"Some consequence yet hanging in the stars..." (On "Romeo and Juliet" and COVID-19)

Well.

As a friend pointed out, it is quite in keeping when discussing Shakespeare to have all the theaters close for fear of plague.

And while there is no plague in "Romeo and Juliet," it seems strangely suited to our current time. I had been planning to write about my frustrations with how current "cooler than thou" culture sneers at the lovers' age and impulsiveness, ignoring how the adults around the central couple act with even more haste and emotion, (and how that may have been Shakespeare's subtle jibe at the way the nobility married off their children at such young ages,) or about the effect of fate and the stars and the humors underlies the action, leading to conjecture that perhaps the lovers and their families have no control over their destinies at all.

But instead, with the thread of COVID-19 hanging over our heads, I'm increasingly drawn to the play's double sense of time. The play feels both hectic and racing, and yet simultaneously like it's gelid, slow-motion, moving glacially from one inexorable moment to another.

Scholars debate the amount of time the play covers, but typically land on somewhere around 4-6 days, with the first day (Romeo's lamentations over Rosaline, and the fateful party meeting) happening on a Sunday, and the planned wedding morning (and faked death of Juliet) on a Wednesday, with debate about how many hours or days go by between Juliet's "death" and Romeo's arrival at the tomb. And much criticism has been lobbed at the two lovers and at the plot of the play itself for the events crammed into so little time.

But in between all of these events, the two lovers and the adults around them seem to discuss more about events that may come or will come, or have happened in the past, than participating in the events currently happening around them. Juliet begs her nurse for news, while the nurse spends line after line putting off the happy announcement of Romeo's marriage plans. The parents discuss their past days of violent fury, while either refusing the young's turn to engage in the feud, as when Capulet rages at Tybalt with his "Go to, boy!" (I.v.) or when Lady Montague castigates her husband with "Thou shalt not stir a foot to seek a foe" (I.i.). We never see Romeo and Juliet's reunification after their marriage, or their words to each other to smooth over the death of Tybalt, just their parting in the morning. Juliet's parents reprimand her for her ongoing grief over that selfsame death of her beloved cousin, but it has been merely hours before they arrange a marriage with Paris to soothe it.

In fact, the only character who seems to live in the moment and not attempt to escape it is Mercutio, who begs Romeo to "Come, we burn daylight, ho!...I mean, sir, in delay / We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day" (I.iv). And it is with Mercutio's death that the play's inertia grows inexorably, his murder the axis on which the chances of a happy ending turn and the wheel of fortune groans toward tragedy.

Which leads me to wondering about our own fate now. The world seems to hold its collective breath, suspended in time, held in slow motion between the time when the virus felt like a far away news story and the time when we shelter in place in our homes for an unknown period and words like "rations" and "ventilator shortages" hang in the balance, peeping through a hazy horizon over which extends a new time.

Moment by moment, the tragic events of "Romeo and Juliet" feel preventable, as if we could just reach through the verse and warn the characters, get the message to Romeo quicker, halt Tybalt's rage, have Juliet drink the poison five minutes earlier. I wonder, in the coming years, what events will we look back on and think "if only we could have...? If only someone had said...?"

"PRINCE: A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished..." (V.iii)

A 1975 illustration of "Romeo and Juliet" by Salvador Dali.