Favourite scenes from Romeo and Juliet

The quickest answer: every scene with Tybalt.

Tybalt is the Darth Vader of Romeo and Juliet. He storms into every scene ready to stomp someone. He delights in killing. He fights with a sword. He gets great one-liners. In a word, he’s a badass.

***

ACT I

SCENE I—Verona. A public place.

[Sampson and Gregory of the Capulets have been bragging about how eager they are to fight the Montagues. Abraham and Balthasar of the Montagues enter. Sampson and Gregory taunt and provoke them. Benvolio, a Montague, arrives as they are about to fight.]

SAMPSON         Draw, if you be men. Gregory, remember thy swashing blow.

They fight

BENVOLIO       Part, fools! [Beats down their swords] Put up your swords. You know not what you do.

Enter Tybalt with sword drawn

TYBALT            What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?

                        Turn thee Benvolio! Look upon thy death.

BENVOLIO       I do but keep the peace. Put up thy sword,

                        Or manage it to part these men with me.

TYBALT            What, drawn, and talk of peace? I hate the word

                        As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.

                        Have at thee, coward!     [They fight]

[Later Benvolio explains to the Lord Montague how the fight happened.]

BENVOLIO       Here were the servants of your adversary

                        And yours, close fighting ere I did approach.

                        I drew to part them. In the instant came

                        The fiery Tybalt, with his sword prepar’d;

                        Which, as he breath’d defiance to my ears,

                        He swung about his head and cut the winds,

                        Who, nothing hurt withal, hiss’d him in scorn.

                        While we were interchanging thrusts and blows,

                        Came more and more, and fought on part and part,

                        Till the Prince came, who part either part.

***

            Need I say more? Tybalt has two lines in that scene and they’re both awesome—well worthy to be voiced by James Earl Jones.

***

SCENE V—Capulet’s house.

[The Lord Capulet has thrown a masquerade party for the town—no Montagues invited. Romeo and his friend Mercutio have snuck in, hidden under their masks. Romeo has spotted Juliet.]

ROMEO            Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!

                        For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.

TYBALT            This, by his voice, should be a Montague.

                        [To a Page] Fetch me my rapier, boy. What, dares the slave

                        Come hither, cover’d with an antic face,

                        To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?

                        Now, by the stock and honour of my kin,

                        To strike him dead I hold it not a sin.

CAPULET         Why, how now, kinsman? Wherefore storm you so?

TYBALT            Uncle, this Montague, our foe;

                        A villain, that is hither come in spite

                        To scorn at our solemnity this night.

CAPULET         Young Romeo is it?

TYBALT                                                ‘Tis he, that villain Romeo.

CAPULET         Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone. ...

                        It is my will; the which if thou respect,

                        Show a fair presence and put off these frowns,

                        An ill-beseeming semblance for a feast.

TYBALT            It fits when such a villain is a guest.

                        I’ll not endure him.

CAPULET                                             He shall b endur’d. ...

                        Am I the master here? Go to! ...

                        You’ll make a mutiny among my guests! ...

TYBALT            I will withdraw; but this intrusion shall,

                        Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest gall.

***

Here we see the Lord Capulet playing Tarkin to Tybalt’s Vader. “Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash!”

Now we reach the crowning moment of awesome and my favourite scene in the play. Romeo has just married Juliet in a secret wedding. She has returned home; he is coming to share his joy with his closest friend, Mercutio.

***

ACT III

SCENE I—A public place.

Enter Mercutio, Benvolio, and Men

BENVOLIO       I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire.

                        The day is hot, the Capulets abroad.

                        And if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl.

                        For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring. ...

Enter Tybalt and others

BENVOLIO       By my head, here come the Capulets.

MERCUTIO       By my heel, I care not.

TYBALT            [to his companions] Follow me close, for I will speak to them.

                        Gentlement, good e’en. A word with one of you. ...

Enter Romeo

TYBALT            Well, peace be with you, Sir. Here comes my man. ...

                        Romeo, the love I bear thee can afford

                        No better term than this: thou art a villain.

ROMEO            Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee

                        Doth much excuse the appertaining rage

                        To such a greeting. Villain am I none.

                        Therefore farewell. I see thou knowest me not.

TYBALT            Boy, this shall not excuse the injuries

                        That thou hast done me; therefore turn and draw.

ROMEO            I do protest: I never injur’d thee,

                        But love thee better than thou canst devise

                        Till thou shalt know the reason of my love;

                        And so good Capulet, which name I tender

                        As dearly as mine own, be satisfied.

MERCUTIO       O calm, dishonourable, vile submission! ... [He draws]

                        Tybalt, you ratcatcher, will you walk? ...

                        Will you pluck your sword out of his pitcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out.

TYBALT            I am for you. [He draws] ... [They fight] ...

ROMEO            Hold Tybalt! Good Mercutio!

Tybalt [under Romeo’s arm] thrusts into Mercutio

PETRUCHIO     Away, Tybalt!                             [Exit Tybalt and his followers]

MERCUTIO                               I am hurt.

                        A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped. ...

ROMEO            Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.

MERCUTIO       No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. ... Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.

ROMEO            I thought all for the best.

MERCUTIO       Help me into some house, Benvolio,

                        Or I shall faint. A plague o’ both your houses!

                        They have made worms’ meat of me. I have it,

                        And soundly too. Your houses!

***

I love this scene. It’s the “I will not fight you” scene from Return of the Jedi. What makes Tybalt, like Vader, really great is he’s not only a badass himself, but he brings out the badass in the other characters. He intends his insult (“thou art a villain”) to provoke a duel, and by the code of honour Romeo ought to have demanded satisfaction. But Romeo has just come from marrying Juliet, Tybalt’s cousin. Therefore Tybalt is now an in-law: he and Romeo are family.

I love the legalism of this scene. A typical modern teacher, presenting the play to a class, would surely use this scene to critique the code of honour that demanded duelling, and make Romeo an enlightened pacifist. But that’s not it at all. Romeo is stung and feels the shame of being insulted; I have no doubt that he meant what he said about “the appertaining rage to such a greeting.” If Tybalt had challenged him yesterday, he would have fought. But Tybalt is his kinsman now, and Romeo will not kill his family; so he tries to withdraw in peace. The crowning touch is that no one else knows about Romeo’s marriage to Juliet, and so none of them understand Romeo’s retreat; Tybalt does not want submission, he wants to fight, so he just pushes on—Mercutio is ashamed of Romeo, thinking perhaps that he is a coward, and steps in to fight Tybalt. The multiple wires of quasi-legal obligation that draw on the different characters make the scene so enjoyable to contemplate.

And in addition to being the “I will not fight you” scene, this is the death scene of Obi-Wan Kenobi. But Mercutio does not go willingly, like Obi-Wan; and unlike Luke, Romeo turns to the dark side...

***

BENVOLIO       O Romeo, Romeo, brave Mercutio’s dead! ...

ROMEO            This day’s black fate on more days doth depend;

                        This but begins the woe others must end.

Enter Tybalt

BENVOLIO       Here comes the furious Tybalt back again.

ROMEO            He gad in triumph, and Mercutio slain?

                        Away to heaven, respective lenity,

                        And fire-ey’d fury be my conduct now!

                        Now, Tybalt, take the “villain” back again

                        That late thou gavest me; for Mercutio’s soul

                        Is but a little way above our heads,

                        Staying for thine to keep him company.

                        Either thou or I, or both, must go with him.

TYBALT            Thou, wretched boy, that didst consort him here;

                        Shalt with him hence.

ROMEO                                                This shall determine that.

They fight. Tybalt falls [and dies]

BENVOLIO       Romeo, away, be gone!

                        The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain.

                        Stand not amaz’d. The Prince will doom thee death

                        If thou art taken. Hence, be gone, away!

ROMEO            O, I am fortune’s fool!

***

Farewell, Tybalt. Thou art a spirit of fire,

Too ardent but to burn thy mortal flesh.

The lie of socialization in school

It seems to be a common defence of elementary and high school that it provides necessary ‘socialization’. I even heard a professor encourage parents to send their toddlers to day care for the socialization. I take it that socialization means teaching children to live in society. If that is what it means, then the claim that school socializes is bull—because the social environment of school is utterly abnormal. It is nothing like the normal social situations of adult life. So how can it prepare children for them?

Let’s consider the chief features of the social environment in school:

1. A large number of children are corralled together, without their parents, for six or more hours per day. I could stop right here—where else in life does this happen? A sweat shop?

2. You spend most of your time with people of precisely your own age.

3. You are expected to spend your entire day on school property. (This loosens up a bit in high school.)

4. You are forced to change tasks and move from place to place frequently.

5. There are large periods of just hanging about, loitering, or killing time.

6. You are placed under a large number of superiors who can punish you or force you to do things.

7. You are required by law to be there. Most of your peers are not there by choice and do not want to be there.

For what social environment is school supposed to prepare children? The military? Prison? Labour camps?

Mind you, I am not trying to prove that the social environment of school is harsh or even unpleasant. For many people it is unpleasant, but many people enjoy it, too. That is beside the point—the question is: does it prepare children to live in society? It could be a dance through the daisies, but that doesn’t have one whit of relevance about socialization. And in fact, school is nothing like the daily reality of adult society: work, family, friends, church...

School does teach children how to socialize. It teaches children how to socialize in the abnormal environment of a school. This might be fun, or it might not, but it is no preparation for adult life. To claim ‘socialization’ as a justification for school is like claiming that gym class is valuable because it teaches kids how to play dodgeball. “What’s the use of knowing dodgeball?” you ask. “Well, you’ll have to play dodgeball in gym!” answers the true believer. Likewise, school teaches children how to be in school.

If you really want to prepare children for adult life, it appears stupidly counterproductive to force them to spend most of their time in the society of other children. Living your whole social life with children, you remain a child. If children lived more in the society of adults (not just placed under the arbitrary authority of strangers), the maturity of the adults would be a constant pressure lifting the children up to their level. To this end, I propose some alternative forms of socialization:

Apprenticeship. Traditionally, an apprentice would be placed with a master of the trade and would actually live in his home as part of his family. But at its most basic an apprenticeship could just mean that a child assists his mentor with the work.

Internship.

Employment.

Volunteering.

Home schooling. At least in home schooling a child spends his school time in the society of his family—with whom he will have a relationship for the rest of his life—rather than being separated from them to socialize with strangers, most of whom he will never see again after school ends.

Taking individual classes. As in adult education or university.

Private tutoring. Similar to apprenticeship, this could take the full form of actually living in the home of the tutor, or more basically just receiving lessons one-on-one.

Finally, if you must put children in school (as may be the case), it would be much more productive to return to placement based on aptitude rather than age. It is not common knowledge these days, but until fairly recently, schools placed children in grades or ‘forms’ based on the results of examinations. So you would have precocious twelve-year-olds in the higher grades alongside older students. This mimics adult life, where you will generally be around people of different ages. It also means that adept children can advance through school rapidly and perhaps into university.

The way schools are constituted right now, the ‘socialization’ they provide is sure to produce immature, confused people who are not well-adjusted to adult life. The people who come out of school able and mature—those are its failures. If we really want to prepare our children for adult life, we should not expect the artificial school environment to do it—instead, we should place them in situations where they can experience adult life for themselves, and be initiated into it.

School is not a preparation for adult life. Adult life is a preparation for adult life.

I Heart Huckabees, conversion, and conservative Christians

I Heart Huckabees is a unique and fascinating movie. It’s tough for a Christian to recommend because, as is usual in the entertainment industry, its creators made sure to include some gratuitous sex scenes and plenty of filthy language. But if you can tolerate that then it’s worth watching. It is unique, as far as I know, in depicting very successfully the thought processes of several character’s ‘existential crises’. It also is well acted and thoroughly entertaining, especially if you’ve ever been through such a crisis yourself.

There are a few points that I’d like to pull out of the movie and attend to, because they are useful for Christians to think about.

1. Jude Law cannot pull off an American accent. Truly, Jude Law’s inherent Englishness is overwhelming. He playing an American business-shark is about as plausible as Sean Connery playing a Russian submarine captain. Wait, that’s not my first point. Let’s try again.

1*. The critique of the Church. The film is about several characters going through what are commonly called ‘existential crises’; basically, for various reasons they realize that the life they’ve been living is meaningless or immoral and then try to understand what is the point of it all and how they ought to live. It is to the film’s credit that the Church shows up in one scene as a possible path. However, the Church is pretty harshly and superficially dismissed in the same scene, on the usual ground of ‘hypocrisy’.

I won’t take the self-flagellating route which is so popular among Christians today and accept uncritically the film’s critique of the Church. It is quite unfair, recapitulating as it does the usual trope that the families who appear most good and wholesome are, under the surface, worse than anybody else. And what is presented as so bad about them is basically that they are a suburban middle-class Republican-voting (I presume) white household. So the Christian family are shown to have adopted a young African and gotten him a job, for which he is grateful, but they get no credit, essentially, because they would vote Republican. Not a very substantial critique.

HOWEVER. There is one thing worth taking away from this scene, and it is that the Church (represented by this Christian family) does not get the existential crisis at all and in fact is represented as trying to shut it back in its box. There is an exchange between the characters that goes something like this:

Existential seeker: Did you ever lie in a meadow at night?

Child: What happens in a meadow at night?

Mother: Nothing!—Seeker (simultaneously): Everything!

Mother (louder): Nothing!—Seeker (louder): Everything!

In actual fact this representation is so far from right that the precise opposite is the truth: the Church is today the only ally of meaning, of truth, of the moral life. BUT—I think this scene presents quite accurately the way most people perceive the Church and one reason people do not more readily turn to the Church when they enter an existential crisis. It’s something we Christians should think about.

2. The causes of the existential crises. The four characters who go through these crises each embody a different Politically Correct trope:

a) The environmentalist (Jason Schwartzman). He is shocked and pained by the destruction of nature in modern society and wants to protect forests and swamps from being built over by a mall.

b) The Noam Chomsky (Mark Wahlberg). He realizes that the USA’s need for oil is driving its government to make all kinds of evil political decisions. It provokes a moral crisis and he tries to stop everyone from using petroleum (he’s a fireman, and he starts riding a bicycle to fires instead of riding the truck).

c) The hipster (Naomi Watts). She becomes disillusioned with advertising and commercialism and starts wearing frumpy clothes instead.

d) The unhappy businessman (Jude Law). He at first fakes an existential crisis in order to advance his career, but it gets out of hand and he gradually realizes that his whole life is a façade he puts on because he hates himself inside.

I bring this up because Christians, especially politically conservative or reactionary ones, tend to be utterly unsympathetic or even hostile to these causes. And they have good reason to be. But there’s a big problem—

These types of causes are, in fact, often the alarms that wake young people up to morality and principles and a purpose in life. I Heart Huckabees presents a pretty accurate picture, in my experience, of the way young people in our society first encounter the big questions and first adopt a standard of virtue. They become vegetarians or stop driving cars or stop buying from Wal-Mart...

And Christians ought not to stamp out these little sparks of the moral life. Those moments of existential crisis are precisely the points when conversion can happen—and not just conversion in the sense of calling oneself a Christian, but actual repentance and an attempt to amend one’s life. (Some people raised as Christians their whole lives could be improved by an existential crisis.) But Christians are often stonewalling on the very questions that these seekers are trying to answer, and so the Faith does not appear to them a live option.

I have no solution to offer. The Church cannot sacrifice the truth in order to win converts—it won’t work, and even if it did, it would be wrong. But at the same time, for many people today the moral life is presented to them in these types of PC pet causes. I have tried here to present this problem. Christians ought to take it seriously.

And now, some words from the Who:

I've looked under chairs

I've looked under tables

I've tried to find the key

To fifty million fables

They call me 'The Seeker'

I've been searching low and high

I won't get to get what I'm after

Till the day I die

I asked Bobby Dylan

I asked The Beatles

I asked Timothy Leary

But he couldn't help me either...

Another look at liberalism in the Church

Newman defined liberalism by laying out 18 propositions that liberals hold. (Newman’s 18 propositions and my comments here.)

There is another way to define liberalism which may be more to the purpose in the Church today. That is as a habit of mind.

Liberalism is the habit of mind that does not look to the actually existing Church (either present or historical) to learn what the Faith is. Instead it gets an idea of what the Faith is from some other source and, seeing that the Church does not teach this, decides that the Church ought to change to conform to this image.

In a way it is Newman’s tenet 5 of liberalism—“it is immoral in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive as being congenial to his moral and mental nature”—but instead of being held and defended as a proposition, it is acted out as a habit of mind. It is the twentieth-century fruit of that nineteenth-century seed. As so often happens, what in one century is the abstract argument of professors becomes in the next century the unconscious assumption of the middle class.

Without a doubt this habit of only listening to what is congenial to our moral and mental nature is active to some extent in all of us and distorts our reception of the faith. In fact there is probably a name for it as a cognitive bias.

The key test which makes a cognitive bias into the habit of liberalism is whether an appeal to the history of the Church has any weight at all. Take the case of the ordination of women. One could imagine a poorly-informed Catholic advocating the ordination of women because he believes there was a time when the Church did ordain women. Then a historian shows him that the evidence uniformly shows that the Church has only ever ordained men, and he reconsiders his position. That man, when he was advocating women’s ordination, was defending a liberal cause. But our man is not a true liberal, because he still cares what the Church has actually done and said. Clearly, his training was deficient.

A true liberal is not be swayed at all by an appeal to history like that. Even the authoritative decrees of ecumenical councils or popes hold no weight. They listen to another authority. It doesn’t have to be left-wing, either—it could be conservative or reactionary. The point is that the Church is not the teacher, the Church is the pupil.

By this definition I would call Dr. Charlton a theological liberal. He will not correct his theological speculations with reference to the actual practice or teaching of the Church, at any time or place in history.

This is why with liberals anything goes. There is no limit to how the Faith could potentially be defined, because the Faith does not have to conform to anything that has actually been said or done about it.

In a word, a Christian ought to have a habit of receptivity to the Church; liberalism is the habit of criticism of the Church. It can be right-wing and reactionary criticism as much as left-wing and modern.

The Christian faith is historical, not philosophical. It cannot be worked out by intelligent speculation or even prayerful meditation. It has to be received as a deposit. This is what’s wrong with the liberal habit of mind—it prevents you from receiving the Faith.

The Faith is reality. And the oft-lamented, much-rued nature of reality is that you have to take it as a given. It is no good criticizing it—what’s the use of criticizing water for freezing at 0^o C? You cannot substitute a better reality for it. You’d better get on with conforming yourself to it.