The Cosmology of Love: Fate and Free Will in Romeo and Juliet
John M. Axten
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings—Plato1
Romeo and Juliet furnishes us with one of the most powerful, enchanting portrayals of the notion of True Love in Western literature. The intensity and immensity of Romeo and Juliet’s mutual love is both transcendent and transformative: in Romeo’s love-smitten eyes, Juliet’s window becomes “the east, and Juliet is the sun” (II.2.3). The play repeatedly depicts their love as a brilliant cosmic light, which endures through their tragic deaths. This recurrent metaphor of light, and its opposite—darkness, seems to figure forth such positive qualities of Romeo and Juliet’s True Love, which is ultimately spoiled by circumstance. Below the surface, however, the metaphor suggests an intimate interrelation between their love and two darker possible causes of their death. In the main, the cosmic light/dark metaphor expresses the paradox of Fate and (misused) Free Will as alternative etiological forces at work behind Romeo and Juliet’s True Love and “untimely death” (I.4.111). Inasmuch as Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, this question of the cause of their tragic demise is central to the play, and it centers upon the antithesis of Fate and Free Will, as expressed by the light/dark metaphor.
The metaphor of cosmic light and dark seems relatively straightforward on the surface: it expresses the positive nature and qualities of Romeo and Juliet’s mutual True Love. In the balcony scene, Juliet, as Romeo’s love object, is immediately figured as a source of cosmic light: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!” (II.2.2-3). Romeo and Juliet’s mutual True Love is emphatically set against the utter darkness of Romeo’s unrequited, “untrue” love for Rosaline, under whose influence he wandered about at night, and relegated himself to his room “before the worshipped sun / Peered forth the golden window of the east” (I.1.109-10). In the balcony scene, Romeo is again stirring about at night, but Juliet as Romeo’s True Love rises as “the worshipped sun,” her window “the golden window of the east.”
The significance of the light metaphor here consists in the contrasting parallelism of the terms “sun” and “window” in the two quotations above: Romeo’s True Love is portrayed as the “sun” rising in the “window of the east” at night, as it did not with his untrue love for Rosaline. Thus, the light/dark metaphor identifies Romeo and Juliet’s True Love with light, setting it against the darkness of “untrue” love. Furthermore, the metaphorical formulation “Juliet is the sun” gives utterance to the transcendent, cosmic immensity and intensity of their love. These qualities are likewise typified by Romeo’s statement that Juliet’s eyes are “Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven” (II.2.15). Romeo’s love for Juliet is so overwhelming, as the Juliet/sun formulation connotes, that not only is Juliet Romeo’s “light and life,” she is the very center of his world. Moreover, the formulation even suggests that, in a post-Copernican world, Juliet is the center around which the world and indeed the entire universe revolve.2 It seems all is well.
The cosmic light metaphors deployed by Romeo in the balcony scene, however, contain a sinister undersong, for they imply the presence of a dark, destructive Fate at work behind his and Juliet’s True Love. As already observed, the stars and their light function as a metaphor for Juliet’s beauty, and, by logical extension, for Romeo and Juliet’s intense mutual love:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return
(II.2.15-17)
Yet this astral conceit recalls the ominous words of the Chorus at the Prologue: “A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life /…The fearful passage of their death-marked love…” (I.i.6-9). Considering the two quotations in conjunction, the notion of a fatal attraction emerges here in the balcony scene. Romeo and Juliet’s True Love is inextricably bound up with their “untimely death” because of some edict of Fate, written in the stars. Their “light and life,” that is, their mutual True Love, is also their forthcoming downfall. Thus, the cosmic light/dark metaphor betrays how their worlds, as they revolve around one another, are simultaneously revolving toward their deaths, under the yoke of Fate. Life and love are for Romeo and Juliet consubstantial—a seamless unity—and that unity is coterminous with their fated deaths.
But the play also suggests by means of the light/dark metaphor that Romeo and Juliet, far from being mere marionettes of Fate, are rather figuratively blind to the rest of the world, which implies the agency of Free Will. Their blindness derives from the fact that they have set up a microcosmic world of love, which is isolated from the macrocosm of the rest of the world. This microcosmic isolation is registered metaphorically in terms of light and darkness: “Juliet is the sun,” and “Romeo, thou day in night” (III.2.17). Romeo and Juliet envision their microcosm of True Love as an entire, separate macrocosm: it is as though beyond it (to borrow a verse from Donne) “Nothing else is.” The problem, however, is that there is a world beyond their microcosm; they simply do not see it. This blindness is expressed again in terms of the cosmic light/dark metaphor by Benvolio at II.1.32, and by Juliet, if unwittingly, in her apostrophe to night:
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing Night…
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties, or if love be blind,
It best agrees with night
(III.2.5-10)
In the “close curtain” of their microcosmic world of love, Romeo and Juliet only see one another, and only by the light of their mutual love. The light metaphor here is ironic: the macrocosm of Verona is to them as dark as night; they are figuratively blind to it in their pursuit of True Love.
The light/dark metaphor in Juliet’s apostrophe to night not only expresses the lovers’ blindness to the exterior world, but it also suggests that such a blind, isolated pursuit of True Love is tantamount to an abandonment of Right Reason. Insofar as the term “Right Reason” denotes the intellectual ability to make well-reasoned moral choices, its faculty presupposes the possession of Free Will. That is to say, it refers to the practice of thinking through and weighing alternatives, of exercising moderation by pursuing, as it were, the middle way between extremes in one’s endeavors. The Friar worriedly comments on the importance of reason vis-à-vis Romeo and Juliet: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast” (II.3.94), and “These violent delights have violent ends /…Therefore love moderately, long love doth so; / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (II.6.9/14-15). Juliet unknowingly expresses her and Romeo’s neglect of these principles of Right Reason in terms of the light/dark metaphor:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging; such a wagoneer
As Phaeton3 would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing Night
(III.2.1-5)
Juliet identifies her and Romeo’s love with “cloudy night,” the “close curtain [of] love-performing Night,” wherein they “can see to do their amorous rites / By their own beauties”; so in beckoning the sun to set, she voices her desire to pursue her love with Romeo. It is immediately striking, however, that Phaeton, not Phoebus, is at the reins of the sun in her formulation. Juliet directly associates her fervid desire to consummate her love with Romeo with a mythical figure commonly considered the embodiment of unreason. Abandoning Right Reason like Phaeton, the lovers do not follow the middle way between extremes, and can expect that “These violent delights have violent ends.” Juliet’s desire to hasten the sun’s course such that “cloudy night” will be brought in “immediately” corresponds to the uncontrolled, destructive speed with which Phaeton, owing to his unreason, wheeled unto his own “untimely death.” On the same note, this hasty desire stands in stark opposition to the Friar’s precepts of Right Reason: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”; “Therefore love moderately, long love doth so.” Thus, through these associations, the Phaetonic light metaphorically invoked by Juliet expresses the abandonment of Right Reason inherent in the lovers’ desire to pursue their True Love. The light/dark metaphor not only forecasts in Juliet’s apostrophe to night the calamity toward which such a neglect of the moderate middle way leads, but even associates the lovers with Phaeton in the last lines of the play:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings,
The sun for sorrow will not show its head.
(V.3.305-6)
An apt comparison can be made to Ovid’s description of Phoebus after Phaeton’s death:
Wyth ruthful cheere and heavie heart his father made great mone
And would not shew himselfe abrode, but mournd at home alone…
A day did passe without the Sunne.
(Metamorphoses, II.416-19)
The play’s penultimate comment upon Romeo and Juliet’s death suggests, through the deployment of the cosmic light metaphor, that the lovers’ neglect of Right Reason in the pursuit of their desire may be the cause of their tragic, “untimely death.”
Having identified this etiological paradox of Fate and misused Free Will, the question remains: which of the two does the play affirm as the cause of the Romeo and Juliet’s “untimely death”? (And, as a corollary, which should the reader consider as the cause?) The play does not firmly espouse one or the other. Romeo and Juliet, by leaving this paradox unresolved, demonstrates that True Love is rather something inscrutable that defies rationalized assessment. But, by the same token, in order to fully appreciate this portrayal of True Love, this antithesis of Fate and Free Will must be confronted and comprehended. For it is only through this comprehension that one can fully appreciate the significance of the fact that neither of these explanations really offers a full, satisfactory account of the lovers’ tragic end as it relates to their True Love. By leaving this etiological paradox of Fate and Free Will unresolved, Romeo and Juliet demonstrates that such rational measuring sticks have no explicatory application to True Love; rather, it suggests that True Love has a mysterious logic of its own—even if that logic seems, by all normative standards, to be utter illogic. As Romeo says to the Friar, in response his comment that “mad men have no ears” (III.3.61): “Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel” (III.3.64).
1. Plato, Phaedrus. Ed. Benjamin Jowett (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html).
2. The reader would do well to remember here that Copernicus had in On the Revolution of the Spheres (1543) recently revised the Ptolemaic System’s reckoning of the earth as the center of the universe, showing the sun to be, in fact, at the center, around which all the spheres revolved.
3. Phoebus Apollo, as the god of light, is traditionally associated with moral wisdom. He typifies Right Reason inasmuch as while driving his chariot (the sun) he keeps to the middle way, exercising moderation in his control over the horses with the reins. He pursues his course neither too slowly nor too fast. By contrast, his son Phaeton typifies the abandonment of reason in his violent pursuit of his desire to drive his father’s chariot. Unable to control the reins as he pursues his course through the sky, Phaeton does not keep to the middle way; the horses reel out of control, soaring wildly too high and too low, going far too fast. For the complete story, see Book Two of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, viz., the Arthur Golding translation (1567), which Shakespeare knew and consulted.
Works Cited
Donne, John. John Donne. Ed. John Hayward. Great Britain: The Whitefriars Press Ltd., 1960.
Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Arthur Golding. Ed. John Frederick Nims. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books., 2000.
Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Random House, Inc., 1937.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2003