Light in Romeo and Juliet Essay

Although Romeo and Juliet is classified as a tragedy, it more closely resembles Shakespeare's comedies than his other tragedies. The lovers and their battle with authority is reminiscent of As You Like It and The Winter's Tale. "Characteristically, those comedies concern themselves with the inborn, unargued stupidity of older people and the life-affirming gaiety and resourcefulness of young ones. The lovers thread their way through obstacles set up by middle aged vanity and impercipience. Parents are stupid and do not know what it best for their children or themselves . . . [Romeo and Juliet] begins with the materials for a comedy - the stupid parental generation, the instant attraction of the young lovers, the quick surface life of street fights, masked balls and comic servants" (Wain 107). Indeed, one could view Romeo and Juliet as a transitional play in which Shakespeare merges the comedic elements perfected in his earlier work with tragic elements he would later perfect in the great tragedies -- Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. This mixture of styles ultimately hurts Romeo and Juliet, exposing the immaturity of the playwright. The heroes of the play must contend with external forces that impede their relationship, but, unlike the great tragic heroes, they are devoid of the inner struggle that makes for great tragedy. The influential Shakespearean scholar, A.C. Bradley, went so far as to neglect the play entirely in his well-known collection of lectures on the great tragedies, Shakespearean Tragedy. While no one can deny the merits of Shakespeare's powerful, inspired verse, the themes Shakespeare stresses in Romeo and Juliet also seem to reflect his immaturity as a writer. To understand properly who this is so, we must examine each pervasive motif in the play.

The Theme of Light

Scholar Caroline Spurgen once wrote, "The dominating image [in Romeo and Juliet] is light, every form and manifestation of it" (Shakespeare's Imagery, 310). When Romeo initially sees Juliet, he compares her immediately to the brilliant light of the torches and tapers that illuminate Capulet's great hall: " O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" (I.V.46). Juliet is the light that frees him from the darkness of his perpetual melancholia. In the famous balcony scene Romeo associates Juliet with sunlight, "It is the east and Juliet is the sun!" (II.ii.3), daylight, "The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars/As daylight doth a lamp" (II.ii.20-1), and the light emanating from angels, "O speak again bright angel" (II.ii.26). In turn, Juliet compares their new-found love to lightening (II.ii.120), primarily to stress the speed at which their romance is moving, but also to suggest that, as the lightening is a glorious break in the blackness of the night sky, so too is their love a flash of wondrous luminance in an otherwise dark world -- a world where her every action is controlled by those around her. When the Nurse does not arrive fast enough with news about Romeo, Juliet laments that love's heralds should be thoughts "Which ten times faster glides than the sun's beams/Driving back shadows over lowering hills" (II.v.4-5). Here, the heralds of love that will bring comforting news about her darling are compared to the magical and reassuring rays of sun that drive away unwanted shadows. Juliet also equates Romeo and the bond that they share with radiant light. In a common play on words, she begs Romeo to "not impute this yielding to light love/Which the dark night hath so discovered" (II.ii.105-6), again comparing their mutual feelings of love to bright and comforting light . Having no fear of the darkness, Juliet proclaims that night can

Take [Romeo] and cut him out into little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garrish sun. (III.ii.23-6)

Here Romeo, transformed into shimmering immortality, becomes the very definition of light, outshining the sun itself. However, despite all the aforementioned positive references to light in the play, it ultimately takes on a negative role, forcing the lovers to part at dawn:

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die. (III.V.6-11)

From this point on, darkness becomes the central motif. Romeo exclaims: "More light and light: more dark and dark our woes!" (III.v.36). And, as Peter Quennell writes, "...the beauty and brevity of love itself -- that 'brief light', doomed to quick extinction, celebrated in Catullus' famous lyric -- are set off by the 'perpetual darkness' of ancient Capulets' sepulchral vault" (Shakespeare: A Biography,150). The final indication that darkness has triumphed over light comes from The Prince: "A glooming peace this morning with it brings/The sun for sorrow will not show his head" (V.III.304-5). There are several other examples one could cite, and, despite Shakespeare's masterful poetic styling, many critics argue that these continual references to light are overkill, illustrative of Shakespeare at his most immature stage of writing.