The artistry of Romeo and Juliet I.v.30-41 is, I fear, under-appreciated. It's an utterly revolutionary moment in the history of the drama, but it's so subtle, so art-that-hides-art, that it easily slips under the radar. Let me quote in full.
Capulet. Nay sit, nay sit, good cousin Capulet,
For you and I are past our dancing days.
How long is't now since last yourself and I
Were in a masque?
Cousin Capulet. By'r Lady, thirty years.
Capulet. What, man, 'tis not so much, 'tis not so much.
'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio
Come Pentecost as quickly as it will,
Some five and twenty years: and then we masqu'd.
Cousin Capulet. "Tis more, 'tis more, his son is elder, sir:
His son is thirty.
Capulet. Will you tell me that?
His son was but a ward two years ago.
Romeo. What lady's that which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
Romeo and Juliet is a play of rhetorical experimentation. In its course, Shakespeare employs extravagant puns and wordplay, rhyme, prose, embedded sonnets, stichomythia, two passages of contrived, Petrarchan oxymora, outrageous bawdy, lament both real and parodic -- everything, in fact, that was in the garner of a 1590s playwright.
The overlooked conversation between old Capulet and his cousin is an innovative piece of rhetoric of Shakespeare's own invention. It's simply everyday, colloquial conversation -- in his time, a complete and utter novelty.
It's two old guys talking the way old guys talk when they're savoring the past. Repetitions: "'tis not so much, 'tis not so much" and "'tis more, 'tis more"; mock challenge: "will you tell me that"?; references to details known only to the participants: "Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio..."; homely exaggerations: "His son was but a ward two years ago." Even though Shakespeare casts the passage in blank verse, he manages to capture the authentic sound of real people engaged in real conversation.
But why? It's all a trick or device to set off the sentence of Romeo's that follows.
Unlike the Capulet cousins, Romeo is wholly captured by the language of splendid and hyperbolic love-longing. Shakespeare therefore encourages his audience to contrast the everyday quality of "His son was but a ward two years ago" with Romeo's "What lady's that which doth enrich the hand/ Of yonder knight." Needless to say, there are no knights at this merchant-class gathering. "Knights" are a creation of Romeo's imagination. So is the slightly archaic phrase "yonder knight," which is directly out of the world of romance and clashes magnificently with the context that Shakespeare has so carefully contrived. So too the inversion "what lady's that" instead of "who is that lady" and the highly poetical (and supremely beautiful) "enrich the hand."
Romeo's sentence is at the same time very serious and highly comic -- a triumph of Shakespeare's original and almost invisible craft.
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