What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?

The Tragedy of Queer Girlhood in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

All was golden in the sky / All was golden when the Day met the Night.

“When the Day Met the Night”, Panic! At the Disco

I’m stuck thinking about my copy of Romeo and Juliet. Second–third–fourth hand with thick annotations written in markers and a cover so frayed you could see the paper’s individual fibres. I remember the pages feeling oily, drenched in yellow highlighter, and that glossy paper that all textbooks were made of always felt wet. I don’t remember much else; I didn’t pay much attention in English class, likely because I was busy drawing Panic! At the Disco fan art in the margins of my copybook. That’s the teenage girl experience.

Despite my grievances, I filled my Tumblr blog with the image of Claire Danes as Juliet in the Luhrmann adaptation standing on her balcony. In the play, Juliet is cursing her and Romeo’s birth, thinking how cruel how quickly her happiness can be taken from her. She wishes their names were different, that they met in another life. But in this image, Juliet is content. There’s an excitement playing in her smile, one she isn’t sure to set free.

Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet.

Recently, I picked up Panic! At the Disco’s Pretty. Odd. on vinyl. When I was thirteen, I bought the CD and obsessed over that floral steampunk cover while the vaudeville-esque tunes washed over me. I listened to it on the ride to and from school, and for hours on the boxy CD player in my room. Those songs, they led the way for me into a world of fanart and fanfiction, where people reimagined their favourite characters as lovers, where queer subtext became the text, where tragedy could become a romantic comedy, and of course, vice versa. 

When I sit on my bed and listen to the album now, I am filled with nostalgia. “When the Day Met the Night” comes on, and I remember every word, as well as every time I’d ever read those lyrics in a fanfic. I think about my younger self, doodling during Shakespeare, and then I think of Juliet. 

I see her now, sweat staining her decadent robes, grease shining through her hair, scratched spots turning her skin red. She’d rather be sitting in her room with her parchment and pastels, sketching Venus and Adonis and embellishing the page with rose petals. Instead, she’s here, being pushed forward by the Nurse and muttering, ‘I don’t want to go—stop fixing my mask—my stomach hurts.’ She grimaces at the crowd and recoils into the nurse’s shadow. She meets Paris’ hungry gaze and wants to vomit. 

Despite being Juliet Capulet, no one wants anything to do with the pubescent girl. She finds it easy to hide in plain sight and she relishes in that small power. That is, until she spies a boy. The boy likely stinks of sweat, just like her. His hair is frizzy in the Veronese heat, just like hers. All she can make out under his mask is his mouth, spotty and scarred, just like hers. 

Juliet is lonely. Juliet wants friends. Juliet wants to live and taste life outside the Capulet walls. something rushes through her, something coy or courageous. 

‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand…’ says Romeo.

Juliet, for the first time, smirks. ‘Good pilgrim,’ she greets him. ‘You do wrong your hand too much.’

Romeo speaks of kissing her, and she banters pleasantly, until he does. She won’t tell him that it’s magical, not yet. Instead she reaches up on her tiptoes and ruffles his hair. 

‘You kiss by the book,’ she says, laughing, pretending that she knows more than she does. She’s had enough fantasies fuelled by Petrarchan sonnets to guess how others kiss. Despite herself, she squeezes Romeo’s hand. Whatever way Petrarch was kissing, it’s nothing compared to this. 

Then Juliet is called away, snatched back into her regular life. Led by the Nurse, she retreats into the shadows, hoping to see Romeo again. All was golden when the day met the night.

I spent my time as a young girl waiting for my Juliet moment. For the meet cutes where my schoolbag would spill open and a boy, preferably one from the year above, would stop and help me gather my things, smiling when he finally sees my face. Or to meet a boy at a céilí and he’d be from far away and we’d strike up a banter and just once I wouldn’t stutter or pick at my chin. Each time I saw a boy my head would start spinning, conjuring some fantasy where it made perfect sense for us to fall in love. My childhood best friend, the boy from across the road, my sparring partner from taekwondo. 

Meanwhile, I was busy trying to woo the vampire Serena in Skyrim. I’d play the Sims and make women and blushed when I made them kiss, telling my friend, ‘I just wanted to see what would happen.’ I assured myself that if I never found a husband, I’d still be happy. Me and my boys were star crossed, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. 

I tried until I realised that a love like that, a love like Juliet’s, would never come my way. I began to hate the Juliet girls that I believed to have boys melting at their fingertips. I hated Juliet and I hated that I couldn’t be her. But what did Juliet have? She had a boy who thought she was attractive in a world that thought that was all she was good for. 

When I revisited the play in University, I realised how readily Shakespeare’s characters, including lover boy Romeo, turn the AFAB (assigned female at birth) body into an image of disgust. I reread the play, and understood to what extent Juliet was abused by the surrounding characters. When she was theirs, she was the most precious jewel in all the world, and when she wasn’t, she was a tarnished ‘wretch’. Always an object, never a girl. 

Themes of burgeoning AFAB sexuality lay throughout the play. Like in our world, it is feared by Verona. On the way to the Capulet ball, Mercutio draws on the possibility of night, pitching it as this mysterious realm of desire. In his Queen Mab monologue Mercutio says, ‘This is the hag [Queen Mab], when maids lie on their backs, / That presses them and learns them first to bear.’ In this darkness, danger lurks. His speech grows sinister, and Mercutio, campy fan-favourite Mercutio, expresses a deep fear of feminine desire, and this fear spreads throughout the text; it plagues Verona. 

Harold Perrineau as Mercutio in Romeo + Juliet.

Later, as Romeo descends into the tomb where Juliet lays, he compares the opening to a body, saying ‘detestable maw, thou womb of death,’ in turn describing the AFAB body as a monstrous and devouring entity. He continues, saying that the tomb is ‘Gorg’d with the dearest morsel of the earth.’ It is a beast that has eaten his beloved. This grotesque, cannibalistic imagery invokes an idea of the AFAB body betraying itself. Juliet has been killed by this womb, as though her “death” is a consequence of her sex—it’s her body that’s to blame for this tragedy. Juliet’s demise could have been avoided if only, in everything including name, she were born a different way. 

We see Juliet on her balcony. She stands beneath the sinking moon, in the one patch of world where she is free. She doesn’t wrap her arms around her pudgy frame. Instead, she spreads them like wings. For this little moment, she lets herself be elated. Dawn will break soon, and with the rising sun, something new arises in Juliet. Something hot, something makes her cheeks flush. She squeezes her fists and squeals.

Romeo senses it too, as he watches her from her garden. ‘Arise fair sun,’ he calls. ‘Kill the envious moon.’ And if we position these lines against Panic! At the Disco’s lyrics, Romeo calls for the masculine sun to kill the feminine moon.

Tom Holland as Romeo and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.

Juliet isn’t free like Romeo to explore the streets of Verona. Romeo has friends, and before he stumbles into Juliet at the party, he has another love. On Archive of Our Own, a popular fanfiction site, the most popular Romeo and Juliet “fic” is “By Any Other Name” by user Grapefruitsnacks. This is what is known as a “fix-it fic” where an author takes an existing work and alters the original plot, usually so that the characters can have a happy ending. This fic was inspired by the art of Crystallizedtwilight, which is itself a response to a post by Tumblr user Nanyoky. In this post, they express their desire to write an alternative ending to Shakespeare’s play in which Romeo calls on his friends Benvolio and Mercutio for help, staging a wedding between Juliet and Mercutio, to free Juliet from her marriage to Paris and allow her to be with Romeo while Mercutio gets to be with his love, Benvolio, a popular Shakespeare fan-pairing. View this post here.

In “By Any Other Name” Juliet explains why she can’t say no to Paris, and Romeo reflects that ‘He’s never thought of that [...] Women were just there to him, and why they never said no to him seemed insignificant. (sic)’ It’s a clever adaptation of the original scene, where Romeo, staring up at Juliet, tries to swear his love to her. Juliet, sick of being assigned to men, says ‘I have no joy of this contract tonight,’ to which Romeo responds, ‘O wilt thou leave me unsatisfied?’ 

I see Juliet pause and bite her limp. She rests her hand on the balcony. The stone is cold under her skin. As a young woman, a girl, she can’t indulge in the spark of sudden lust that Romeo experiences. Her heart beats. Romeo gazes up, expectant, pushing. She can’t say no, it isn’t her right.

‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ she asks instead. 

Romeo can dive head first into his feelings, like ‘lightning’, but Juliet has to stop and think of the consequences. In “When the Day Met the Night”, the Sun (male) first meets the moon in her garden. All the moon asks of the sun is to promise ‘Not to break my little heart / or leave me all alone in the summer.’ Juliet looks down at Romeo and says, ‘If that thy bent of love be honourable / Thy purpose of marriage, send me word tomorrow.’ It is only then, when Juliet builds up a safety net for herself that she can join Romeo in his innocent doting. Still, she is forced to keep her love a secret. The Nurse is her only confidant.

Juliet’s life is one spent in shadows, moonlight her only guide. Her position on the balcony creates the perfect image of a child, standing on the cusp of the world–of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. In this scene, Juliet tells Romeo, ‘Swear not by the moon, th’inconstant Moon / that monthly changes in her circled orb.’ And while there is no scientific connection between the menstrual cycle and moon phases, there is a symbolic comparison to be drawn between their waxing and waning.

There are a lot of reasons as to why I detached myself from those Shakespeare classes in secondary school. In truth, I remember very little from secondary school, except all the things I loved: Skyrim, Superwholock and Panic! At the Disco. I detached myself from every scene, because there I was sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair beside boys that jumped at every opportunity to be misogynistic and girls that didn’t want to be like me. I wore a woolly jumper and itchy skirt that made people think I was faking being trans—there weren’t many people that knew that, and the friends I thought I could tell didn’t seem to care. Not in an accepting way, just in an, ‘Oh, there’s Claire saying something weird again,’ way. Even in this suffocating environment, my body was betraying me. I should’ve been a woman, all the signs were there. I didn’t want to be, but what power did I have to change that? 

Like a play, gender is a performance, as famously expressed by theorist Judith Butler. But just as we act out the expectations of our gender identities, I believe gender can be acted upon us. As Juliet is thrust into the world of womanhood, so am I. Do either of us want to be here? When Juliet denies the expectations of her gender, she is cast out by her father in a barrage of abuse. For trying to step outside of this box of preconceived womanhood, her father threatens her, shouting ‘hang, beg, starve, die in the streets.’

I’m not arguing that Juliet is trans, that’s a different essay. What I am saying is that I know what it’s like to be in a world that tells me I have to be a certain way, and for my body to agree with it. I could’ve been Juliet Capulet, stuck on her balcony and wishing that things could’ve been different, if only I was born another way.

& Juliet is a jukebox musical adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. The premise is that Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, rewrites the end of his play. Juliet, at her lowest moment, stands up. She leaves the tomb that she was supposed to die in and walks away from her tragedy. She goes on to enjoy the life of a contemporary teenage girl. She has friends, she goes to parties, she dances. The musical transforms the play into a comedy, even following tropes of Shakespeare’s comic plays.

One of Juliet’s friends is a person named May. They are non-binary, and their experience of gender is an integral part of their character. They sing to Juliet, “I’m not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”. The musical’s use of the song transforms its meaning in a way that centres May’s androgyny, as they express how difficult dating is for them as a trans-non-binary person. Though May’s and Juliet’s experience differs, their struggles align, and if Juliet can relate to May, then perhaps she can relate to me, too.

Juliet and May in & Juliet.

Through fanfiction, through adaptation, through simply reading something with a new lens, people give themselves the power to alter narratives, to give tragic characters happy endings or to bring a new queerness to texts whose authors have long passed. In discussing workshops she led in which she demonstrated to secondary school students how Romeo and Juliet can be read as a queer narrative, English teacher Paula Ressler states: 

Reading queerly to explore nonnormative sex and gender identities, reading against a text that was written to deny equality to some, and reading for social justice and the creation of a better world have the potential to include all students in meaningful dialogue and to create engaged and successful learners and caring school communities.

I know that I am not alone when I say that my experience of puberty was mentally painful, especially as a trans person. I write that, but I wonder if there’s anyone who did find puberty affirming. It’s scary feeling your body change into something you could never have prepared for. Childhood is suddenly swapped for expectations of sex and relationships, and failing to live up to these societal desires risks being looked down upon or cast out. 

In that way, I am Juliet. As I grow and learn to love Juliet, I learn to love myself too. Lately, the internet has been going through a nostalgia renaissance. Fans of the Twilight series have jumped back into the mainstream. Those who experienced their teenage years being bullied for their interests, cast out for their “cringey” passions, have rebuilt a community of fandom that serves as a safe space to those who were once nerdy teenage girls, sitting alone in the back of English class. 

Bella Swan in Twilight: New Moon reading Romeo & Juliet.

I see Juliet in a field, in a valley, in Verona. She sits with her back against a tree and a piece of parchment in her lap. Pastels are nestled beside her in the grass, and her fingertips are stained all sorts of colours. The parchment is filled with drawings from her favourite plays, characters playing out new scenes she created in her head. She lifts her hand to cover her eyes from the setting sun, and hums a melody. Some little ballad she heard once, about the day meeting the night.

Works Referenced

Grapefruitsnacks. “By Any Other Name.” Archive of Our Own. 2018 - 2020. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15252330/chapters/35377200

Panic! At the Disco. “When the Day Met the Night.” Pretty. Odd. Decaydance, Fueled by Ramen, 2008. 

Ressler, Paula. “Challenging Normative Sexual and Gender Identity Beliefs through Romeo and Juliet.” English Journal. Vol. 95, No.1, National Council of Teachers of English, 2005. 

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Project Gutenberg Books: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1513/1513-h/1513-h.htm