Pas de deux: Romeo and Juliet

1. A leaden soulin empty verse 

When we first meet Romeo, he is a man who refuses to dance. Where others have “nimble soles,” he has a “soul of lead.” The reason is simple: Romeo is in love with Rosaline, and for him, being in love means being a disciple of the sonnet master Petrarch. He speaks in frozen paradoxes about an idealised woman who does not respond. He suffers. Love is a condition he carries alone. It makes him infinitely interesting to himself, and infinitely self-absorbed to everyone else. He believes the beloved is unique, but she is a construct: an idea of Woman, not a woman. 

Romeo is out of step with everything and everyone. That is precisely why Mercutio insists that he needs to dance: “You are a lover; borrow Cupid’s wings, / And soar with them above a common bound.” The key word is “bound”: on Cupid’s wings, the lover can transcend the limits of ordinary people. Romeo protests. “I am too sore enpierced with his shaft / To soar with his light feathers, and so bound, / I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe.” Romeo is so bound by longing that he cannot leap beyond his dull pain. “Bound” connects dance, motion, and transcendence with restriction and limitation. 

2. The first pas de deux 

Even so, Romeo goes to the feast in the hope of seeing Rosaline. There he sees Juliet dancing, and at once understands who she is—his teacher: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright” is the first thing he says about her. He is the torch that must learn how to burn. 

It begins with him touching her hand. As the Petrarchan disciple he is, Romeo immediately begins to compose a sonnet to his chosen one—the formal language he has for love. But Juliet does something Rosaline never could: she improvises—and answers him. Romeo delivers the first quatrain alone. Juliet responds with the second. Then they begin to alternate lines, faster and faster, until the final couplet is shared between them—one line each. It is a closed form, but Juliet opens it. 

Romeo:   
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss

Julie:
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this,
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss 

Romeo:
Have not saints lips and holy palmers too? 

Julie:
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo:
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do –
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Julie:
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. 

Romeo:
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. 

The sonnet is sealed with a kiss. Rhyme becomes touch. Words become action. The improvised poem turns into a new form of dance. It is the first pas de deux, centuries before it is formalised in ballet: two bodies in mutual dependence. One supports and counterbalances the other. Every step exists only because the partner is there. It cannot be danced alone; it requires a shared rhythm. If one falls, the other falls. In Shakespeare, this becomes a new language of love. Love is no longer one who suffers, but two who act—together, and as equals. 

3. Unmetered love, lovers in time 

Before the dance, Romeo is bound, weighed down, and stati—“bound”—and at the same time detached from the community. When Romeo meets Juliet in the garden after the feast, in the so-called “balcony scene” (Act 2, Scene 2—there is no “balcony” in Romeo and Juliet), it is therefore no coincidence that her key line is this: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” Her love is unbound and without limit. It overflows, like the sea, and defies all economic logic: giving it away gives her more of what she already has. For her, love is not lack, but pure abundance. 

What prevents this love from becoming formless is precisely the shared rhythm—so long as he is able to follow her. She does not teach him a dance. She teaches him how to dance: to fall into time with another’s boundless freedom. 

The two are, to begin with, deeply unfree: their families hate one another, and she is to be married off to someone else. Yet as long as she is able to hold the rhythm and regulate the tempo, Romeo and Juliet remain in contact—and dance. It is she who plans the secret marriage. And yet she fears that everything is happening too quickly: “It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, / Too like the lightning which doth cease to be / Ere one can say ‘it lightens’.” The greatest enemy in Romeo and Juliet is not the patriarchs or society, but time itself, beating a faster tempo than their own. It is speed, not love, that kills them. 

4. Pas de die: speechless rhythm 

The dance exists only in secret: at the feast, behind masks, in the garden at night, behind closed doors. It is intense, but also fragile because it is hidden. When Romeo returns from the garden, he has become someone else. He is out of step with his friends, who still believe him infatuated with Rosaline, and treat him accordingly. After the marriage—known only to Juliet’s Nurse and Friar Lawrence—he is out of step with all of Verona. He is expected to hate the family he has just married into, and cannot explain why he refuses to do so. The rhythm becomes speechless, and the chasm between private and public truth becomes impossible to bridge. It consumes Mercutio and Tybalt. Romeo is responsible for both deaths: he lacks a language capable of holding reality together. 

When Romeo is banished from Verona, time itself unravels for the lovers. They fall out of step with one another, grope and stumble on their own, unable to synchronise what they know. She, already married, is forced toward a second marriage. The messenger does not arrive in time. Pas de deux becomes pas de die. 

5. A dance without end 

The tomb scene — where Romeo arrives too early and Juliet wakes too late, seconds after he has died, only to take her own life — is so devastating precisely because it stages how the two are no longer coordinated, no longer in time. They speak past one another in monologue, attempting to restore dialogue, but the space has been emptied of real presence. Romeo misreads Juliet’s signs of life as signs of death — and tries to follow her into the dance of death as well. It is the distorted mirror of the ballroom scene: communication that fails to reach its destination. 

And yet, after Romeo and Juliet, a mutual, partner-specific, and equal love still exists in the world — as a possibility for the rest of us. It can be imagined, lived — and danced: a rhythm without end, a passion in time. That is why a ballet of Romeo and Juliet is not a translation of the play. It restores the work to its own form, and reopens the dialogue between the lovers. Romeo and Juliet invented the dance. They will always dance.