B.Smith 1
Bradley Smith
English 378
Aug. 7, 2002
Romeo and Juliet’s Generational Gap:
Ideological Clash in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England
Attempts to acknowledge situatedness have led scholars to expand the time governed by modern ideals, splitting it into three main parts: pre-modernism or early modernism, modernism and postmodernism. In these three different parts, scholars have isolated characteristics of modernism, though they are treated differently in each time period. Of the three, pre-modernism shows the attempt to recognize our own situatedness most clearly, because it is an attempt to reclassify the time period usually thought of as the Renaissance. The new name signifies a change in priorities in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, as Leah Marcus points out in her essay “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” appearing in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Marcus writes, “Early modern carries a distinct agenda for historians, who have adopted the name quite consciously as a sign of disaffiliation from what they perceive as the elitism and cultural myopia of an older ‘Renaissance’ history” (41-2). It is an attempt by scholars to look at the time period and isolate and identify elements of modernism and postmodernism “in embryo” (43). One of these elements is modern individualism.
The idea that all humans are individuals with equal rights was seemingly second nature to mainstream twentieth century scholars as they looked back on history—so much so, that they assumed every society throughout history valued individuality in the same way they did. Recent scholarly developments, however, have proven otherwise. The development of the human being as an individual is in fact the product of the modern historical time period and our society. Assuming that society always privileged the individual over the group or the family shows that we were blinded by our own values.
In Shakespeare’s plays there is a conflict between this newly privileged individuality and the older sentiment that privileged the family and God over the individual. Romeo and Juliet becomes a site where this conflict emerges. The play’s different generations have different ideas of what should be valued. The younger generation values individual autonomy and pursuit of happiness, as shown by Romeo and Juliet. The older generation also values the autonomous individual, but less so. In a moment of crisis, the older generation reverts to an older set of values by emphasizing family loyalty and deference to the family’s patriarch.
Modernism’s beginnings coincide with a shift in the economic conditions around Europe occurring in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In England during the sixteenth century, the economic culture was subtly shifting from a feudal arrangement to agrarian capitalism. With wool’s prices rising and its relatively lighter weight allowing for easier transportation, landowners with capital found it was more economical to enclose their lands and use them as pastures for raising sheep rather than continuing the traditional feudal arrangement where peasants raised grain for a manor’s lord in return for a percentage of the harvest. The wool was used to establish an international trade for other goods.
Since raising sheep was less labor-intensive than farming under the feudal system, many poorer peasants were left without ways of supporting themselves. John Martin in Feudalism to Capitalism remarks that during the first half of the fifteenth century the peasants, no longer able to grow their own crops and raise their own livestock, began to desert the manors for larger cities in order to earn a living as a wage laborer. “In the second half of the century,” he writes, “as a result of high wool prices, landlord aggressiveness took a new form: landlords actively sought to evict peasant communities in order to convert peasant holdings to pasture” (123). The struggle that ensued between landowners and peasants led to riots and the desertion of small towns, as peasants made their way to the city, increasing the number of wage laborers. Around the same time period, there was a shift in land ownership. Henry VIII, when he split from the Catholic church, confiscated all of the church’s land in England and distributed or sold it. The land was bought at a discount by Henry’s supporters or by urban merchants and yeoman farmers who had the capital to purchase them. The buyers then sold the land at considerable profits to gentry whose property neighbored the land for sale and wished to increase their estate or were held by the merchants or farmers in an attempt to join the gentry.
The morphing economic system led to a morphing ideological system to help make meaning of and control the new economic conditions that had developed. In “Ideology and the State,” Althusser describes the relationship between production and the reproduction of the conditions of production (the base and the superstructure). He writes there are two different parts to the structure of every society “the infrastructure, or economic base (the ‘unity’ of the productive forces and the relations of production) and the superstructure, which itself contains two ‘levels’ or ‘instances’: the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.)” (129).
Althusser writes:
The reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class (127-28).
When the goals of the ruling class change, as they did in England during this time period, the ideologies used to control people change as well. Under the feudal system, the ruling class needed the peasants to work their land to produce food and goods in return for protection and food. This required loyalty to the feudal lord. It also required the peasant and his or her family to stay in a fixed place for generations.
Thus, as Lawrence Stone writes in Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, there was an emphasis on the Great Chain of Being. The peasants were taught that their lord had a divine right to rule passed down from God. To leave the estate or disobey their lord in any way was a sin. Moreover, God was thought of as a part of everyday life. Peasants saw everything that happened as an act of God. Things like death and birth in the family were certainly mourned and celebrated, but these events had a less exaggerated impact on families when compared to later centuries. This lessened sentiment caused feelings that all people of an equal station were interchangeable. “One wife, one child could substitute for another, like soldiers in an army,” Stone writes (257). The emphasis in this society was not on the individual, but to “assure the continuity of the family, the clan, the village or the state” (Stone 258). As the economy shifted to capitalism, these things became less important. After the shift it was better if peasants were no longer tied to the land. Power shifted to a central government that controlled a nation-state, and Peasants were required to shift their loyalty away from their feudal lords to the nation-state. And like feudal lords, God too took on a different meaning. Stone writes, God went from being a daily part of people’s lives to a distant watchmaker who presided over the maintenance of a mechanical universe (246). The shift is one toward the theology of Free Will.
Though he does not contribute the changes occurring during this time solely to the new economic situation, Stone finds a great deal of change occurring around the status of the individual in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. He cites a number of changes in iconography as diverse as tombs to diaries showing the emphasis has switched from the family to the individual. For example, tombs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries bore the family name and coat of arms with little recognition of the individual. Stone writes, “It was a display of family pomp and position, not a memorial to the individuality of the dead” (225). But as the seventeenth century ended and the eighteenth century began, tombs began to become personalized, bearing a bust of the deceased based on personal sittings or a death mask—though, as Stone notes, the family’s coat of arms was still quite prominent.
Stone dismisses industrialized capitalism as a cause of these changes to the family. He states the new family type developed in New England and England well before industrialization began. Nor did the factory break up the family unit (661). Stone’s error is that he is trying to pin the changes occurring during this time to industrialized capitalism rather than capitalism in general. Stone writes, “What needs explaining is not a change of structure, or of economics, or of social organization, but of sentiment. [ . . .] There was a shift in a whole cultural system, defined as the growth of Affective Individualism” (658). He cites the cause of this rise in autonomy to the Renaissance ideal of the individual hero and the Calvinist ideal of guilt and anxiety about salvation. Yet he never discusses what might have been the cause of these phenomena and why they developed during this time period. The answer that Stone tries so hard to overlook is the shift from a feudal system to a capitalist system.
It is easy to see capitalism lingering phantom-like behind all of Stone’s arguments. He even cites capitalist ventures as being one of the main causes of changes to the family structure. He cites changes that occur in the bourgeois class to help prove his point. He even states that the professional and upper bourgeois classes are part of the groups responsible for the change (661). This fact is important to note. In this new economy the bourgeois classes are controlling ideology. They become the society’s leaders, resulting in a replacement of ideology left over from the feudal system with a new ideology to fit the new needs of a capitalist society. As ideology is a top-down phenomenon, it shows that the bourgeois was becoming the new ruling class—the class that imposes the method of reproducing the methods of production. That a bourgeois class even exists during this time period proves deciphering what occurs in the dynamics of family life is inextricably bound to capital.
In feudal society aristocratic marriages had a great deal to do with accumulating wealth and solidifying power. Aristocratic fathers, ideologically speaking, therefore needed close family ties and deference to his will to create the best economic situation for his family’s continuance. Stone writes the feudal relationship between father and child was characterized by a great deal of deference to the father. Children would kneel, or stand if they were sitting, or doff their cap to their parents as signs of respect. These forms of respect begin to fade, however, by the middle of the seventeenth century, and they were replaced by a mutual affection and a less physical show of respect. Under the feudal arrangement, the head of the family or clan would make marital decisions based on what was best for the family, but as the feudal period ended and agrarian capitalism began, children were given more and more power to choose their spouse or overrule the judgment of their father. In addition, Stone writes, the reasons for marrying changed from consolidation of power and wealth to companionship and friendship (though it must be added this companionship was to be between social equals). “It is obvious,” Stone writes, “that at the root of both of these changes in the power to make decisions about marriage, and in the motives that guided these decisions, there lie a deep shift of consciousness, a new recognition of the need for personal autonomy, and a new respect for the individual pursuit of happiness” (273).
In the aristocracy near the end of the seventeenth century, marriage was not as important in developing political ties, but it was still important in consolidating wealth. However, the forms of wealth had shifted slightly. Land was still the most important asset, but with enough money, urban merchants and yeoman farmers could buy land and over the decades work their way into the gentry class. Therefore, marriage codes were relaxed. Sons and daughters were no longer required to defer to their parents, but they were given a limited autonomy in choosing their spouse with the consent of their family.
Romeo and Juliet give a glimpse at the autonomous individual’s emergence, whereas, Juliet’s parents show a generation on the cusp of the ideological switch. From “Two households, both alike in dignity,” Romeo and Juliet’s actions and words in the play show they are less concerned with their family as they are with their individual happiness. The first time the audience meets Romeo, he is suffering from melancholia over the unrequited love of Rosaline. He avoids his father and his cousin Benvolio, and locks himself up in his room or goes to a grove of sycamores to be by himself. This longing to be by himself sets Romeo apart from Benvolio, who prefers being part of a community over being by himself. As Romeo tries to leave him, Benvolio calls, “Soft, I will go along; / An if you leave me so, you do me wrong” (Greenblatt 877).[1] After the Capulet’s feast, Romeo again wishes to be by himself. He gives Mercutio and Benvolio the slip, remarking, “Can I go forward when my heart is here? / Turn back dull earth, and find thy centre out” (889). Romeo is again privileging his own feelings over the company of his kinsman. This time it is his love for Juliet that drives him from Mercutio and Benvolio’s company.
Romeo’s romantic feelings for Rosaline and Juliet are a clue to his autonomy. Stone admits that romantic love was sure to have been a part of feudal society, but he writes,
In the early seventeenth century, the melancholia induced by unrequited love was an increasingly familiar theme both to dramatists and to scholars like Robert Burton. It seems likely, therefore, that love before marriage, however rare it may have been in the sixteenth century, may have been on the increase in the early seventeenth century and after (283).
I think it’s reasonable to say that this shift away from economics toward affection when choosing a spouse is based on an increase in individual autonomy. People were now marrying to make themselves happy rather than to improve or retain the status of their family.
As Juliet stands on her balcony, asking Romeo to defy his father and refuse his name, Romeo is quick to take action on her request: “I take thee at thy word,” he responds, “Call me but love and I’ll be new baptized. / Henceforth I never will be Romeo” (892). “Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?” Juliet asks. “Neither, fair maid,” Romeo responds, “if either thee dislike” (892). This passage suggests that Romeo believes there is more to who an individual is than his family name and by extension his family.
Likewise Juliet believes the individual is more important than family. She remarks,
That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.
She continues by remarking Romeo’s name is no part of him: “Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name – which is no part of thee – / Take all myself (891).
Yet again Romeo shows he values his own happiness and love over his family when he refuses to fight Tybalt for the family honor. Tybalt challenges him and insults him, and Romeo responds not in defense of his family honor, but in defense of his love. “Tybalt,” Romeo says, “the reason that I have to love thee / Doth much excuse the appertaining rage / To such a greeting” (905). As Tybalt continues to goad him, Romeo responds, “I do protest I never injured thee, / But love thee better than thou canst devise (905).
But it is in the Capulet household where the shifting ideologies can be most easily recognized. At the beginning of the play, the county Paris wishes to marry Juliet. Capulet, however, wants to give his daughter a chance to choose for herself, rather than choose a husband for her. And Capulet tells Paris this: “woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart; / My will to her consent is but a part, / And she agreed, within her scope of choice / Lies my consent and fair-according voice” (878). As Stone shows, the arranging of marriage underwent a considerable change with the change from pre-modernism to modernism. Under the feudal system, Stone writes, “the choice is made entirely by parents, kin, and family ‘friends’, without the advice or consent of the bride or groom” (271). As time progressed, children began to make their own marital decisions with the consent of their parents. “At the same time,” Stone writes, “there was inevitably a marked shift of emphasis on motives away from family interest and towards well-tried personal affection” (272). Marriage for romantic love, like Romeo and Juliet’s, was still frowned upon.