Sampling the Product

After I finished my other two term papers on light and dark imagery in "Romeo and Juliet." I gave all three to Robert N. Watson, assistant professor of English. The following is the finished product, with both excerpts from the papers and Watson's comments.

Paper No. 1 (Richard's)

In "Romeo and Juliet" Shakespeare has written a play that is crowded with images. So crowded in fact that the play's movements happen swiftly. The Prologue warns us that the lovers are star-cross'd, misadventur'd, and death mark'd.

Yet, so warned, the images dictate that catastrophe is everything and must be sudden and surprising.

In the end, with image of poison and the grave, lightness goes out, suddenly stilled, for both the living and the dead.

The thought of "Light and Dark Imagery" manages to be both terribly simple and terribly scattered. The paragraphing, which appears to have been done by a food professor rather than a word professor, is a symptom of the utter absence of any organizing ideas beyond the examples themselves: Presentation here sadly mirrors preconception, both of them so careless as to be virtually absent. This might slip by with a D-, if the "author" has had bad lighting and good luck working for him or her.

Paper No. 2

This use of dark and light in association with loves permits Shakespeare to promote the romance of Romeo and Juliet to cosmic proportions. The lovers, as the Prologue informs us, are star-crossed. Juliet being referred to by her paramour as a "sun." The figures of Romeo and Juliet are like "Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light."

Paper #2 stars off handsomely enough, but it becomes merely a list of examples of light-images in "R & J," doggedly culled but only casually sorted, and explained in the most brief and generalized way. The overall idea, of darkness setting off the lovers' light, is good enough, but the execution is awfully perfunctory. I'd give it a C.

Paper No. 3

Although it is vital to understand the basic attitude that Elizabethan audiences brought to any astronomical references, and particularly to "Romeo and Juliet" where the idea of divine providence pervades the play, the imagery of celestial bodies in "Romeo and Juliet" goes far beyond the basic concepts of "destiny."

Carolyn Spurgeon calls the overall effect produced by the grouping together of several images and references, a "running image," In "Romeo and Juliet" it is the continual stream of images related to light in contrast with darkness that sets the mood or atmosphere.

The ending of the long paper, more exhaustion than explanation, reveals the fact that the author invested in critical research more than he/she could spare from critical thinking. Especially in the first pages, the groundwork is laid (with obvious effort and some skill) for a major edifice that the paper never completes or inhabits. Gradually the paper begins to slip away from coherence as it tries to keep hold of lots of plays and critics, and so while it provides a suggestive survey of references to astronomy in Shakespeare, it never has time to pull them together into any sharp, integral analysis. This would probably get a B for effort, with maybe a minus for the chaos.