Juliet builds a sonnet with Romeo. Lear disowns Cordelia for saying “Nothing.” Shylock sharpens a knife while Portia speaks. In three Shakespeare plays, love, anger, and the demand for justice all depend on what another person says back.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

At the Capulet feast, a stranger takes a girl’s hand and calls himself a pilgrim. She could laugh at him or pull her hand away. Instead, Juliet accepts the figure Romeo has given her, answers him with saints and palms, and keeps changing the metaphor until they have made a sonnet together (Romeo and Juliet, 1.5). The kiss that follows belongs to an exchange neither could have completed alone.

That scene interests me because passion has barely announced itself yet. The lovers have known each other for only a few lines. What Shakespeare gives them first is attention: Romeo offers something, Juliet alters it, and Romeo must account for what she has done before he can continue. The word passion comes from the Latin pati, to suffer or undergo, and the older meaning carries an implication that modern discussions of emotion can easily lose. Passion happens to a person. It works upon judgment and upon the body, often before the person experiencing it can give a coherent account of what has changed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson caution that “a too persistent focus on the passionate individual” can obscure the social meanings early modern culture attached to emotion, including the communal bonds through which feeling became intelligible in the first place (13).

Shakespeare’s plays make those bonds dramatically visible. Romeo’s love develops because Juliet keeps answering him. Lear’s anger begins when Cordelia gives him an answer he has made himself incapable of receiving. Shylock’s demand for justice grows out of years of insult and exclusion, then hardens until the bond becomes more authoritative to him than anyone speaking against it. The claim I want to make is therefore more specific than saying that emotion happens between people, which is true of almost any play. Shakespeare repeatedly shows passion changing while another person can still affect what happens next. Once that responsiveness closes, the relationship does not disappear; it survives inside the passion as memory, grievance, expectation, or injury, and begins exerting pressure without the corrective of another human voice.

Love Under the Clock: Romeo and Juliet

The Prologue calls Romeo and Juliet “star-crossed,” and fate has consequently become one of the play’s most familiar explanations. Shakespeare certainly gives fate a vocabulary. The lovers speak of stars, dreams, premonitions, and death so often that the language is impossible to dismiss. Yet the machinery that actually brings them to the tomb is stubbornly human and practical: a killing, a sentence of exile, a marriage arranged by parents, a friar’s plan, a quarantine, an undelivered letter. Fate may hang over the play, but catastrophe moves through decisions and failed communication.

Juliet herself recognizes the problem of speed before anyone has paid its price. During the balcony scene, she calls her love “as boundless as the sea” and, within the same encounter, describes what is happening as “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; / Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say ‘It lightens’” (2.2). Friar Laurence gives Romeo essentially the same warning: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume” (2.6). His earlier instruction is almost comically plain by comparison: “Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast” (2.3). The lovers understand that time is working strangely around them. Their problem is that the world outside the relationship gives them little time for understanding to become wisdom.

Tybalt’s death is the great disruption, and any argument about listening has to account for it. Romeo kills Tybalt; the Prince banishes Romeo; Juliet is left inside the Capulet household while her husband is sent away. The feud supplies the violence that makes their situation dangerous. What happens afterward, however, determines what that danger will become. Juliet still has people to appeal to, and Shakespeare spends a long scene showing those appeals fail one after another. She kneels before Capulet and asks him to “Hear me with patience but to speak a word” (3.5). His answer is abuse and an ultimatum. Juliet then turns toward Lady Capulet and asks for time, first a month and then a week. Her mother withdraws altogether: “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. / Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee” (3.5).

The feud has placed Juliet in danger, but this scene removes the ordinary human means by which danger might still be negotiated. She asks to be heard before she begins deceiving her parents. She asks for time before she accepts the friar’s desperate plan. Her isolation occurs inside a room full of people who have decided her answer will no longer affect their decision. The feud creates the danger. Juliet becomes trapped when her parents stop allowing anything she says to change their decision.

The last act makes the cost of that failure almost painfully literal. Friar Laurence sends a letter, but it does not reach Romeo. News of Juliet’s apparent death reaches him first, and Romeo acts upon the only answer the world has given him. “Then I defy you, stars!” he says (5.1). He buys poison and returns to Verona. By the time Juliet wakes, Romeo has already drunk it, and her first words over his body are practical before they are poetic: “O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop / To help me after?” (5.3). A few minutes separate them. Earlier in the play, a few seconds had been enough for one person’s line to alter the next.

Anger and the Refused Answer: King Lear

Lear begins with a map. “Give me the map there,” he says, and the kingdom lies divided on parchment before his daughters have spoken a word of love (King Lear, 1.1). He has already decided what will happen. Goneril and Regan understand that affection is being converted into language and language into land, so they give him the performance the ceremony requires. Cordelia answers, “Nothing, my lord,” and then offers a measured account of her obligation to him, “no more nor less” than the bond between father and daughter should require. Lear hears deprivation because he has prepared himself to hear abundance.

Aristotle describes anger as a desire for retaliation arising from a real or apparent slight (Rhetoric 2.2). Lear fits the definition remarkably well. The interesting word is apparent. Cordelia’s answer wounds him in a situation he designed, by standards he set, before she has any opportunity to speak. Kent sees that immediately. “See better, Lear,” he says (1.1). The line offers correction at precisely the moment correction is still possible, and Lear receives it as a second insult. Pride belongs to the scene, certainly, but pride alone does not explain its structure. Lear’s authority has allowed him to confuse judgment with reality so thoroughly that disagreement itself begins to look like disloyalty.

The heath seems at first to challenge any claim that his anger remains relational. Lear is outside in a storm, shouting at wind and rain while the daughters who provoked his rage are nowhere near him. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” he cries (3.2). If passion requires another person, this should be where the argument breaks down.

Instead, the scene shows what happens after another person is no longer available as a genuine respondent. Lear carries Goneril and Regan into the storm with him. The weather speaks a language that still belongs to the family conflict, except that the wind cannot interrupt him, defend itself, explain its intentions, or tell him he has misunderstood what happened. Earlier, Cordelia and Kent both resisted Lear’s interpretation of events. On the heath, he has found an interlocutor incapable of resistance. His anger has become enormous partly because nothing outside it can now revise the story it is telling.

The change that follows therefore concerns attention as much as repentance. In the hovel Lear stages a mock trial of his daughters and begins asking what kind of cause might make hearts so hard (3.6). The question is still distorted by his grievance, but it is a question, and questions make room for realities outside the person asking them. Later, near Dover, Lear watches justice in action and tells Gloucester to “see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief,” then asks, “which is the justice, which is the thief?” (4.6). The man who began the play by assuming that his words settled the meaning of other people’s behavior has become suspicious of judgment itself.

The reunion with Cordelia is the center of the play for me because Shakespeare gives Lear another answer and allows us to see that he can finally receive one. He wakes in her care and says, “Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man” (4.7). He knows she has cause to resent him. Cordelia answers, “No cause, no cause.” Her first “Nothing” became intolerable because Lear had attached land, authority, and filial love to the form of her reply. “No cause” carries no bargain at all. If I were directing the scene, I would resist asking the actor playing Lear to manufacture remorse before Cordelia speaks. The change should be available in what he does with her answer. Can he hear generosity without turning it into evidence about himself? Can he let four quiet words affect him more deeply than the declarations he demanded in the opening scene?

When Lear later enters carrying Cordelia’s body, the loss is devastating because the capacity to hear her has returned at the moment her voice is about to disappear. His tragedy began with a daughter speaking and a father deciding that her words meant something other than what she intended. It ends with the father listening desperately for any sign that she might speak again.

Justice and the Letter: The Merchant of Venice

Shylock presents the hardest case because his refusal to be moved becomes deliberate. In the trial scene, he sharpens a knife while the Duke appeals to him. Bassanio asks why he whets it so earnestly. “To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there,” Shylock answers (4.1). The actor has an action to perform and an object for that action, and the audience has already heard the same man insist that Jews possess the same bodies, senses, affections, and vulnerabilities as Christians. Any account of Shylock that turns him entirely into a victim or villain has to flatten something Shakespeare has put onstage at the same time.

James Shapiro challenges the assumption that Jewish questions were absent from Shakespeare’s England simply because openly practicing Jews were few, arguing that English culture remained deeply preoccupied with Jews and Jewishness (225). That context helps explain why Shylock can carry so much cultural material without becoming reducible to a single symbolic function. He is a Jewish moneylender subjected to Christian contempt, a father furious over Jessica’s flight, a businessman insisting upon a contract, and eventually a man willing to kill Antonio under cover of law. Those pressures do not resolve neatly into one moral category.

His language shifts with the audience before him. When Salarino asks what good Antonio’s flesh could possibly do, Shylock answers, “To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge” (3.1). The speech that follows grounds his grievance in the body: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” He moves through wounds, sickness, heat, cold, and blood before reaching retaliation. “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” The argument for common humanity has already become entangled with his justification for revenge. “The villainy you teach me I will execute,” he says, “and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

In court, revenge becomes law. Shylock asks, “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” and demands “the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (4.1). The change of vocabulary is intelligent. Salarino hears grievance; the Duke presides over an institution with the authority to enforce a contract. Shylock presents the same passion in language most likely to compel action from the listener.

By then, however, he has also made himself increasingly unavailable to anyone else’s answer. Antonio attempts to speak with him earlier in the play, and Shylock stops him: “I’ll have my bond. I will not hear thee speak” (3.3). The line deserves to be taken seriously because it describes a choice. Shylock has spent much of the play demanding recognition from people who have denied it to him, and now he deliberately refuses the possibility that Antonio might say anything that could change what comes next. Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech enters a scene in which the problem is therefore larger than disagreement about mercy. Shylock has reached the point at which the bond carries the accumulated authority of every injury that preceded it.

This is where the argument about passion has to survive its second hard case. Shylock’s obstinacy looks intensely self-contained. Yet even here, the other people have not disappeared from the passion. Antonio remains its object; Christian cruelty remains part of Shylock’s explanation for his conduct; the law is being asked to ratify a relationship between creditor and debtor that has become inseparable from humiliation and revenge. Shylock has not escaped relation. He has reduced relation to a fixed account in which the past determines what the other person can mean now.

Portia defeats him through that same fixation. The bond gives him flesh but “no jot of blood,” and the document whose authority he has insisted upon is read with enough literal precision to destroy the remedy he expected. What follows makes the Christians’ language of mercy difficult to accept at face value. Shylock’s life is spared, but his property becomes subject to the court’s judgment; Antonio’s intervention requires Shylock’s conversion and a deed securing his estate for Lorenzo and Jessica (4.1). Shylock accepts the terms and says, “I am not well.” The threat to Antonio has ended, while the earlier demand for recognition remains unresolved.

Acting Shakespeare: Passion as Response

This is where the argument becomes most useful to me in rehearsal. Sanford Meisner’s familiar definition of acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” belongs to a discipline in which the actor lets behavior develop from what has actually happened (Meisner and Longwell 15). His chapter “The Pinch and the Ouch” begins from the same principle: something happens before the response has any reason to appear (26). Shakespeare’s language can tempt an actor to begin with the ouch because the emotional destination is already so famous. Romeo loves Juliet. Lear is furious. Shylock wants revenge. Those descriptions may be true, but none of them gives the actor much to do.

Take Cordelia’s “Nothing.” I would not ask the actor playing Lear to become angry on the word. I would ask him to hear it. He has staged a ceremony, watched two daughters satisfy its terms, and turned toward the child he appears to love most with every expectation that she will complete what he has begun. “Nothing” interrupts the event he believes he is directing. If Lear’s actor begins the scene by showing rage, Cordelia loses the power to disturb him, and the audience loses the moment when anger becomes necessary.

Juliet’s scene with her parents requires a different discipline because her actor already knows, intellectually, where the scene is going. She knows Capulet will threaten her and Lady Capulet will abandon the conversation. Juliet does not. Her appeal to her mother has dramatic value only if some part of her still expects it to work. “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word” has to change the scene when Juliet hears it. An actor who plays abandonment before the line lands gives Lady Capulet nothing left to do.

Uta Hagen’s discussions of circumstances, objective, and action offer another useful way into Shylock’s scenes (158, 174, 184). What does he need from Salarino when he asks, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” What does he need from the Duke when he invokes the law? By the trial scene, Shakespeare has also given him the knife. I would want the actor occupied with it while Portia speaks, because the physical task prevents the mercy speech from becoming an abstract debate between attitudes. The actor can hear her while preparing to cut Antonio, and whatever reaches him, or fails to reach him, has somewhere to register in the body.

This approach also changes a director’s vocabulary. “More angry” tells an actor almost nothing about what to do next. A question about what the character has just heard brings attention back to the scene. Lear can discover Cordelia’s refusal. Juliet can discover that her mother has withdrawn. Shylock can keep sharpening the knife while Portia presents another possibility. Emotion then has a source, and Shakespeare’s verse can remain connected to the event that made the character speak.

Conclusion

The passions in these plays do not become dangerous simply because they are large. Romeo and Juliet love with extraordinary intensity while they can still surprise one another. Lear’s anger becomes destructive as his authority teaches him that another person’s answer has value only when it confirms what he has already decided. Shylock’s desire for justice grows out of injuries the play refuses to trivialize, then narrows around a bond whose terms eventually matter more to him than anyone who might still speak against it.

Cordelia offers the clearest image of the alternative. She spends the opening scene telling Lear a truth he cannot hear. Much later, when he expects blame from her, she gives him mercy instead: “No cause, no cause.” For a few lines, nothing in the world is repaired. Lear has lost his kingdom, and the battle that will separate them again has not yet been fought. What changes is smaller and, dramatically, more important. Someone speaks, and Lear allows the answer to change him.

Further Reading

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Book 2.

Hagen, Uta, with Haskel Frankel. Respect for Acting. 2nd ed. Foreword by David Hyde Pierce. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. Vintage Books, 1987.

Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, editors. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press, 1996.