Was the most classic love story of all time actually meant to be gothic horror?

Is Romeo and Juliet supposed to be Scary?

Good morrow my Gothic gogglers! Since Spooky Season is upon us, I’d like to discuss the notion that, rather than being an iconic story of romantic love, maybe Romeo and Juliet is actually supposed to be gothic, disturbing, and maybe even terrifying!

I got the idea for this post after perusing the Michaels halloween displays, and realizing that many of them are Shakespeare themed in general, and Romeo and Juliet in particular. It got me thinking that, although Shakespeare died before such writers as Poe, Shelly, and Byron, his work has many ideas, themes, and tropes that are common in what we call Gothic literature; a kind of genre dominated by imagery of terror, disgust, and a fascination with the macabre.

Point 1: Romeo and Juliet was originally a cautionary tale.

One common trend in horror is punishing young people for their indescretions, especially disobedience and premarital sex. This is still common today; once you see a couple kiss in a horror movie, you know a grizzly death is coming. People see this story as the ideal love story, which it definitely is not. Shakespeare isn’t trying to put these lovers on a pedestal, he’s trying to show how hard it is for love to flourish in such a toxic, violent world.

This might shock you, but Shakespeare didn’t invent the story of Romeo and Juliet; he based it on an English poem by poet Albert Brooke, whose attitude to young lovers would’ve made Norma Bates blush! Look at the Introduction to the 1593 edition of the poem Romeus and Juliet:

The  good
man’s  example  biddeth  men  to  be  good,  and  the  evil  man’s

mischief  warneth  men  not  to  be  evil.  To  this  good  end, good
Reader,  is  this  tragical  matter  written,  to  describe  unto thee  a  couple  of  unfortunate  lovers,  thralling  themselves  to
unhonest  desire  ;  neglecting  the  authority  and  advice  of
parents  and  friends ;  conferring  their  principal  counsels
with  drunken  gossips  and  superstitious  friars  (the  naturally
fit  instruments  of  unchastity)  ;  attempting  all  adventures  of
peril  for  th’  attaining  of  their  wished  lust ;  using  auricular
confession,  the  key  of  whoredom  and  treason,  for  further-
ance of  their  purpose ;  abusing  the  honourable  name  of
lawful  marriage  to  cloak  the  shame  of  stolen  contracts ;
finally  by  all  means  of  unhonest  life  hasting  to  most
unhappy  death. -Albert Brooke

Brooke’s introduction reads like a sermon, suggesting that we look at the lover’s unfortunate lives like a parable designed to “scare us straight.” Even though Shakespeare takes a more sympathetic tone to the story, its roots as a cautionary tale come through in the plot and characters.

What is Gothic Horror?

Probably these days when you think of “gothic.” you think of a pale person with black hair wearing piercings, crosses and black clothes, but back in the 19th century, gothic was a genre of “Romantic literature” that emphasized the unusual, the mysterious, the grotesque, and the terrifying.

To understand what gothic literature is, you have to first understand what Romanticism is. Elizabethans like Shakespeare emphasized the concept of reason and a devotion to logic and subduing passion and superstition to reason, which is why most of his tragic heroes fall victim to their passions and almost never use their reason. By contrast, 19th century Romantic literature favored the opposite approach- rejecting cold reason and machine-like rationality and embracing the passions that make people human- passions like love and awe and devotion, but also terror and desire, which became the tentpoles of gothic literature. Gothic stories like those of Mary Shelly (Frankenstein), Brahm Stoker ( Dracula) and of course Edgar Allen Poe, took the Romantic concept of emphasizing feeling and mood, and crafted masterpieces of terror and suspense.
In short, you could think of Romanticism as the moody child of Shakespeare, and gothic literature as his even moodier grandchild.

As Romanticism took hold in literary circles, it also took hold in the way Romeo and Juliet was staged too. In 1882, a celebrated production of the play debuted at the Lyceum theater in London, the same theater managed by Dracula author Brahm Stoker. The production had an emphasis on the gothic elements of the story with dark, moonlit scenery, gothic crypts, and an eerie scene where Sir Henry Irving as Romeo carries the slaughtered body down a long, winding staircase to lay him in Juliet’s tomb.

A few years later, Stoker would finish Dracula, and adapt it as a stage play at the Lyceum.Legend has it that Stoker based the character of Dracula on Sir Henry. Sadly for Mr. Stoker, Irving never played the role onstage. Therefore you can see how Shakespeare’s writing helped form the ideas of gothic writers like Shelly and Stoker, and Romeo and Juliet was re-interpreted from a medieval morality tale into a Romantic story of two people whose desire is both powerful and destructive (Source: Royal Shakespeare Company)

Violent Delights/ Monstrous Ends

1. Courtly love- the trope of star-crossed lovers requires a tantalizing distance; the feelings engendered are primarily longing and unfulfilled desire; the lovers express joy from finding love, but they also suffer as long as they cannot totally be together. In Romeo and Juliet, the distance is simply an accident of birth- they happened to be born into families that hate each other. It is a simple step to turn this fate unto something much more horrible
2. Romeo in particular, rather than using lawful means to overcome the stars, use violence to express their love- Romeo can and does kill for Juliet, twice. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Romeo as a vampire or some other monster who kills to maintain his relationship. In our culture, such relationships are toxic, but the romantics ate them up.

The Play’s obsession with Death

Case Study- Twilight: an attempt to make Shakespeare cool for goth kids

Shakespeare understood implicitly that passion and blood are linked- it goes back to the ancient Greek concept of the humors, which I explored in my Romeo and Juliet lectures that blood was associated with passion- both the passion to create life, and the passion of intense feelings such as love, rage and destructiveness as Freud says

1. The star crossed lovers ridiculously short timeline- the play only takes place over six days! As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was another deliberate choice by Shakespeare to  make the action more intense.
2. Edward As the Byronic Romeo- bloodlust is a metaphor for abstinence, turning Christian morality into gothic fear- if the hero gives into his lust, it will destroy his beloved.

Death follows Romeo like a predator stalks its prey.

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