A thought on Capulet
My dear friend invited me to see Romeo and Juliet in Topanga Canyon. He's joined a chorus of other friends who ask "why don't you know the works of Shakespeare?" My answers are really no good. I pointed to the truism that our civilization is founded on his works and the Bible, and that I've made a good effort with the Bible. That suggests this work is in front of me, but still I make no move.
After dinner one night, he handed me a book on Goethe's dinner table conversations. I read some pages admiringly. Goethe was very certain that the bones of writing which penetrate us are made of dramatic situations. We absorb the situation, and learn about life by following the characters as they navigate the landscape created by that situation.
Characters and topography.
Souls and their environment.
I got the sense that there is a right move for each soul, when faced with a particular landscape.
This idea "caught" me, and I can feel the life behind it.
And then we saw the play. I liked it, overcoming ancient prejudice. Somehow, to me, Capulet is the character who got me thinking hardest. Or, I should say...wondering.
So I wrote this. I hope it goes partway to repaying the gift of the play! I've been, to whatever degree, touched by the Bard!
Lord Capulet
My friend and I discussed Capulet. He’d talked earlier about the sadism of the man, how he ends his tirade with the threatening “My fingers itch!” It seemed he wanted to murder his wayward daughter. We watched the performance, which was fantastic. But I found myself sympathizing with him. He dreams of making his daughter’s life safe. But that dream, too-well dreamt, makes of him a tyrant.
How frightening may be the choice of man she marries? If she makes a wrong move, if her eyes light up for the men of black hearts, but she remains heavy-lidded at the sober young men, what drama and disaster comes to the family?
A son, Capulet may have thought, can survive a poor decision. The world will school him. But a daughter seemed to him a far more delicate charge. One wrong marriage, and there would be no second beginning. Her security, her family’s honor are bound up in that fraught moment. She must be delivered safely into her future.
Or so he imagines, to his peril. And look, we see him attempting diplomacy with the suitor. He thinks he is defusing a bomb, only safe when the marriage is complete. He makes a very human error: because the marriage decision is absolute, is final, with no “do-over,” he decides he must control it. And because of that, he loses his daughter. She disappears beneath the plan he has made for her. Though he tells himself he loves her, there is now no room in the present moment for true love.
I’m not coming down on Juliet. I think she did the best she could with what she had. Somehow she had to carry the spark of life in her from her birth through to womanhood. That very spark will long for extinguishment when faced with a half-life in tunnels.
If he had listened. Maybe if he knew her favorite poems. If he knew what frightened her, what made her laugh, which memories she returned to in solitude. But I don’t know. Maybe it is structurally impossible. Maybe if man becomes a sheltering tree, then his branches no longer move in the way the young would need. Maybe these tragedies are closer to car accidents and sheer bad luck, than they are pointers to hidden defects in the heart, which, had they only been found first and repaired, would have never been.
Maybe none of us are really right for each other in our roles. I begin to think so. And thinking so, I imagine the route to more success than failure is to remember this. To remember this essential “not-quite-correctness,” or even “always-with-error” quality we bring to everything we do. And therefore, conscious of the error of my own being, to only wish to be kind, and small, and will the good of the other in my presence. The father made the error of “bigness,” and thus blotted out relationship entirely. The opposite error would be a better one, because it at least allows the other to respond, and their response may have information. Juliet was already married. Had he been small, that the bridge and sky between them be large and bountiful and blameless…then she may have said “what father, if I cannot marry?”
Those words are the end of a thread, which may be pulled by not pulling, but waiting, in kindness and love.
If only he had left Juliet room to answer. If she hadn’t been hidden behind the future he imagined, then he could have entered a larger dream, and become the father we all wish to be: loving and fighting for his daughter in the reality of the present. I can see him running to the magistrate. To the priest. Closing the door to the suitor.
I can see him allowing the present to be born.