10 shocking pronouncements by the Chorus in Romeo & Juliet
What follows is Part 1 (maybe we should call it 5 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
For centuries, critics have dismissed the Chorus’ speech at the start of Act 2, calling it pointless. In fact, it’s one of the most important and consequential speeches in the entire play. Following immediately after Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting, and commenting directly on that meeting, the Chorus in no way romanticizes the lovers. Rather, it calls Romeo an ill-natured, sex-driven boy, Juliet the girl who takes his “bait.”
Imagine there was a character in Romeo & Juliet whose only role was to comment on—not participate in—the action.
Imagine he spoke immediately after the lovers’ first meeting.
Imagine he commented directly on that meeting.
Imagine he said the opposite of what we’ve said for centuries. Not that their love is deep and true and destined to end the feud. That Romeo is an ill-natured, sex-driven boy, Juliet the girl who takes his “bait” (the Chorus’ actual word!).
Imagine he said Romeo was using Juliet to gratify himself carnally.
Now imagine generations of critics had simply ignored the speech, pretending it hardly existed at all.
Unlikely as it may sound, this is precisely the case with the Chorus’ speech at the start of Act 2, the most important yet neglected discourse in the entire play.
While everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet are characterized by the first Chorus—as a pair of “star-crossed lovers”—no one knows how they’re characterized by the second, where Romeo “hooks” Juliet with his “sweet bait.”
Why not? Because, for centuries now, critics have dismissed the speech as unimportant.
Most famously, Samuel Johnson said its “use” is “not easily discovered” and that it “adds” nothing to our understanding of the action.
Since Johnson, many other critics have said the same. According to one, the speech is a “useless appendage.” According to another, it’s of “no dramatic use.” And another: it “provides no needed information.”
Still others betray they’ve given the speech zero thought or attention. For example, Harold Bloom says this speech “reassures the audience that Romeo’s old love is gone and that he and Juliet now love each other.” Similarly, Stanley Wells says this Chorus “reminds us that Romeo’s love for Rosaline is gone.”
These statement aren’t just mistaken, and demonstrably so. They betray a lackadaisicalness or outright illiteracy at the highest echelons of academia.
The Chorus “reassures” us about the love of the title couple? Actually, in bombshell after bombshell, it says everything we’ve said the play for 400 years is fundamentally amiss, a comprehensive, start-to-finish misinterpretation.
Here, after hundreds of years of denial and obfuscation, is what Shakespeare’s own built-in commenter says about the action and its significance. Prepare to have your mind blown, and more than once.
Romeo and Juliet by Ford Madox Brown
1. Romeo’s second love is no truer than his first
“Now old Desire doth in his deathbed lie,” begins the Chorus, “And young Affection gapes to be his heir.” Here, the first line evidently refers to Romeo’s love for Rosaline, the second his love for Juliet. Yet the Chorus in no way contrasts the two. One may be “young,” the other “old,” but Desire and Affection are synonyms, not antitheses, conveying sameness, even interchangeability. As such, far from differentiating Romeo’s two loves, the Chorus equates them. And as we’ll see below, this equation is but the first of many.
Nor are Desire and Affection flattering terms—not remotely. Rather, they’re the terms Shakespeare uses to characterize the most dubious “lovers” in his corpus, including the Spanish braggart Armado and the lustful lord Tarquin. After falling for Jaquenetta, an indiscriminate dairymaid first seen sleeping with the clown Costard, Armado states,
If drawing my sword against the humor of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take Desire prisoner and ransom him to any French courtier for a new-devised curtsy.
Armado proceeds to bribe a subordinate to arrange an encounter with the country-girl, fornicating with and impregnating her.
The same forces propel Tarquin toward Lucrece’s bedchamber. “Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize,” exclaims the lustful lord, “Affection is my captain, and he leadeth.” Driven by these forces, the Roman lord ravishes and destroys a woman with an otherworldly purity.
Therefore, Shakespeare isn’t just equating Romeo’s two loves. He’s identifying Romeo with one man who is ludicrous and another who is evil.
2. Romeo’s speech is absurdly hyperbolic
The Chorus doesn’t endorse Romeo’s love for Juliet. Nor does it endorse his poetic proclamations about her. Instead, it mocks them.
In particular, when the Chorus says, “That fair for which love groaned for and would die / ... is now not fair” (my italics), it comments sarcastically on how Romeo went from calling Rosaline the most beautiful girl ever to calling her outright unattractive.
Specifically, it comments on how Romeo went from calling Rosaline the most beautiful girl in history—“The all-seeing sun / Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun,” he’d told Benvolio—to calling her utterly plain or unattractive, but one more “crow” trooping with the “snowy dove” Juliet, as he proclaims at Capulet’s party.
That afternoon, Rosaline was so extraordinarily beautiful she was worth dying for. Since then, she seems to have fallen down the ugly tree, hitting every branch.
In the secondary literature, Romeo’s poetic proclamations are often understood as conveying the depth and sincerity of his feeling. But that’s not how the Chorus sees it—not even close. Rather, this commenter suggests Romeo’s wild claims about the opposite sex are patently ridiculous.
3. Romeo is shallow and irrational
The Chorus’ third pair of lines—“Now Romeo is beloved, and loves again, / Alike bewitched by the charm of looks”—is ordinarily understood as referring to the second relationship alone, that is, to the mutual bewitchment of Romeo and Juliet.
In itself, this suggests that their love is both irrational and shallow, founded on appearances, or founded on acts of looking, “looks” clearly having both of these senses. Based on this one pronouncement alone, it’s unclear how any empirically-oriented reader can come away calling this a story of “love.”
But the implication appears more cynical still.
The subject of these lines is Romeo. It’s Romeo whose change of heart the first four lines comment on. It’s Romeo now who “loves again.” And it’s this phrase that immediately precedes the reference to a bewitchment that is “alike.”
Therefore, the primary meaning is that Romeo is bewitched with Juliet in the same way as he was bewitched with Rosaline!
Like the initial two pairs of lines, the third insists Romeo’s second love is no truer than his first. Again the Chorus isn’t just equating Romeo’s two loves but emphatically equating them.
Here and throughout, it’s impossible to overstate the negativity of the language. If Romeo is “charmed,” he is comparable to the mad lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck’s love-juice is just this, a “charm,” and causes those under its influence to love most inconstantly and most indiscriminately. For instance, it’s Titania “charmed eye” that compels her to dote on an ass-headed “monster.”
Therefore, in calling Romeo “bewitched by the charm of looks,” the Chorus says his love for Juliet is about as true as Titania’s for Bottom.
But the parallels get crazier still!
For Romeo isn’t the only “lover” in Shakespeare who is described as “bewitched” by a “charm.” Another is the raper of Lucrece, Tarquin. Here, as the lust-driven prince premeditates on the consequences of the rape, he is described—how?
You won’t believe it.
As “bewitch’d with lust’s foul charm.”
Parallels this precise are relatively uncommon in the Shakespeare canon. As such, it should appear in all critical editions of Romeo & Juliet without exception.
Instead, how many editors mention it? Care to guess?
Bingo! Not one.
4. Romeo is a menace
Next up is the Chorus’ most overtly sinister pronouncement, a statement that doesn’t just undermine a romantic reading but flatly contradicts it. “But to his foe supposed he must complain,” says the Chorus,
And she steal Love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks.
This image isn’t just unromantic but about the most unromantic conceivable. Who or what is doing the baiting and hooking? According to some editors, “fearful hooks” refers to the feud. But the Chorus simply isn’t talking about the lover’ circumstances. Nor does the feud qualify as something that looks “sweet” but is in fact “fearful” in nature, there being nothing superficially attractive about it.
Rather, “fearful hooks” clearly refers to Romeo, and for a host of reasons.
First, Romeo is the explicit subject of these lines. In the immediately preceding line, “he” and “his” obviously refer to Romeo. Indeed, throughout its 14 lines the Chorus’ most striking feature is its singular focus on Romeo—a point I’ll return to in Part 2.
Second, in Shakespeare’s source, Brooke uses the exact same imagery and indeed terminology in connection with Romeus. In particular, as Juliet wonders whether Romeus means merely to use and discard her, she asks herself, “What if with friendly speech the traitor lie in wait, / As oft the poisoned hook is hid, wrapt in the pleasant bait?”
Third, the imagery constitutes one more distinct parallel between Romeo and Tarquin. Here, as Lucrece welcomes the evil-minded prince, she is described as touching “no unknown baits, nor fear[ing] no hooks” (103)—that is, completely failing to apprehend the fact that Tarquin means to ensnare and devour her.
Fourth, the idea of a gap between appearance vs reality suits Romeo very well indeed, a young man who is repeatedly characterized as attractive on the outside but something else on the inside. Indeed, after he kills her cousin Tybalt, Juliet herself condemns him as a “fiend angelical,” “dove-feathered raven” and “beautiful tyrant,” not to mention “vile” on the inside but “sweet” on the outside—using the exact same adjective as the Chorus.
Put simply, Romeo’s what? Not a lover. A menace. The kind of guy you attach yourself to at your peril. Who’ll ensure you meet a quick, execrable demise.
And Juliet? The girl who takes the bait.
5. Romeo would have killed himself for Rosaline!
But the Chorus goes still further in equating Romeo’s two loves. Specifically, when the Chorus calls Rosaline “that fair for which Love groaned for and would die,” it asserts the truly unthinkable: that Romeo would have committed suicide for his first love!
That statement shouldn’t give you pause.
It should make your jaw drop.
And drop.
And drop again.
Romeo Montague, Juliet’s Romeo, the boy who ends the play by killing himself for girl #2… would have killed himself for girl #1?!
How can this possibly be explained? Does the author grasp what his Chorus is saying? How consequential this idea is? How it undermines if not precludes a romantic interpretation of the action? How it takes the defining event of the story and makes a mockery of it?
Some of the Chorus’ ideas are difficult indeed to discern. For instance, in Part 2 I’ll contend the Chorus says Romeo embodies the power of Cupid—a point that’s far from obvious. By contrast, there’s nothing ambiguous about “groaned for and would die.”
Again the question is: Does or does not Shakespeare know what he’s doing?
And what’s astounding is how few readers have been humble enough to answer affirmatively, surrendering the ideas with which they entered the play for those actually found in it.
In effect, the Bard himself here stands up and tells the romanticizers of this sensationalistic Italian tale that they’re wrong, and not by a little.
And they respond how?
With a tilt of the head.
And a quick flip of the page.
No, the neglect of this speech is no accident.
Conclusion
Unambiguously unfavorable as they are, the Chorus’ pronouncements don’t just lend credence to a skeptical take on the play. They suggest a skeptical take ought to be the default one, and abandoned only in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—evidence that never has been and never will be found.
As you may recall, the first Chorus asks us to listen closely to what follows. For twelve lines, it previews the action. It then states,
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Pay attention! Pay very close attention, urges the most authorial voice in the play.
It’s exactly what we haven’t done with the second speech of the Chorus.
Nay, with the play as a whole.
