Romeo and Juliet is famous for its dramatic death scenes—the doomed lovers' tableau in the tomb, the deaths by sword of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris. But the play has a relatively low body count for a Shakespeare tragedy—only one other character dies: Romeo's mother, who dies of grief at Romeo's banishment, offstage.
Popular and scholarly consensus is that Romeo's mother is not an important character. Few remember her death at all when recalling the play, and she does not even appear on the cast list of Bloom's critical study.
Why, then, does Shakespeare kill her off?
Her death seems to serve no dramatic purpose. It happens offstage, and no character knows about it except Romeo's father, who announces it in the last scene. But I am not satisfied that the death is unimportant: it is one of only six, after all, and Shakespeare takes the time to let us know it has occurred.
Who is Lady Montague? It is true that she is not a well-developed character, unlike her counterpart the fearsome, cold-blooded Lady Capulet. She appears on stage twice, both times with her husband, and speaks a total of three lines. In her first line she warns her husband not to brawl with Capulet, and in the next she asks where Romeo is and expresses relief that he was not at the fight. These lines give us our only look into her character, and they reveal a deep concern for her husband and son. Perhaps they foreshadow her later demise.
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| O where is Romeo? Saw you him to-day? / Right glad I am he was not at this fray |
But that is all they do. The next time we see her she is again present in the aftermath of a brawl—one in which Romeo has killed the Capulet Tybalt and fled into exile. In this scene she does not speak, we are not granted access to her private thoughts. Here, an actress portraying her may have free reign to play up the grieving mother in pantomime, because it is in this scene that the Prince announces Romeo's sentence of exile, the tragedy which supposedly breaks Lady Montague's heart and causes her later death. An actress may portray a silent woman in the throes of grief, but she gets no instruction from Shakespeare.
And so this woman, so briefly sketched, almost background scenery, ends up as dead as the charismatic Mercutio, the timeless lovers themselves, the vengeful Tybalt. In such company, I cannot dismiss her as unimportant. She serves a purpose.
A chilling purpose, from the perspective of characters as pawns in the hands of their author.
Romeo and Juliet is of course about a blood feud between two families—Capulet and Montague—which also involves a third family, the governing family of the Prince. At the conclusion of the play, the feud is resolved amid tears, each family having lost something precious.
The Prince has lost his cousins Paris and Mercutio.
The Capulets have lost Juliet and Tybalt.
The Montagues have lost Romeo—and his mother.
Three families, two losses each. Very clean, very just, very symmetrical. Each death an equal grief to each family. And yet Romeo's mother's death seems to carry less dramatic weight. It is important to the characters that she is dead. It is important to the symmetry of the play, to the sense of justice.
And to the laws of blood feud.
Shakespeare seems to have killed her off for the same reason that Lady Capulet wants Romeo dead—blood for blood, Romeo's in exchange for Tybalt's. At the end of the play, with two Capulets dead, the Montagues are still in blood debt. Enter Montague with the news of his wife's demise. And then Friar Laurence's explanatory speech, the resolution of the feud, the pronouncements of the Prince.
In other words, although the main story of the doomed lovers ends with their deaths, the play itself cannot end, the conflict cannot be resolved, without the death of Romeo's mother.
Merely a plot device? Plot device, yes, merely, no. There is some nobility in a character who serves her author's purpose, goes to her death in the service of the narrative. And a character who serves such an important role in that narrative should never be an afterthought.
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