00:36:16,110 --> 00:36:24,000 those anti comic figures who are always persuaded or ultimately circumvented by comic plotting. 340 00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:30,260 Comedy tends to see the young young win out or supersede their elders in the whole point about comedies. 341 00:36:30,260 --> 00:36:34,050 It's about regeneration and a kind of social progress. 342 00:36:34,050 --> 00:36:40,490 It's a comedy belongs to the children, not to the parents. 343 00:36:40,490 --> 00:36:45,100 It makes some someone that scream, which is referred to before as a kind of useful comparison. 344 00:36:45,100 --> 00:36:50,400 It it see, Midsummer Night's Dream is another father who is dead set against his daughter's choice in marriage. 345 00:36:50,400 --> 00:36:56,200 But his objections are simply overruled as the play comes to its multiple comic marital ending. 346 00:36:56,200 --> 00:37:02,790 We might think the prince in Romeo Juliet for the undeveloped figure to be particularly weak figure in a way. 347 00:37:02,790 --> 00:37:07,200 But there he is. He's being primed to step in and say, let's stop this. 348 00:37:07,200 --> 00:37:14,400 We're not having any more of it, although that doesn't happen. It's exactly what does happen in Midsummer Night's Dream. 349 00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:24,690 When Theseus overrules Jess McHugh shows staff itself a consequence of Romeo's awkward and hasty intervention into the 350 00:37:24,690 --> 00:37:34,530 fight with Tybalt is often cited as the point at which the play stops being a comedy and turns inexorably towards tragedy. 351 00:37:34,530 --> 00:37:41,670 In fact, both lovers must leave aside their comic companions. The nurse and McHugh show an end to that lonely world. 352 00:37:41,670 --> 00:37:45,570 That is the precursor of tragedy we see in the play a busy, 353 00:37:45,570 --> 00:37:55,740 sociable world of the play's opening or of the party perhaps narrowing to the claustrophobia of the Capulet, too. 354 00:37:55,740 --> 00:38:00,630 So this is a trap. If this is a tragedy, Bill Snyder would have it on a comic matrix. 355 00:38:00,630 --> 00:38:07,440 Perhaps the purpose of the chorus is more pointedly pre-emptive. It might look as if this could all turn out well. 356 00:38:07,440 --> 00:38:13,740 But you've already heard that it won't. You might be all churned up and anxious. 357 00:38:13,740 --> 00:38:17,460 But on this point, we know what's going to happen. Tragedy is restful. 358 00:38:17,460 --> 00:38:24,750 It's reinstated by the fact that the chorus or perhaps the cosmic conclusion is borne out. 359 00:38:24,750 --> 00:38:31,430 Marriage is transformed here into a kind of country made. And with that, some of that is out there in the tube. 360 00:38:31,430 --> 00:38:43,250 The idea that death is a bridegroom. So maybe the place gestures towards comedy are all written out in a in a grey, more sombre form. 361 00:38:43,250 --> 00:38:53,810 Or maybe they're always contained in the narrative that's foreclosed on a conclusion by having the courts tell us what's going to happen. 362 00:38:53,810 --> 00:38:59,740 So my final point is what happens when the chorus doesn't tell us that? 363 00:38:59,740 --> 00:39:05,800 Romeo and Juliet is an interesting play. Textually it exists in a quarter of 15 '97. 364 00:39:05,800 --> 00:39:13,750 And another of 15. Ninety nine. These two quarters are substantively different from each other. 365 00:39:13,750 --> 00:39:16,450 And if you actually want to work on this most familiar of plays, 366 00:39:16,450 --> 00:39:23,800 there's some really helpful de familiarisation about looking at the two texts alongside each other. 367 00:39:23,800 --> 00:39:31,540 The arguments about whether the differences between Q1 50, 97 and Q2 50, 99 record authority, revision, 368 00:39:31,540 --> 00:39:38,110 adaptation for performance or simply errors in transmission are still unresolved, probably unresolvable. 369 00:39:38,110 --> 00:39:43,010 But if you look at the text in parallel, we can pinpoint what's specific to each version. 370 00:39:43,010 --> 00:39:52,000 And not least because in the cases of King Lear and Hamlet, we've seen a certain editorial scrupulousness in how to keep the text clearly separate. 371 00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:56,950 Not to conflate them into one kind of super text. 372 00:39:56,950 --> 00:39:59,640 It's interesting to think how why Romeo and Juliet hasn't have that, 373 00:39:59,640 --> 00:40:07,630 when what modern medicines of romantic that tend to do is to pick and choose from the two early versions where they think it's preferable. 374 00:40:07,630 --> 00:40:12,130 So disaggregating is looking at them separately. 375 00:40:12,130 --> 00:40:17,050 I think is a really interesting thing to do. A key one is shorter by about a fifth. 376 00:40:17,050 --> 00:40:22,750 It probably could fit into two hours. Its opening prologue is 12, not 14 lines. 377 00:40:22,750 --> 00:40:28,840 Juliet's row is particularly diminished in Q1. So if you're interested in any of those things, looking at the to text is interesting. 378 00:40:28,840 --> 00:40:33,220 But the point I wanted to embalm is not a part about the differences between Q1 and Q2, 379 00:40:33,220 --> 00:40:39,650 but about one difference in the Foleo tax for the Foleo tax was published in the Posthumus complete works of sixteen twenty three. 380 00:40:39,650 --> 00:40:43,810 It has no independent authority. It doesn't have any other information in it. 381 00:40:43,810 --> 00:40:48,940 So it's not particularly interesting editorially, except in one distinct feature. 382 00:40:48,940 --> 00:40:59,050 It has no opening chorus. So scratch everything said no spoiler, no prolapsed, no histone on programme. 383 00:40:59,050 --> 00:41:02,840 Now the reasons that the FOLIA does not have the chorus to Romeo and Juliet are 384 00:41:02,840 --> 00:41:09,870 set almost certainly practically attributable to some kind of textual mistake. 385 00:41:09,870 --> 00:41:19,750 Typically, Stern has argued brilliantly about how certain elements of play texts, particularly songs, prologues and epilogues, were porous, 386 00:41:19,750 --> 00:41:24,400 separable bits of the overall play script quite likely to get detached, 387 00:41:24,400 --> 00:41:29,860 replaced or omitted depending on the occasion that she elements that they're not integral to. 388 00:41:29,860 --> 00:41:37,180 The place which can impact us is that the play script itself is not an integrated and autonomous unit. 389 00:41:37,180 --> 00:41:43,240 So the question of why the prologue is missing is probably a theatre, historical or a textual one. 390 00:41:43,240 --> 00:41:49,890 The question of why it might matter is more about topic today and more literary or interpretive wonder. 391 00:41:49,890 --> 00:41:54,850 And the fact that one early version of the play does exist without this element 392 00:41:54,850 --> 00:42:00,670 perhaps makes my opening question a bit more pertinent and a bit less hypothetical. 393 00:42:00,670 --> 00:42:06,580 How is the Folio? Romeo and Juliet different from the quartos by not having this chorus? 394 00:42:06,580 --> 00:42:13,900 Is it less deterministic? Is there more chance for the for the characters to take on these roles and do something with them? 395 00:42:13,900 --> 00:42:22,410 Is it less assured? Is it less relaxing in always terms? Could we be watching a play which we well, we genuinely don't know what's going to happen. 396 00:42:22,410 --> 00:42:29,320 There's been a long history from the 18th century onwards, a performing Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending or alternating a happy ending, 397 00:42:29,320 --> 00:42:34,700 Romeo and Juliet with a tragic ending on alternate nights. 398 00:42:34,700 --> 00:42:40,450 There is a kind of wish for this play to work out. Well, I'm playing with the end of the play. 399 00:42:40,450 --> 00:42:46,780 Playing with the sequence by which Romeo and Juliet die is absolutely endemic in almost every production. 400 00:42:46,780 --> 00:42:56,080 C11 do that. Do that too. So is it more comic or more evitable, that principle of Snider's, that things could go in different directions? 401 00:42:56,080 --> 00:42:58,300 Is it less tragic? 402 00:42:58,300 --> 00:43:08,710 It's worth reviewing some of what we've said today about the chorus and the work that it does in the light of the photos publication without it. 403 00:43:08,710 --> 00:43:13,270 Is it possible to get a sharper sense of the work that that short prefatory verse does? 404 00:43:13,270 --> 00:43:19,270 The text of Romeo and Juliet, with which we are also overfamiliar when we look at the fact that it isn't that in the 60s, 405 00:43:19,270 --> 00:43:27,850 23 Foleo and in fact is not part of the play in published editions for about one hundred years after that. 406 00:43:27,850 --> 00:43:35,110 Okay, so finish up, Ben. I've been talking about Rome and Juliet in terms of over determinism, fatalism, already written. 407 00:43:35,110 --> 00:43:41,900 Nice. I've tried to introduce Putnam's lovely figure of the preposterous or disordered speech historian approach 408 00:43:41,900 --> 00:43:50,920 Protozoan and talk a bit more about this next week when the play I'm going to be working on is Julius Caesar. 409 00:43:50,920 --> 00:43:57,310 I think I want to ask something about the walk-On part of Cinner, the poet in the spirit of the plot. 410 00:43:57,310 --> 00:44:02,900 Spoiler with. We've been concerned today. Let's say it's in, but he doesn't walk off. 411 00:44:02,900 --> 00:44:15,172 And I want to try and use this cameo from Julius Caesar to think about writing poetry and what the Roman world means for Shakespeare.