In thinking through my editing choices for the final form of my scene, I find myself asking what it means that the servants speak first in Romeo and Juliet. Why start the play here, between the lines of locker-room talk? How does this frivolous conversation frame our interpretation of the narrative?
The most available answer might be that in a comedic way, we are shown that this tragic love story will inevitably involve conflict, and what better way to acclimate the reader than with a fight over House loyalties right in the opening scene? It becomes readily apparent that the bad blood between the Capulets and Montagues runs so deep that it impacts the thoughts and choices of their servants (much like how it will impact their own children to rebel).
On closer inspection, this becomes a closed-circuit study on the expressions of power within a fixed system. Like Romeo and Juliet, the serving men are also a part of the familial ties that bind them, and which dictate their freedom to a certain degree. The word “tyrant” is used in these opening lines – a sentiment that will echo the way Romeo and Juliet embody tyranny over an agency of their bodies later on. What is also tyrannical is the act of putting something into words – whether it be putting words to hate like in this opening scene, or love as Romeo and Juliet do when they meet. In our class discussions we concluded that the body can be a sign of cultural affiliations, and these bodies each belong to and perform within their House names, choosing to regardless of their duty as well. We come back to the question then, of what’s in a name? In all of the versions I studied, Samson notes dismemberment – he wants to cut off the maidens’ heads. To remove the head from the body of the House is a clever symbol for the dismemberment of names and ties, quite literally in cutting off familial affiliation. To remove the head from the body also indicates a unique separation between the mind and body, which is a motif explored in the concluding scene of the play, when all conceived plans end in the expiration of bodies.
An interesting contrast is that the two men we meet first are servingmen of the House of Capulet – Juliet’s family. I found it to be an interesting perversion that the two men serve the feminine House of the play, and that they are the ones who provoke and attack the masculine House. Sex is used as an impending threat based on the many ways Samson imagines the phallus in almost his every move. Sex (or love) is a tool that can be weaponized, correlating sex and violence in the uncanny in this opening scene, and contrasting Juliet’s efforts at remaining chaste and coy.
As the back-end of the Capulet family, Gregorie and Samson enact the reality of the public – even if these are members of the elite Houses, they are closer to the average citizen than the rest of the courtiers are, which gives us insight into the type of community where this love story unfolds. Is this a commentary on what is said outside of proper society? The formality of what is well-mannered becomes stripped by the realities which underscore it, performed first by these two men standing outside on the street.
For these reasons, I chose to recreate an edition of the opening scene. To be able to unpack the seemingly unimportant dialogue between minor characters has changed the way I viewed the mirrored anxieties later on. One choice I made that I might have gone back on would be to actually include Gregorie and Samson’s names within the lines, and to introduce them in the title. I made the rookie mistake of thinking that removing this information in my edition would simplify the clarity of the content, because it is not spoken by memorable people. However, I fall into my own trap here, because glossing over the names glosses over the scene also, presenting it as more dismissible than perhaps it should be. Looking back, I would follow the 1609 and 1622 publications to include Gregorie and Samson’s names in the first stage direction and in the line count.
Additionally, I better understand now that the annotations could have gone deeper than the meanings I provided from the Holland text. I originally chose to include Holland’s footnotes because the lines felt immovable without their help to the modern eye. To understand the full scope of every pun, I thought it best to help translate the text line by line in certain areas, with the use of Holland’s historic research. If I had completed this aspect correctly, I would have suspended my anxieties about reader misunderstands to delve deeper into topics like the body gesturing that also occurs in this scene, I.e. biting one’s thumb, as another form of communication. I can see potential research like this working well as a springboard into the final project.