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Shakespeare, Identity, Honor Cultures and Conflict Transformation

She Negotiates

Romeo – the most impulsive and misguided romantic hero in the history of Western literature – has much to teach us about the way conflict unfolds, how we resolve disputes in the absence of a strong central legal authority, what family means, and what dangers lurk when inexperienced peacemakers try to negotiate peace in “honor cultures.”

Because most of the English-speaking world honors the rule of law more than the strongman’s dictate, we often recoil from the type of tribal violence that expresses itself in cultures like the one in which the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet unfolds.

Honor Cultures

As social science popularizer Malcolm Gladwell explains in his book Outliers, people descended from herding cultures such as those that flourished in the Mediterranean where Shakespeare sets his scene depended for their safety upon the creation and maintenance of publicreputations for violence.

As Gladwell explains,

A herdsman is off by himself [and] is under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear through his words anddeeds that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to this reputation – and that’s what a “culture of honor” means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth.

Members of honor cultures meet outsiders with a suspicion so finely tuned that violent retaliation follows slights that rule-of-law cultures can safely ignore. You’re rude to my sister. I call you a boor. You brandish a knife. I grab my gun. You lunge. I shoot. You lie in the street, blood pooling around your head, and I flee for my life.

Disrespect for or Absence of a Robust Rule of Law

Your brothers watch you die. They break into my father’s house and kill my uncle. Now we have a family feud, a gang war or tribal border skirmish that will continue in escalating cycles of violence into generations not yet born.

Which brings us back to Romeo, and his American counterpart Tony in the 1960s musical West Side Story. In both plays, much is made of the warring families’ contempt for the law.

In Romeo and Juliet, the law is the Prince who chronically complains about his subjects’predictable refusal to follow his edicts. In West Side Story, the law is personified by the hapless Officer Krupke, a racist clown who is as disrespected by the Sharks as he is by the Jets.

In fact, the gangs’ contempt for Krupke is the only point on which they agree.

In both plays, a cycle of escalating violence is set into motion by a casual insult. In Romeo and Juliet, a member of the Capulet family makes a rude hand gesture in the direction of a group of Montagues.

Tony and Maria’s star-crossed fate begins with an exchange of insults choreographed by Jerome Robbins, set to music by Leonard Bernstein, and put into words by Stephen Sondheim.

In both cases, the stage is set for violence and for boundary-crossing love.

Transcending Family Honor

At the Capulet ball and at the high school dance, Romeo meets Juliet and Tony meets Maria. Juliet’s family, the Capulets, and Maria’s people, the Puerto Ricans, are at war with their beloveds’ kin. Romeo is a Montague to Juliet’s Capulet and Tony is an American to Maria's Puerto Rican family.

Tony is a Jet and Maria’s relatives are Sharks. But love – crazy, sudden, irrational, passionate teenage love – trumps family and gang loyalty. It leaves both couples to ponder the meaning of their group identity as it grinds against the grain of forbidden passion.

“When love comes so strong,” Maria sings, “there is no right or wrong.”

This is a transcendent love. Freed from the bonds of blood loyalty and the bitter hatred of ancient feuds, all four lovers respond as if newborn. This new loyalty, grounded in emotion rather than history, is so momentous that each experiences a crisis of identity.

Because allegiance to historical ties is wholly incompatible with love for one’s enemy, and because teenage love is stronger than storied animosity, it is the conflict that must vanish and the self that must be transformed.

“What is Montague?” Juliet asks of Romeo’s last name from her legendary balcony. Her answer to the question is nothing short of revolutionary.

“‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet dares to think. And Romeo, she concludes, is a “self ” with an identity separate from his family ties.

Unity from Disunity

Romeo need not be her enemy and can be her love. In her famous soliloquy, Juliet separates each physical part of Romeo from the name that would prohibit their union. Romeo’s name – his family- “is not hand nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.”

Not knowing Romeo lurks in the garden below, Juliet beseeches him to “doff thy name and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all myself."

Let’s pause for a moment here to fully take in the meaning of this moment in the history of human relations. In fewer than two dozen lines, Juliet has moved from asking what family means to deciding it means nothing to offering her hand in marriage to her family’s most hated enemy.

What is in a name? In an honor culture, it is everything. Safety, loyalty, honor, purpose, self.

Romeo, equally liberated and equally daft, is hiding in the bushes as Juliet declares her new allegiance to him. He, too, is willing to throw off his old sense of identity andbe someone new.

“Call me but love,” he exclaims, “and I’ll be new baptized. Henceforth I never will be Romeo”

The year is 1591. America has not yet been discovered. Yet here is Shakespeare suggesting what a bunch of scruffy hippies in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park would be singingabout nearly four hundred years later.

“All you need is love.” It is in this moment – echoed by Tony and Maria’s metaphoric marriage in the dress shop – that the new generation transcends their parents’ and their parents’ parents’ conflicts, opening possibilities for themselves as individual actors expressing their autonomy in a way that never before existed.

This is what mediators and peacemakers are talking about when they speak of conflict transcendence and transformation. As mediator, lawyer, educator and author, Dr. Kenneth Cloke, observes in his book, The Crossroads of Conflict,

Every conflict presents the parties... with a... choice. They can cling to safe territory, keep the conversation focused on relatively superficial issues and avoid mentioning deeper topics, remaining locked in impasse and placing their lives on hold.

Or they can take a risk, adopt a more open, honest, empathic approach and initiate a deeper, more dangerous, heartfelt conversation that could change their lives and result in transformation and transcendence.

Which path they take will depend partly on their willingness to engage each other in heartfelt communications.

By virtue of Romeo's, Juliet's, Tony's and Maria's “heartfelt communications,” all four lovers are forever altered.

The way they experience their previously narrow world, and the certainty they feel in their new place in it can never be the same. As Cloke explains:

Transcendence occurs when people gain insight into the attitudes, intentions and perceptions that sustained their conflict, improve their ability to learn from it, work collaboratively to prevent its reoccurrence and evolve to higher levels ofconflict and resolution.

Tragically, the world does not transform itself nor transcend its ancient grievances just because a couple of teenagers fall in love. The teens are in danger. What that danger is and why the tale of Romeo and Juliet and that of Tony and Maria becomes tragedy rather than transformation will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

Click here for Part II of this post.

This post is from R is for Romeo in the ABCs of Conflict Resolution, available in paperback or kindle editions.

