Two Hours' Traffic

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival in Kansas City, and although I know I am not alone in finding the great many flaws of this play at odds with its popularity and reputation, it would be dishonest of me to claim that its mixed genres and sudden narrative undo the excellence of its poetry or the good painting of its characters. This production was far from perfect. Yet if it lacked much in Romeo’s part it boasted a fine Mercutio and a passable Juliet; Tybalt was more senseless but the Friar more sympathetic than usual; Paris was restrained rather than empty or caricatured, and the nurse was not so bad as she often is. Indeed there was much to like about the production, but I have a few things I would like to comment upon especially.

There is a common tendency among performers of Shakespeare, I feel, to rush their lines. I have observed this in amateur as well as professional productions, and therefore I judge that it is not so much a sign of poor acting as an aesthetic choice. Now I have heard generally two defenses of this method: first, that the lines were meant to be spoken quickly, after the manner of the time, and, second, that it is more realistic for the characters to speak quickly and less formally, and makes the play fresher for the audience. As to the first, it would be quite a valid point if the audience were accustomed, as the Elizabethans would have been, to take in sometimes complicated poetry by hearing it; suffice it to say that this is not true, on the whole, of the modern audience. The second justification has its merits, I think especially in dusting off bookishness from the plays, yet it imposes a sort of realism on the Shakespearean stage that it did not know. Blank verse is a very flexible instrument, but I feel it sometimes escapes the notice of actors full of base modern prose that the verse these characters are speaking in is not, by its very nature, realistic or colloquial, and that in this it is not merely different, but higher than everyday speech. Naturally this is truer of some characters than others.

A character of whom this is especially true is Juliet, and it was therefore most unfortunate to find this production’s Juliet quite the line-rusher. Juliet is a partner in the play’s best exchanges and the speaker of its best (and most poetic) speeches. Indeed the finest speech in the whole play belongs to her as she prepares to take the Friar’s potion (IV.iii); when she says “Here’s drink,” the audience should look on in chill terror. Yet if Juliet has rushed the unsettling imagery of the speech that gives that little line great power, it will hardly have weighed upon the audience with its foreboding, and there will be no stares and shivers. In this particular scene our Juliet’s line-rushing appeared to try to capture a frantic state of mind; yet this simply cannot be done in a poetic speech of some forty lines, if the audience is to get something from the words and not merely how they are said.

The Mercutio of this production was a fine balance to this, especially in his Queen Mab speech, which he delivered at a refreshingly measured pace. Now the Mab speech holds hardly half the complexity of conceit that Juliet’s major speeches do, and it is perhaps so popular as a set piece precisely because it is far easier to get at its progress of descriptions than the extended metaphors that Juliet runs in. In any case, our Mercutio either felt no need or resisted the urge to put some sort of character interpretation ahead of the audience's understanding of his lines; and in doing so the scene as a whole maintained a much greater coherence than it had in some other productions I have seen over the years, in which the speech becomes a set piece for the actor and not the poet.

This production also repeated the common error of forcing an intermission into the play when the real plot has just begun, at the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, and so doing damage to an already interrupted tragic momentum. As I commented to my mother after the play, Shakespeare keeps the Aristotelian unities loosely enough as it is; we should hardly encourage him with an intermission.