10 shocking pronouncements by the Chorus in Romeo & Juliet
What follows is Part 2 (maybe we should call it 5 more shocking pronouncements?), of John McGee’s thought-provoking analysis of the way Shakespeare uses the Chorus in Romeo & Juliet. Maybe we’ve all been reading the play wrong?
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Argument
Sandwiched between Romeo and Juliet’s first and second meetings, and commenting directly on both, the second Chorus in no way celebrates these encounters. Rather, it suggests Romeo is driven by Cupid, the god of blind sexual passion, that his mental health goes from bad to worse, and in a series of bawdy puns, including one on “groaning and dying” and another on “tempering extremities,” suggests he was and is seeking his own carnal gratification, and that alone.
Romeo and Juliet by Ford Madox Brown
6. Romeo embodies Cupid, the god of blind sexual passion
One of the Chorus’ most important points is also its most subtle, namely, that Romeo embodies the power of Cupid, the god of violent, indiscriminate sexual passion.
While the Chorus does not explicitly name this deity, it refers to Romeo as “Desire,” “Affection” and “Love” personified—all terms which Shakespeare uses synonymously with Cupid. In its first two lines, the Chorus refers to Romeo as “Desire” and “Affection” personified. The Chorus then twice refers to Romeo as “Love” personified, including in its third line, “That fair for which Love groaned for and would die” and its eighth, “And she steal Love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks.” In addition, the Chorus puns on Romeo as “beloved,” a term which suggests not only loved by Juliet but also embodied by the god, Love.
To appreciate the significance of these pronouncements, we have to look both backward to Romeo’s self-described subjugation to Cupid, including just ten lines into his first appearance, where he calls Love “tyrannous” and suggests he has found a “pathway to his will,” that is, taken over his volition.
And forward to Romeo’s allusions to Cupid in the immediately following scene, where, in a series of never-discussed allusions, Romeo attributes his very leap of the Capulet wall to Love personified. Specifically, when Juliet asks, “How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?” Romeo replies, “With Love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls. / For stony limits cannot hold Love out, / And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt.” Another ten lines later, she asks, “By whose direction found’st thou out this place?” Romeo answers, “By Love, that first did prompt me to inquire. / He lent me counsel, and I lent him eyes.”
All of these lines allude unambiguously to Cupid—and all remain virtually undiscussed in the secondary literature. Of course, Romeo doesn’t mean to substantiate the Chorus’ point that he is a Cupid-driven lover, but that’s exactly the effect of his statements. In future essays, I’ll have a great deal more to say on this topic, one of the most consequential yet neglected in the entire play.
7. Romeo is deeply unwell
This one too is very easy to overlook—and very important. In line 7, the Chorus says of Romeo, “But to his foe supposed he must complain.” Of course, Romeo’s “foe” is Juliet, a Capulet. But what’s really significant is “complain,” a verb whose meaning has changed considerably since the 16th century.
Today, to complain means “to express dissatisfaction or annoyance about something.” But in the 16th century, it had the much stronger sense of “to give expression to sorrow or suffering; to bewail, lament.” Originally, in fact, it meant “to beat the breast or head in sign of grief.” As such, to complain isn’t to suffer in any ordinary way. It’s to feel such acute anguish that it manifests itself in self-hatred and even self-harm.
Which is one hell of an etymology for a young man who, two days from now, will poison himself in the bottom of a tomb.
Sound ominous? It is indeed. In fact, in saying this, the Chorus directly contradicts the common critical assumption that Romeo meets Juliet and is instantly transformed. For instance, Harold Bloom says, “From the moment when he beholds Juliet, a transformation takes place within [Romeo].” Similarly, Jill Levenson, editor of the current Oxford critical edition of the play, speaks of “Romeo’s transformation” in Act 1, Scene 4, where he meets Juliet.
No, says the Chorus. Romeo is unwell to start with—and only ever gets worse. And as we’ll see below, it reiterates this point again in its final line.
8. Romeo is untrustworthy
The Chorus goes on to say,
Being held a foe, he may not have access
To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear.
Here, the suggestion is not that Romeo is an exceptional lover—just the opposite. With “access,” he would swear as any male lover would. Further, Romeo “uses” vows, which is to say, employs them for a romantic (i.e. sexual) end, not to convey any actual commitment.
In this, the Chorus looks ahead to Romeo’s self-evidently laughable effort in the very next scene to swear his love to Juliet—an effort that includes swearing by the “moon,” a patent symbol of inconstancy.
In saying Romeo “uses” vows, the Chorus suggests he flatters girls in order to get what he wants. In this, he distinctly resembles Juliet’s own father when he was young. Early on in the evening, as Capulet welcomes Romeo and his friends to the party, he shares with a middle-aged peer how he used to go to parties and seduce girls. “Welcome, gentlemen,” he says,
I have seen the day
That I have worn a visor and could tell
A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,
Such as would please. ’Tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone.
Little does he know that, within a matter of hours, one of these boys will use the same tactic on his daughter.
9. Already unwell, Romeo only gets worse
Let’s turn now to the Chorus’ final line, “Tempering extremities with extreme sweet,” a line which, as I’ll try to show, is a marvel of poetic compactness, harboring not one but two vitally important meanings.
To discern those meanings, it’s crucial to observe the syntax of the final six lines. Specifically, it’s crucial to notice that the final couplet begins with “But,” and that this conjunction ties the couplet back to line 9, which states that Romeo does not “have access” to Juliet. In other words, the syntax makes it clear that, as it’s done throughout, the Chorus continues to focus on Romeo.
With this in mind, a first sense of “tempering extremities with extreme sweet” becomes apparent, namely the moderating Romeo’s extreme intemperateness. To temper means to “cure,” while extremity means “a condition of extreme urgency or need.” As we’ve seen above, Romeo’s condition at the beginning is indeed one of extreme urgency, and he does indeed need a cure, a point stressed more than once.
Except there’s a catch, and a crucially important one. Do you see what it is?
Logically, to temper something extreme with something extreme is to temper that something not at all. Therefore, the Chorus speaks not of an alleviation but an exacerbation, not a recovery but a decline. In other words, it suggests that, far from being cured by Juliet, Romeo becomes still worse off as a result of his second love.
Earlier on in the play, Romeo’s second love is foreshadowed several times. But it’s never foreshadowed as a cure. Rather, it’s foreshadowed as a new disease. For instance, as Benvolio gets frustrated trying to help his forlorn friend, he advises him to get better by getting worse. “Tut, man,” Benvolio tells Romeo,
one fire burns out another’s burning;
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning.
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die.
Do you see? Taking one “desperate grief” and “curing” it with another: this is precisely synonymous with the idea of taking one “extreme” and “tempering” it with another. As such, these two passages work together first to forecast and then to confirm that Romeo becomes not better off but worse as a result of his second love.
Usually, we suppose Romeo kills himself for love of Juliet. But this speech suggests something very different: that Romeo is in a bad place to start with and only ever deteriorates, that the play is built around the male protagonist and his mental decline.
10. Romeo uses Juliet for sex
And now for the most provocative point of all, that “tempering extremities” has a bawdy significance, Romeo’s being the extremity in question.
Several things justify this interpretation. To start with, then as now, extremity could refer to “the uttermost parts of the body.”
Earlier, the Chorus characterizes Romeo’s desire for Rosaline in blatantly, even graphically sexual terms—as “groaning and dying,” a pun on achieving orgasm.
As we saw in Part 1, the Chorus emphatically equates Romeo’s two loves. Therefore, the sexual joke represents but the logical culmination of this equation.
In addition, the joke forms part of a much larger pattern of jokes about Romeo, including within two dozen line of the Chorus, where Mercutio suggests it would “anger Romeo / To raise a spirit in his mistress’ circle / Of some strange nature, letting it there stand / Till she had laid it and conjured it down.”
Finally, “tempering” evokes the image of a sword, and swords symbolize erections throughout the play.
Therefore, according to the most objective and authorial voice in the play, in a dirty joke that has remained hidden for centuries, Romeo doesn’t love Juliet. He uses her to gratify himself sensually.
In sum, this play on “tempering extremities” must be one of the most brilliant puns in English literature. With incomparable concision and precision, Shakespeare comments on Romeo’s desperation, both psychological and sexual.
Conclusion
The second Chorus thus speaks in terms that are deeply and consistently unfavorable to the title couple.
And in this, it appears to be profoundly at odds with the first Chorus, or opening Prologue.
In its first speech, the Chorus seems very sympathetic to the couple. It calls them “lovers.” It calls them “star-crossed,” that is, victims of fate. It calls their deaths “piteous,” or poignant and regrettable. And it says their deaths will “bury their parents’ strife,” that is, reconcile their families and end the bloody feud.
To judge by these pronouncements, the play is about two young people who achieve the seemingly impossible, finding love in the midst of hate and successfully bringing peace to their war-torn city. And many if not most critics think exactly this.
Look more closely, however, and you find something very different.
To start with, the Chorus calls the lovers “children,” stressing their extreme youth, and, by implication, ignorance and immaturity.
Further, the Chorus by no means refrains from judging the lovers morally. Rather, several of its adjectives are plainly pejorative. For example, when the Chorus speaks of the lovers’ suicides as “misadventured overthrows,” the adjective misadventured is not neutral in meaning—not even close. Rather, the word conveys an “ill-conceived, misguided, or regrettable enterprise; an adventure which turns out badly” (OED 1). In other words, it conveys recklessness and foolhardiness. With this one word, the Chorus comments on the lovers’ self-inflicted deaths and strongly suggests they represent major errors in judgement.
Nor is that the Chorus’ only such statement. Rather, as I argue in my “The Meaning of Star-Crossed,” star-crossed isn’t astrological but nautical in meaning, anticipating the lovers’ self-inflicted shipwrecks and, like misadventured, conveying “misguided.”
The Chorus contains still further wordplay with a similar bent. For instance, when it speaks of the lovers and and “the continuance of their parents’ rage,” the play-on-words suggests that, far from transcending the rage of their parents, the lovers inherit and prolong that rage. But Romeo and Juliet—rage? Does that make any sense at all? Actually, it makes a great deal of sense. For example, according to Romeo himself, he kills both Tybalt and Paris in fits of “fury.”
So no, the story isn’t about two young people rising extraordinarily above their circumstances. It’s about the intra-familial propagation of a bloodstained, hereditary passion. About the old-to-young bequeathing of self-destructive proclivities. About—and maybe you already thought of this—the sins of the fathers being visited upon their children.
