glenn clark

The Civil Mutinies of Romeo and Juliet enlr_1086 280..300

n the wake of the work of Norbert Elias and others on the political
I and cultural transformations attendant upon civil life in Renaissance
Europe, studies of civility in early modern England have sought to
destabilize the historical vision of an absolute distinction between
civility and magnate culture.1 Recent scholarship has convincingly
demonstrated that the mannered and regulated behaviors called civility
or courtesy were understood to be central aspects of elite daily life.2
They enabled competition for social place and even tolerated violence
in the pursuit of prestige. Not all early modern discussions of civility
understood it as competitive aristocratic behavior, however, nor were
all behaviors we ourselves might describe as civil a feature solely of
aristocratic life.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet reveals the cultural significance of a
subordinate and even insubordinate civility.The play figures this civility
as an aspect of defiance and tragic disaffection with aristocratic author-
ity, but also adumbrates a more positive vision in which civil insub-
ordination and forms of non-deferential mutuality enhance each other.

I would like to thank Tony Dawson, Judith Owens, Gail Kern Paster, and Luke Tromly for
thoughtful readings of drafts of this paper. The late Thomas Moisan offered valuable encour-
agement in the earliest stages of its composition.
1. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed., tr.
Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, et al. (Oxford, 2000); see also Arthur B. Ferguson, The
Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.,1965); Mervyn James, Family,
Lineage, and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics, and Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640
(Oxford, 1974); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).
2. See Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern
England (Oxford, 1998); Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness
and Honour (Cambridge, Eng., 2003); David Quint, “Dueling and Civility in Sixteenth-
Century Italy” in Contextualizing the Renaissance: Returns to History, ed. Albert H. Tricomi
(Binghamton, 1994); Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan
Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, 1984).

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Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Glenn Clark 281
Romeo and Juliet imagines that civility offers a sense of agency and
self-esteem for women and servants, and links their subordinate civility
to urban citizenship. It recognizes that civility promotes social trans-
formations, and that such change may appear disruptive as well as
productive. Like the virtù foundational to the vivere civile described by
J.G.A. Pocock, Shakespeare’s civility actively works “to disturb old
forms and change them into new” (p. 175).This civility is distinct from
that described by Lawrence Manley, for whom civility is an ideological
process whose function is to sedentarize not only warrior magnates,
but all urban residents, under the early modern absolutist state.3 In
Romeo and Juliet, as in other humanist texts, civility accompanies and
reinforces non-deferential emotions and is understood to work in the
interests not only of the Prince, but of subordinates. The play suggests
that the transformative sociopolitical power of civility is sustained by its
compelling affective force.
Romeo and Juliet is filled with defiance of authority and hierarchy in
act and image. Much of this defiance is obvious. The lovers defy their
families. Romeo imagines that in death he will shake off “the yoke of
inauspicious stars.”4 Friar Lawrence defies his social superiors by aiding
the young protagonists.The aristocrats defy Prince Escalus. Early in the
play, Tybalt resists his uncle’s demand that he act hospitably toward all
guests at the Capulets’ feast and endure Romeo’s presence, leading to
old Capulet’s furious response:

Am I the master here, or you? Go to.

You’ll not endure him! God shall mend my soul,
You’ll make a mutiny among my guests!
You will set cock-a-hoop! You’ll be the man! (1.5.77-80)

All of this defiance contributes to the play’s tragic sense of disorder.

But the nature of defiance or resistance to authority in Romeo and
Juliet is not always clear. Here, for example, Capulet offers two some-
what different evaluations of Tybalt’s motivations, without necessarily

3. Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, Eng., 1995).
See esp. pp. 15–16, where Manley suggests that literature “encouraged settlement and civility” in
response to the “unsettling experience” of London life. I would argue that the literature of
civility is not necessarily “settling.”
4. Romeo and Juliet (5.3.111). All citations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works of
Shakespeare, fifth ed. Lawrence Manley, ed. David Bevington (New York, 2004).

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realizing that he has done so. On the one hand, he suggests that Tybalt
merely wants to “set cock-a-hoop” and release himself from appropri-
ate restraints.This conforms well with the perspective the play gives us
on Tybalt as a self-proclaimed brawler, a man who tells Romeo he
hates peace, “As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee” (1.1.71). But at
the same time, Capulet suspects that Tybalt’s indecorum amounts to a
desire to become “master” and to be the “man” who replaces him.This
would be disobedience of a different and much more serious order.
Capulet is angry about Tybalt’s disobedience, not about his intended
violence.That disobedience implies a threat to Capulet’s authority and
reveals Tybalt’s frightening lack of devotion to his elder. It is this fear
that accounts for the depth of old Capulet’s indignation, and which
drives him to the strangely ambiguous statement about “a mutiny
among my guests.” He seems to mean that Tybalt will create an
embarrassingly violent fracas in a properly joyful setting, but the term
“mutiny” is far too loaded to allow only for embarrasment on Capu-
let’s part. The line allows us to understand that he fears Tybalt is
determined to “make” or promote a domestic coup or rebellion among
the guests. And Capulet is not sure who else among the guests might
join that “mutiny,” or how wide its bounds might grow.
By the time we have come to the dispute between Tybalt and old
Capulet, the play has forced us to recognize that rebellious energy has
spread very far indeed. Shakespeare’s first scene, which has no equiva-
lent in the play’s sources, offers disconcerting support for Capulet’s fear
of mutiny. Samson and Gregory, members of the Capulet household,
are eager for a fight with their counterparts from the Montague
household. The scene purports to demonstrate the intensity of house-
hold loyalties, but in fact serves to acknowledge the depth of subor-
dinate disaffection and aspiration. Samson asserts his loyalty by claiming
that he will not only defeat the Montague men, but he will also kill or
rape the women:
SAMSON ‘Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought
with the men, I will be civil with the maids—I will cut off their heads.
GREGORY The heads of the maids?
SAMSON Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in
what sense thou wilt.
GREGORY They must take it in sense that feel it.
SAMSON Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ‘tis known I
am a pretty piece of flesh. (1.1.21-29)

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 Glenn Clark 283
Like much else in Romeo and Juliet, this scene can be understood to
represent the failure of satisfyingly experienced subordination. Sam-
son’s is a grotesque fantasy, but it is nonetheless a fantasy of release
from inferiority which reveals frustration with and contempt for
service. He first imagines himself as a tyrant rather than a servant.Then
the speedy and witty transformation of the image of cutting off heads
to the “civility” of forcefully taking maidenheads allows Samson the
chance to indulge in further self-flattery. He has, he implies, a pretty
large “piece of flesh.” The dialogue does not merely offer Samson’s
powerful phallic masculinity as an addition to his identity as a servant,
but as a substitution for it.5 He “is” a pretty piece of flesh—he is an
impressive as well as rapacious man—and (again) for a moment he is
not a servant. The comic hyperbole of the dialogue, during which the
audience laughs if, and because, it realizes Samson cannot assert himself
this forcefully, does not negate the fact that it articulates an ambition
and an inability to “endure” obedient subordination just as strong as
Tybalt’s.
Samson’s shocking fantasy of murder and rape suggests the displace-
ment of frustrated rage founded in attenuated love or devotion to his
superiors.The dialogue’s immediate context enhances the resonance of
Samson’s insubordinate disaffection. When Gregory says “The quarrel
is between our masters and us their men” (1.1.19-20) it is hard not to
hear this as a claim to intra-domestic conflict between masters and
servants, rather than as a claim to honorific inter-household conflict
between Montagues and Capulets (1.1.19).6 Only moments earlier,
Samson had acknowledged and opened to an ironically mastering wit
the frustration of being “collared” not only by the Montagues, who
ostensibly anger him, but by Capulets (1.1.4). When Gregory tells
Samson to “draw your neck out of collar” he can certainly be under-
stood to mean that he must remove himself from the “collar” of
obedient service, as well as to be making a joke about avoiding the
hangman’s noose to which choler might drive him. Gregory’s ambi-
guity allows him to mean that Samson must acknowledge and make
5. Robert Appelbaum has analyzed the violent fantasy world of Samson and Gregory in
terms of the instabilities and ultimate dissatisfactions of masculinity on Shakespeare’s stage.
“‘Standing to the wall’: The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly
48 (1997), 251–52.
6. Chris Fitter finds a similar dynamic in the dialogue. See “‘The quarrel is between our
masters and us their men’: Romeo and Juliet, Dearth, and the London Riots,” English Literary
Renaissance 30 (2000), 164–66.

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self-assertive use of the choler that arises from being collared in service.
Samson’s aspirational energy is as or more evident to Gregory than
household loyalty or even lust for violence. There is very little subor-
dinate devotion here. In fact, Gregory registers contempt for subordi-
nation simply by opening their choler to punning instability.7
The dialogue between Samson and Gregory is not the only scene
near the beginning of the play which gives force to old Capulet’s fear
that his authority is under threat. Shakespeare allows the sense of
aristocratic authority to decay rapidly at the beginning of Romeo and
Juliet. As soon as the Montagues and Capulets begin to fight, it
becomes clear that disaffection with Verona’s magnates has grown very
wide among the city’s residents.When “three or four Citizens” enter to
put an end to the aristocrats’ melee they shout “Clubs, bills, and
partisans! Strike! Beat them down! Down with the / Capulets! Down
with the Montagues!” (1.1.73-74). Their rage at the continuing public
feud is no less strongly felt than old Capulet’s indignant rebuke of
Tybalt, but the social ideals founding the Citizens’ anger are the
opposite of Capulet’s. They are not angry about disobedience, but
about aristocratic violence. While Capulet is wrathful primarily
because his authority is threatened, the Citizens now wish to put an
end to what they see as unjustified, reckless and brutal aristocratic
domination. They feel no sense of devotion or moral subordination to
their merely social superiors. From the point of view of an aristocrat
like old Capulet, they too are mutinous.

ii
Romeo and Juliet opens with a perspective that prompts its audience to
recognize the actions of the first scene as insubordinate defiance and,
surprisingly, as civility. Capulet’s furious response to Tybalt echoes the
play’s opening words in its Prologue, and the two passages serve to
frame and offer a cultural context for the significance of the disaffected
thoughts of retainers and citizens alike. The apparently straightforward
Prologue rehearses the plot of a story with which Shakespeare knew
many in his audience to be familiar, and appears to give to that story
a reassuringly conventional tragic meaning.
7. We should remain aware of the contrast between this tragically frustrated service and the
compatibility of freedom and service located elsewhere in Shakespeare by Judith Weil, Service and
Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), pp. 129–45.

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 Glenn Clark 285
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (1.0.1-14)

As a sonnet, it formally indicates that love—or perhaps frustrated

affection—will be the primary theme of the play. It suggests that
Romeo and Juliet are fated to be the sacrifices whose deaths end the
feuding of their respective families. The Prologue casts the dramatic
situation in ritualistic terms. To compensate for the pollution of
bloodshed, Romeo and Juliet must endure a kind of frightful limi-
nality, a “fearful passage,” as part of a supernatural economy of sac-
rifice and expiation. The implication of the Prologue is that once the
sacrificial ritual is done, peace will indeed be at hand. The pain
through which Romeo, Juliet and others in Verona suffer will be a
thing of the past, or the thing that allows the past to become a
different present. In this sense the Prologue is also a story about the
demise of civic violence in Verona. We are invited to think that
internecine violence will become part of the “ancient” past, which
was as fated to give way to an orderly present as Romeo and Juliet
were fated to die.
If the Prologue implies that the story of Romeo and Juliet provides
an occasion for understanding the supernaturally authorized and sta-
bilized difference between the violent past and the peaceful present, it
is not as convincing as it first appears. The Prologue’s story, like the
standard narratives of sonnet sequences, is subject to deferral and
uncertainty rather than sharp finality. Not only is the controlling
agency of the dramatic world described in stellar terms merely literary
and conventional for Elizabethans, but there is, crucially, nothing more
than a hint of the new world which follows the world of the “ancient

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grudge.”8 Feudal “strife” is “buried” after the tragic sacrifice generates
pity, but lines nine through eleven generate uncertainty by hinting that
“parents’ rage” both poetically succeeds and historically survives the
“passage” and passing of Romeo and Juliet.9 The syntax of line eleven
places a disconcerting final emphasis on “naught could remove” and
alienates the clause from the qualifying phrase “but their children’s
end.” The Prologue offers a history so simple that it creates a mood
Elizabethans would experience as appropriate to a story about the
deaths of uncomprehending children.
What really makes history, rather than mystery, of the Prologue is the
link it develops between civility and mutiny.The grammatically ambigu-
ous first quatrain ends with the memorable paradox calculated by
Shakespeare to signal civility’s thematic presence in the play, to reveal its
conceptual instability, and to make it untrustworthy:“where civil blood
makes civil hands unclean.” If the antecedent of line four’s “Where” is
taken only as “Verona,” then the line leaves the faint impression that the
“dignity” and “fairness”of Verona and its families have something to do
with their innate but tragically fragile or disingenuous civil manner.The
line means in part that Veronese hands are polluted when they are
covered with the violently shed blood of other Veronese. It is this
pollution that makes the sacrificial ritual necessary. In such a reading
civility can simply mean civic or Veronese. But there is no reason to
exclude from signification the startling paradox that civility may be the
maker of a grotesque disorder: “civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”
As such, line four must be read as a clause qualifying line three’s “new
mutiny.” In this context, line four links civility to the creation of
insubordination. It implies that civility will reveal its genuine self in the
form of what it makes: a mutiny, a foully insubordinate rebellion against
natural order.This disquieting and conservative vision may be paradoxi-

8. Clifford Leech finds the stellar imagery especially facile. See “The Moral Tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, ed. Joseph A. Porter (New
York, 1997), pp. 18–19.
9. My reading of the Prologue as a self-consciously insufficient history runs parallel to
Thomas Anderson’s examination of the representations of historical trauma in early modern
texts. Anderson argues that such texts, Shakespeare’s histories in particular, represent “a failure of
history” in which “a violent past is not finally overcome.” While Anderson argues that the early
modern texts of trauma “articulate in displaced form the anxiety of becoming an historical
subject,” I would argue that by itself the Prologue represents the discomfort of being subject to
civil history. See Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot, 2006),
pp. 1,5,8.

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 Glenn Clark 287
cal to the point of incoherence for a modern audience. But it was almost
certainly less baffling, if still paradoxical, to an Elizabethan audience.

iii
Much of the intriguingly mysterious ambiguity of the Prologue’s
paradox of civility stems from its insistent synecdoches. We are forced
to wonder not only about how civility can be a mutiny, but about
whose “blood” is civil, and which “hands” are civil. Part of the function
of the opening scene of the play is to answer those questions.The very
first scene, involving the violent fantasies of Samson and Gregory,
should prompt us to recognize that the mutinous “hands” can be those
of the disaffected Samson and Gregory. But how could those hands be
“civil,” and how could “civil blood” make them civil? A possibility
here—and one whose paradoxicality matches the formulation of the
Prologue’s line—is that Samson and Gregory are not only hostile to
their aristocratic overlords, but copy them as well. The “civil blood” is
that of violent gentlemen like Tybalt, a gentleman “of the blood,”
whose first appearance on stage just as the brawl begins serves to
illuminate the likeness between violent servants and intemperate mas-
ters.10 Such aristocratic violence could be civil in an Elizabethan sense.
Civility was often synonymous with the aristocratic courtesy that
facilitated ambition as well as defense of privilege, and courtesy could
be violently assertive.11 David Quint demonstrates that aristocratic
violence was paradoxically civil because “violence itself has manners.”
Dueling, for example, was an essential part of the culture of courtesy.
He demonstrates that the early modern duel “was as much inside as
outside a civilizing process, for it gave a kind of ceremonial contain-

10. For Jill Levenson, the critique of dueling is part of the play’s larger repudiation of codes
of courtly love and violence which diminish the trustworthiness of love and honor by
contaminating them with a “disposition toward competition and advancement.” “‘Alla stoccada
carries it away’: Codes of Violence in Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Texts,
Contexts and Interpretation, ed. Jay L. Halio (Newark and London, 1995), p. 94; see also Joan Ozark
Holmer,“‘Draw if you be men’: Saviolo’s Significance for Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly
45 (1994), 163–89.
11. According to Bryson, “Nothing in the courtesy literature of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries supports the notion that ‘civility’ represents a bourgeois standard of behaviour
at odds with the previously established aristocratic ideals of ‘courtesy’” (From Courtesy to Civility,
p. 60). For the competitiveness of courteous behavior, see Whigham, Ambition and Privilege.

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ment to the aristocratic violence it simultaneously sanctioned.”12 Aris-
tocrats perceived violent civility as both sign and guarantee of their
freedom and reputation. Subordinates might wish either to reject or
appropriate such assertive civility. The Citizens reject aristocratic vio-
lence and the aristocrats along with it.13 But while Samson reveals
hostility to his overlords, he also makes their behavior his own.That he
is so doing, whether consciously or unconsciously, is suggested by his
use of the term civil: “I will be civil with the maids.” He does not
necessarily intend irony. Markku Peltonen argues that courteous vio-
lence neither stabilized hierarchical distinctions nor even functioned as
consistent support for central royal authority. According to Peltonen, at
least some early modern theorists of civil courtesy believed that “hier-
archical distinctions . . . attenuated markedly in competitive situations”
characterized by the mannered behavior leading to duels.14 For the
Prologue, what we might call the “cultural creep” of mannered civil or
courteous violence is akin to spreading contamination.
But in Elizabethan culture civility has another meaning very differ-
ent from mannered and potentially violent aristocratic courtesy. For the
Prologue, however, even this way of understanding civility is disturb-
ing. As they watched Romeo and Juliet, Elizabethans could have come to
understand the “civil blood” and “hands” to belong to scene one’s
anti-aristocratic Citizens and Prince Escalus. Early modern humanist
culture challenged and at least rhetorically diminshed magnate repu-
tation and authority, and did so, paradoxically, in the name of the
cultivated refinement and productive sociability also called civility. At
least some humanists mocked aristocrats for their failure to achieve
civil cultivation and values, and for their outdated reliance on mere
social position for prestige. The humanist discourse of civility some-
times becomes a realm in which aristocratic reputation is made subject
to contempt. In De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1526), for example,
Erasmus writes, “Now everyone who cultivates the mind in liberal
studies must be taken to be noble. Let others paint lions, eagles, bulls
and leopards on their escutcheons; those who can display ‘devices’ of
the intellect commensurate with their grasp of the liberal arts have a

12. Quint, pp. 69, 91.

13. Daniel Javitch argues that the disingenuousness and honorific violence of courtliness in
the late sixteenth century resulted in its “ethical fragility.” Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance
England (Princeton, 1978), p. 111.
14. Peltonen, p. 71.

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 Glenn Clark 289
truer nobility.”15 The passage is ostensibly about intellectual cultivation
and the appealing, well-respected manner that accompanies such cul-
tivation. But Erasmus teaches his readers not only the importance of
cultivation, but also the pleasure of contempt for the old order. The
“escutcheons” of the old aristocrats—the “others”—are subtly mocked
as tediously conventional and therefore fraudulent signifiers of status,
signifiers which contrast with the “truer” arts of civilitate.
A similar claim to the superiority of civil and harmonious aspiration
is prominent in Stephano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation, a text
which promotes the value of public sociability and polite conversation
with an unusually casual attitude to deference. Unlike other Italian and
English conduct writers, Guazzo’s intent is to instruct middle-class
citizens and lower-ranking gentry rather than high-ranking aristo-
crats.16 Few men, Guazzo argues, lack the instinctually civil “spurres,
which pricke them forwarde into companie, and make them presse
into places where they see the greatest throng of people: for the desire
to maintaine and increase their wealth, and to mende their estate, will
not suffer men to stande ydle with their handes at their gyrdels, whiche
you shall plainely see, if you once set your foote in the Court of some
Prince” (II, 117). He registers contempt for the courtly world by means
of the dismissive and broadly generalized indistinction of that penul-
timate “some.” Any court is likely to be filled with unproductive
incivility, Guazzo suggests. In court, those who resist the feeling of the
“spurres” which naturally “pricke them forwarde into companie” reveal
their misunderstanding of the value and utility of public urban space
and are unnaturally idle. Guazzo’s vision of court is similar to Erasmus’
view of the lions, eagles and leopards on aristocratic “escutcheons.”
Both imply that what once appeared naturally noble now seems the
result of a fraudulent elevation. For Guazzo, civil conversation depends
on the value of public, urban space, and does not rely on traditional
distinctions of rank. From a perspective valuing practical conversation
in public space and the dignity which accrues to such conversation,

15. On Good Manners For Boys, tr. Brian McGregor, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and
Educational Writings, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto, 1985), XXV, 273, 274, 288.
16. Stefano Guazzo, The Civile Conversation (Venice, 1574; tr. George Pettie, 1581). For the
audience and influence of Guazzo in England, see John Leon Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the
English Renaissance 1575–1675 (Chapel Hill, 1961), pp. 44–45; also Daniel Javitch, “Rival Arts of
Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo’s Civil Conversation and Castiglione’s Courtier,” Year-
book of Italian Studies 1 (1971), 178–98; also Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, pp. 107–40.

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courtly aristocratic life seems worthy of mockery. Pocock argues that
civility is a cause of ideological transformation. He describes active
virtù, whether of a prince or of citizens in the vivere civile, as “that by
which men control their fortunes in a delegitimized world; it may
also be that by which men innovate and so delegitimize their worlds”
(p. 166). Guazzo is engaged in precisely such delegitimization.
The civil challenge to aristocratic prestige also found a place in
poetry and drama. In “The First Anniversary” of Donne’s “An
Anatomy of the World,” for example, we find that if man’s divinely-
given virtues appear in “other creatures” we must assume that “They’re
but man’s ministers, and legates there, / To work on their rebellions,
and reduce / Them to civility, and to man’s use.”17 For Donne,
harmonious and peaceful civility is socially mobile. It can be imagined
in “other creatures.” In Elegy 18, “Love’s Progress,” Donne’s speaker
imagines the progress of a series of kisses descending a woman’s body.
Donne offers this deliberately ambiguous line: “Civility, we see, refined
the kiss / Which at the face begun, transplanted is” further down the
body toward the feet. An alternate to the first line found in several
manuscripts exposes the ambiguity Donne wishes to capture: “Civility
we see refined: the kiss.”18 Here, civility in the sense of aristocratic
mannered behavior, of courtesy, is “refined” by being made more
humble. In the former version of the line, civility does the refining, the
humbling. Either way, Donne draws resonance from a culture in which
the exaltation of aristocratic behavior is no longer guaranteed, and in
which civility can be understood as the agent of this destabilization.
For Donne, the meaning of the term civility includes the transforma-
tion of aristocratic behavior and self-perception. It can exist in peaceful
and non-rebellious “other creatures” but also offers—or perhaps
threatens—to humble the manners of the elite and to make a kind of
rebellion. It can diminish the difference between high and low, elite
and subordinate. If civility is indeed perceptible to Elizabethans as a
suite of characteristics that have the potential to “refine”and “reform”
elite behavior, Sir Toby’s hostility to Malvolio—whom Olivia describes
as “sad and civil” (TN 3.4.5)—carries a great deal of resonance.
Refined civility can, paradoxically, appear disruptive. In such an intel-

17. ”An Anatomy of the World,” ll. 163–66 in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed.
A.J. Smith (London, 1971).
18. Elegy 18, “Love’s Progress,” ll. 81–82 and notes in Complete English Poems.

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 Glenn Clark 291
lectual environment, the Prologue may well imagine the insubordinate
disaffections of retainers, Citizens, and even Tybalt as the consequence
of a culture of civility.
Shakespeare also allows Prince Escalus to make contemptuous ref-
erence to the fraudulence of the distinction between aristocrat and
common citizen. As the Prince admonishes the Montague and Capulet
houses, he shocks both gentlemen and retainers into attention by
addressing them as “You men, you beasts.” His reprimand is framed in
comparative terms:
Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word,
By thee, old Capulet, and Montague,
Have thrice disturbed the quiet of our streets
And made Verona’s ancient citizens
Cast by their grave-beseeming ornaments
To wield old partisans in hands as old,
Cankered with peace, to part your cankered hate. (1.1.89-95)

Elias offers us an historical context for the relationship between Escalus

and the Veronese aristocrats as well as for the play’s initial thematic
development. Civil manners and civilization in the West more generally,
Elias argues, depend on state-sponsored cultures which encourage
warrior-class renunciation of the unhindered release of violent instinc-
tual drives. Elias’ civility marks the abatement of aristocratic autonomy
(pp. 60–72). Like Elias’ state-sponsored humanists, working to privilege
the state’s bourgeois office holders, Escalus contemptuously denies the
feuding aristocrats any kind of rhetorical privilege in his speech. Not
only are the gentlemen “beasts,” but the “old” Capulets and Montagues
have no temporal or ethical priority to the “ancient citizens.” The
Prince rhetorically balances the “cankered” and revered old hands of the
citizens against the grotesque “cankered hate” of the magnates only in
order to achieve the ironic effect of degrading the aristocrats.As he does
so, he makes a powerful claim on behalf of the citizens to the rightful
possession and control of “our streets.”The possessive adjective is espe-
cially significant. It designates more than the Prince’s royal possession of
the streets. In the context of the rhetorical opposition he constructs
between a series of malicious qualities and things assigned to the aris-
tocrats by means of the adjective “your” (“your pernicious rage,” “your
veins,” “your mistempered weapons” [1.1.84, 85, 87]) and the peace
valued by citizens, the quiet streets qualified by “our” must be associated

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with those citizens. The Prince implies that since the aristocrats have
degraded themselves, the citizens now have rightful control of their city.
As Escalus makes his claims to the shared ownership and control of
“our streets” and the “ancient” gravity and pedigree of the citizens, his
point becomes increasingly clear. In the city aristocrats are not distinct
and can claim no special privileges. Citizenship gains prestige as aris-
tocratic privilege dwindles, and citizenship contributes to the dwin-
dling of aristocratic prestige.The Prince’s oxymoronic denunciation of
the “civil brawls” makes this point emphatically. The brawls are “civil”
in the sense that they occur in the city, but the very fact that they
occur in the otherwise peaceful city is what demonstrates their debased
incivility. From the genuinely civic and civil point of the view of the
ancient citizens and the Prince who share the streets what appears to
the aristocrats to be an honorable feud becomes nothing more than
common brawling subject to sarcastic reproval.
That the “three of four Citizens” work as a group to bring order to
their streets strengthens the link between civility, shared urban space and
citizenship. Their cooperation, presumably facilitated by their shared
residence in the city, their shared interest in peaceful and usable streets
and their conversations about those issues, is illuminated by contrast
with the feuding magnate houses.19 Gail Kern Paster explains that
“citizenship in the fullest sense means . . . a shared civility” in which
civility implies the fellowship of city-dwellers.20 The anonymously
authored treatise entitled A Discourse of the Names and First Causes of the
Institution of Cities and Peopled Towns, appended to Stow’s Survey (1598),
speaks of urban and civil life in the utopian tones of Italian humanist
urbanism.21 Cities were invented, we learn, to enable the civil “love and

19. Jennifer Richards has argued that the early moderns imagined civil conversations to be
those that were “capable of nurturing shared aspirations and sociability,” Rhetoric and Courtliness
in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), pp. 3–4. According to Markku Peltonen,
citizenship in the city or commonwealth enhanced “English humanists’ ‘self-image’ and their
understanding of their own active political role,” in Classical Humanism and Republicanism in
English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), p. 10. On this topic also see
Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen.
20. Gail Kern Paster notes that civis “means not citizen but fellow-citizen,” in The Idea of the
City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, Ga., 1985), p. 14.
21. On humanist urbanism, see Paster, pp. 9–32. Mervyn James also argues that there is a
spatial component to the development of civility in early modern England. For James, civility
developed as humanist schooling and the Reformation facilitated the movement of political and
social discourse out of the grand household and into more public and open spaces. Family,
Lineage, and Civil Society, pp. 188–198.

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 Glenn Clark 293
goodwill of one man towards another . . . where men by mutual society
and companying together, do grow to alliances, commonalties, and
corporations” in which “Wealth and riches . . . are increased.”22 Civility
brings dignity and wealth to all citizens, the treatise suggests. Antony
Black remarks,“The town rescues men from seigneurial oppression.”23 It
does so by providing a space in which civility pays off for citizens. It
provides wealth and safety without the need for deference and subor-
dination to feudal magnates.What is important is that the civil mutuality
of citizenship—of “our” shared streets—both accompanied and accel-
erated the ideological delegitimization of the place of elites in the social
order. It is partly to this cultural development that the Prologue refers in
its paradox of civil mutiny.
Although the Prologue does think in anxious, conservative terms,
Shakespeare allows it to reveal doubt about its own perspective. While
the civil pollution imagined in the first quatrain ostensibly necessitates
the sacrificial ritual described in the next two quatrains, it is also possible
to recognize that the unconvincingly childish story of fated lovers is
proleptically demystified by the first quatrain’s implicit historicism.
Understood thus, the Prologue merely retreats from the disturbing
revelation of civil mutiny into a naïve vision of mystery and thinly-
disguised providential agency. And precisely because the shift from first
quatrain to second seems like a retreat from historical analysis to mystery,
we cannot forget the Prologue’s final line:“What here shall miss, our toil
shall strive to mend.” Here, the Prologue intimates the limits of its own
explanatory force, and wittily uses those limits as a justification for the
play itself.As a whole, the Prologue prompts its audience to interpret the
play in terms of disturbing civility rather than fate, but this line also
prompts that audience to suspend its assent to a hostile perspective on
civility itself. Both mystification and suspicion may “miss” something.

iv
As Romeo and Juliet proceeds, it never fully undoes the Prologue’s
paradoxical link between civility and mutinous defiance. Samson’s
ironically grotesque claim to a desire to “be civil with the maids” serves
22. A Discourse of the Names and First Causes of the Institution of Cities and Peopled Towns, in
John Stow, The Survey of London, ed. H.B. Wheatley (London, 1987), pp. 482, 484.
23. Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought From the Twelfth
Century to the Present (Ithaca, 1984), p. 39.

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294 English Literary Renaissance
at least partly to reinforce the Prologue’s fear that civility makes “hands
unclean.” But more positive qualities do accrete to the meaning of civil
disaffection and qualify its emotional force. Civility is the play’s word
for an emotion and behavior that participates in both angry disaffec-
tion with superiors and friendly counsel and mutuality. The play’s
diction and imagery even suggest that civil mutuality sustains civil
insubordination. In Juliet’s beautiful epithalamium, civility is briefly
imagined as behavior which blends egalitarianism and aspiration. For
her, it is friendship and comforting help. This, I would suggest, is the
civility the Prologue seems to “miss.”
While waiting for Romeo to return to her bedroom for their first
night together after being wed, Juliet apostrophizes night and discovers
a vision of civility very different from that of the Prologue. She invokes
“cloudy” and “love-performing” night to bring Romeo to her safely
under cover of darkness, “untalk’d of and unseen.” The darkness
prompts Juliet to imagine night wearing black, like a grave matron:
Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match
Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.
Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle till strange love grow bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
...
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo (3.2.10-16, 20-21)

At first we hardly suspect that the concept of civility as Juliet is using

it signifies more than the gravity and sobriety by which it is frequently
glossed.24 Juliet’s personification of night functions to emphasize the
intensity of her excitement and nervousness. Night is civilly “sober-
suited . . . in black” because Juliet will set Romeo’s snowy and star-like
beauty against night’s darkness. Night’s dark-clothed civility is also
comforting because Juliet takes it as an accommodation to her own
emotional needs. Civil night will not only help bring Romeo to Juliet,

24. G. Blakemore Evans glosses civil as “grave” and “sober” in The Cambridge Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge, Eng., 2003). In the Arden Romeo and Juliet Brian Gibbons chooses
“grave, decently solemn” following Johnson (London, 1980). David Bevington offers “circum-
spect, somberly attired.”

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 Glenn Clark 295
but offers no threat of competing for Juliet’s (or Romeo’s!) attention.
This is, at least superficially, a selfless, discreet and relatively unassertive
female helper. Juliet’s invocation in the midst of intense desire for her
new husband helps to naturalize civility. The parallel and repeated
grammatical constructions—“Come, civil night . . . Come, gentle
night, come, loving . . . night”—persuade an audience to situate civility
along with gentleness and loving helpfulness in a field of natural
desires. Here we should remember that Tudor domestic texts frequently
described marital harmony as a civil state.25 In Juliet’s epithalamium
civility becomes not merely proximate to harmonious and loving
marriage, but a vehicle for it.
The epithalamium makes civility into something natural, sociable,
peaceful, and comforting. Sara Mendelson, like many historians of
civility, notes that such civil behavior helped reinforce “the dichotomy
between . . . civilized gentility and brutish vulgarity.”26 The dramati-
cally ironic situation of Juliet’s speech strengthens the sense of natu-
ralness in Juliet’s desire for civility, and reinforces claims to its ethical
superiority. Civil night offers a stark contrast to the male violence so
prominent in the previous scene’s hot daylight.
Juliet’s civility does not reinforce any relationship between rank and
ethical superiority.The likeness of harmonious and loving “civil night”
to Juliet’s Nurse suggests that Juliet associates civility with a friendship
indifferent to concern for rank. Not only is the Nurse the only matronly
woman Juliet knows, but the Nurse and civil night seem to know the
same things about Juliet. Earlier, the Nurse had remarked,“Now comes
the wanton blood up in your cheeks” (2.5.70). Juliet now imagines that
civil night will teach her to hide that same “bating” blood. The epith-
alamium offers a remarkably effective description of Juliet’s feeling of
relative equality to the Nurse. Civil night is imagined not only as the
teacher of Juliet, but as a teacher of courtly games and the arts of
hawking and performance. Here Juliet reverses her usual imagery; she
has consistently imagined herself as the falconer to Romeo’s hawk, but
now she imagines herself as the hawk trained by civil night.27 If

25. See Helen Moore, “Of Marriage, Morals and Civility,” in Early Modern Civil Discourses,
ed. Jennifer Richards (London, 2003).
26. “The Civility of Women in Seventeenth-Century England” in Civil Histories: Essays
Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, et al. (Oxford, 2000), p. 113.
27. For Juliet as falconer, see “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo,” Studies in English Literature
1500–1900 36 (1996), 333–55.

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the personification of civility is reminiscent of a female servant in a
prestigious and respectable position, that civility cannot be aristocratic
courtesy.
The significance of Juliet’s image of civil night is enhanced in the
context of the play’s thematization of non-deferential friendship and
counsel. The invocation feels compatible with Juliet’s description of
Romeo as “Love, lord, ay, husband, friend!”, a phrase in which the
caesura-like “ay” has the effect of suggesting that Juliet is fine-tuning
her understanding of Romeo as husband and supplementing the ver-
tical hierarchy informing “lord” with the horizontal affection signified
by “friend” (3.5.43).28 Like Romeo, Juliet also relies on Friar Lawrence
for guidance and friendship. Both protagonists come to Friar Lawrence
with the expectation that they will receive care and friendly counsel,
rather than demands that they fulfill social obligations. Romeo
approaches the friar as a “fearful man” and as one who despairingly
believes that “Heaven is here / Where Juliet lives” (3.3.30-31). Despite
his blasphemy, he receives “good counsel” and finds that his “comfort
is revived” (3.3.1, 160, 165). Juliet too comes to her “dear father”
Lawrence in sinful despair and still receives “some present counsel”
(4.1.126, 61).
Of course, Juliet approaches her nurse, as well, for help:
Comfort me, counsel me.
Alack, alack, that heaven should practice stratagems
Upon so soft a subject as myself!
What sayst thou? Hast thou not a word of joy?
Some comfort, Nurse. (3.5.209-13)
That the Nurse is unable to offer satisfying counsel at this moment is
not as important as the lines’ reinforcement of the intensity of Juliet’s
desire for counsel and comfort and the deep respect she feels for her
Nurse. In her longing for real comfort she substitutes mutuality for
subordination to an unsatisfyingly cruel “heaven.” Like Romeo, who
defies the “inauspicious” stars, Juliet distrusts and refuses to exalt
heaven. Instead, she craves civility in the form of what Mendelson
calls “concern for each others’ welfare, comfort and self-esteem”

28. Laurie Shannon convincingly demonstrates the non-deferential and even anti-deferential
force of friendship in early modern English discourse. As Shannon suggests, “friendship models
configure an image of political consent, offering a counterpoint to prevailing types of polity.”
Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002), p. 8.

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 Glenn Clark 297
(p. 122). In The Civile Conversation, Stephano Guazzo had insisted that
the company of inferiors makes one “well pleased and joyful” and can
substitute “libertie” for “servitude.”29 But it is only in the contemptu-
ous imagery I have earlier analyzed, rather than in his argument, that
Guazzo’s pleasure in horizontal affect can be seen to have sociopolitical
consequences. Shakespeare gives us situations and imagery in which
the friendly conversation of subordinates not only offers comfort, but
destabilizes devotion to hierarchy itself.
Within the egalitarian and affectionate relationship Juliet imagines
with “civil night,” what civility counsels, and what it shares, is
emboldening self-esteem. Juliet offers her Nurse more affection and
respect than any other servant in the play receives. Juliet herself fears
that she will be inadequate to the task of allowing herself to be
“manned” and suspects she may prove herself unattractively “simple”
or foolish if she displays too much “modesty” in bed with Romeo.
If her naturally modest behavior will not do, she must learn to
perform a “bold” sexuality. Everything Juliet wants to learn requires
a certain boldness. She hopes that “civil night” will deliver Romeo
to her bed, and will also train her in the ways of sex as if it were
a courtly “match / Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.” The
imagery of the sporting match in which the players risk a rich
wager—the precious sexual innocence of both Romeo and Juliet—
heightens our sense of the degree of boldness Juliet thinks can be
gained in a civil relationship. Her desire to “lose a winning a match”
may even reflect her wish to avoid the superficially appealing match
with Paris, an accomplishment her father would certainly perceive as
rebellious and punishable. She can think of no one better suited to
teach her to act this boldly than civil night.

v
The paradoxical nature of the image of gaining by losing helps us
recognize the complex perception of civility in Elizabethan culture. A
simple matron, very much a subordinate figure, is here imagined
teaching courtly and elite behavior. A gentle and loving servant is
imagined teaching the bold and emboldening sexual sprezzatura which
displaces “simple” or foolish “modesty” while obscuring the “act”
29. Guazzo, Book 2, p. 193; Book 1, p. 22.

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enabling romantic aspiration. Simple civility is here imagined to enable
an art that can strengthen love.30 The passage registers the Elizabethan
indistinction of civility and mannered, artful courtliness, but its para-
doxicality also sharpens the distinction. It is surprising and strange that
simple affection should enable an aspiration whose stakes are so high
that they can be imagined in terms of courtly behavior. But surprise
marks the distinction between civility and courtliness. Civility is dis-
tinctively simpler than courtesy, and ethically rather than socially
gentle. That civility should share with courtesy the knowledge of bold
and artful aspiration is for Juliet a paradox because civility and man-
nered courtesy are distinct.31
In the enclosed environment of esteem-enhancing mutuality, defer-
ence decays. As the epithalamium contrasts loving subordinate civility
to aristocratic male violence, it also naturalizes insubordination. Juliet
would naturally want to “lose [her] match” and subvert her father’s
plans given her excited sense of Romeo’s beauty. More deeply, the
soliloquy’s intertextual debts to Marlowe intensify its erotic energy and
enhance tragic suspense by recalling the explosive or fatal climaxes of
the Marlovian poetry of intense desire accompanied by violent rejec-
tion of traditional obligation.32 Most importantly, the likening of civil
night to the Nurse brings bold rebelliousness within the discursive
realm of civility. Mendelson demonstrates that civil female friendship
often found itself “at odds with the disciplinary aims of male institu-
tional authorities” and that “the coexistence of different codes of
civility entailed the continual mediation of conflict . . . [between] the
civility of deference and the tenets of . . . friendship” (pp. 122, 125).
The Nurse’s respectful and affectionate relationship with Juliet encour-
ages a daring impudence toward her master. When Juliet resists the

30. Harry Levin notes that characters in Romeo and Juliet repudiate artificial language as
part of the process of gaining emotional profundity. I would add that the repudiation of
artificiality is rarely—or more likely never—entirely complete or convincing in Shakespeare’s
plays. See Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (New York,
1976), p. 109.
31. Coppélia Kahn describes the epithalamium as a “parody” of the language of male
conflict in the play. Kahn is right, but the speech should be understand not only to destabilize
male and aristocratic expectations but to actively imagine a civil alternative. See “Coming of
Age in Verona,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carloyn Lenz, et al.
(Urbana, 1980), p. 184.
32. The epiphalamium echoes several Marlowe works, esp. Hero and Leander. See the
annotations by Gibbons in the Arden Romeo and Juliet.

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 Glenn Clark 299
“decree” that she marry Paris, the Nurse forcefully rebukes her master
for berating his daughter too harshly.
NURSE God in heaven bless her!
You are to blame, my lord, to rate her so.
CAPULET And why, my lady wisdom? Hold your tongue,
Good Prudence. Smatter with your gossips, go.
NURSE I speak no treason.
CAPULET Oh, God-I’-good-e’en!
NURSE May not one speak?
CAPULET Peace, you mumbling fool! (3.5.168-73)

The Nurse’s denial of petty treason may exaggerate her bravado and her
danger, but it is an appropriate response to Capulet’s shock and anger at
her behavior.33 We might liken the Nurse’s speech to the confidently
articulate humanist counsel Arthur Ferguson links to the rejection of
analogical thinking.34 The tone as well as the logic of Nurse’s rebuke
seems to contrast, rather than to liken, the loving “God in heaven” to a
short-sighted and cruel domestic “lord.” We should understand her
counsel as partly consisting in an oblique reminder to old Capulet that
his perspective is far more limited than God’s.This extends what Pocock
might call a reflection of the “delegitimization” of hierarchy by active
citizens to the brink of outright insubordination. Not surprisingly, her
rebuke first prompts Capulet’s mockery, but then reduces him to near-
inarticulate rage: “God-I’-good-e’en!” The Nurse anticipates the even
more boldly disobedient servants of the major tragedies.35
The Nurse’s behavior here, understood in the civil context Juliet
provides for it, further anatomizes the play’s larger conflict between
“citizens” and raging aristocrats. Together, Juliet and her Nurse
approach citizenship. As the “three or four Citizens,” brought together
in the city and sharing its streets, feel little devotion to domineering
aristocrats, so Juliet and the Nurse share a self-strengthening intimacy

33. In Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca,

1994), Frances E. Dolan examines the significance of petty treason in early modern tragedy.
Dolan does not discuss Romeo and Juliet.
34. In The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance, Ferguson argues that the recognition
of complex change necessary to careful economic analysis demanded of humanist counselors a
skepticism about “the organic analogy of the ‘body politic’” (p. 293).
35. Richard Strier brings the morally justified disobedience of various servants in King Lear
to our attention in Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley,
1995), pp. 165–202.

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that dimishes their sense of natural subordination.The play imagines an
unusually broad citizenship. It suggests that low-status women and
servants may be like citizens, and it implies that what really distin-
guishes the civility of citizens from magnate fury is a felt indifference
to deference combined with a commitment to peaceful aspirations.
Romeo and Juliet’s grand theme of defiance is qualified by affectionate
civility. If civility promotes mutiny in the play, it does so because
relationships of mutuality have come to feel to some characters more
natural and comforting than deferential devotion. Civility and citizen-
ship are in profound ideological conflict with aristocratic privilege and
order. There is some force to the critical perception that Romeo and
Juliet resembles comedy more than it does the later tragedies because it
naturalizes the coercive power of the state and bourgeois ideology.36
But I would argue that Romeo and Juliet anticipates the later tragedies
in its recognition of the breadth and depth of subordinate disaffection
for a social order in which the behavior of those who claim superiority
has begun to appear unnatural or grotesque.To the extent that the play
reveals the longing for something more comforting and more civil
than hierarchy, it fails to stabilize any sort of dominance or coercion.
university of manitoba

36. See, e.g., Dympna Callaghan’s “The Ideology of Romantic Love:The Case of Romeo and
Juliet,” in Romeo and Juliet (New Casebooks), ed. R. S.White (Basingstoke, 2001; orig. pub. in The
Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, ed. Dympna Callaghan, et al. [Oxford, 1994]).

© 2011 English Literary Renaissance Inc.