The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 25.138 Monday, 17 March 2014
From: Marianne Kimura <
Date: March 15, 2014 at 12:47:32 AM EDT
Subject: Balcony Scene
> . . . “the balcony
>scene” is the most famous scene in English-language drama....
>Why is the balcony so impressed upon the collective
>consciousness, when no character in the play, and nothing in
>the stage directions, refers to it as such?
>
>These are questions that doubtless require speculation, and
>thus I welcome it from this learned and (ahem) not-unloquacious
>group.
Dear Editor, SHAKSPER,
My work directly addresses the question of “why the balcony scene” in R& J is “so impressed upon the collective consciousness.” Two years ago I published an academic paper called “’Juliet is the sun’: the secret anti-coal play and the cosmic heliocentrism of Giordano Bruno”. The basic idea is that the five scenes where the lovers play together stand in relative isolation and produce a series which can be ‘read’: Romeo (man) meets and worships the sun (this is our ‘pagan’ past) encoded in the party scene; next, in the balcony scene, we see man separated from Juliet (yes, at some window or a higher level on the stage) since man has left the sun/nature religions; next, the lovers are married by the friar (the only character allowed into the magic circle since he is Shakespeare encoding himself), and this is some sort of device to show Shakespeare’s passionate goal in a microcosm; next, the lovers separate as man leaves the sun economy to live in exile from the sun economy while he uses fossil fuels; finally, the tomb scene encodes the era when mankind returns to the sun, which doesn’t function well as an economic generative entity anymore (hence Juliet is ‘comatose’ and Romeo thinks she is dead). All of this plays out over centuries or maybe longer, so although it seems dire in the play, it may just seem very slow and natural for us at any given point during our human-lifespan lifetimes. And I want to add that Shakespeare encoded variations on this theme in his other plays, including positive takes on it in his comedies.
The paper is at my Academia site and it is also here:
So the reason the balcony scene is so important and so spell-binding for us collectively is that it is us. When we see it, we see that fascinating moment when we made the leap away from being closely bound to nature. Much of our progress has been tied to that leap. But equally, we are naturally interested in the sustainability of our progress and in its future. What I have seen in Shakespeare’s works is a lot of serious and thoughtful efforts to address this issue, and I have published some of my ideas about this in my research. This is not to say that I want to recommend Shakespeare as an authority on sustainability or energy policy. I have no position on that at all.
Just for fun, I wrote a novel called “Juliet is the Sun” (under the pen name Gemma Nishiyama); this novel takes a fun and popular approach to revealing a secret hiding out in the open for centuries. Yes, that Juliet is really the sun. In the end, what impresses me the most about his efforts was his amazing audacity.
Marianne Kimura