The Alba Genre in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare dramatizes many of the themes present in Giraut de Bornelh’s “Reis Glorios.” The watchman’s insistencies that the lover must rise in Bornelh’s poem are transformed into a dialogue between Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare. In Bornelh’s poem, the signs of the approaching day, the sunlight, the birds’ singing and the threat of a “jealous one,” are described by the watchman in stanzas I to VI and they are discarded in stanza VII by the lover (“I care nothing for my foolish rival or the dawn!”). In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo uses the same themes to evoke the approaching day:  It was the lark, the herald of the morn,No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaksDo lace the severing clouds in yonder east.Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund dayStands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.I must be gone and live, or stay and die.  As the watchman, Romeo notes the songs of the lark, the rays of sunlight and the danger he incurs if he stays with Juliet any longer.  Yet while in “Reis Glorios” the lover simply rejects the watchman’s reasoning (“I never wish to see dawn or day again”), Juliet proposes a different interpretation for what Romeo recognizes to be the signs of daytime: The bird they hear singing is “the nightingale, and not the lark” and the light they see “is not daylight […] It is some meteor that the sun exhal'd.” By proposing a different reading of the conventional motifs of the alba genre, Shakespeare plays with the conventions and stereotypes associated to the parting of lovers at dawn. Juliet’s intentionally “half-serious” performance in the excerpt of the play (cf. video clip) well illustrates her ludic appropriation of the conventional motifs.