Characters are not people: they are skilfully created theatrical illusions that ‘act’ and ‘behave’ as we think ‘real’ people do, but that doesn’t make them individuals. As such, characters do not possess psychologies, inner drives, personalities or identities. They have no past and no future, only the ‘life’ is presented for us on stage. This rather simple and straightforward truth can be hard to remember when confronted by theatrical illusions as expertly and even convincingly created as are Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They seem real, and so we tend to think of them as being real…and while this is essential to the pleasure of watching the play, it does present a problem when we come to consider it as a play, from the vantage of literary analysis. Because we aren’t (and cannnot be) analysing people but the words that have created the illusion of people.
So that’s what we’re going to practice first: analysing some language that is then spoken by an actor as part of the job of selling the illusion that there’s this ‘person’ called Romeo whom we should care about.
Begin by reading (carefully, and a number of times) 1.2.180-233 (as different editions have slightly different line numberings the passage begins with Romeo saying, “Why, such is love’s transgression” and continues to the end of 1.2). Then consider the following question:
Question: What kind of ‘person’ does the language used by this Romeo character create? Another way to think about this is perhaps, What (themes or ideas) is this Romeo character ‘about’ (at this point in the play)?
The more specific and precise you can get with this, the better. Look at individual word choices and images, and think about the ‘personality’ of this (imagined/illusory) person that is the result of those details. Really try to remember that the character is made by the language spoken by the actor, and consider what kind or sort of character we are here witnessing being built for us. Do not try to explain the person (because there isn’t a person, only a character) and do not think that there is some kind of single or simple ‘answer’ to some sort of riddle. The language used in this passage is complicated, evocative, metaphorical, potentially even contradictory, so it requires and rewards an approach that is exploratory, question-based, open to possibilities and relational.
Once more, and I cannot say this enough, there is no person here ‘revealing’ who he ‘is’ — there is complex and poetic language that, when performed by a talented actor, creates the illusion of a complex and poetic ‘person’. By focusing on the complex possibilities of that language we can begin to get a better sense of the theatrical illusion we call “Romeo” and what’s at stake in that imaginary figure.
