Spring means one thing for my 9th grade English classes: Romeo and Juliet. For the past few years, I have required my students to memorize the 14-line Prologue. I assign this, not because of a perceived innate desire to scar and traumatize my students, but because I believe that working with Shakespearean English is the best way to remove my students’ barriers to understanding it. Language, of course, is astonishingly powerful. One does not need to read Mark Antony’s famous eulogy in Julius Caesar (a rite of passage for my 10th graders, by the way) to see that words and the way they are crafted and grouped can antagonize or inspire, infuriate or disarm. More on that later.
The famous opening to Romeo and Juliet introduces us to the warring parties (“two households”) and the setting (“fair Verona”), and for years, I have seen the notion of two families’ intractable feuding as a mere backdrop against which the play’s main action - the tragic story of the “star-cross’d lovers” - can take place. This is, after all, a love story, a cautionary tale for adults and teens alike of what can happen when you fall in love with the wrong person. The fighting of the Montague and Capulet families is - at first glance - necessary only because we need some kind of insurmountable obstacle to stand in the way of the lovers’ happiness and thus make “the fearful passage of their death-marked love” futile yet compelling.
But as I consider recent events in Dallas, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge (not to mention Ferguson, Baltimore, and New York), as well as the sound bites from the current political season, the more I have come to realise that the play’s tragedy actually lies in the society torn asunder by hatred. The Prologue mentions Verona as a place “where civil blood makes civil hands unclean”. We are so caught up in the “misadventured piteous overthrows” of two teenagers that we overlook Verona’s poisonous climate in which every word and every encounter threaten violence.
Fast forward 400 years and we find ourselves in a similar position. Rhetoric, violence, accusation, and recrimination swirl in ever-quickening cycles. Our voracity for some form of revenge (I was going to use “justice”, but if we really thought about it, I doubt any of us would want justice dispensed fairly) seems to be matched only by our voracity for validating our own worldviews and opinions with the posting of increasingly hysterical and polarizing invectives on social media. “Here’s much to do with hate,” muses Romeo later in Act I, “but more with love.”
How much do we really want peace when we are so keen to embrace and spread vitriol?
How much do we want unity when we are content to close ranks and interact merely with those who agree with us?
I read an excellent piece recently about our complete lack of willingness to consider and listen to other viewpoints. A quick look at my carefully curated news stream and Facebook feed would support this theory. As a friend recently posted (and I’m paraphrasing here): when was the last time you read something you disagreed with? Or perhaps more pertinent would be the question: when was the last time you didn’t read something because you knew you’d disagree with it?
Merely reading something, though, is the easy part. We don’t have to really engage intellectually with an argument from a news source from which we have radically different world views. While there is something to be gained from considering the other side of the argument, I would like to suggest something more radical.
Consider the person and not the argument.
Consider the person and not the argument.
Towards the end of Act One, Romeo, a Montague, finds himself at a Capulet party. It is, of course, when he meets Juliet, but it is equally significant (now that I am looking at the play in this new light) for the reaction of Capulet to his presence. When informed by his outraged nephew Tybalt that a Montague has crashed the party, Capulet merely says, “Let him alone, gentle coz.” It would seem that Romeo’s mere presence is enough to temper Capulet’s hatred of his enemy to the extent that he allows him to stay at his party (although he may have acted differently had he known that Romeo at that moment was falling in love with his daughter!). In that moment, Capulet is forced to concede that Romeo is by reputation a popular and polite young man. Of course, Capulet has many selfish reasons for doing this, but the point is this: presence diffuses anger.
It is far easier to mouth off about illegal immigration on Facebook than it is to say those very same words to the undocumented worker landscaping your yard. At least, I hope it is for you. In the moment of meeting someone, our shared humanity creates a commonality that, thanks to our social mores, is very difficult to ignore. We have, unfortunately, become inured to the ease with which we can add our voice to social media; we get all of the benefits of speaking with none of the consequences. But consequences there are, and we have reaped them in all their ugliness.
The Civil Language Project, the brainchild of Dave Bruno, seeks to promote unity in a fractured society. It resolves to promote confession over accusation, to eschew reductionism and division, and to use language that invites calm, measured, and rational conversation, and interactions that produce unity. How do we do this?
Well, the final scene of Romeo and Juliet gives us a suggestion. Standing amid the bodies of his daughter, nephew, son-in-law, and hoped-to-be-son-in-law (it’s a long story), Capulet, arguably the chief architect of the misery that has unfolded, turns to his rival and says, “O brother Montague, give me thy hand.” And, just like that, the feud is over. Of course, this is Shakespeare’s way of rapidly concluding the play before the grief of the lovers’ needless deaths has dissipated, but there is a lesson to be learned, nonetheless.
Just like the fight between the Montagues and the Capulets, I get the sense that it has taken a series of tragic and senseless deaths and a political season like no other to force us to recognize our own brokenness and fraudulent self-righteousness. I am encouraged by what I have seen from some brave people on both sides of the police violence debate (not so much in the Republican and Democratic National conventions). For when we turn to someone and say, “O brother, give me thy hand” (the old English is not required, but it does sound good), we are immediately - literally - unified. It diffuses tension and establishes a mutual respect that is essential for any future dialogue.
[Admittedly, it might be awkward to say this in a comments thread on Facebook, but we can say words to that effect; therein lies the problem of social media. Rarely can interaction on its many platforms be a legitimate substitute for face to face meeting, but starting here is better than not starting at all.]
We cannot list our grievances and deliver our defense and then come together. We must come together first. No negotiations, no pretensions, no conditions. Just a recognition of our collective failures and moral bankruptcy. Then we can talk. Then we can discuss. Only after we have shared common ground literally can we seek it figuratively.
The word “civil” can be used several ways. Civil war. Civil rights. Civil behaviour. Shakespeare recognized this in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Maybe our society is not going the way of Verona, but sometimes it certainly feels like it. Plenty of civil blood has already stained our civil hands, and we are all to blame.
Ultimately, Romeo and Juliet may well be a play about love, but it also provides us with insight into the pain a fractured society can cause and the simple steps we can take to start the process of fixing it. The discussions we have (online and in person) in the coming weeks and months will, I am sure, provide us with ample opportunities to do so.
Please check out the Civil Language Project and consider participating.
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