The Lover’s Companions and the Dramatic Context

Abstract

It is clear, therefore, that Shakespeare achieves a kind of harmony through variety in the play’s language and imagery. The technique used is essentially comic, with many parallels to be found in the comedies of the same period. For example, Love’s Labour’s Lost also brings together a lavish variety of distinctive languages, from the courtly sonneteering of the Lords — which is not unlike Romeo’s early style — to the blank incomprehension of Constable Dull. All are combined in a ‘great feast of languages’ that at the end of the play almost achieves the harmony of a comic resolution, only to be deferred by the intrusion of death. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hippolyta provides the most familiar and succinct summary of the technique, by describing the various cries of Theseus’s hunting hounds as ‘musical discord … sweet thunder’. However, such a technique is by no means the only one by which Shakespeare seeks to control the audience’s responses to the story of the two lovers. As T. J. B. Spencer describes it in his introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play (1967):

‘we observe the progressive isolation both of Juliet and of Romeo in their environments. Their love gradually separates them from their friends and families’. (p. 28)