What Romeo and Juliet Can Teach Me about The Boston Marathon Bombings

As someone who has been teaching high school English for over twenty years, I have taught Romeo and Juliet many times. I happen to be teaching it right now at a small school five miles away from the Boston Marathon finish line. Last weekend my eleventh grade students were supposed to be reading Act four, scene three.
Romeo and Juliet is helping me understand how an enlightened society might react to events like those that took place in Boston last week.

When we started the play I introduced my students to six lines that I wanted them to memorize by the end of our study:
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified. (2.3.17-22)

It is a snatch of Friar Lawrence’s soliloquy just before Romeo tells him that he has fallen in love with Juliet. The friar is gathering herbs and musing on the presence of good and evil, on and in the earth and in plants and flowers. Like most priests in his time, he is one of the learned and scientific. He knows that, depending on their use, some plants and flowers can be medicinal or poisonous. He believes that there’s nothing so bad that it can’t produce something good, and there’s nothing so good that it can’t be twisted to a destructive use.

He is not talking only about weeds.

As people rejoice over the death of one young man and the capture of another, I am relieved that the Tsarnaeva brothers are no longer able to do harm, I grieve for their victims, and I trust our system to bring Dzhokhar to justice. I also imagine them sitting in classrooms not far from my own a few years ago. I see those young men as plants that were distilled into poison instead of medicine. They were strained from their fair use and stumbled on abuse.

I think of the incredible horror of the spray of nails and ball bearings on a beautiful Monday afternoon, and I try to see some action dignifying that horror. I see the flowering of some special good in marathon runners who ran to hospitals to donate blood and in first responders who dove into the danger to rescue others. There’s nothing so evil that it doesn’t reveal some human grace. Look for the helpers, Mister Rogers told us.

In Shakespeare’s tragedies, as in this one, there are many victims and no winners. His stage is full of dead and maimed bodies, weeping parents and friends. There is usually one sane voice to point out the pointlessness of violence. In Romeo and Juliet, the prince, who has lost two relatives, says: “All are punished.” No one wins.

Every time I teach Romeo and Juliet, someone asks me, “What was the feud between the Montagues and Capulets about?” It’s important that Shakespeare doesn’t tell us. Early in the play, the prince chastises the noble families for engaging in “three civil brawls bred of an airy word.” The brawls start over -- nothing.
If you look at the language in the fatal duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, you will see lots of anger. Romeo tries to break the cycle of vengeance, but both Mercutio and Tybalt are too worried about saving face, too drunk on the feeling of “Get him!” Mercutio calls Romeo’s peace-making overtures to Tybalt “calm, dishonourable, vile submission.” And, after Romeo kills Tybalt to show that he is, after all, a loyal (patriotic), brave Montague, he cries, “Oh, I am Fortune’s Fool!”

The feuds of this world – between families, countries, ideologues -- keep running on vengeance and anger. They carry the same tone of the Montague-Capulet enmity: “Get him! Destroy the ones who hurt and humiliated us!” Some of the language in the media in response to the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarvaeva is a lot like Mercutio and Tybalt’s. It is that tone, that compulsion to have the last word and to save face that contributes to the death of Mercutio, Tybalt, and eventually Romeo and Juliet.

The play ends with this speech by the prince. A lamentation, it promises justice, but it conveys no desire for more violence.
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

I wish there were a Prince Escales, who would stand before us, strike the right note, and say “All are punished.”