Juliet’s Soliloquy: Is It ‘When He Shall Die’ or ‘When I Shall Die’?
So I have a conundrum.
The very first edition of Romeo and Juliet I bought was from a Scholastic book fair, which had this version of the Act 3, Scene 2 soliloquy:
Juliet. 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. (21-25).
So imagine my surprise when most other editions of R&J—if not all—I have bought or borrowed or consulted through the years had “when I shall die” rather than “when he shall die.” Including all the original quartos and folios save the bad quarto, which has only four lines of the speech.
At first I assumed that the Scholastic text was drawing from one of the earlier or even bad quartos—I’ve looked up all the other good quartos and folio editions of the time and they’ve all been consistent: The true Shakespearean is “when I shall die.” My copy was a cheap dollar-something from a school fair. No mystery, then. This Scholastic edition, however, edited by John E. Hankins, does follow the text of the Quarto 2 (1599)—the good quarto, in other words, and the basis for all the other editions including the Folio. That quarto definitely has “when I shall die.”
Also. The Scholastic edition is a reprint of the Pelican Shakespeare edition, which may have had its editor choose “when he shall die” instead of “when I shall die.” (If anyone knows/has the Pelican Shakespeare edition of R&J and can check, that’d be great).
If so, then at least (1) editor agrees what I’ve been mulling over and have long suspected: The original Shakespeare makes little sense in this context.
I mean, think about it. In the original Shakespearean, Juliet says that she wants the night to take Romeo, cut him up into little stars, and the beauty/ brightness of his essence will make the night even better than day…but when she, Juliet, dies/orgasms. (?)
There are two meanings working in tandem here: The literal sense of dying and the figurative (orgasm). Why would Juliet want Romeo to be cut into little stars and make the night even more beautiful than the day…when she is dead? There seems to be little connection between the two ideas.
Conversely, if orgasm is what is chiefly meant here, why would Romeo be the one to be the new-and-improved night sky? Would Juliet herself be more appropriate—the force of her orgasm making her the new night sky so bright no one would care about day anymore? That would make sense: That’s how hard she is going to get laid, yo!!! So why does she bring up Romeo at all if the focus of her soliloquy is on her sexual pleasure?
Well, it could be that 1) Juliet is linking her own mortality/pleasure with Romeo’s, assuming that if she dies/comes, Romeo is going to die/come even harder. So hard that he’d be the new night, yo. If so, then Shakespeare is not only buttressing the mutual, “two sides of the same coin” characterization for R&J he has carefully built in their love language, but making it explicit in a supremely meta way through Juliet. Even Juliet confuses herself and Romeo (canon!!!). This passage is also a callback to Romeo’s “would through the airy region stream so bright / That birds would sing and think it were not night,” so this is apropos.
Or 2) This is really a Hamlet “Thus diest thou” sort of thing and Shakespeare actually meant he and his sloppy secretary handwriting was consistently misread. Not likely, but so. He in this context would make the tragic ending foreshadowing much clearer, as well as flow more logically to the main idea: Romeo’s death/orgasm being the trigger to his becoming the new night in the afterlife. At least, that’s what I think is the rationale for an editor just arbitrarily deciding for he instead of Ifor no good (textual) reason.
For my part, I actually think I would prefer he. I think this choice would, paradoxically enough, emphasize Juliet’s focus on her sexual pleasure more as both subject and as object: After all, she would be the implicit cause of Romeo’s death/orgasm. (Plus the tragic death foreshadowing is much more evident here). “When I shall die,” though, may convey a denser, more complex poetic idea, even if it is initially more riddling, which would be typical of Shakespeare. It also canonizes my two-sides-of-the-same-coin theory regarding Shakespeare’s authorial intention, so…yay?
