She has, she feels, been through enough-and is beginning to believe that fate is “practic” on her, striking her with terrible news and insurmountable problems for sport. Juliet has, at this late point in the play, had to deal with the death of her cousin, the cruelty of her family, and the destruction of her previously held ideals about the nature of good and evil, friend and enemy. “Alack, alack, that heaven should practice stratagems / Upon so soft a subject as myself,” Juliet laments after learning that her parents have arranged for her to marry Paris, not knowing that she is already married to Romeo. By having Romeo and Juliet verbally acknowledge-privately and to one another-their fears about their doomed fates, Shakespeare showcases how badly his characters want to believe that their desires and actions stand a chance in the face of fate’s wily hand. Yet every attempt to outsmart, outwit, or dodge fate ends terribly. Throughout the play, characters acknowledge-and make “misadventured” attempts to thwart-the invisible forces guiding their lives. From the chorus that introduces the first two acts of the play, commenting upon the events that are about to take place, to the characters’ own preoccupation with the unseen forces that control them, Shakespeare imbues the world of the play with the heavy atmosphere of a “black fate” sitting like a storm cloud just above the entirety of the action. In the world of Romeo and Juliet, fate and predetermined destinies are an accepted part of life and society.
Repeated references to fate and fortune throughout the play underscore Shakespeare’s suggestion that humans are merely pawns in a larger cosmic scheme-invisible but inescapable fates, Shakespeare argues throughout the play, steer the course of human lives, and any and all actions that attempt to subvert those fates are futile and doomed to fail. Though much of Romeo and Juliet is driven by the choices its main characters make and the actions they take, there is a dark undercurrent running throughout the play: the suggestion that fate, not free will, is behind the entirety of the human experience.
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