What did Shakespeare, and the people that he was writing for, think a tragedy was? Today we use the word frequently, often for news events that are particularly sad: missing children, natural disasters, needless killing. For us, tragedy can be used to describe real events and experiences that have happened in people’s lives, but for an Elizabethan theatregoer, this would have been puzzling; a tragedy only referred to fictional stories that appeared in poems or plays. Shakespeare’s audience expected a play to be one of three types: a comedy, which usually has a happy ending; a history play, which tells stories from the past; and tragedy, which is characterised by death and disaster. While we still see sad films or read sad novels, our modern idea of tragedy is something that we have taken from fiction and applied to reality.
Most Shakespearean tragedies involve characters of very high status in society. Julius Caesar is the most important man in Rome, Hamlet is a prince, Macbeth is a lord who becomes a king, and King Lear is ruler of all Britain. This was normal for the 16th and 17th centuries. Part of a tragedy’s power is derived from the idea that the whole of society is affected in the play, from the top down; if something bad happens to the person in charge, everyone else is affected.
Romeo and Juliet is not like this. The main characters have little influence in Verona – if they did, there wouldn’t be a problem with their relationship. So as a tragedy, this play would have been unusual in Shakespeare’s time. In fact, it comes much closer to the way we use the word today. Whilst other tragic heroes are to some extent responsible for their downfall, the biggest mistake that Romeo and Juliet make is to fall in love.
So part of what constitutes tragedy in this play is that Romeo and Juliet cannot control their destiny. ‘I am fortune’s fool’ (3.1.136), says Romeo, suggesting that his actions are determined by fate, even though this line comes after he kills Tybalt. When we use the word ‘tragedy’ today, we usually try to work out how the disaster occurred. With Romeo and Juliet, we can look at the word ‘disaster’ itself for a clue. Just as ‘astrology’ means the influence of stars, and ‘astronomy’ refers to the actual stars, disaster indicates a cruel, unavoidable fate, one that is controlled by the stars.. We are told this from the start of the play, when the Prologue identifies Romeo and Juliet as ‘star-crossed lovers’.
So why does the tragedy of the play happen? Is it because the lovers cannot control their destiny? Or because they try to?