BY WILLIAM ARCHER.

“Romeo and Juliet” affords a good illustration of the fallacy which lies at the root of the Shakespearologists’ panegyrics of the poet’s “local color.” We are told that every touch and tint is correctly and vividly Italian. Schlegel, Coleridge, and PhilarÈte Chasles have sought to concentrate in impassioned word-pictures the coloring at once of “Romeo and Juliet” and of Italy. What Shakespeare designed to paint, in vivid but perfectly general hues, was an ideal land of love, a land of moonlight and nightingales, a land to which he had certainly travelled, perhaps before leaving the banks of the Avon. It happens that Italy, of all countries in the material world, most closely resembles this fairyland of the youthful fantasy. If we must place it on the earth at all, we place it there. Therefore did Shakespeare willingly accept the Italian names for scene and characters provided in his original; and, therefore, our scenic artists very properly draw their inspiration from Italian orange groves and Italian palaces. But it is a fundamental error to regard Romeo and Juliet as specifically Italians, or their country as Italy and nothing but Italy. Their pure-humanity is of no race, their Italy has no latitude or longitude. Shakespeare could not if he would, and would not if he could, have given it the minutely accurate local color of which we hear so much.

Could not if he would, for even the most devout believers in his visit to Italy place it after the date of “Romeo and Juliet” and before that of “The Merchant of Venice.” Now, to maintain that the poet evolved Italian local color out of his inner consciousness is merely a piece of the supernaturalism which infects Shakespearology. Schiller, by diligent study and conversations with Goethe, grasped the cruder local colors of Switzerland, but Shakespeare had no means or opportunity for such study, and no Goethe to aid him. By lifelong love two modern Englishmen have attempted to construct an Italy in their imagination; Rossetti quite successfully, Mr. Shorthouse more or less so. Shakespeare had neither the motives nor the means for attempting any such feat.

But further, had Shakespeare known Italy as well as Mr. Browning, he would still have refrained from loading “Romeo and Juliet” with local color. His audience did not want it, could not understand it, would have been bewildered by it. The very youth of Juliet (“she is not fourteen”) proves, it is said, that the poet thought of her as an early-developed Italian girl. Now, the physiological observation here implied is in itself questionable, and, had it conflicted with their pre-conceptions as to the due period of first love in girls, would have been incomprehensible, if not repellent, to an Elizabethan audience. We, though taught to regard it as “local color,” are, by our social conventions, so accustomed to place the marriageable age later, that in our imagination we always add three or four years to Juliet’s fourteen; and on the stage the addition is generally made in so many words. But the social conventions of Shakespeare’s time tended in precisely the opposite direction. Anne, daughter of Sir Peter Warburton, was only twelve when, in 1539, she was married to Sir Edward Fitton. In Porter’s “Angrie Women of Abington,” published in 1599, some five years after the probable date of “Romeo and Juliet,” it is explicitly stated that fifteen was the ordinary age at which girls married. That was the age of Lady Jane Grey at her marriage: the wife of Sir Simon d’Ewes was even younger; and a little research could easily supply a hundred other cases. In Johnson’s “Crowne Garland of Goulden Roses” (1612) a girl who is single at twenty expresses her despair of ever being married. Thus we find that this renowned proof of Juliet’s Italian nature resolves itself into a familiar trait of English social habit in the sixteenth century. Had it been otherwise, it would have been a fault and not a merit in a play which addressed itself, not to an ethnological society, but to a popular audience.

A touch which may possibly have conveyed to Shakespeare’s audience a peculiarly Italian impression, is Lady Capulet’s suggestion that Romeo should be poisoned. In the sixteenth century poisoning was commonly known in England as “the Italian crime,” and was probably connected with Italy in the popular mind as are macaroni and organ-grinders at the present day. But poison is part of the stock-in-trade of the tragic dramatist, and plays a prominent part in the two most distinctly northern of the poet’s works, “Hamlet” and “Lear,” Again, the Apothecary’s speech,—

is held up as a peculiarly Italian touch, no such law appearing in the English statute-book of the time. The fact is that Shakespeare found the idea in Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” and used it simply to heighten the terror of the situation.

The insult of “biting the thumb” is said, rather doubtfully, to be characteristically Italian; but what can be more English than the cry for “clubs, bills, and partisans” which immediately follows it? Lord Campbell, indeed, seeks to prove Shakespeare’s minute knowledge of English law by the frequent and accurate references to it in this opening scene. The “grove of sycamore” under which Romeo is described as wandering, is said to be of unmistakably Italian growth; why, then, does Schlegel, though one of the originators of the local-color theory, seek to make it still more Italian by translating it “Kastanienhain”? Had Shakespeare possessed either the will or the ability to transport his hearers into specifically Italian scenes, would he have confined himself to mentioning one tree, which is neither peculiar to Italy nor a particularly prominent feature in Italian landscapes? Where are the oranges and olives, the poplar, the cypress, and the laurel? Where are the rushing Adige and the gleaming Alps? Where is the allusion to the Amphitheatre, which could scarcely have been wanting had the poet known or cared anything about Verona except as the capital of his mythic love-land? It might as well be argued that he intended the local color to be peculiarly English because he makes Capulet call Paris an “Earl.”

The truth is that when the reader’s imagination is heated to a certain point, the colors which subtle associations have implanted in it flush out of their own accord, with no stronger stimulus from the poet than is involved in the mere mention of a name. There is a strict analogy in the Elizabethan theatre. Given poetry and acting which powerfully excited the feelings, and the placard bearing the name of “Agincourt” made all the glaring incongruities vanish, and conjured up in the mind of each hearer such a picture of the tented field as his individual imagination had room for. So it is with the Italy of “Romeo and Juliet.” Our fancy being quickened by the mere glow of the poetry, the very name “Verona” places before us a vivid picture composed of all sorts of reminiscences of art, literature, and travel. The pulsing life of the two lovers—types of pure-humanity as general as ever poet fashioned—easily puts on a southern physiognomy with their Italian names. The might of a name has power to cloak even openly incongruous details. It is only on reflection, for instance, that we recognize in Mercutio a most un-Italian and distinctly Teutonic figure, an “angelsÄchsisch-treuherzig” humorist, as Kreyssig truly says, who is even made to ridicule Italian manners and phrases with the true Englishman’s provincial intolerance. Thus all of us, in reading “Romeo and Juliet,” are haunted by visions of Italy, whose origin the commentators strive to find in individual touches of local color and costume, instead of in the powerful stimulus given to all sorts of latent associations by the whole force of the poet’s genius. Even apart from travel, pictures and descriptions which do actually aim at local color have made us far more familiar with Italy than any Elizabethan audience can possibly have been. It is scarcely paradoxical to maintain that the least imaginative among us gives to the love-land of “Romeo and Juliet” far more accurately Italian hues than it wore in the imagination of Shakespeare himself. In the same way I, for my part, never read Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta” without forming a vivid picture of the narrow, sultry stairways of Valetta (which I have never seen), conjured up, not certainly by any individual touches of description in the text, but by the mere imaginative vigor of the whole presentation. Conversely, too, a work of small vitality, a second-rate French tragedy for instance, may be full of accurate local and historical allusion, and may yet transport us no whither beyond the cheerless steppes of frigid alexandrines. There is an art, and a high art, to which definite local color is essential, but Shakespeare’s is of another order. If we want a masterpiece of strictly Italian coloring we must go, not to “Romeo and Juliet,” but to Alfred de Musset’s “Lorenzaccio.”

Shakespeare, in short, presents us with so much, or so little, of the Italian manners depicted in Brooke and Paynter as would be readily comprehensible to his audience. The fact, too, that the whole love-poetry of the period was influenced by Cisalpine models gave to the forms of expression in certain portions of his work a slightly Italian turn. For the rest, he imbued the great erotic myth with the warmest human life, and left it to create an atmosphere and scenery of its own in the imagination of the beholder. No atmosphere or scenery can be more appropriate than those of an Italian summer, and therefore it is right that our scenic artists should strain their resources to reproduce its warm luxuriance of color. “For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring,” says Benvolio, and if we choose to call this hot air a scirocco, why not? But Shakespeare knew nothing of scirocco or tramontana; he knew that warmth is the life-element of passion, and made summer in the air harmonise with summer in the blood. That is the whole secret of his “local color.”—Gentleman’s Magazine.