Juliet

'My bounty is as boundless as the sea.'

We’ve got to do the big ones eventually…

‘Love give me strength, and strength shall help afford.’ 

Have you ever noticed that it’s Juliet who makes the plans?

It’s not always useful to think of Shakespeare characters in terms of character arcs and personal development—or at least, not in the same way we expect and understand those things today. Now, it is all but unheard of for a character not to undergo growth over the course of a play or movie, but that isn’t always what characters in Shakespeare are there to do. 

Juliet may not be the first character to come to mind as a counter-argument. She and Romeo are fate-led, star-crossed, designed not for growth but for careening down the path to tragedy with blind, giddy youthfulness—right? 

Juliet begins the play compliant. She is dutifully willing to consider marrying Paris, and promises not to get her heart set on it without her mother’s consent. Upon meeting Romeo, she undergoes a change. She turns and speaks to the audience for the first time, confiding secrets her parents and her Nurse cannot hear. From that point forward, the plot is more or less in her hands: she proposes marriage, she forgives Romeo for killing Tybalt and asks the Nurse to fetch him for their wedding night, she makes the final, ill-fated plan with the Friar to pretend to be dead. 

One of my favorite lines in the play is often cut, including in both of the most famous film adaptations, Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version. It’s the quotation that begins this section: “Love give me strength, and strength shall help afford.” 

Juliet says these lines to the Friar at the very end of their scene together, after they have made their plan for her to seem to die. The two films cut the line entirely; I’ve also seen productions just cut the second half of the sentence, reducing Juliet’s resolution to a feeble cliche: ‘Love give me strength!’ But in the actual text, Juliet recognizes that it is not love itself that will save her. Her strength is inspired by love, yes, but ultimately salvation lies in her own inner will. 

This is the source of Juliet’s remarkable agency. ‘Strength’ is not a word that appears very often in the play, and one of the only other instances is another line of Juliet’s, when she promises not to get ahead of herself when it comes to Paris: “But no more deep will I endart mine eye / Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.” From allowing her strength to be dictated by her mother’s consent to rooting it in love—and thus, in her own mind, heart, and desires.

Love is not a surrender to fate, it is an infusion of courage. Because Juliet is in love, she has the strength to make difficult choices.

Perhaps she is insufficiently attentive to the consequences of those choices (what was the plan, once they were secretly married?). But that is because she has been shielded from consequences all her life. She has been told, and seems to believe, that the adults in her life will protect her. The Nurse and the Friar will help her. As her supports fall away one by one—her father rejects her, her mother turns away from her, even the Nurse sides against her—there’s always one more person to turn to... until at last she is alone in a tomb with only Romeo’s corpse and (in an essential exchange that is, once again, too often cut) the Friar begging her to run away in order to save his own reputation. 

‘Then I’ll be brief.’ 

Juliet refuses to leave Romeo’s body. The Friar leaves, terrified of the approaching watch. 

Juliet finds the vial of poison, finds that there is none left. She tries to kiss some poison off of Romeo’s lips. She feels his lips are still warm. 

Another constantly cut moment: the watch enters, and speaks, looking for her and Romeo. It is this, this arrival, that prompts Juliet to act: “Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief.” 

It’s almost a joke—‘Oh, they’re coming? Better hurry it up’—but I can’t help but read it as more than that. I can’t help but think of the line—still years away from being written—from Macbeth, in which life itself is a ‘brief candle.’ It is Juliet herself who will be brief. She cannot return to the encroaching world; she cannot enter a nunnery, cannot resume her docility, cannot go back to the people who have betrayed her. 

‘Take all myself.’ 

When productions cut the Friar’s appearance in the tomb and the actual, physical incursion of the watch, they cut Juliet’s final act of defiance. They pull out the bookend of her transformation. Her decision is about Romeo, but it is not only about Romeo. She reacts not only to his corpse, but against the world—the men—who controlled her once and are already creeping in to do it again. 

Shakespeare’s decision to depart from his source material and make Juliet so incredibly young is of course at the root of the modern scorn for this play and its main characters. How can a thirteen year old know what she’s doing? How can she really understand what kind of future lies ahead of her? But the slow constriction of the watch and Friar demonstrates exactly what Juliet’s future holds, and shows us that she knows it. The Friar says he’ll put her in a convent. The watch are trailed by her father, who told her to die in the street rather than disobey him. Romeo—she calls him, as they part for what she suspects will be the last time, ‘Love, lord, husband, friend’—is gone.

Romeo and Juliet is not a story about idiotic teenagers, but about the old failing the young. Both Romeo and Juliet are victims of this fact, but it is Juliet who explicitly traces a journey from acceptance to defiance. From trusting obedience to trusting love, and letting love make her strong. She is only thirteen, and she sees her world clearly.

But this letter’s recurring theme of frequently cut lines and consistently excised moments reflects how deeply we, too—we, like the Friar and the Nurse and the Capulets—need Juliet to be pliant and predictable. We make a ragged patchwork of her journey and her agency as we try to fit her into the pattern of a compliant, passive heroine, unchangingly fixed to the path set out for her by fate—a mold she would rather die than fill.

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