In a Tortoiseshell
The following excerpt is from my midterm paper for my freshman seminar, FRS117: Tragedy and the Meaning of Life. There was no prompt for this assignment—the only restriction was that we had to write about a text we had read in class so far—so I opted to write about Romeo and Juliet. In this paper, I chose to interrogate why the language of Romeo and Juliet shifts between what I coined to be “conventional” (filled with familiar literary forms and tropes) and “authentic” rhetorical styles. I ultimately contend that a rhetoric of authenticity necessarily reflects the tragic complexities of reality, a reality that cannot be neatly categorized by convention, borrowing Victor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” to help me argue that moments of syntactical authenticity heighten the play’s tragic gravitas.
Excerpt
Conventional rhetoric is not just unable to represent reality, but it fails to represent tragedy, which for Shakespeare is an integral part of reality. This idea crystallizes in the latter half of the play, when the play’s truly tragic moments occur. In particular, Lord Capulet’s reaction to Juliet’s ‘death’ is stiff and forced: he says “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field,”1 and a few lines down, continues “Flower as she was, deflowerèd by him. / Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir.”2 Here, the consecutive accumulation of conventional floral imagery and filial metaphors makes Capulet’s expression of grief appear contrived. In fact, imagery associating dead brides with flowers can even be found within numerous epitaphs in the Greek Anthology, a Renaissance record of Hellenic poetry.3 Capulet’s mourning, modeled on the Classics, is therefore derivative. When read in the context of the rest of the scene, the detachment and automaticity of Capulet’s dialogue becomes even more apparent. Just before Capulet delivers his lines, the Nurse exclaims “She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead, alack the day!”4 which is mirrored by Lady Capulet’s exclamation, “Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!”5 Unlike Capulet, the reactions of the Nurse and Lady Capulet more authentically convey the grief of losing a child. While Capulet uses descriptive imagery, neither the Nurse nor Lady Capulet do so: for them, their sorrow and shock are unable to be adequately captured but for repeating the words “she’s dead”, an utterance that seems out of place in a play filled with poetic language, but an utterance that nonetheless feels like a natural expression of grief for the audience. In this context, Capulet’s turn to literary convention appears detached from the actual emotional consequences of the tragedy.
Accordingly, an authentic rhetoric, which is divested of convention, is better able to understand a world that is itself unconventional; authenticity indeed heightens the audience’s ability to feel the tragic emotions of fear and pity because it enables the process of defamiliarization. In his essay ‘Art as Device,’ Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky defines defamiliarization as the act of describing objects and experiences in novel, unfamiliar ways so that the audience can view these objects and experiences in a different light. Shklovsky refers to the Aristotelian notion that poetic language must have “something foreign, something outlandish about it.”6 To put it simply, conventional rhetoric produces an automatic effect on the audience; that is, when the audience hears a sonnet, they know the characters are deeply in love. When rhetoric is then authentic—meaning it lacks familiar literary conventions—the audience is confronted with tragedy in ways they have not experienced before in previous literature, and thus fear and pity are produced in new ways.
The defamiliarizing power of authentic rhetoric is epitomized by Juliet’s Act IV Scene 3 soliloquy. Juliet’s soliloquy can be read in contrast to Aristotle’s concept of dianoia (‘tragic language’), which Aristotle believed should include references and allusions, typically to Classical mythology.7 Devoid of these conventions, Juliet’s soliloquy instead uses defamiliarizing vivid imagery to express her troubled interiority. Unlike her father who uses borrowed Classical imagery in his mourning, Juliet portrays death brutally and viscerally. She fears being “stifled”8 in a place “where the bones / Of all my buried ancestors are packed,”9 presenting death as suffocating and asphyxiating. She then imagines waking up to “madly play with my forefathers’ joints, / And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, / And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone / As with a club dash out my desp’rate brains?”,10 a series of grotesque images strung together by verbs so tactile that the audience can almost physically feel the violence. This soliloquy, moreover, is formally defamiliarizing, as Juliet frequently breaks the usually stable flow of iambic pentameter. For example, the three-syllable long line “Come, vial,”11 beginning with the forceful imperative, reflects Juliet’s unwavering and resolute mindset. More importantly, it is the lack of the other seven syllables that makes this line effective: by giving the audience time to pause, Shakespeare heightens the tragic solemnity of this scene. Breaks in form continue throughout the soliloquy to reflect Juliet’s conflicted line of thought, such as the line “No, no! This shall forbid it. Lie thou there.”12 Here, the caesuras disrupt the rhythm of the soliloquy, underscoring Juliet’s inner turmoil as she alternates between her fear of death and commitment to the Friar’s plan. The soliloquy concludes with the line “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink. I drink to thee,”13 in which the rapid stream of syllables in this fifteen-syllable line amplifies the intensity of the tragic moment.
Footnotes
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Peter Holland (Penguin Books, 2016), 4.5.28-29. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.5.38-39. ↩︎
- Gayle Whittier, “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.5.107. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.5.108. ↩︎
- Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1—14. In this essay, Shklovsky coins the idea of “defamiliarization,” the idea that poetry should describe familiar things in unfamiliar ways such that the reader can gain a newfound appreciation or perspective. This will be expanded on further in the essay. ↩︎
- Aristotle, “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE),” in Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, ed. Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard (Methuen Drama, 2019), 23. Aristotle argues that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “pity and fear” in the audience through the process of imitation. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.3.33. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.3.40-41. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.3.51-54. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.3.20. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.3.23. ↩︎
- Shakespeare, 4.3.58. ↩︎
Bibliography
Aristotle. “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE).” In Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, edited by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard. Methuen Drama, 2019.
Brown, Carolyn E. “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 333—55. https://doi.org/10.2307/450952.
Petrarch, Francesco. Sonnets and Shorter Poems. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Peter Holland. Penguin Books, 2016.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1—14. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752.
Author Commentary / Nikki Han
Attempting to write a paper about a play that has centuries worth of scholarly discourse was an incredibly daunting task. I had no idea where to begin, so I began by going back through the notes I had typed in class. There were two key ideas that stuck out to me in my notes: the first was a brief mention of Petrarch’s influence on Romeo’s language; the second was an observation that Juliet’s soliloquy was devoid of references and allusions. These two ideas, I realized, seemed to be in tension with each other. Consequently, I went back through the play and realized I could use a framework of “convention” and “authenticity” (though I had not yet come up with these specific words to frame my thoughts) to understand the language of the entire play. Arriving at the thesis, however, was still a difficult process. I brainstormed and mind-mapped, drafted and redrafted thesis statements, until I finally arrived at a thesis that actually convinced me. Along the way, I decided to use Victor Schlovsky’s theory of “defamiliarization,” which I had encountered back in high school, as I found that “defamiliarization” could help explain the effect of “authentic” rhetoric: convention is familiar, and authenticity is (sometimes) unfamiliar.
My thesis hinges on careful textual analysis, so doing an effective close reading of Shakespeare’s language was integral to my piece. In order to argue my thesis, I had to prove multiple things: firstly, that the play’s language does actually fluctuate between conventional and authentic; secondly, that Shakespeare’s contrasting use of conventional and authentic rhetoric reflects his specific, tragic vision of the world; and thirdly, that moments of authenticity heighten the play’s tragic gravitas. To do so, I moved between analyzing individual words, assessing meter, and examining the very structure of the tragedy. I also completed additional research to help me understand when Shakespeare invoked other literary traditions and authors. Doing this close reading helped uncover an entire world of meaning that lay beneath the highly wrought text. Juliet famously says “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet”—an adage that illuminates the gap between language and lived experiences—but when analyzing literature, a “rose” is always called a “rose” for a reason.
Editor Commentary / Annie Kim
College-level writing can seem daunting, especially when your chosen topic is a text that has been studied and commented upon for hundreds of years. Nikki’s impressive paper, which is even more so because it was written for an FRS course, trusts in her own reading of a text instead of excessively historicizing Early Modern English. She critically examines the use of classical allusions and literary tropes in the expression of love and grief and incorporates a concept from high school to form her motive, just like the Gaipa moves we often discuss in Writing Seminar. With her paper, Nikki proves that college-level writing is not an unreachable goal but simply a small step up from what we can all achieve with practice.
We worked on maintaining the close focus of her argument by avoiding defaulting to the general argument that hyperbole creates a sense of contrivance. This excerpt, taken from the end of Nikki’s paper, demonstrates her eloquent and concise orienting which is done throughout her paper, as when she introduces “defamiliarization” and “dianoia,” which she uses to support her analysis of textual evidence. Nikki’s thesis is clearly stated at various appropriate points — “…an authentic form of rhetoric, defined by its lack of literary influences and occasional breaking of meter, is more effectively able to represent the complex tragedies of reality…” and “through the process of defamiliarization, a rhetoric of authenticity is able to generate the greatest tragic effect…” — shows the amount of thought she put into its formulation.
