by Hailey Bachrach, Globe Research Intern
Our Romeo & Juliet is currently on tour. Find out more on our website.
You’ll often read that early modern writers set plays in Italy when they wanted to portray particularly wild events that would not be seen as acceptable in English society, but were considered par for the course for those hot-blooded, Catholic Mediterraneans. Those crazy Italians, you imagine an Elizabethan theatregoer chuckling, of course they end up stabbing each other/poisoning people/committing incest/[insert dramatic tragic plot twist here]. And there are a lot of violent, dramatic decisions in Romeo and Juliet. One of the most crucial is Tybalt and Mercutio’s fight in Act 3, Scene 1, the hinge which swings the play into irrevocable tragedy. The pointless duel between mercurial Mercutio and hot-tempered Tybalt might seem quintessentially stage-Italian—but in fact, such a sudden outburst of public violence might have been, for an Elizabethan theatregoer, one of the most familiar things in the play.
Matt Doherty as Tybalt and Steffan Donnelly as Mercutio in the Globe’s current touring production of Romeo & Juliet © Helena Miscioscia
In a crowd of early modern Englishmen, plenty of people would have been armed—and not just the seedy denizens of Southwark. In the rigidly hierarchical Elizabethan culture, one of the marks of a gentleman was the right to carry a sword. In Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio is sure that the combination of young men, old rivalries, and handy weapons is surely a recipe for disaster: ‘if we meet we shall not scape a brawl,/ For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring’ (3.1.3-4). In early modern London, the situation was not so different. As printed books proliferated, highly formalized duelling codes travelled from Italy to England, where the aristocracy adopted them. In these kinds of duels, however, the outcome was basically irrelevant: the point wasn’t to actually hurt or kill your opponent, just to demonstrate that you were honourable enough to risk being hurt or killed yourself. In other words, it wasn’t exactly the same as the kind of duelling we see in Romeo and Juliet, though both Tybalt and Mercutio insist that honour is the reason they want to fight. In truth, however, these fights look more like the street brawls with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries were intimately, and often personally, familiar.
To present-day sensibilities, playwrights are probably among the last people you’d expect to be tangled up in a murder case. But in theatrical circles of Shakespeare’s day, it happened surprisingly often. Ben Jonson, who would later write alongside Shakespeare for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, was sentenced to death for killing a fellow actor in a duel, but managed to escape hanging by pleading the ‘benefit of clergy’: a law that spared literate men from capital punishment for felonies. More famous is the death of playwright Christopher Marlowe, apparently the result of a brawl over who would pay a tavern bill. But this was not Marlowe’s only brush with violence: in 1589, he was briefly imprisoned in for his participation in a fight that ended with a man dead. The account of the incident sounds eerily familiar to the events in Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet. Constance Brown Kuriyama, Marlowe’s biographer, describes what happened, quoting from the coroner’s inquest which followed:
Christopher “Morley” [a common alternate spelling of his name] of London, gentleman, was fighting with William Bradley in Hog Lane […] Thomas Watson of London, gentleman, alerted by the shouts of the crowd that had gathered around the combatants, approached them, drawing his sword to separate them and restore the queen’s peace. Marlowe promptly desisted and withdrew. Bradley, on the other hand, “seeing the same Thomas Watson thus intervening with his drawn sword said to him in the following English words, ‘Art thou now come? Then I will have a bout with thee.’”
Bradley proceeded to badly wound Watson (who was, incidentally, also a writer) in his attack, but it was Watson who finally struck the killing blow. Both Watson and Marlowe were arrested, and Watson put in a plea that he had attacked in self-defence. Marlowe spent about two weeks in Newgate before he was bailed out by some friends.
This kind of street brawling was sometimes unfavourably compared to more ‘proper’ forms of combat: that is, fighting in war, as in Robert Barret’s 1598 book The theorike and practike of moderne warres discoursed in dialogue wise. A true gentleman was expected to be temperate, to have close control of his emotions at all times. In other words, a gentleman should never be, as Mercutio teasingly describes Benvolio, ‘as hot a Jack in thy mood as any in Italy, and as soon moved to be moody, and as soon moody to be moved’ (3.1.11-13). But while the hot-tempered, violence-prone young men of Romeo and Juliet are often viewed as typically Italian, their quarrels and even their murders can very clearly be traced much closer to Shakespeare’s own life and world.
Further reading
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life by Constance Brown Kuriyama
The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness, and Honour by Markku Peltonen
Shakespeare & Co. by Stanley Wells