Matching Tracksuits

Yesterday and today, we covered one of my most favorite mini-lessons in the Shakespeare unit. It tags onto the end of one day’s work and requires a couple of minutes the next day to answer the question, “Just how much time has passed in this play?” For several scenes in the play, it’s a little unclear to a reader who is not looking for clues, but they’re there, scattered throughout, but it doesn’t become obvious until 3.4, when Paris comes to talk to Capulet again about Juliet’s hand, we know it’s late, for Capulet explains, “‘Tis very late, she’ll not come down to-night: / I promise you, but for your company, / I would have been a-bed an hour ago.” But late on what day? We get the answer shortly when Capulet, deciding when the wedding will be, asks what the day is: “Monday, my lord,” responds Paris.

Juliet won’t come down because she’s weeping for Tybalt, or so the Capulets think. In the scene before, she learns of Tybalt’s death, and while she’s initially upset with Romeo, she reconsiders: ” Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? / Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, / When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?” She explains that she’s only been his wife for three hours, so the wedding had to have taken place sometime after 12 but before the evening. We know that Romeo doesn’t fight Tybalt because he’s now related to him:

I do protest, I never injured 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 my own,–be satisfied.

This means that the fight between Romeo and Tybalt happens after twelve but before the evening, because Juliet says she’s only been Romeo’s wife for three hours. But how do we get the twelve I keep referring to? Simple: in 2.4, when Juliet is waiting for the nurse’s return, she complains that “from nine till twelve / Is three long hours, yet she is not come.” We know from the balcony scene in 2.2 that Romeo is supposed to meet with someone to arrange the wedding at nine the next morning.

But how do we know for certain that the balcony scene was the night before? Simple: when Friar Laurence makes his entrance in 2.3, it’s clearly dawn:

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels:
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.

Shortly after that, he encounters Romeo at his door and pondering how it is that Romeo is up so early, he suggests “then here I hit it right, / Our Romeo hath not been in bed to-night.” Romeo confirms that he’s been with Juliet the night before and hasn’t gone to bed: “That last is true; the sweeter rest was mine.” This puts the balcony scene and the party on Sunday evening/night.

When Lady Capulet comes to speak initially to Juliet about Paris, she asks, “What say you? can you love the gentleman? This night you shall behold him at our feast.” This would put the scene in which it happens, 1.3, sometime in the late morning or early afternoon on Sunday.

In the scene before, Paris asks Capulet for Juliet’s hand. Capulet refuses the offer, insisting that they wait two more years. He then tries a deflationary tactic:

This night I hold an old accustom’d feast,
Whereto I have invited many a guest,
Such as I love; and you, among the store,
One more, most welcome, makes my number more.

This happens concurrently with Lady Capulet’s discussion with Juliet or just before it. We know that Capulet’s conversation with Paris is almost immediately after the opening fight scene because he explains, “But Montague is bound as well as I, / In penalty alike; and ’tis not hard, I think, / For men so old as we to keep the peace.” So the fight that opens the play must have happened Sunday morning.

Benvolio, in explaining to the Montagues in 1.1 why Romeo was fortunately not involved in the fray explains to Lady Montague,

Madam, an hour before the worshipp’d sun
Peer’d forth the golden window of the east,
A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad;
Where, underneath the grove of sycamore
That westward rooteth from the city’s side,
So early walking did I see your son:

With all this in mind, we returned today to 3.5 and examined the opening lines: “Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.” Clearly, it’s morning, but just to make it clear, Shakespeare has Juliet later say ask, “Who is’t that calls? is it my lady mother? / Is she not down so late, or up so early?” So it’s early Tuesday morning.

They met Sunday evening.

“How many of you thought it was a matter of weeks that had passed?” I asked, as I do every year. Most hands go up. “It puts the whole thing in a new perspective, doesn’t it?”

We began today by going over the latest article of the week, looking at a complete of connections that I wanted students to make within the text.

Afterward, we returned to the work of tracking down some of the ways that Shakespeare has characters start echoing each other. For example, we covered this unique echo:

They’re both comparing the other in terms of brightness so intense that it would overpower the night and turn it into daytime. There are a few differences, though:

• Juliet frames it in the future (Romeo’s death) whereas Romeo frames it in the present. This reflects their personalities as well.
• Juliet begins to hint at the coming conclusion of the play. “Death is just around the corner for them both,” I reminded them.

I’m tempted to give a little spoiler tomorrow as we finish act 3 and Romeo climbs out of the house in a sort of bookend balcony scene: “This is the last time they will see each other alive.” Tempting…

As we move toward the end of the play, I want students to start picking up on how characters echo each other. I want them to see that Juliet in act three echoes Romeo’s words in the balcony scene in act two:

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.

I want them to see that Juliet expresses her anger in act three the same way Romeo does in the first scene of the play, with a litany of oxymorons:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In moral paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!

I want them to see that Juliet echoes Friar Lawrence when they learn that Romeo has killed Tybalt. She says about the situation:

Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?
But, wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?
That villain cousin would have kill’d my husband:
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring;
Your tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.
My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain;
And Tybalt’s dead, that would have slain my husband:
All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?

He says:

What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

Echoes.

To do this, I’ve developed what’s called a gallery walk: each passage is printed out and put on a large piece of butcher paper. Kids circulate in groups with Post-It notes, making comments about vocabulary, motifs, inversions, elliptical constructions, and, most importantly, other portions of the play about which given passages remind them.

As they circulate, the passages become covered with comments, and students learn from each others’ observations. With each rotation, it becomes increasingly difficult to say something original. They have to dig a little deeper, think a little more critically.

And sometimes, a bit of humor appears. While one group was reading this passage

O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.

I overheard an outspoken girl — one of my favorite students this year, though I’m not supposed to have those, right? — summarize it succinctly to her group: “Juliet just wants to get laid.”

It’s funny how much meaning a few notes scribbled on the board can have for a group of fourteen-year-olds and yet be completely incomprehensible to others — to other students, to other teachers, to other adults in general.

Below are the notes from today’s class. The scribbles don’t look like much, but to the kids with whom I’ve been working now for several months, they represent the last little bit (though critical bit) of guidance for a major writing assignment. These few words and abbreviations include notes about organization, notes about planning, notes about content, guidance for self-correction, potential problems and their solutions

We’ve developed our own shorthand, or own codes, or own abbreviations, as I do with every class every year. And it all moves the students toward writing that they would have found impressive a few months ago and now is their new-normal, their new standard.

It’s an honor to be a part of that growth, to play a small part in it.