On a moment in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

"Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face."  What does Juliet say in saying this to Romeo?  "Mask" may be a gently metadramatic word choice, as opposed to "dark," or "cover," or even "veil."  The actor playing Juliet acknowledges being in a play, and that "Thou" knows that this is a theatrical event.  Is "Thou" Romeo, or only Romeo?  Maybe it would only be if the plays events were actually happening, or at least if they were happening without an audience other then the one the two actors are for each other, say in a rehearsal space.  "Thou," watching the play, are aware that it is a play, that Juliet represents a performance, that there is no tragic risk in these actors speaking to each other.  But that knowing can get obscured, can get masked, in the plays emotional knowing, so the metadramatic "mask" offers a reminder, a relief.

And "the mask of night" is different from "the mask of dark," "the mask of shadows," and other words he could have used.  Night represents a natural event, a recurring, routine one--regularly recurring, predictably expected.  Juliet may be expressing that the greater and brighter fact of her love of Romeo has been covered up, even defaced by the overwhelming trappings of her civic and familial realities.  Hers--families, realities--are at war with his by virtue of birth, by the nature of the city's strict hierarchies, and by the vicious clannishness of their families.  The night of being young in Verona's humdrum or normal forms of war, its aristocratic drama that has been deadly not only for people but for the bonds between them, is marring her.

In this moment of awareness of multiple realities--that the actor is in a play, that the daughter is in a family drama, and that Juliet is in love with Romeo--the sounds of the line mimic or perhaps incarnate it.  Instead of an alliterative move as in Romeo's "I am fortunes fool," which might embody a bond, Shakespeare has a variety of sounds and the only repeating consonant start of a word, "n" in "know'st" and "night," complicated by the silent "k."  It gently disrupts, but only gently and with metric grounding--as if to say "know this is a play, and play anyway."

Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest in relation to Aristotle's Unities

Samuel Johnson claiming Shakespeare didn't use Aristotle's unities of time and place leaves out, I believe, two important exceptions that have another significant distinction.  They are Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, both of the plays that prominently feature magic--not just prophecy or descriptions of magical or supernatural events, but magic of physical transformation.  In Midsummer Night's Dream it's Bottom the Weaver getting an ass's head, in The Tempest it's a storm.  

The Aristotelian meeting the magical in these plays seems easy to me to overlook, though, partly because, among classical philosophers who wrote about poetry, Aristotle may be among the more conducive to the material, the mundane, the non-ethereal.  Plato may have been anti-poetry but he still saw it as ex nihilo.  Horace may have dismissed the outlandish in poetry but he wrote his own that could be said to undercut his position.  Aristotle so systematized, structured and segmented that his discourse might seem closed off against unexpected storms, let alone a misplaced donkey head.  

One possibility that comes to mind is that, here and elsewhere, Shakespeare drew creative energy from being at odds with his influencers--not necessarily in Oedipal grappling like Harold Bloom talked about (though maybe--I say that and am not grappling with him, with Bloom, I hope), but relating to them at a slant, like Emily Dickinson talked about.  So, the narrative poem about Romeus and Juliet became the play, the story of Amlothi became the play of Hamlet, and that of King Lear became what it became.

Also, this possibility:  that place (like the woods outside of Thebes, like the island away from Milan) held a kind of magic for the man who could not get away from his life as the Shakespeare we know, back to his roots in Stratford.  Not until that life ended, perhsp with the help of Aristotle as well as Shakespeare.