Romeo and Juliet in the Kingdom of Politics

Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet

I never cottoned to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet when I read it in college. Unlike Macbeth or King Lear, something about R&J sat badly with me. These protagonists came across as self-indulgent, petulant, and deaf to reason. Somehow I never twigged that maybe, that was Shakespeare’s intent: that Romeo and Juliet are bad people, molded by bad influences. Never, that is, until last week, when the Anthony Bouchard story broke.

If you missed this story, count your blessings. Bouchard, a Wyoming state senator and leading primary challenger for damaged incumbent Republican Representative Liz Cheney, admitted impregnating his 14-year-old girlfriend when he was 18. The relationship progressed through a teenage marriage and divorce, through personal and relationship strife, to suicide and estrangement. This folderol makes Shakespeare’s “pair of star-crossed lovers” look sober and abstemious.

Importantly for our purposes, Bouchard compares his tempestuous adolescent cyclone, to Romeo and Juliet. He clearly means this flatteringly, like his doomed first marriage was a beautiful love story of teenage innocence—like I once assumed Shakespeare intended. Yet considering the death, estrangement, and other violence left behind, I’ve reevaluated Shakespeare’s play, and realize Bouchard may be more correct than he realizes.

This idea that Romeo and Juliet is some beautiful story of innocence, probably comes from the accumulated myth. Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film presents its protagonists as beautiful, youthful lovers whose relationship is impeded by the grown-ups around them, the embodiment of Vietnam-era youth culture. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “white gangsta” interpretation contemporizes the same basic themes. These reflect the prettified baggage which Shakespeare’s story has accumulated through the centuries.

Yet one suspects, comparing Shakespeare’s play to Bouchard’s story, that perhaps The Bard anticipated a very different interpretation. Like Romeo, Bouchard used an esoteric legal loophole to wed his absurdly young bride. Things escalated, though. Like Juliet, Bouchard’s first wife destroyed herself. Which leads me to suspect that Juliet, and probably Bouchard’s first wife, had existing unresolved issues she couldn’t handle correctly. Their “romances” were extensions of this.

Wyoming State Senator
Anthony Bouchard

Bouchard’s wife committed suicide, and therefore is beyond questioning. But we can construe, from the fact that she married Bouchard, that she consented to the age-inappropriate relationship, inasmuch as teenagers can consent. Therefore she presumably sought an older boyfriend, looking for whatever psychological comfort he could provide. We can postulate the details; they don’t matter. What matters is the theme.

(Let’s withhold statutory considerations, which apply to Matt Gaetz. Wyoming’s age-of-consent laws include a four-year “close in age” exception. Bouchard’s behavior is skeevy, but not actually unlawful.)

Shakespeare’s play acknowledges that children have no control of their emotions. They fall in love easily, influenced by the courtly romances then popular throughout Europe. Without adult guidance, which Shakespeare shows early that both lovers lack, teenage emotions quickly go sideways, turning them into instruments of destruction. Kids feel deeply, and mistake their feelings for normal sexuality, which they assuage through reckless, sensual behavior.

We adults forget that teenagers aren’t miniature grown-ups. They have nearly adult bodies and desires, but haven’t learned to manage those desires, a reality compounded because our educational system extends the period of juvenile dependency until the almost-traumatic onset of adulthood. Our culture is bipolar, keeping kids helpless and childlike through young adulthood, then dropping the full burden of maturity upon them on their eighteenth birthdays.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Bouchard and his inappropriately young girlfriend had reckless sex, then had to face the consequences. Their marriage wasn’t happy, because it didn’t really sate the unresolved conflicts inside themselves, as Romeo and Juliet’s wouldn’t have. And like our star-crossed lovers, whose real desire was to die, Bouchard’s wife eventually fulfilled that goal. The living remained to gather the copious debris.

Shakespeare understood something which succeeding generations have forgotten: teenagers don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. They don’t want to express love, feel intimacy, or even just get off. Plagued with the fallout of protracted adolescence, teenagers are possessed of inner fires which they fear will consume them. Sex offers a false promise of temporary release. But children, by definition, haven’t learned to handle these pressures appropriately.

This story has forced me to reevaluate my college interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. My reaction to them as immature and petulant maybe reflects a deeper truth: that children think themselves more mature than they are, or than society lets them be. Their self-indulgent behavior isn’t incidental. And if their adolescent intemperance isn’t stopped, they grow up thinking themselves entitled to power, because even as adults, consequences don’t matter.