Edward Dowden in 1900: Shakespeare did not intend to represent more than a fragment of human life in the tragedy. He did not aim at a criticism of the whole of human character; he cared to show us his hero and his heroine only as lovers, and as exemplary in the perfection of their love; faithful even unto death; choosing, with a final election of the heart, love at all costs. Here is no view of the whole of life; we are shown merely what befell a young pair of lovers during four days long ago in Verona. But Shakespeare felt, and we all feel, that if such love as theirs can be taken up into a complete character, modified and controlled by the other noble qualities which go to form a large and generous nature, the world will be the better for such pure and sacred passion. Such, it appears to me, are the ethics of the play.
And the personages by whom the lovers are encircled are so conceived as to become the critics of ideal love from their several points of view, honouring and exalting it by the inadequacy of their criticism. To old Capulet, in his mood, it seems that the passions of the heart are to be determined by parental authority. To Lady Capulet marriage is an affair of worldly convenience. To the Nurse it is the satisfaction of a pleasurable instinct. Mercutio, a gallant friend, is too brilliant in his intellectuality to be capable of a passion in which the heart shows that it is superior to the brain; he mocks at love, not because he really scorns it, but because he is remote from it, and cherishes before all else his freelance liberty. The Friar views human passion from the quietudes of the cloister, or amid the morning dew of the fields; but botany is not the science of human life. Even Romeo’s earlier self, with his amorous melancholy, becomes the critic of his later self, when a true and final election has been made, and when love has become the risen sun of his day. As for Juliet, her words—
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite,
—may serve for an inscription beneath that statue of pure gold of which Shakespeare was the artist.
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