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| Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet |
What, an acquaintance recently asked, is Juliet’s fatal flaw? We know Romeo is impetuous and overly emotional, driven by sentimental whimsy, but what about Juliet? The traditional attributions, like pride, avarice, or jealousy, don’t apply. Some friends and I got to discussing this question, and though we’re no closer to reaching a conclusion, the debate did generate some meaningful suggestions.
Aristotle postulates a “fatal flaw” as a humane virtue that becomes so extreme and disproportionate, that it distorts and becomes a vice. Oedipus wanted to investigate the truth because he considered the truth a straightforward moral good, and didn’t realise the truth would implicate him. Orestes wanted vengeance to rebalance the scales of justice, but in order to do that he had to kill his own mother, which upset the scales again.
Using that standard, what virtues do we see in Juliet? She loves deeply, and she rejects her parents’ conformist attitudes. In today’s individualistic society, we perceive these attitudes as good, as triumphant, as reasons to consider her a good human being. But in Verona's tightly controlled aristocratic society, they are deviations from systems of control. The desire to love deeply, contradicts the ways a late-feudal society holds itself together.
This concept of Verona as “late-feudal” matters. Shakespeare wrote while conservative aristocratic precepts were giving way to nascent capitalism. Though Shakespeare wrote in praise of kings and of history, and often appears conservative in his own writings, he did so in no small part because he was hamstrung by the attitudes of official state censors. He needed to satisfy the bureaucracy, which he achieved by flattering the Queen’s regime.
Shakespeare lawfully had to praise kings and priests, during the twilight of monarchs and ecclesiastics. The old ways of seeing and being in the world were winding down, gradually being supplanted by the ways of money and discovery, the power of nominally self-made individuals. Shakespeare was a rough contemporary of Sir Francis Drake and other national heroes; he could probably see the old systems growing threadbare.
Verona, as depicted, isn’t an actual Italian city-state. Juliet’s romantic forwardness reflects this; her behavior in vetting suitors and participating in family masquerades reflects this. Reading this play with historical hindsight, clearly Shakespeare presents Verona as a distant Neverland, a nation of ideological exploration, where the author manipulates character and events to underline his symbolism. Like Othello or Twelfth Night, this Italy is distinctly English.
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| Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet |
The Montagues and Capulets support the old systems, because they have to. Their aristocratic system no longer supports the people, lumbering on simply because the powerful fear change. The rising sense of individualism among Tudor England matters: the sense that one could circumnavigate the world and make a sort of conquest for themselves, the values of budding colonialism, the sense that we could remake ourselves in the New World.
These attitudes were probably new and dangerous, and Shakespeare maybe didn’t believe them himself. He presents the undiscovered world as dangerous in plays like The Tempest. But simultaneously, he needs to accommodate this New World, because the Old World was surely unravelling. The sense of wounded honor that dominates Verona’s aristocracy, becomes something different in the New World, the savagery of backcountry Hatfields and McCoys.
Because the old way is usually violence. Dedicated history readers know that war often marks the old edifices falling away: as we’re seeing right now, with threats of violent insurrection from people who perceive their privilege undercut by changes in society which they find scary. The Montagues and Capulets would have more in common with the January 6th mutineers than we might like to admit.
Violence recognizes that we’re bound to the past, that the dying order owns us, and we have nothing else to sustain us. Romeo and Juliet have something positive, something nonviolent, by which they survive. They’re naïve, of course, pummeled by their emotions, and had they survived the moment, they probably would have descended into something different and unglamorous. But in the moment, they have a world that isn’t defined oppositionally.
Viewed thus, I propose, Juliet has no “fatal flaw.” Young and morally unformed, she cannot possess either virtues enough to turn vicious, nor vices enough to condemn her. Instead, she simply is, in a world grown weary and gangrenous. The fault, expressed in the Prince’s final stiff scolding of Old Montague and Old Capulet, belongs not to the children; it belongs to Verona’s elders, for clinging to a dying way.
Romeo & Juliet is, beneath the surface, the Tragedy of Verona.
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