Unpacking `Romeo and Juliet Sonnets (2)

Olivia Hussey as Juliet and Leonard Whiting as Romeo, in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 production

ROMEO

[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO

Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

JULIET

Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

ROMEO

Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

JULIET

You kiss by the book.

From Act I, scene v

This first meeting between the two star-crossed lovers quietly moved heaven and earth, and I am utterly enthralled with it.  The vast lot of directors seem not to comprehend or appreciate the import of this first meeting, Zeffirelli being the best as the exception.

1. For one, Romeo and Juliet speak in a sonnet to one another.  Let me rephrase that: They create a sonnet together.  In fact, of course, it is Shakespeare who creates that sonnet.  But in so doing, he resorts to his poetic and dramatic prowess to speak to their romantic collision and inevitability
2. It is not easy to write a sonnet.  It took me years to find my stride with it, and then once I did, it came more easily.  In a way, perhaps, this lovers' sonnet suggests that there may have been generations of love before them, but they alone make it as natural and as exalted as a sonnet.
3. In the staging I will do at some point, I have Romeo prowling around the dance floor, eyes dead center in the radar where Juliet is.  In his sly way, he finds a circuitous route to her, and takes her hand.  That's the first quatrain: It's formal and respectful, it's chivalrous and Romantic.
4. Juliet is immediately charmed by him, just as he was immediately taken by her moments before.  She responds with her own poetry, that is, the second quatrain, in which she echoes "hand" and "pilgrim" from Romeo's opening gambit.  
5. Amazingly, though, Juliet doesn't just echo words, but also mirrors the very rhyme he uses "this" and "kiss." Moreover, while he is romanticizing her, she takes it all in stride and sanctifies whatever might be in his mind by referencing saints and the palm-to-palm manner of their kissing.  
6. But, oh, Romeo is a clever, flirtatious boy.  So after the formality and politeness of the first two quatrains, all bets are off.  He knows he's got her, endearingly of course, and maneuvers to play up his scheme to steal a real kiss from her.  
7. Not so fast, though, Juliet seems to say in the third quatrain.  She demures once again, re-invokes the sanctity of saints, and makes another call for him to behave.
8. But Romeo is a persistent boy.  He cleverly installs her as the saint she has been alluding to.  Except that: Just as hands come together for prayer, lips also come together for prayer.  Just as saints grant pilgrims a prayer, still him as a pilgrim - actually his lips - so must Juliet grant him a "prayer."    
9. The final couplet of this sonnet is perfectly created by Romeo and Juliet: Each shares a superb iambic pentameter line, which rhyme beautifully with one another.  The line "Saints do not move" actually begins with a trochaic foot, and the accents literally have to move to fall in iambic step.  
10. Which is such a beautiful irony for what is happening to Juliet: She stops trying to hold him back, and lets him kiss her.  But the little metric move, plus the thematic meaning of "move" (i.e., aroused), all suggest is not at all stationary but is literally and romantically coming around.

The romantic collision between Romeo and Juliet is so heaven- and earth-shaking that a single sonnet cannot quite speak to it.  He manages to steal yet another kiss from her, his flirtation clearly an unrelenting sort.  It takes another quatrain to close what is obviously just the first chapter in their love.