Hello everybody and welcome to today’s video. Now Lord and Lady Montague don’t play much of
a role in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, but as we shall see in today’s video,
that in itself tells us something important about Elizabethan England.
Shakespeare’s initial presentation of Lord and Lady Montague highlights the similarities they
have with Lord and Lady Capulet. In Act 1, Scene 1, these four characters arrive on the scene
during the street fight, and Shakespeare presents them in remarkably similar ways:
CAPULET What noise is this? Give me my long sword, ho!
LADY CAPULET A crutch, a crutch! Why call you for a sword?
And
MONTAGUE Thou villain Capulet!—Hold me not, let me go.
LADY MONTAGUE Thou shalt not stir one foot to seek a foe.
The parallels are clear: the lords seek to join in with the fighting,
and the ladies soon put a stop to that.
We already know from the prologue that these are the heads of ‘Two households,
both alike in dignity’, and so we might assume that the role played by each set of parents will
be similar throughout the play. But that’s simply not the case at all. Lord and Lady
Capulet appear time and time again, with much of the play taking place in their house. Lord
and Lady Montague feature much less prominently, and we never see a single scene inside their home.
In fact, Lady Montague only speaks in Act 1, Scene 1! The question is, as always, why?
One point to consider is how Shakespeare’s presentation of Romeo and Juliet’s respective
parents is used to highlight the different treatment of men and women in Elizabethan England.
Put simply, men had much greater freedom than women. Romeo can stay out all night, be away
from home, pursue Rosaline then Juliet, hang out with his friends, gate-crash parties and do pretty
much whatever he wants, free from interfering or controlling parents. For Juliet, the situation is
very different. In Elizabethan England, women were dependent on men: first their fathers,
then their husbands. To attract a good husband, a young woman needed a reputation for chastity.
Juliet is never seen roaming the streets of Verona. She is under constant supervision. The
absence of Romeo’s parents in the play therefore reminds the audience of the different standard
applied to young men, a standard which hugely contrasts with that applied to young women.
Today, we rightly see this double standard as completely unacceptable.
As well as Act 1, Scene 1 being the only scene in which Lady Montague speaks, Shakespeare gives
Lord Montague his longest speech when he is talking to Benvolio about Romeo’s sadness:
Many a morning hath he there been seen, With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew,
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs; But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the furthest east begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son, And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks far daylight out, And makes himself an artificial night.
Black and portentous must this humour prove, Unless good counsel may the cause remove.
The hyperbolic or exaggerated poetic nature of Montague’s speech is significant.
Filled with metaphor, imagery of nature and classical allusion,
these words remind us of the way Romeo himself speaks.
Perhaps this is a subtle suggestion that Romeo has inherited his personality from his father.
The poetic nature of Montague’s words
is more notable when compared to the plain description given by Benvolio:
So early walking did I see your son:
Towards him I made, but he was ware of me, And stole into the covert of the wood.
Lord Montague is one of the final characters to speak in the play, offering to raise a statue of
Juliet ‘in pure gold’. Lord Capulet’s instant response is that he shall raise a statue to
Romeo ‘by his lady’s side’. This final exchange between the two Lords can be seen as competitive
rather than cooperative, with each seeking to outdo the other.
As we have seen, Lady Montague’s speaking role is limited to Act 1, Scene 1. Her role is so minor
that her death is announced in the play’s final scene when she dies offstage. Brett Gamboa argues:
I suspect that Romeo’s mother dies not from grief but from theatrical necessity.
She could not come out onstage, because she was already there. If the 12 actors on stage
at the end of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ were all that Shakespeare’s company had available,
or all it chose to employ, our understanding of the company’s
composition and distribution of labour may grow considerably… Absences like Lady
Montague’s suggest that Shakespeare engineered plays with fixed casting limitations in mind,
each constructed to be playable by a small, set number of players who would play multiple roles.
—'Shakespeare’s Double Plays: Dramatic Economy on the Early Modern Stage’ (2018)
This makes a lot of sense—Lady Montague’s death certainly adds nothing to the tragedy.
She has played such a small role in the play in the first place that the
audience surely would not be moved by her death.
KEY QUOTATIONS For key quotations,
perhaps the exchange from Act 1, Scene 1 which mirrors that of Lord and Lady Capulet:
MONTAGUE Thou villain Capulet!—Hold me not, let me go.
LADY MONTAGUE Thou shalt not stir a foot to seek a foe.
This lends itself nicely to an analysis of how Shakespeare’s presentation of Romeo’s parents ends
up being so different to Juliet’s. It will also allow an exploration of just why that is the case.
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Everything I go through in these videos can be found in the new third edition of
Mr Bruff’s Guide to Romeo and Juliet, available through following the links in the description.