Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet.  By Joseph Pearce, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Joseph Pearce started his literary career focusing on the Christian authors of the twentieth century, but in recent years he has directed much of his focus to the career and religious beliefs of William Shakespeare.  His first major study of the subject, The Quest for Shakespeare, confronted the long-held belief that Shakespeare embraced the Anglican break with Rome, as well as the common assertion amongst contemporary scholars that Shakepeare was an atheist or agnostic, whose skepticism permeated his plays.  Pearce argues from the historical evidence that Shakespeare was in fact a Roman Catholic throughout his writing career, and that his plays reflect his faith.  As such, Pearce argues that it is necessary to view Shakespeare’s work from what we can now glean about his worldview.  In a follow-up book, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, Pearce analyses a few of Shakespeare’s most prominent plays, stressing the religious significance of the Bard’s themes.  Now, in Shakespeare on Love, Pearce turns his attention to understanding the religious themes of Romeo and Juliet.

 

“This book rests on the solid conviction that William Shakespeare was a believing Catholic.  The evidence for such a conviction has been given in my two previous books The Quest for Shakespeare and Through Shakespeare’s Eyes.  In the first of these volumes the solid documentary and biographical evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism is given; in the latter the evidence for his Catholicism is gleaned from three of his most celebrated plays, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear.  It should be stated from the outset, therefore, that these other books should be consulted for the definitive proof of Shakespeare’s Catholic faith, whereas the present volume will simply offer further corroboration of the conclusions reached in the earlier volumes, based on the evidence that emerges in Romeo and Juliet, his most popular play and perhaps the most famous tragedy ever written.”   (Note: Through Shakespeare’s Eyes was reviewed here in October 2012).

 

Pearce clearly views Romeo and Juliet primarily as a tragedy, rather than as a romance, first and foremost.  Pearce observes that the story of the doomed relationship was not Shakespeare’s original creation.  The story had been told before by a few authors, sometimes attacking certain segments of society, often imposing different morals on the story than Shakespeare did.  Many of the alternative tellings have been lost today, and none of them were told with the same level of poetry as Shakespeare.  Pearce argues that Shakespeare’s plays have an added facet of beauty and poignancy due to their moral compass, which stems from his religious faith.  Pearce explains, writing that:

 

“The point, however, is that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic when he wrote his plays, Romeo and Juliet included, and, as such, we should expect to find the presence of the faith, philosophically and theologically, in the midst of this greatest of love stories.  Seeing the tragedy unfold through Shakespeare’s Catholic eyes enables us to see it in a new and surprising light.  The following work is an effort to see the play through the eyes of the playwright so that we may be enlightened and surprised by what we see.”

 

Shakespeare on Love is more than just a critical work on a legendary play, it is a criticism of literary criticism.  A popular recent quip (the precise origins of which are unclear), states that “Romeo and Juliet is not a love story.  It’s a 3-day relationship between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old that caused 6 deaths.  Sincerely, everyone who actually read it.”  Pearce’s critique is far less blunt and snarky, but on practically every page he stresses that there is far more to the tale than the all-too-common view of the play as an innocent youthful romance marred by unavoidable tragedy.

 

“Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most famous love story ever written.  Its cultural influence is so profound that Shakespeare’s “star cross’d” lovers have become synonymous with the very meaning of romantic love.  But what exactly does the world’s greatest playwright have to say about the world’s greatest lovers?  Does he sympathize with their plight?  Does he consider them blameless, or are they at least partly responsible for the tragedy that awaits them?  Is the love story about fatalistic forces beyond the control of the protagonists, or is it a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of unbridled erotic passion?  And what does Shakespeare have to say about the relationship between romantic love, or eros, and the greatest love of all, the love which God has for man, which manifests itself in his giving his only Son as a willing sacrifice for man’s salvation?  What relationship is there between eros and caritas, between the romantic love between a man and a woman and the love of Christ for humanity?  What is the connection between the most famous love story ever written and the Greatest Love that there is?  These questions are asked and answered in the following pages as we endeavor to see Romeo and Juliet through Shakespeare’s devoutly Catholic eyes.”

 

The first chapter is titled “Creative Revision and Critical Misreading.”  Here, Pearce explains how Shakespeare put his own unique stamp on the quasi-familiar story, and he also explains why he finds so much of the existing scholarly analysis of Romeo and Juliet so wanting.

 

“Broadly speaking, it seems that there are three ways of reading the play.  The first is the fatalistic reading in which fate or fortune are perceived as omnipotent by blind and impersonal forces which crush the “star-cross’d lovers,” and everyone else, with mechanical indifference.  In such a reading, free will, if it exists at all, is utterly powerless to resist intractable Fate.  If the fatalistic reading is accepted, nobody is to blame for the events that unfold throughout the play because there is nothing anyone can do to alter them.”

 

This approach to reading the play is morally facile.  According to this perspective, there was nothing that anybody could do to prevent half a dozen deaths.  The choices the characters made had nothing to do with the tragedy.  It was all Fate, inescapable, unavoidable, and remorseless Fate, a power that brings forth doom and negates all human responsibility.  It’s all very sad, but no more representative of human sin and folly than a tornado or a hurricane.  Fate becomes a whitewash for the consequences of foolish or malicious actions.  Pearce convincingly argues that to view the play through such a lens is to become a moral imbecile, and that intelligently understanding Romeo and Juliet means applying Catholic morality and theology to a reading of the play.

 

“The second way of reading the play is what may be termed the “feudal” or romantic reading, in which the feuding parties are held to blame for the tragic fate of the doom-struck and love-struck lovers.  In such a reading, the hatred and bigotry of the Capulets and Montagues are the primary cause of all the woes, and the lovers are hapless victims of their parents’ bloodlust who are nonetheless redeemed and purified by the passion and purity of their love for each other.  In our day and age, this is perhaps the most widely accepted interpretation of the play’s overarching morality or deepest meaning, harmonizing as it does with the ingrained romanticism and narcissism of the zeitgeist.  Such a reading allows our contemporary epoch to moralize about “love” and “hate” without the imposition of conventional moral norms.  It is the morality of Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love,” a “love” which is rooted in the gratification of desire and which has its antecedents in the romanticism of Byronic self-indulgence.”

 

This interpretation is a bit more sensible, but once again, it fails to provide a thoroughly nuanced and appreciative perspective to the play by scrutinizing the actions of the titular characters.  Pearce is blunt and unyielding in his analysis of the shortcomings and foolishness that Romeo and Juliet indulge in over the course of the play.  Romeo is headstrong, impulsive, and rarely thinks through his actions or emotions.  Juliet views Romeo in a practically idolatrous manner.  The adults also get their shares of recriminations, though Friar Laurence, who often gets a hefty share of abuse from some critics for his role in the tragedy, receives a chapter of his own from Pearce, where he freely faults the Friar for not following his own advice on patience and careful thinking, though Pearce winds up viewing the Friar more warmly than the other erring adults, quoting the Prince’s opinion that “We still have known thee for a holy man” in the title of the chapter based on Friar Laurence.  The point Pearce makes in this study is that in Romeo and Juliet, no character is sinless.  He explains this perspective, writing that:

 

“The third way of reading the play is the cautionary or moral reading in which the freely chosen actions of each of the characters are seen to have far-ranging and far-reaching consequences.  In such a reading, the animosity of the feuding parties and its consequences are weighed alongside the actions of the lovers, and those of other significant characters, such as Friar Lawrence, Benvolio, Mercutio, the Prince, and the Nurse.  Each is perceived and judged according to his actions and the consequences of those actions on others, and each is integrated into the whole picture so that the overriding and overarching moral may emerge.  It is surely significant, for instance, that Romeo and Juliet was probably written at around the same time as The Merchant of Venice, a play that is preoccupied with the whole question of freedom of choice and its consequences.  Clearly such questions were at the forefront of the playwright’s mind as he grappled with the hateful or besotted choices of his Veronese protagonists as they had been when he grappled with the choices facing his Venetian heroes and villains.

 

In spite of the misreadings of many modern critics, it is clear from Romeo and Juliet itself, and from its place within the wider Shakespearean canon, that the only correct way of reading the play is the third way.  It is, however, not the present writer who affirms this as an opinion, but the play itself that insists upon it as a fact.”

 

Shakespeare on Love is a moral treatise stressing that all people need to take responsibility for their own actions.  Appealing to a culture saturated with sappy high school soap operas and teen death songs, Joseph Pearce attempts to inform readers that the true moral of a story can easily be lost in maudlin emotion or careless sentimentality.  In Pearce’s eyes, the great literature of Shakespeare is not just drama, it is also religious allegory.

 

 

–Chris Chan