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Popular Culture Review
the Nurse’s, as are Friar Lawrence’s, as are Mother and Father Capulet’s, who
spend most of their time in the play not thwarting a love affair about which they
know nothing, but attempting to “do the best” by what they believe to be a
disturbed offspring. The play may be called Romeo and Juliet, but the
perspectives and goals of several other people are richly explored by the text.
Only Friar Lawrence’s exposition at the end of the play appears univocal—but it
serves more to explain what has happened (to those on stage and in the
audience) than to present the vision of the title characters or the playwright.
Julia Kristeva (115) writes “the postmodern lies closer to the human
comedy than to abysmal malaise.” And as we have seen, gloom and doom and
inevitability are conspicuously lacking in Romeo and Juliet. Its twists and turns
of action and plot lie closer to the snarls of The Comedy o f Errors and Twelfth
Night than to the breakneck, inexorable drive of Macbeth to power and
destruction or the inexorable descent of Lear from anger to madness. Even the
ending stresses another postmodern ambivalence, which “accepts injustice, and
therefore the destructive part of the world, as the price of life” (Olsen 18). Out
of the lover’s deaths comes reconciliation and civic peace, or as Galligan (29)
puts it, the comic lesson of “hope and life.” The comic, and postmodern visions
attempt to pull the “rug out from under wishful thinking, egocentrism, affected
dignity, pedantry, absurd pride, willfulness, and other human follies” (Olsen 23).
Virtually every one of those “rugs” is pulled out from under virtually every
major character in Romeo and Juliet.
Finally, postmodern theory stresses that the aim of the author is to “subvert
a power structure for no other reason than the pleasure of subverting a power
structure,” and that “no one text has any more or less authority than any other”
(Olsen 18, 23). Romeo and Juliet fits those criteria too. One cannot say with
credibility that in this play Shakespeare sought to attack traditional sixteenthcentury family values, nor parental authority, nor aristocratic dominance, nor
romantic love, but at the same time the play also belittles them all. Family
loyalty is subverted by a senseless blood feud. Parental authority is subverted by
the Nurse, and by Father Capulet’s senseless raging. Romantic love is subverted
by the seeming helplessness of those in love. As characters, lovers and parents
alike, aristocrats and underlings alike, behave sometimes with stupidity,
sometimes with wisdom, sometimes with nobility, sometimes with pettiness.
Shakespeare surely seems to be manipulating his text in the same manner as
critics characterize postmodern texts, presenting “a system of private instead of
public norms, his or her final position remains uncertain” (Olsen 18). And,
though less obvious, Shakespeare seems to be saying “no one text has authority
over any others.” First, he takes Brooke’s known, rather solemn piece of
narrative, tragic poetry, designed to appeal to aristocratic readers, and reworks it
with comic situations and characters designed to appeal to the middling and
lower classes. In so doing he also mocks and subverts the texts of other
contemporary tragedies—the poetry of Romeo and Juliet is lyric, like
contemporary comedy, not lofty like contemporary tragedy; the title characters