著者

細川 眞 Makoto Hosokawa

雑誌

中京英文学 = Chukyo English literature (ISSN:02852039)

巻号頁・発行日

no.2, pp.49-74, 1982-01-20

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Romeo and Juliet is fundamentally based on the medieval fate tragedy and the Liebestod myth which are very different in the treatment of death because while death comes as a negative force to a hero and a heroine in the former, it is pursued by them positively in the latter. But this drama has a varied form of each tradition. Fortune in this play is not such a capricious and malignant force as is seen in the tradition, but Nemesis identified with divine vengeance who punishes two families and Verona itself for their hate and civil strife, sacrificing their son and daughter. As to the latter, the myth is mainly related to only a private love-passion, not with society as this drama is, and its love-death motif is transfigured into an initiation into Neoplatonic love where love begins with a purge of sensuous passion, then enters intellectual love which is symbolized by seeing Cupid, and ends in voluptas 'through the first death' and 'the second one.' Voluptas (desire) which had been despicable in the Middle Ages was reclassified as a noble passion by Neoplatonists when it combined with beauty, and became the highest form of divine love, which blind Cupid represented. Spiritualism and the cult of beauty in Romeo's first love and the sexuality of Mercutio and the Nurse prepare us for the divine love of Romeo and Juliet where two elements are united. In the balcony scene, divine love is born in the stage of intellectual love. A Neoplatonist, Friar Lawrence helps them to develop it. Romeo's banishment indicates 'the first death' which is a detachment of the soul from the body. In Juliet's case, the feigned death corresponds to it. Though fortune which has its own purpose works against them by interrupting the Friar's plan in the end, it is no matter to them because they have already risen above the world. On the contrary it gives them an opportunity to experience 'the second death' by which they are completely severed from the body. In this second death, they die ecstatically and attains voluptas, divine ecstasy, the death of which is, E, Wind says, 'to be loved by a god, and partake through him of eternal bliss.' It is concluded that in this drama Shakespeare sets the theme of an initiation into Neoplatonic love in the framework of fate tragedy in which fate works as Nemesis.