The aesthetic resurrection of the "death-mark"d" lovers in Romeo and Juliet

pp. 139-147

in: Adam M. Cohen, Wonder in Shakespeare, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

In chapter I.2, Cohen traces the presence in Shakespeare's drama of "pseudoresurrections," which he defines as "either the raising of those thought to be dead but not actually dead, or the apparent rising—in the form of a ghost, for instance—of the actual dead."¹ Although Cohen identifies Juliet's revival after ingesting a liquid effecting "A thing like death" (4.1.74)² as a pseudoresurrection,³ I find that the Friar's phrasing recalls a morose fact of the "death-mark"d" title characters' existence (1.P.9): they are "a thing like death," theatricalized representations of fictional figures who are introduced as having "take[n] their life" prior to their first entrance (1.P.6). Expanding upon Cohen's examination of the relationship between medieval Resurrection plays and Shakespeare's theaetr, I will first discuss how Romeo and Juliet reproduces forms of awe present in the dramatizations of resurrections in the Wakefield cycle. I will then argue that Romeo and Juliet frames the title characters as "aesthetic resurrections," rather than as "pseudoresurrections," through the conventions of the stage. This is in part a result of the play's prologues, conclusion, and deathly allusions, which function to maintain the wonder of resurrection drama in the present tense of the love tragedy, where the deceased Romeo and Juliet are brought back to life as living characters by actors even as their deaths continue to haunt the action from an "unaesthecized absent-present affective space" that Bryan Reynolds and I refer to as a 'some-other-where-but-here-space."⁴