Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, current season
In 1873, Walter Pater famously described the Renaissance in
terms of way its cultural products (in other words, its art) attempted to
reconcile the predominating world view of Christianity with that of the ancient
Greek and Roman mythologies, philosophies, and scientific hypotheses that had
been “rediscovered” and disseminated in the 15th and 16th
centuries. What made the Renaissance so revolutionary, according to Pater, was
the way the era represented these clashing ideologies as if they were
“subsisting side by side… substantially in agreement with each other.” With the
interplay of natural and divine imagery that proliferates one of Shakespeare’s
earliest tragedies, we find copious evidence to support Pater’s thesis.
Shakespeare composed the tragedy Romeo and Juliet in tandem with his comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another play that appropriates the story
of Pyramus and Thisbe, the “star-crossed lovers” of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Shakespeare’s literary borrowing of these characters’
fates, as well as the numerous references to both celestial bodies and the
inconstant, ever-changing qualities of atomized nature in the play, manifest
his attempt to synthesize Epicurean/Lucretian materialism with Christian cosmology.
In the opening scenes of Romeo and Juliet,
Shakespeare introduces his audience to a world in which violence is a priori:
the origin of the familial feud between the Montagues and Capulets is never
fully explained, and it is into this conflict that the sweetness of the titular
characters’ tender love blossoms. Although they feel their love to be as
“boundless as the sea” beneath the “all-seeing sun” (to which Juliet is compared
by the bard only fifty odd years after Copernicus proposed his heliocentric
theory – a radical comparison indeed, that a 14 year old girl could embody the
same qualities of magnetism, boundless warmth, and life-sustaining power as the
center of the universe), the conflict that surrounds Romeo and Juliet destroys
the tenderness of their love. Although in an Epicurean trope, Friar Laurence advises
them to love moderately so that their passion will not engulf them, his failure
to relay his ill-conceived plan of Juliet’s “resurrection” to Romeo spurs the
lovers’ tragic fate. Ultimately, however, in death, the lovers escape the a
priori restraints that imprison them: their family names, their religion, and
even their bodies. Paralleling the Christian story of resurrection, with their “love
sprung from hate,” and the ultimate sacrifice of their deaths, Romeo and Juliet
are not only “cut out in little stars” where it is implied they will twinkle
eternally in the heavenly spheres, they also appear to redeem their families
and the future generations, as their fathers pledge a pact of peace in the
final scene. In Romeo and Juliet, the
final image is one in which both the older and forthcoming generations are
redeemed by the sacrifice of the children’s love.
In UM’s current production, director Laura Rikard focuses
our attention to these contrasts, as well as asks us to imagine how the story might
look if the socially-constructed categories of race and gender had been no more
limiting to Shakespeare’s vision than the characters’ family names themselves.
By deploying the actors’ bodies to the stage in a way that reformulates space,
using anachronistic musical passages to explode our contemporary assumption
that Shakespeare’s works are primarily “period pieces,” and perhaps most
startlingly, updating the play through the casting of female actors to play
male roles, Rikard not only inverts and exploits Elizabethan theater practice,
but also demonstrates the extent to which Shakespeare’s 400-year old play is
still both timely and timeless.
