Hiya darling! I’m going to a Shakespeare masterclass soon (very exciting) and they’ve asked us to bring along a speech so I’ve got the ‘gallop apace’ one that Juliet does just because I love it. Before I go in, I was wondering if you had any thoughts or extra light that you’d want to shed on your favourite parts or lines or even just a general outlook on the speech! Love your blog by the way! X
Hi! I hope you enjoy your Shakespeare masterclass! I think this is a wonderful speech—so much could be said about it. It is first and foremost the expression of Juliet’s sexual longing. It is a very extreme, very passionate, very physical speech. Her words are governed by an insatiable yearning: they are ardent (fiery horses galloping across the sky) and impatiently demanding (she uses up to 14 imperatives).
The speech is also filled with a pinch of darkness worth considering—through her sensual metaphors, Juliet foresees the lovers’ shared death. I am particularly marveled by her invocation of Phaethon:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,Towards Phoebus’ lodging: such a wagonerAs Phaethon would whip you to the west,And bring in cloudy night immediately.
As you may know, Phaethon, the son of Phoebus (the god of the sun), insisted on driving the chariot of the sun for one day. But given his inexperience the travel turned chaotic: he lost control of the steeds. So it’s interesting that Juliet mentions him; she doesn’t seem to mind invoking disaster if that may allow her to have Romeo in her arms. Phaethon’s catastrophe seems very ominous considering the fatal destiny of the young lovers. Besides, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a sunless day after Phaethon’s tragedy (‘A day did pass without the sun’, it says). After Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy, too, a sunless sky takes over Verona:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings.The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
There are actually quite a few similarities between this speech and the death scene, I believe—there is always a strong connection between love and death in Romeo and Juliet. This is evident in the following passage (which is one of my favorites!):
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun.
Now, ‘to die’ can mean not only to lose your life, but to make love. So it’s a highly suggestive line. Juliet imagines what she will see behind her eyelids when she closes her eyes in sexual ecstasy: a sky filled with lovely stars, like firework. Romeo undergoes a starry metamorphosis in Juliet’s mind. It is one of the many occasions when the lovers imagine each other conquering the sky with their light (Romeo uses the same conceit several times in the orchard scene). Juliet wants to have him cut out in little stars—she thinks he could regenerate the sky, just as he thinks ‘birds would sing and think it were not night’ if Juliet were in the sky.
I love the explanation offered by the second Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet:
Intuitively, Juliet in her soliloquy moves from the first line towards the idea of her own death and Romeo’s. By using the same image of the stars to symbolize the eternal quality of their love, Juliet unconsciously admits awareness of impending malign fare; but, simultaneously, she transforms that star-crossed love into a symbol of ultimate triumph.
Some editions change the pronoun ‘I’ for ‘he’ as in ‘Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die…’ However, the ‘I’ pronoun suggests both shared sexual enjoyment and it also predicts their shared death. Both their suicides are indeed filled with sensual nuances, as if to imply that Juliet’s lines become true: ultimately they outrun the garish sun, which remains hidden after the climax of their deaths. In a way, they become Verona’s sun:
MONTAGUE… I will ray her statue in pure goldThat while Verona by that name is known,There shall no figure at such rate be setAs that of true and faithful Juliet.CAPULETAs rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie.
Most editions have ‘I will raise her statue’ rather than ‘I will ray her statue’, but I personally prefer ‘ray’. It highlights the lovers’ use of light motifs to describe each other. Because Juliet was compared to the sun before, it is as if her statue (and Romeo’s) became sunshine.
