I don’t talk about Romeo and Juliet as much as I could, or should.

In fact, this is the first Shakespeare Sunday entry in 2026 which refers to the play. Regular visitors – you’re welcome to demand your favourite appears more frequently if you feel it’s being overlooked!

This week’s community theme – Sun & Moon – gives me an opportunity to begin righting that wrong.

Overheard in an embarrassing confession of her ardour, Juliet scrambles for an equivalent assurance. Romeo is about to swear by the moon.

Why does he pick it? And why does she interrupt him?

O, swear not by the moon¹

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The romantic conventions of the moon persist well into the twenty-first century, so it’s relatively simple to understand what (the feckless – there, I said it!) Romeo is aiming at. 

The moon has been an object of desire for much longer than the Space Race; its cultural roots are firmly embedded in ideas around the feminine, fertility, mystery and perhaps the privacy of darkness. Even Plutarch gives us versions of the moon yearning after the sun. Although elsewhere they’re figured as siblings. God – those Ancient Greeks!

But this tugs at something which has been bugging me: the moon is perhaps the most paradoxical of heavenly bodies.

It’s inconstant.

Juliet tells us so:

the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb

And yet its changeability is remarkably dependable.

This is especially interesting in the broadly agricultural society Shakespeare lived in. The moon was mistrusted for its changeability, at the same time that swathes of society relied upon its cycles to guide planting, harvesting and the rhythms of life.

The moon changes. The cycle doesn’t.

That, I think, is why Juliet objects. She isn’t necessarily rejecting change. She’s rejecting inconstancy.

And there’s another thought here which I’m going to park for another day: the immutable, sun is golden, while Romeo describes the moon as “silver”, subordinate to that masculine light and capable of being tarnished. There are some fairly obvious implications in that patriarchal worldview. Another post, perhaps.

For now, Juliet is worried, and rightly so. With the stakes potentially much higher for high-status girls than boys, she wants constancy, not someone who’ll blow hot and cold.

Which brings me to change.

Change is one of those words we use as though it were automatically synonymous with improvement.

Advertisements constantly ask us to change: this brand for that, our current model for a newer one. Leaders are trained in change “management”, while employees are urged to embrace change. 

But then politicians are castigated for U-turns if they change their minds.

We want change.

We fear change.

We distrust change.

And perhaps that’s because change isn’t necessarily progress. Nor is it necessarily growth.

Nor transformation.  Those words aren’t interchangeable, however much our language sometimes pretends they are.

A thing can change without growing.

It can transform without improving.

It can move without progressing.

So how does this stack up in Shakespeare?

In the comedies, change is an essential part of the carnivalesque, but that transformation is almost by definition temporary. Twelfth Night gives us mistaken identities, altered social positions and disrupted hierarchies, but the play eventually puts most things back where they belong.

I’m not sure the situation is much different in the tragedies, actually.

Take Macbeth. Macbeth is certainly an ‘agent of change’. He kills Duncan, takes the throne and transforms Scotland through violence. But order is restored at the play’s end. The ‘bloody tyrant’ dies, and Malcolm (perhaps an ‘agent of stasis‘?) becomes king.

Back to normal, then?

Oh, hang on.

Is it?

Two of my favourite Shakespeare adaptations do something really interesting with that apparently reassuring ending of the Scottish Play.

In Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth – my teaching copy – Malcolm’s restoration isn’t quite the end of the story.² Instead, Donalbain, Duncan’s younger son, slips away to seek out the witches. Polanski’s added ending replaces Shakespeare’s sense of restoration with the unnerving suggestion that the cycle of ambition and violence might simply begin again. 

Justin Kurzel’s superb study of madness does something different but equally unsettling: Fleance reappears at the end.³ Banquo’s son has survived, and with the witches’ prophecy still hanging over the story, Macbeth’s defeat doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the struggle for power.

The faces change.

The cycle continues.

I’m beginning to get the sense that change can be simultaneously inevitable and temporary.

Widening the net, of course I’m thinking of Orwell before almost anyone else, and I’m struck by the ending of Animal Farm.⁴ The revolution Major dreamed of is just that: a full 360-degree turn, with the pigs stepping into the shoes vacated by Farmer Jones.

If they’re allowed to wear shoes, of course.

And, skipping genre and art form, as you know I love to do, I’ve been thinking about The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again as a subtitle for today’s post:

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.⁵

It’s almost a political definition of the difference between change and transformation.

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And, yes, as you might suspect by now, everything I read reminds me of a song or two, and vice versa! Check out the ‘soundtrack album’ I compiled for R&J during my Shakespeare read-through back in 2019.

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Back to change.

Change the personnel and you may change the names.

Change the structure and you might change the system.

But change the system without changing the people within it (not just their names) and perhaps we’re simply waiting for the same human impulses to reassert themselves.

If Gil Scott-Heron‘s revolution was televised, after all, would we notice anything unusual apart from the names of the actors?

Perhaps the timescales change.

Perhaps the costumes change.

Perhaps the people in charge change.

But if we don’t learn, adapt and grow, what have we actually transformed?

And where does this – perhaps rather bleak – line of reasoning leave poor Juliet?

First love makes it very easy to believe that what we are experiencing is unique. There is no previous version of herself to compare it with, no history of romantic mistakes from which to learn. I hope that from what I said earlier that you sensed that I have sympathy for her, and I’m absolutely with those who believe that this is her tragedy.

But I don’t think her tragedy is simply that she is naive. If anything, her character is the one who understands the problem, differentiating between change and constancy. She wants Romeo to change – to grow up, perhaps – and she expects that change to be permanent.

With our sense of dramatic irony whispering Rosaline in our ears, we might fear the worst. To do him justice – even through through gritted teeth – Romeo does change.

But Juliet changes too.

And this, perhaps, is where the distinction becomes most interesting.

Romeo changes reactively.

I think Juliet grows.

She moves from obedient daughter to someone capable of making decisions for herself, resisting her parents, challenging the Friar and ultimately choosing her own fate.

Her transformation is real.

And it comes at an extraordinary cost.

The families’ hatred is old. So old, famously, that nobody remembers why it exists.

Two young people change. But when the two families don’t, only a catastrophe can break the cycle. Maybe that’s the problem with change.

Sometimes it happens because we want it to.

Sometimes it happens because circumstances force it upon us.

And sometimes the only way to achieve genuine transformation is to suffer enough that returning to the old order is no longer possible.

The moon changes every month. It has been doing so for longer than any of us can imagine. But it’s still the moon. Its changes are regular, predictable enough to be relied upon. Can real transformative change only happen when accompanied by real pain?

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Sources and Further Reading

Title Song: Bob Dylan, ‘Things Have Changed,’ performed by Bettye LaVette, Things Have Changed (Verve, 2018) you can see this her perform it, live, here.

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012) or read online at www.opensourceshakespeare.org ↩︎
2. Roman Polanski, Macbeth (Columbia Pictures, 1971) ↩︎
3. Justin Kurzel, Macbeth (The Weinstein Company, 2015) ↩︎
4. George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (London: Secker & Warburg, 1945) ↩︎
5. The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Who’s Next (Track Records, 1971) ↩︎