Hey! Another Pocket Blog is coming soon (and might involve another severed head), but in the meantime please enjoy this sample post from dramatis personae, a newsletter by Shakespeare scholar, dramaturg, and fellow geek Hailey Bachrach! Each installment of dramatis personae features an in-depth look a single character from Shakespeare’s plays, fleshed out with performance histories, textual analyses, social and historical contexts, and just plain top-notch knowledge by Hailey. If you’re looking for some quality Shakespeare geekery to keep you busy until Good Tickle Brain comics resume next month, look no further!
‘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.” …