In the last part of the play, when the remaining characters find out the deaths of Paris, Romeo and Juliet, hear the report from Friar Laurence (5.3.228-68), and learn the contents of Romeo’s letter (5.3.285-89), the main textual world finally moves toward the end. In the final reconciliation, all the surviving characters rec-ognize their flawed cognitive spaces. These realizations, of course, lead to the reader’s or the audience’s awareness of the textual world structure.
4.1. Friar Laurence
Like Juliet, Friar Laurence is one of the characters who know and help the main formation of the textual world. His arrangement of the marriage of Romeo
東華人文學報 第十九期
and Juliet (2.6.9-15), of Romeo’s escape (3.3.107-53), and of Juliet’s feigned death (4.1.89-120) all seem perfectly promising. However, like the Nurse, Friar Laurence has “no place in the new world brought into being by Mercutio’s death, the world of limited time, no effective choice, no escape” (Synder 65). Of course Friar Laurence shows better knowledge than the other characters, on the occasion they find Juliet dead (4.5.91-95). What he cannot think of is the failure of the de-liverance of his letter to Romeo about Juliet’s pretended death, and the sudden return of Romeo to Verona. More ironically, Friar Laurence’s advice to Romeo that “Wise and slow; they stumble that run fast” (2.3.90) becomes his own doom, and the collapse of the world he deliberately builds. As Allan Bloom proposes, Friar Laurence might have prevented the tragedy (26); nevertheless, Friar Laur-ence relies on a series of chances.15 He bets on Juliet’s apparent death and the Prince’s mercy after Juliet revives at the right time. As a result, his plan goes wrong, and, even worse, Juliet wakes up at the wrong time. However, he might still have been successful, if he had gone to the grave earlier and save Romeo in time. His forsaking Juliet at the last moment causes her death, as well as the ruin of the textual world.16
15 Although it might be argued that the failure of Friar Laurence’s plan is due to chance, the limit of his cognitive space engenders the situation and causes the outcome. As Auden argues, Friar Laur-ence “thinks he knows God’s will, and he arranges the marriage. He wants to play God behind the scenes. But he is a coward, afraid of anything happening to him, and he runs away from Juliet at the end out of self-conceit and fear” (49). Friar Laurence indeed is enclosed by his own cogni-tive space until the very end.
16 On the other hand, as Allan Bloom proposes, “it is interesting to speculate about what the opinion of that world would have been if the priest had succeeded” (27). Whether Friar Laurence can ac-tually merge his cognitive space into the textual world remains questionable, but of course it is reader’s recognition that determines its reconciliation. As Auden conjectures, if Friar Laurence had stayed in the last scene and told the story, we “would get a play on marriage, which is not aesthetically interesting” (50). Different readers would propose different reconciliation.
From Recognition to Reconciliation
4.2. The Prince of Verona
That the play ends in the grave suggests the dark side of the love world of Romeo and Juliet. It reveals the nexus between love and death. The mixture of two cognitive spaces strengthens the paradoxical effect of the play. As Allan Bloom argues, this textual world is full of uncertainty and terrors: “the eros for the beautiful is the hopeless attempt to overcome the ugliness of the grave, an at-tempt of the unwise to adorn a very questionable world” (14). The darkness of the location, as well as the development, shows that no characters can thoroughly see through this textual world created by the playwright.
The Prince of Verona gives his remarks on this tragic ending by addressing Capulet and Montague (5.3.290-94).17 Having lost his two relatives, Mercutio and Paris, the Prince admits the limitations of his earlier recognition. His confes-sion also leads to the reconciliation of the two feuding families, the Capulet and the Montague. When they shake hands, the Prince points out the significance of the morning (5.3.304-05). He reminds the characters and the reader or the audi-ence that all should wake up from this dream-like world.
5. Conclusion
With this analysis of the different spaces owned by Juliet and Romeo in the text, Juliet’s space is apparently larger and more comprehensive than Romeo’s.
While other characters also share parts of the protagonists’ spaces, most of them misread each other’s space because limited spaces are allotted to them. The mis-reading and the realization develop the plot and result in the existence/exit of each
17 The action of Romeo and Juliet can be “punctuated by the three appearances of the Prince”
(Wells 141), so that the textual world can indeed be divided into three sub-worlds. As this paper focuses on the sub-worlds owned by Romeo and Juliet and their spaces shared by other charac-ters, the division of the three sub-worlds is not discussed and elaborated here.
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character and the whole play.
When Mercutio says that “dreamers often lie” (1.4.51) and keeps on de-scribing his idea of “dreams” (1.4.53-95), Romeo interrupts him by commenting that he talks about “nothing” (1.4.95-96). This “nothing,” similar to that in King Lear (1.1.86-92), turns out to be significant in reverse. Those who do not recog-nize the flaws of their spaces have been forced to leave the stage. The survivors at the end of the play are those who can at last see the boundaries of these spaces.
The feuds between the Capulet and the Montague might continue, but all the characters have experienced their limitations and might have had a glimpse of others’ cognitive spaces. Harold Bloom suggests that, “What is left on stage at the close of this tragedy is an absurd pathos” (103). However, the play is never merely ridiculous; instead, the reality in the play is, as Frye states, “the sense that nothing perfect or without blemish can stay that way in this world, and should be offered up to another world before it deteriorates” (166). Nevo, on the other hand, points out a different perception of this reconciliation: “We reconcile ourselves to our pity and terror because we have witnessed one complete cadence of the hu-man spirit, enacted to the full, rendered entirely intelligible. What reconciles us is not what could possibly reconcile us in life. Only achieved art can so order and satisfy our appetencies, our perceptions, and our insights” (85). Indeed, the reader or the audience has their reconciliation or recognition or both. Each has to make his or her own sense of the play. The cognitive space is created by the confined textual space or the theater.
In the construction of all the spaces in the play, it seems that a dream world is whimsical, just as Mercutio describes it, but each character’s realization reveals his or her accomplishment. In this light, their awakenings appear to echo much of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As no character dreams fruitlessly, he/she does not
From Recognition to Reconciliation leave the stage in vain. Overall, the textual world helps the reader or the audience to develop each person’s imagination after the performance and reflect on reality.
The textual world and the characters’ sub-worlds of the play, though unreal in a sense, do impinge and modify a certain reality of the characters and the reader or the audience. The reconciliation, indeed, results from the recognition.