of his passion Romeo plays thinker; Juliet says, "Good-night" and
disappears, but he finds time to give us the abstract truth:
"Love goes towards love, as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks."
Juliet appears again unexpectedly, and again Hamlet's generalizing habit
asserts itself in Romeo:
"How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears."
We may be certain that Juliet would have preferred more pointed praise.
He is indeed so lost in his ill-timed reverie that Juliet has to call
him again and again by name before he attends to her.
Romeo has Hamlet's peculiar habit of talking to himself. He falls into a
soliloquy on his way to Juliet in Capulet's orchard, when his heart must
have been beating so loudly that it would have prevented him from
hearing himself talk, and into another when hurrying to the apothecary.
In this latter monologue, too, when all his thoughts must have been of
Juliet and their star-crossed fates, and love-devouring Death, he is
able to picture for us the apothecary and his shop with a wealth of
detail that says more for Shakespeare's painstaking and memory than for
his insight into character. The fault, however, is not so grave as it
would be if Romeo were a different kind of man; but like Hamlet he is
always ready to unpack his heart with words, and if they are not the
best words sometimes, sometimes even very inappropriate words, it only
shows that in his first tragedy Shakespeare was not the master of his
art that he afterwards became.
In the churchyard scene of the fifth act Romeo's likeness to Hamlet
comes into clearest light.
Hamlet says to Laertes:
"I pr'ythee, take thy fingers from my throat;
For though I am not splenitive and rash
Yet have I something in me dangerous
Which let thy wisdom fear."
In precisely the same temper, Romeo says to Paris:
"Good, gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man;
Fly hence and leave me; think upon these gone,
Let them affright thee."
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