‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ (Romeo and Juliet) So begins the Prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The Prologue tells us the setting of the play: we are to be transported to the beautiful (‘fair’) Italian city of Verona, where the ensuing action takes place. There, a long-standing feud between two well-respected households or families, a grudge which goes way back, will violently break out again. The line ‘Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean’ takes a bit more unpicking: ‘civil’ here refers to ordinary citizens (as opposed to soldiers: hence the word ‘civilians’ or ‘civvy’ used for non-combatants in a war situation). The word also carries a related but slightly different sense: ‘civil’ as used in such phrases as ‘civil war’ or ‘civil strife’, i.e., conflict between persons of the same nation (or, as in this case, the same city). But ‘civil’ also means ‘courteous’ or ‘polite’, which clearly cannot be possible in the face of such ‘mutiny’ or violence between the ‘two households’. So ‘civil hands’ cleverly conveys both meanings, and the line means both ‘where violence between families makes ordinary citizens’ hands dirty with blood’ and ‘where violence between families makes otherwise friendly and non-violent hands violent’.
However, there’s yet another sense to the line, too, which relates to the double meaning of ‘blood’: both violence (as in the phrase ‘bad blood’ between two people) and kinship or family. So, ‘civil blood’ can also mean ‘the blood, or family loyalty, tying citizens together’. In other words, it is ‘blood’, or family, that is the problem: the Montagues and the Capulets cannot really pick a side based on political allegiance, but are bound to continue their feud (indeed, their blood feud) by virtue of which family they belong to. As Juliet will later famously ask Romeo, ‘wherefore art thou Romeo?’ If only he had been born of different blood, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Two doomed children from these feuding families fall in love with each other and take their own lives. They are ‘star-cross’d’ because it is destined by the stars that their love for each other will be thwarted. There are many astrological references in Romeo and Juliet to the idea that the stars govern human fate: Romeo will later defy the stars, and elsewhere he will observe that ‘my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars’.
However, the Prologue goes on to reveal (giving a fair few spoilers as to the details of the play that hasn’t been staged yet) that the two lovers’ ‘misadventured piteous overthrows’ will, through their two deaths, succeed finally in convincing their parents to put the feud behind them and live in peace with each other. The word ‘overthrows’, as a noun, means a successful coup, such as overthrowing a corrupt military leader or politician; ‘misadventured’ relates to the idea of an unfortunate accident (Romeo and Juliet cannot help falling in love with each other, if it’s written in the stars!); and ‘piteous’ obviously means ‘deserving of pity’. The doomed love between Romeo and Juliet and how it came about, and the way their parents persisted in their anger towards each other (which nothing except the deaths of their own children could put to an end), will now constitute the business of the play that follows for the next couple of hours. (As a point of interest, love and remove may have been more than eye-rhymes in the time of Shakespeare.)
But we mentioned something notable about the form Shakespeare uses for the ‘Two households’ speech. What is it? You may have noticed that we divided the Prologue’s fourteen lines up, in the analysis above, into four sections: three four-line sections (or quatrains) and a concluding two-line section (or couplet). In other words, Shakespeare writes the ‘Two households …’ prologue in the form of a sonnet: specifically, an Shakespearean sonnet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. Sonnets have long been associated with the courtly love tradition: male admirers gazing longingly upon a beautiful but unattainable woman and waxing lyrical about her beauty. Romeo is such a figure, desperate to fall in love (first with Rosaline, and then, truly, with Juliet); when he and Juliet first meet and converse at the ball, their exchange takes the form of another sonnet, while there is also a second ‘Chorus’ in sonnet form between the first and second acts of the play.
