J.M. Ivo Klaver’s Blog

Peter Milward writes: “Once we turn to the tragic part, we pass from the Catholic ideal to a harsh, recusant reality […] In Romeo’s ears the word ‘banishment’, associated as it is with the long-drawn-out sufferings of the poor Catholic exiles on the continent, is intolerable” (Shakespeare the Papist, p.75).

Friar Laurence warns Romeo: “they stumble that run fast”. Does this remark give us an adequate cue to the tragedy that follows?

Nurse:

She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead, alack the day!

Capulet’s wife:

Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.

Chorus opens Romeo and Juliet with a lot of emphasis on the families (and the parents), and not on the individual lovers (“two households”; “parents’ strife”; “parents’ rage”). Does this mean we should read the play mainly from this perspective?

The sources for the Romeo-and-Juliet story are Da Porto and Bandello (Bandello’s version seemed to have inspired Shakespeare through Arthur Brooke’s translation). In Da Porto Juliet (Giulietta) is 18, in Bandello she is 17. Shakespeare makes her 13 (or, as Steve Sohmer argues, 12).  Why did Shakespeare make his Juliet so much younger?

HAMLET Denmark’s a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ Then is the world one.

HAMLET A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

ROSENCRANTZ We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind. (II.2.242-251)

Commenting on this passage Marvin Hunt (p.65) draws a helpful parallel with Milton’s Paradise Lost when Satan says “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”. Can such radical reasoning also apply to a Catholic reading of Hamlet?

To be [a Catholic], or not to be [a Catholic] i.e. To be a Catholic and die as a martyr, or not to be one and thus deny your faith. Does such a reading of the famous lines make sense to you?