Nicholas Crawford’s “We’ll Always Have Paris: The Third Household and the ‘Bed of Death’ in Romeo and Juliet” Response

 

In his article, “We’ll Always Have Paris,” Nicholas Crawford describes the disruption of Romeo and Juliet’s deathbed in the Capulet tomb due to the inclusion of Paris next to Romeo and Juliet in death and vermiculation intermingling the trio’s physical bodies. Crawford claims, “This third household… represents a structural disruption to the play’s easy binaries…” (324). The triangulation of Romeo, Juliet, and Paris represents “three households unalike in dignity until they are made alike through the indignity of an eroticized and vermiculated death” (324). In other words, worms are the vehicle that literally and metaphorically flatten the characters, that make all the characters equal because “death ultimately negates… [distinctions of] family, class and romance” (332). Romeo and Paris are from feuding families, different classes, and pine after the same woman; but death draws no distinctions and there is even a homosocial pairing of Romeo and Paris once they are both wedded in death to Juliet.

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Crawford not only examines the grotesque triangulation of William Shakespeare’s characters textually though, but is also concerned with this triangulation on the stage. Films and plays alike have erased Paris from Romeo and Juliet’s death scene (325-27), and in doing so these films and plays have subtracted meaning from the scene because it hinges on physicality. Crawford claims that a Freudian reading of the play is one concerned with the anxiety of incest (332). This reading is largely founded on the sexual symbol of flowers and phallocentric use of swords within the play (327-31). However, the presence of worms largely adds to this reading as well. Worms penetrate all three of the tightly knit lovers’ bodies freely (333). Crawford also theorizes along a similar line as Janelle Swartz's Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism when he writes that “the worm emblematizes the process of decomposition…. Worms’ work consists of consumption and excretion” (334; emphasis mine). Unlike Swartz's study of worms' work though, Crawford mixes the natural philosophers’ concern of the material quality of worms with Freudian phallocentrism. This distinction is largely due to the fact that Romeo and Juliet has been perversely altered by history to be a romantic love story when in actuality the play is a tragedy driven by the abject.

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In a final note, I find it important to state that Crawford did not dream up the presence of worms in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Crawford is diligent to mention the multiple comments about worms within Romeo and Juliet. One particular to the death scene is made by Romeo when Juliet dies. In this scene Romeo states that Juliet dies “With worms that are thy chambermaids” (Shakespeare 5.3.109). Shakespeare first inserted worms into the narration and Crawford is simply illuminating the importance of worms in the play missed by scholars, readers, and theater production companies.

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Pairing Crawford and Swartz, my own study is concerned with the sexual, material nature of worms within the Romantic period. I interrogate questions of continuity between Early Modern literary devices and Romantic ones. Are worms vehicles of Freudian phallocentrism and the abject in Romantic works as they are for Shakespeare? Or, is the only use of worms in Romantic literature that is carried over from Early Modern literature the material, vile quality of worms? Crawford’s essay and the abundance of worm references I have been chancing upon in Romantic novels and poetry were the original inspiration for this current study. Swartz’s work reinforced my curiosity of the purposeful and thoughtful use of worms by Romantic writers. So a pairing of Crawford and Swartz is natural and vital to my study because together these works emphasize the material importance of worms in literature but also allow me to question if worms are connected to women’s bodies specifically in Romantic works or if these creatures draw no distinction of gender in death.