ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
Aeschylus made explicit in the Oresteia, the polis authority over the household (Arnhart, 1990; 1994). It is against this backdrop that we examine Romeo and Juliet.
The Consequences of Blood Feud in Romeo and Juliet
The Chorus immediately highlights the negative consequences of blood feud. Clark
(2011) notes:
Romeo and Juliet opens with a perspective that prompts its audience to recognize
the actions of the first scene as insubordinate defiance and, surprisingly, as civility…The pain through which Romeo, Juliet and others in Verona suffer will be a
thing of the past, or the thing that allows the past to become a different present. In
this sense the Prologue is also a story about the demise of civic violence in Verona.
(pp. 284-285).
A “new mutiny” occurs in Verona, the result of an “ancient grudge” between two descent groups: the Montagues and the Capulets (1.0.3). The Chorus states that “civil
blood makes civil hands unclean,” important in that, in nation-states, citizens are encouraged to treat each other as like kin, rather than to make distinctions between kin
and non-kin. This ancestral blood feud will result in the death of each patriarch’s only
offspring; hence, the descendant-leaving success of the original ancestor of each, the
House of Montague and the House of Capulet, a measure of fitness, is diminished, and
the lineages have possibly become extinct, or “heirless,” at the play’s conclusion (Utterback, 1973, p. 107). The “loins” of descent name bearers are “fatal,” indicating that
ancestral Montague and Capulet, through encouraging their descendants to perpetuate
the feud (its tradition), created the conditions that led to the demise of their own descendants. The suicides of Romeo and Juliet, along with the death of Tybalt, does indeed diminish, and perhaps extinguish these lines, and affects Verona in such a way
that even its prince, Escalus, representative of the state, loses “a brace of kinsmen”
(5.3.294). As he states at the play’s conclusion: “All are punish’d” (5.3.294). The perpetuators of the feud, in exhibiting the old traditions of proper kinship behavior (e.g.,
faithfully copying ancestral instructions) have a destructive effect on all Verona. Traditional behaviors and proper citizenry, in this play, are presented in neardichotomous opposition: Romeo and Juliet, by behaving nontraditionally (not copying
ancestral behavior), are at the same time practicing proper citizenry (not participating
in the feud; taking actions to end it). Tybalt, by contrast, by behaving traditionally,
practices improper citizenry, disrupting the streets of Verona and killing one of his
fellow citizens, Mercutio, kinsman to the Prince (representative of the state). Had the
characters in the play treated the Prince (their king) as their patriarch, obeying his rather than ancestral instructions, it would have prevented those deaths depicted in the
play.3 The message Shakespeare appears to communicate to his audience is to abandon old kinship traditions (of favoring kin and hating one’s ancestral enemies) in favor of new state prescriptions of obeying one’s king and practicing proper citizenry
(treating fellow citizens kindly) (Steadman & Palmer, 1997).4
In the houses of Montague and Capulet, Romeo and Juliet presents the older, kinshipbased model of society, in which all members are encouraged to behave as kin toward
members of their own house and as blood enemies toward members of the other. Such
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