(preprint review to be published in The Review of English

Studies)

René Weis (ed.), Romeo and Juliet. Pp xviii + 451 (Arden Shakespeare Third Series).  London: Methuen Drama, 2012. Pb, £8.99.

René Weis’s new edition of Romeo and Juliet,which succeeds Brian Gibbons Arden 2 edition is distinctly Janus-faced. In comes performance and poetic appreciation, out goes bibliography: Weis is a thoroughly modern editor when thinking about the play’s afterlives and performance possibilities, and a curiously old-fashioned one in presenting an eclectic text in the manner of the older Ardens rather than the third series.

The introduction is most enthusiastic when discussing the play’s incarnations on film. Weis’s readings of West Side Story and of versions by Baz Luhrmann and Franco Zeffirelli are informed, lively, and appealing. Elsewhere he gives details of the ages of the characters and the timescheme of the play, giving a schedule from the ‘street melee’ on Sunday morning in late July to dawn on Thursday when Capulet, Montague and the Prince meet at the tomb. Weis uses this ‘tightly plotted and exiguous time-scheme’ to argue effectively against the common trend of seeing the play’s structural affinities with comedy. As he acknowledges, ‘Quite how literal one dare be when dealing with a Shakespeare play is a moot point’; Weis is daring in stressing realist timing (although he acknowledges the Friar’s potion does not live up to its chronological promise) and, at points, realist characterization. Weis introduces a new character, Petruchio, whose single line has been rescued from the italics of a mistaken stage direction, and he also suggests the famously anonymous Nurse’s name is revealed when she is addressed as ‘Angelica’ by Capulet (it’s not clear who or what is being addressed, and Weis does not gloss any possible culinary pun in the context of the bustle preparing the wedding breakfast). Poetic analysis is a strength of Weis’s introduction, and perhaps appropriately for this most reinvented of plays, historical context is downplayed. The facsimile reproduction of the British Library copy of Q1 (1597) is a welcome addition.

The volume’s editorial stance is, however, nostalgically eclectic. Weis’s copytext is Q2 (1599), advertised as ‘newly corrected, augmented, and amended’, is liberally patched with Q1, ‘as it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely’. These emendations lack a consistent rationale. Some are stage directions: of two dozen Q1 stage directions, only two are not adopted wholesale including ‘Enter Romeo and Juliet at the window’ (Weis incorporates Q2’s ‘aloft’, apparently to suggest the use of the upper level of the stage). Some Q1 readings are supported through new scholarship: tracing Shakespeare’s persistent debts to Nashe supports Weis’s decision to replace Q2’s ‘phantacies’ with ‘fantasticoes’, and ‘ottamie’ with ‘atomi’. Others seem to be on grounds of literary preference. In Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, for instance, Q1’s ‘maid’ is preferred over Q2’s ‘man’, presumably giving this highly suggestive speech an additional bawdy potential. To add to this reading, however, Weis opts for Q2’s ‘Pricked’ as ‘more dramatic and suggestive’ than Q1’s ‘pickt’, and thus Arden’s line ‘Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid’ is neither Q1’s ‘Pickt from the lazy finger of a maid’ nor Q2’s ‘Pricked from the lazy finger of a man’. The line that Weis prints is more internally coherent than either of the quartos in that the collocation of ‘pricked’ and ‘maid’ seems appropriate to Mercutio’s lewd poetry, but it has no consistent principle of textual selection.

There are some other inconsistencies too. Take Romeo’s speech on leaving Juliet at the end of Arden’s 2.2, beginning ‘The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night’. What has been most interesting about this speech to many textual critics is the fact that it is repeated in Q2 by the Friar as he enters, ‘alone with a basket’, to begin the following scene. In Q1 there is no repetition: only the Friar has the speech. Weis gives us no substantive discussion about his bibliographic theory of why the speech appears seriatim in Q2 – nothing, for instance, on the idea of authorial second thoughts -  nor about why he has chosen not to turn to Q1’s simple clarification. Instead he follows F2 in giving it to Romeo rather than the Friar, with the sole explanation that ‘the lines hardly fit with the Friar’s meditation on medicinal herbalism’. If his editorial justification is minimal here, the decision on Romeo’s line at the end of the scene is also under-motivated. In Q1 Romeo vows ‘Now will I to my Ghostly fathers Cell’. The equivalent line in Q2 is ‘Hence will I to my ghostly Friers close cell’. One might think that here an editor was faced with two equally explicable versions of the line, with 'father' and 'friar' as synonyms neither of which is in obvious need of emendation, and that therefore the chosen copytext reading would prevail. (There is no discussion of the pastoral/Catholic implications that might differentially attach to the two terms.) Weis prints the line ‘Hence will I to my ghostly sire’s close cell’: a line based on the syntax of Q2 but with an emendation, ‘sire’, not seen in either of the early texts. Why? Because this is the word in Arthur Brooke’s source poem: 'To fryer Lawrence will I wende, to learn his sage advise./ He is my gostly syre'. There seems to be no possible reason to intervene in the text in this way.