Summary: Act 5, scene 1
Then I defy you, stars.
On Wednesday morning, on a street in Mantua, a cheerful Romeo describes a wonderful dream he had the night before: Juliet found him lying dead, but she kissed him, and breathed new life into his body. Just then, Balthasar enters, and Romeo greets him happily, saying that Balthasar must have come from Verona with news of Juliet and his father. Romeo comments that nothing can be ill in the world if Juliet is well. Balthasar replies that nothing can be ill, then, for Juliet is well: she is in heaven, found dead that morning at her home. Thunderstruck, Romeo cries out “Then I defy you, stars” (5.1.24).
He tells Balthasar to get him pen and paper (with which he writes a letter for Balthasar to give to Montague) and to hire horses, and says that he will return to Verona that night. Balthasar says that Romeo seems so distraught that he is afraid to leave him, but Romeo insists. Romeo suddenly stops and asks if Balthasar is carrying a letter from Friar Lawrence. Balthasar says he is not, and Romeo sends his servant on his way. Once Balthasar is gone, Romeo says that he will lie with Juliet that night. He goes to find an apothecary, a seller of drugs. After telling the man in the shop that he looks poor, Romeo offers to pay him well for a vial of poison. The Apothecary says that he has just such a thing, but that selling poison in Mantua carries the death sentence. Romeo replies that the Apothecary is too poor to refuse the sale. The Apothecary finally relents and sells Romeo the poison. Once alone, Romeo speaks to the vial, declaring that he will go to Juliet’s tomb and kill himself.
Summary: Act 5, scene 2
At his cell, Friar Lawrence speaks with Friar John, whom he had earlier sent to Mantua with a letter for Romeo. He asks John how Romeo responded to his letter (which described the plan involving Juliet’s false death). Friar John replies that he was unable to deliver the letter because he was shut up in a quarantined house due to an outbreak of plague. Friar Lawrence becomes upset, realizing that if Romeo does not know about Juliet’s false death, there will be no one to retrieve her from the tomb when she awakes. (He does not know that Romeo has learned of Juliet’s death and believes it to be real.) Sending for a crowbar, Friar Lawrence declares that he will have to rescue Juliet from the tomb on his own. He sends another letter to Romeo to warn him about what has happened, and plans to keep Juliet in his cell until Romeo arrives.
Analysis: Act 5, scenes 1–2
The sequence of near misses in this section reveals the inescapable work of fate. There is no reason for the friar’s plan to go wrong. But an outbreak of plague forces Friar John into quarantine and prevents him from delivering Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo, while Balthasar seeks out Romeo with news of Juliet’s death. Just as the audience senses an inviolable fate descending on Romeo, so too does Romeo feel himself trapped by fate. But the fate the audience recognizes and the fate Romeo sees as surrounding him are very different. The audience knows that both Romeo and Juliet are bound to die; Romeo knows only that fate has somehow tried to separate him from Juliet. When Romeo screams “Then I defy you, stars” he is screaming against the fate that he believes is thwarting his desires (5.1.24). He attempts to defy that fate by killing himself and spending eternity with Juliet: “Well, Juliet,” he says, “I will lie with thee tonight” (5.1.34). Tragically, it is Romeo’s very decision to avoid his destiny that actually brings fate about. In killing himself over the sleeping Juliet he ensures their ultimate double suicide.
Through the irony of Romeo’s defiance rebounding upon himself, Shakespeare demonstrates the extreme power of fate: nothing can stand in its way. All factors swing in its favor: the outbreak of the plague, Balthasar’s transmission of the message of Juliet’s death, and Capulet’s decision to move Juliet’s wedding date. But fate is also something attached to the social institutions of the world in which Romeo and Juliet live. This destiny, brought about by the interplay of societal norms from which Romeo and Juliet cannot escape, seems equally powerful, though less divine. It is a fate created by man, and man’s inability to see through the absurdity of the world he has created. Now, in this scene, we see Romeo as agent of his own fate. The fortune that befalls Romeo and Juliet is internal rather than external. It is determined by the natures and choices of its two protagonists. Were Romeo not so rash and emotional, so quick to fall into melancholy, the double suicide would not have occurred. Had Juliet felt it possible to explain the truth to her parents, the double suicide might not have occurred. But to wish someone were not as they were is to wish for the impossible. The love between Romeo and Juliet exists precisely because they are who they are. The destructive, suicidal nature of their love is just as much an aspect of their natures, as individuals and couple.
In the character of the Apothecary, once again, Shakespeare provides a secondary example of the paradoxical and pressing social forces at work in the play. The Apothecary does not wish to sell poison because it is illegal, banned by society. But it is the same society that makes him poor, and which insists on validity of the differences between rich and poor. The Apothecary is pushed to sell the poison by external forces that he, like Romeo, feels completely unable to control.
Summary
In the churchyard that night, Paris enters with a torch-bearing servant. He orders the page to withdraw, then begins scattering flowers on Juliet’s grave. He hears a whistle—the servant’s warning that someone is approaching. He withdraws into the darkness. Romeo, carrying a crowbar, enters with Balthasar. He tells Balthasar that he has come to open the Capulet tomb in order to take back a valuable ring he had given to Juliet. Then he orders Balthasar to leave, and, in the morning, to deliver to Montague the letter Romeo had given him. Balthasar withdraws, but, mistrusting his master’s intentions, lingers to watch.
From his hiding place, Paris recognizes Romeo as the man who murdered Tybalt, and thus as the man who indirectly murdered Juliet, since it is her grief for her cousin that is supposed to have killed her. As Romeo has been exiled from the city on penalty of death, Paris thinks that Romeo must hate the Capulets so much that he has returned to the tomb to do some dishonor to the corpse of either Tybalt or Juliet. In a rage, Paris accosts Romeo. Romeo pleads with him to leave, but Paris refuses. They draw their swords and fight. Paris’s page runs off to get the civil watch. Romeo kills Paris. As he dies, Paris asks to be laid near Juliet in the tomb, and Romeo consents.
Romeo descends into the tomb carrying Paris’s body. He finds Juliet lying peacefully, and wonders how she can still look so beautiful—as if she were not dead at all. Romeo speaks to Juliet of his intention to spend eternity with her, describing himself as shaking “the yoke of inauspicious stars / From this world-wearied flesh” (5.3.111–112). He kisses Juliet, drinks the poison, kisses Juliet again, and dies.
Just then, Friar Lawrence enters the churchyard. He encounters Balthasar, who tells him that Romeo is in the tomb. Balthasar says that he fell asleep and dreamed that Romeo fought with and killed someone. Troubled, the friar enters the tomb, where he finds Paris’s body and then Romeo’s. As the friar takes in the bloody scene, Juliet wakes.
Juliet asks the friar where her husband is. Hearing a noise that he believes is the coming of the watch, the friar quickly replies that both Romeo and Paris are dead, and that she must leave with him. Juliet refuses to leave, and the friar, fearful that the watch is imminent, exits without her. Juliet sees Romeo dead beside her, and surmises from the empty vial that he has drunk poison. Hoping she might die by the same poison, Juliet kisses his lips, but to no avail. Hearing the approaching watch, Juliet unsheathes Romeo’s dagger and, saying, “O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath,” stabs herself (5.3.171). She dies upon Romeo’s body.
Chaos reigns in the churchyard, where Paris’s page has brought the watch. The watchmen discover bloodstains near the tomb; they hold Balthasar and Friar Lawrence, who they discovered loitering nearby. The Prince and the Capulets enter. Romeo, Juliet, and Paris are discovered in the tomb. Montague arrives, declaring that Lady Montague has died of grief for Romeo’s exile. The Prince shows Montague his son’s body. Upon the Prince’s request, Friar Lawrence succinctly tells the story of Romeo and Juliet’s secret marriage and its consequences. Balthasar gives the Prince the letter Romeo had previously written to his father. The Prince says that it confirms the friar’s story. He scolds the Capulets and Montagues, calling the tragedy a consequence of their feud and reminding them that he himself has lost two close kinsmen: Mercutio and Paris. Capulet and Montague clasp hands and agree to put their vendetta behind them. Montague says that he will build a golden statue of Juliet, and Capulet insists that he will raise Romeo’s likeness in gold beside hers. The Prince takes the group away to discuss these events, pronouncing that there has never been “a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5.3.309).
Analysis
The deaths of Romeo and Juliet occur in a sequence of compounding stages: first, Juliet drinks a potion that makes herappear dead. Thinking her dead, Romeo then drinks a poison that actually kills him. Seeing him dead, Juliet stabs herself through the heart with a dagger. Their parallel consumption of mysterious potions lends their deaths a peaceful symmetry, which is broken by Juliet’s dramatic dagger stroke. ThroughoutRomeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has held up the possibility of suicide as an inherent aspect of intense love. Passion cannot be stifled, and when combined with the vigor of youth, it expresses itself through the most convenient outlet. Romeo and Juliet long to live for love or die for it. Shakespeare considers this suicidal impulse not as something separate from love, but rather as an element as much a part of it as the romantic euphoria of Act 2. As such, the double suicide represents both the fulfillment of their love for each other and the self-destructive impulse that has surged and flexed beneath their love for the duration of the play. The Friar’s embodiment of good and evil are united in a single act: suicide. Juliet tries to kill herself with a kiss: an act of love as intended violence. When that fails she stabs herself with a “happy dagger,” “happy” because it reunites her with her love (5.3.168). Violence becomes an assertion of autonomy over the self and a final deed of profound love.
Social and private forces converge in the suicides of Romeo and Juliet. Paris, Juliet’s would-be husband, challenges Romeo, her actual husband, pitting the embodiments of Juliet’s lack of power in the public sphere against her very real ability to give her heart where she wishes. Through the arrival of the Prince, the law imposes itself, seeking to restore the peace in the name of social order and government. Montague and Capulet arrive, rehashing family tension. None of these forces are able to exert any influence on the young lovers. We have seen Romeo and Juliet time and again attempt to reconfigure the world through language so that their love might have a place to exist peacefully. That language, though powerful in the moment, could never counter the vast forces of the social world. Through suicide, the lovers are able not just to escape the world that oppresses them. Further, in the final blazing glory of their deaths, they transfigure that world. The feud between their families ends. Prince Escalus—the law—recognizes the honor and value due the lovers. In dying, love has conquered all, its passion is shown to be the brightest, most powerful. It seems at last that Friar Lawrence’s words have come to be: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die” (2.5.9–10). The extremely intense passion of Romeo and Juliet has trumped all other passions, and in coming to its violent end has forced those other passions, also, to cease.
One senses the grand irony that in death Romeo and Juliet have created the world that would have allowed their love to live. That irony does exist, and it is tragic. But because of the power and beauty of their love, it is hard to see Romeo and Juliet’s death as a simple tragedy. Romeo and Juliet’s deaths are tragic, but this tragedy was fated: by the stars, by the violent world in which they live, by the play, and by their very natures. We, as an audience, want this death, this tragedy. At the play’s end, we do not feel sad for the loss of life as much as we feel wrenched by the incredible act of love that Romeo and Juliet have committed as monuments to each other and their love. Romeo and Juliet have been immortalized as the archetypes of true love not because their tragic deaths bury their parents’ strife, but rather because they are willing to sacrifice everything—including themselves—for their love. That Romeo and Juliet must kill themselves to preserve their love is tragic. That they do kill themselves to preserve their love makes them transcendent.
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