My wife and I are Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST) subscribers and will soon be seeing Romeo and Juliet at Navy Pier. CST Director Barbara Gaines does brilliant work and this upcoming performance will almost certainly be memorable.
In any event, I just received an email reminder with various relevant links, one to A Scholar's Perspective. Its author, Stuart Sherman, begins ...
All from a sensitivity to a bit of text -- “A plague o’ both your houses.” -- a sensitivity informed by an awareness of how it might have been heard and, from this, why it might have been selected.
It occurs to me that the study of Torah deserves no less.
In any event, I just received an email reminder with various relevant links, one to A Scholar's Perspective. Its author, Stuart Sherman, begins ...
... There's a horror story in here too, with visions of death at its most macabre. And a tale of social terror also: a fever-dream of perpetual conflict from which we’ve not yet found a viable way to wake.
Halfway through the play, Shakespeare compresses both these elements into a single oft-quoted line: “A plague o’ both your houses.” Romeo’s friend Mercutio, mortally wounded in a street skirmish, intones the curse three times quickly, as though it were his dying mantra.
For Shakespeare’s audiences, Mercutio’s o’ would have sounded doubly, signaling not just on, but also, more strangely, of—as if the plague were already intrinsic to the feuding houses of Capulet and Montague, as though the conflict between them were the plague, inbred and maybe ineradicable. Here it claims Mercutio as the play’s first victim.
In Mercutio’s mouth, the “plague” is metaphorical, a commonplace curse-word of the time (with the particular curser’s chosen target slotted in after that o’). But for Romeo and Juliet’s first audiences, plague was real too. Everyone in the theater on opening day (ca. 1596) had survived a visitation of the Black Death in London just three years earlier. They could recall the screams of the afflicted locked up in their own houses (to contain contagion); they would have witnessed the decanting of the dead from those same houses into carts bound for mass burial: hundreds of human corpses dumped into one common pit. The presence of plague in houses was something Shakespeare, his actors, and his audience could feel on their own shaking pulses.
Halfway through the play, Shakespeare compresses both these elements into a single oft-quoted line: “A plague o’ both your houses.” Romeo’s friend Mercutio, mortally wounded in a street skirmish, intones the curse three times quickly, as though it were his dying mantra.
For Shakespeare’s audiences, Mercutio’s o’ would have sounded doubly, signaling not just on, but also, more strangely, of—as if the plague were already intrinsic to the feuding houses of Capulet and Montague, as though the conflict between them were the plague, inbred and maybe ineradicable. Here it claims Mercutio as the play’s first victim.
In Mercutio’s mouth, the “plague” is metaphorical, a commonplace curse-word of the time (with the particular curser’s chosen target slotted in after that o’). But for Romeo and Juliet’s first audiences, plague was real too. Everyone in the theater on opening day (ca. 1596) had survived a visitation of the Black Death in London just three years earlier. They could recall the screams of the afflicted locked up in their own houses (to contain contagion); they would have witnessed the decanting of the dead from those same houses into carts bound for mass burial: hundreds of human corpses dumped into one common pit. The presence of plague in houses was something Shakespeare, his actors, and his audience could feel on their own shaking pulses.
All from a sensitivity to a bit of text -- “A plague o’ both your houses.” -- a sensitivity informed by an awareness of how it might have been heard and, from this, why it might have been selected.
It occurs to me that the study of Torah deserves no less.
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