Romeo and Juliet

On Teaching, Divorce, and the Comforts of Art

I wrote this essay 90 percent of the way to completion back in April or May. It’s been sitting as a draft ever since, and it’s high time to clear the decks. Hope you enjoy it.

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You wake up with a headache, a real frontal lobe throbber. It’s six-thirty a.m., and spring is fanfaring its way through the windows, bright and green.

Coffee doesn’t quell the headache. Maybe you forgot your Claritin? At 7:35 you’re in the car, and by 7:50 you’re at your desk. You enter by the lower school doors and walk toward your classroom, sneaker soles gripping the linoleum agreeably. Every year school starts so seriously, you think. And by this time of year, each year, the seriousness begins to fall away. It doesn’t matter the way it did; the mask is slipping. All the world’s a stage, and school is a stage especially, and by the time May presents its pollen-drenched lovely face it’s hard to remember one’s lines anymore, hard to play one’s part with any conviction. I think this might even be more true for the teachers than for the students, since with their different sense of time, they seem but dimly aware of how close the end really is. Not to mention that just sitting there limply toward the end of the year is a student’s prerogative, while I still have, unbelievably, to get up in font of the class and teach.

But at least there’s Shakespeare! There are no two ways about this: I love teaching Shakespeare. I love it selfishly, which is to say in a way that has little to do with the students; I love teaching Shakespeare because I love Shakespeare. I love teaching Shakespeare because teaching Shakespeare gives me a different, unique way to relate to Shakespeare, one that agrees with me very much. Last year I taught Hamlet, and for six weeks or so of the spring I lived in Hamlet.

Hamlet, in spite of being the best play, is not a good play for ninth graders, so this spring it’s Romeo and Juliet I’m living in. Less of a good play, though in some ways a nicer place to live. Better weather. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time. Which is kind of on-theme because Romeo and Juliet is all about haste and its pitfalls, but still, it’s not ideal.

In the twenty-minute passing time between first and second periods I receive an email. It’s from a long-lost love. (I’m not making this up.)

My long-lost love writes that he’s sorry—mortified, actually—by an email he sent me the week before. He’d meant to send it to a different Katherine S. It’s strange, he explains in this apology note, since he hadn’t been in touch with me in many years, but last week autofill spat my name into the the “to” line. Haste and its pitfalls.

The email my long lost love sent the week before can’t be reprinted in this family publication. When it arrived, I read it fast, thinking it cheeky for a message out of the blue; in fact, I read it so fast that I managed not to notice that the acts and places described didn’t precisely match anything that he and I had ever shared, to say nothing of the bizarre time lapse. It appears that when someone writes a message that begins “I have been thinking of you lately,” the egocentric mind doesn’t stop to ask questions.

Students were coming in and taking their seats for second period, plastic snack bags ruffling loudly. Heads of long hair shifting. Sweatshirts as far as the eye could see. I hunched over my computer and kept typing my reply to his apology. His embarrassment and sorrow were somehow gratifying. It’s not a big deal, I wrote, don’t worry. I’ve been divorced these two years. I’m glad you’re having adventures, I’ve had a few of my own.

Class resumed.

In act 3 of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo impulsively kills Tybalt, an important member of the Capulet family, and as punishment he is banished from Verona, on pain of death, by the Prince. In the rest of the act, you see how the two young people, Romeo and Juliet, react to his banishment, as well as how the adults around them respond.

Unsurprisingly, Romeo and Juliet speak of the banishment as of a fate worse than death. Earlier this same day, they’ve been secretly married, and have not yet been able to consummate their relationship. Learning the news of his banishment, Romeo throws himself to the ground and tries melodramatically to kill himself with a knife. His mentor, Friar Lawrence, gives him a stern talking-to. It isn’t one of the best-remembered speeches in the play, but it is one of the most satisfying. Friar Lawrence takes Romeo to task for his tears and his melodrama. He points out that committing suicide would be the worst thing Romeo could do to Juliet. And he systematically points out the advantages to Romeo’s current situation, names all the ways that the cup isn’t fully empty—a wonderful part of the speech punctuated by the refrain “there art thou happy.”

What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead:
There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slewest Tybalt: there art thou happy.
The law that threatened death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile: there art thou happy.

“A pack of blessings light upon thy back,” the Friar continues, and he hatches what is, to him, an entirely workable plan. Romeo will go to Mantua and stay there until things can be smoothed over: the Prince mollified, Juliet’s parents apprised of her marriage, and the pangs of Tybalt’s death blunted by time. In the meantime, Juliet’s nurse will sneak Romeo into Juliet’s chambers for a temporary farewell.

Juliet’s parents, meanwhile, feel baffled and frustrated by her bottomless grief, which is all, she says, for the death of her beloved cousin Tybalt. Ignorant of her secret wedding, Lord and Lady Capulet want her to cheer up and get married to the suitor they’ve picked out for her, the County Paris.

Friar Lawrence’s reaction to Romeo’s banishment, while arguably breezy and soft on details, is fairly mature and perspective-taking. The Friar is old enough to have seen situations arise and blow over, and he believes that this one will do the same. Juliet’s parents’ trajectory is weirder. In particular, Juliet’s father makes an about-face on the subject of her marriage that’s so swift, complete, and unexplained that it almost transcends its own irrationality; the word I keep wanting to describe it with is “majestic.”

Just a couple days earlier, Juliet’s father insisted to Count Paris that his daughter was too young to marry, and that in any case, he could never make Juliet marry against her own wishes and preferences. But by act 3, scene 5, Capulet is transformed into a rageful embodiment of the patriarchy, threatening to “drag” his daughter to church to wed Paris, against her protests, the very next week. The scene goes on and on. It is usually played with Juliet more or less writhing around on the ground as her formerly doting father berates her very existence.

Hang thee, young baggage, disobedient wretch!
I tell thee what: get thee to church o’ Thursday,
Or never after look me in the face.
Speak not; reply not; do not answer me.
My fingers itch.—Wife, we scarce thought us blesssed
That God had lent us but this only child,
But now I see this one is one too much,
And that we have a curse in having her.

We never find out why the change has happened. If some ordinary writer were crafting the story, this would be a big plot hole, inconsistent characterization, etc. But Shakespeare not only gets away with it; in his hands, the inexplicable nature of the change becomes somehow sublime. Desire, having run in one direction, suddenly turns and runs another. (Maybe it works in this play because it echoes Romeo’s abortive passion for Rosaline. This is a world where people can change their minds.)

My lost love’s reply email comes back before the period is out.

Oh no, divorced. I'm so sorry. That's heart breaking. I was so happy that you seemed to have found a place and people for yourself. I'm glad you are moving on and having adventures, and I hope you still feel settled and happy. 

His dismay feels sickly sweet, like a bruise.

Later I go outside to warm up, and I walk across the bridge over Roland Avenue. “Oh no, divorced” is iambic, I think. Better: “Oh no” is a spondee, two stressed syllables in a row, the exclamation emphasizing the sense of itself—ritualized dismay breaking the mold of the iambic pattern. Who am I? I’m a person who notices these things, finds pleasure in them.

/      /     ˘      /
Oh no, divorced.

I feel sad. I am not used to feeling sad about being divorced, largely because getting divorced was my “idea” and there’s a mountain of guilt and weirdness about it and my sadness is trapped underneath that mountain. The mountain of shame and knowing better and feeling bad for him and for the kids. Mount Responsibility. My sadness is trapped under that mountain. My sadness is complicated; it’s not something I’m allowed to have. But my old friend’s words burrowed straight to it, brought it to the light, and I stood there over Roland Avenue feeling sad because Oh no, divorced.

My lost love added:

I wish I'd had the good sense to get in on the ground floor and find someone to grow old with. I should have stayed in New York and married you. Things since have been “interesting” but pretty much a disaster. 

There was a time when these words would have felt like a triumph, but they don’t. I once would have wanted to marry him too, but that desire ended a long time ago.

A line from my teaching notes for today:

Point out, maybe, how TIME is a problem in this play. As it often is in Shakespeare’s plays and, perhaps, in life itself!

There is a moment near the end of act 3, scene 5 that’s really stunning. All throughout the play, Juliet’s nurse has done just about everything Juliet has asked her to. The nurse is probably the most interesting person in the play—she drives the action forward, basically puts her life on the line to do so, and her motives are never clarified. Amusement? Fondness for Juliet? Lack of intelligence? You could play it any way you liked.

Anyway, in this moment the Nurse, who has risked life and limb to help Juliet be with Romeo, turns on her in a way that’s as cruel as it is pragmatic. Romeo has just been banished, and Juliet’s parents have demanded that she marry Paris right away. When Juliet asks the Nurse for advice and “comfort,” the Nurse responds by reminding her that Romeo may not come back at all; or if he does, it will have to be “by stealth”:

Then, since the case so stands as it now doth,
I think it best you married with the County.
O, he’s a lovely gentlemen!
Romeo’s a dishclout to him. An eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye,
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,
I think you are happy in this second match,
For it excels your first, or, if it did not,
Your first is dead, or ’twere as good he were
As living here and you no use of him.

I love this moment for its its clash of realities. It is the worst thing the Nurse could have said to Juliet, and expressed in the worst possible way, the very lightness and offhandedness of her tone a knife-twist almost as violent as Capulet’s talk of disowning just lines before. And yet you (if you are a grown-up) can understand the Nurse’s point of view completely. The Nurse is earthy, working-class. She knows that nobody ever needs to find out about Juliet’s secret marriage, her one night of passion with Romeo (or about the Nurse’s own role in allowing it to happen). Even if Juliet is pregnant, if she gets married now, nobody will ever know the difference. Romeo was nice, but he’s gone, and probably never coming back. If he does, Juliet can have a secret lover. If he doesn’t, well, Paris is a good man, a rich man, a handsome man . . . the Nurse said as much back in act 1, before Romeo ever entered the scene. The Nurse had lots of fun helping Juliet secure Romeo, but now that he’s gone, she has no problem reverting back to her earlier position. Easy come, easy go.

Juliet’s response is stony. “Speak’st thou from thy heart?” she asks. When the nurse replies that she does, Juliet says to herself that she will go to Friar Lawrence for advice; if he fails her, she’ll resort to suicide. The nurse has offered resolution befitting a comedy plot, but Juliet is hellbent on tragedy.

I’ll to the Friar to know his remedy.
If all else fail, myself have power to die.

What drives the nurse? Are Romeo and Juliet great lovers, or are they spoiled, capricious children? In life, unclarity can be a drag. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Why did it happen as it did? You’ll never get to the bottom of these questions. My love of art is multi-dimensional, but the strongest thread in it may be this: art takes the murky painfulness of everyday life, that blunted, stuck-in-the-soup feeling, and turns it into something legible. The best art doesn’t “oversimplify,” but it does organize, clarify, render. Great art clears away the noise, the static, the undergrowth. It creates ambiguity, which is an aestheticized version of life’s confusions. Great art doesn’t provide “easy” answers. It probably doesn’t provide answers at all. But it does set up the questions, and even makes them feel admirable.

When I was a young teenager, I bought a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare at a yard sale and kept it in my bedroom. It had a dark blue, slightly waxy cover, and it cost five dollars. I stored it in a place of honor, and while I certainly didn’t read the whole thing cover to cover, I did leaf through it from time to time, as if it were a hotel-room Bible and I a restless traveler. Something had made me decide to worship Shakespeare. There was an aspirational quality—in a poseur sense—about my affection, to be sure. (Just like how with Romeo, there’s something aspirational about his loves. He loves Juliet, and before that he loved Rosaline, but before any of that, one assumes, he had a desire to love, an ambition without an object.) The funny thing is that here I am all these years later. My feeling for Shakespeare is still aspirational (I’m happy to be the kind of English teacher who likes Shakespeare), but what I get out of him is real. Some loves endure.

After the walk, a little work, the end of third period, you go out to the lawn where they’re serving a free buffet lunch to teachers because it’s teacher appreciation week. Your head is still throbbing as it’s been since the moment you woke up, and you mention this to the person behind you in line, who says her head has been hurting too. You sit at a round table and eat too much, and it’s warm outside. You think about how a year and a half ago you didn’t have this job and none of this was real for you but here you are now, looking for all the world like someone who’s settled and happy.