"Not Fourteen": A Random Shakespeare Appreciation Post

Okay. Well. Here's the thing. The more delicate among you may need to avert your eyes for a moment. Are you ready? Here we go: 

I am not really a Shakespeare fan. Cue the hisses of blasphemy. 

Perhaps this is a product of having to read Shakespeare all throughout high school and into college, without much choice in the matter. We were practically given a mallet and told explicitly to beat the plays to death with it – Hamlet, I'm looking at you. Perhaps I just don't really like to read plays. I've been to Ashland. Macbeth was amazing. Have I ever read it? No. Was I supposed to? Probably. Will I ever? We'll see. (Probably not. Ironically, it's difficult to read Shakespeare by yourself instead of with a class, but with a class, it's almost always unbearable. That might be a catch-22, but I didn't finish reading that book, either, so I wouldn't know.)

Even though I don't like Shakespeare all that much, however, I can appreciate him. Some of the things he does are quite clever, especially within the lines themselves. 

This is going to be a lot less effective, because I can't find the original blog post/article/comment/whatever-it-was, which stated things so clearly and wonderfully, but oh well. Basically, I ran across this interpretation of a single phrase in Romeo and Juliet, and it blew my mind. I've posted about it in at least one place before, but no one shared my enthusiasm, which... WHAT? How is this not amazing?

In Act I, Scene III of the play, the Nurse and Lady Capulet are discussing Juliet. 

Nurse: She is not fourteen. How long is it now / To Lammas-tide?

Lady Capulet: A fortnight and odd days.

Nurse: Even or odd, of all days in the year, / Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.

Juliet is "not fourteen." But do you know what is fourteen? Sonnets. Sonnets, Shakespeare's go-to, perfect form, are fourteen lines. Juliet is thirteen, and will die before she can become that perfect sonnet. She will die before she can become fully formed: a woman. 

It's been eight years since I read the play, so this source tells me the play's action takes place over only four days. Juliet can't even reach for the number fourteen by being fourteen days away from that age, because her mother says Juliet is "A fortnight and odd days." A fortnight being, of course, fourteen days (or nights, technically). It's like, by the addition of that "and odd days," Juliet is being explicitly denied her ~sonnet of womanhood yet again. 

To me, this is a bit more textual evidence that my reading of the play isn't completely unfounded. I personally don't believe that Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate love story; I think it's a cautionary tale. I think it's not only a warning to feuding families, but to stupid kids. 

Even if you do think Romeo and Juliet is romantic (which is totally fine, especially since we are basically socialized from birth to think so), you've got to admit, the sonnet connection is pretty neat. Or perhaps I'm just overly excitable.