Love In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet

Love in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet

Romeo and Juliet are probably the most famous couple of lovers in the world. Unfortunately, the lack of harmony and understanding existent in the society, the lack of moral criteria, make a love story like that, based of sincere and pure feelings, have a sad end. The tragic comes from the impossibility of the two lovers to actually live their love in plenitude. In this play, the destiny or an unhappy complex of circumstances seems to ruin the lovers plan and what remains is only the idea of love that passes beyond death.

Romeo’s love for Rosaline

There is a scene, at the beginning of the play, a discussion between Romeo and Benvolio, his friend, at the first apparition of the hero. Romeo is melancholic, because he is hopeless in love:

Romeo: Well, in that hit you miss. She’ll not be hit

With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit

And, in strong proof of chastity well armed

From love’s weak childish bow, she lives uncharmed.

…Oh, she is rich in beauty, only poor

That when she dies, with beauty dies her store.

Benvolio: Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

Romeo: She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste,

For beauty, starved with her severity,

Cuts beauty off from all posterity.

She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair,

To merit bliss by making me despair.

She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow

Do I live dead that live to tell it now.

…Farewell. Thou canst not teach me to forget. (I, 2)

Romeo’s dream love, who passes near love caste and impassive like Diana, is named Rosaline.

It is remarkable the fact that Rosaline, which in comedies is the embodiment of Venus, becomes in Romeo and Juliet a symbol of Dayana, the virgin-goddess which, in order to keep her purity, doesn’t allow herself to get hit by the arrow of love. The tradition is not transmitted by descendants anymore, but through wit. Because, if in comedies Rosaline could love and be loved, in our play she no longer responds to love. And she doesn’t because she knows that Romeo isn’t capable of her love. This results from the first dialogue Romeo has with Friar Lawrence:

Friar Lawrence: Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear,

So soon forsaken? Young men’s love then lies

Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.

Romeo: Thou chid’st me oft for loving Rosaline.

Friar Lawrence: For doting, not for loving, pupil mine.

Romeo: And badest me bury love.

Friar Lawrence: Not in a grave,

To lay one in, another out to have.

… Oh, she knew well

Thy love did read by rote that could not spell. (II,3)

This is where the tragedy of Romeo starts. He couldn’t have the trust of Rosaline, not because he didn’t love her, but because he loved her with an inconstant and passionate love, a love that matches the one that Juliet has, but not Rosaline. The tragedy of Romeo comes from Rosaline’s oblivion, although he had just told Benvolio that he couldn’t forget her. Very significant, from this point of view, is the fact that while Juliet is celebrated by Romeo like a saint, in the famous lyrics of the pilgrim, Rosaline is seen by Mercutio above all the great legendary heroines of the past.

Mercutio: Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was but a kitchen-wench— marry, she had a better love to berhyme her—Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose. (II,4)

Romeo replaces Rosaline with Juliet and once with this substitution, the old beauty, the original one dies. And once with her, her treasure is lost. Because Rosaline is the symbol of tradition, of the spiritual deposit, is the power of tradition which, once lost, so are the hopes of possible reintegration in earth’s paradise. Maybe that is why Romeo is so melancholic at the beginning of the play, because he anticipated this loss. And he can’t prevent it, more than that he hastens it by marrying Juliet. The tragic motif, the uncontentious, makes place right in the middle of the apparent happiness. And Juliet, who is just born for love, is born for a painful love, not for a pure one like Rosaline has, but for a human one, therefore tragic.

In fact, Romeo’s love for the concept of love is intense and passionate; he is desperately searching for the love that he red so much about it and he does everything to feel it. Even his melancholic state of mind suggests the need and desperation for love. He falls in love with Rosaline, a platonic love, that he takes it to extremes because he can’t find another being as perfect as his conception about her. He chooses an impossible love because he seeks intensity and also because loving Rosaline gives him the opportunity to dream, to experience his love and feelings through the pages of his books.

3.1.2. Romeo and Juliet’s love

Romeo’s love has something “secret”, it has a kind of “madness” and his soul is like the “lead”. At the same time, love is for him an amount of contrasts. It could be everything, surpassing this opposites, so the duality.

The love meeting between Juliet and Romeo it changes every perspective of love and life that Romeo has until then. Everything turns upside down. Touched by the lightning, the eyes and then every sense turn on fire:

Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this;

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer

Romeo: O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:

They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair

Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.

Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take

This from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged. (95-105)

In their first kiss, Romeo and Juliet escape from the world’s ordinary time and place into a private world of intimacy, where the imagination is the main leader. As this moment happens Romeo realizes that everything he had red about love and feelings was painted in front of his eyes. This analogy with the pilgrimage gives a Christian aspect to the meeting of the two lovers, underlined by the fact that Romeo (which name means, in fact, “pilgrim to Rome”) addresses to Juliet as a saint, not as a Goddess.

But, the threat is showing her face, being born once with the love:

Juliet: My only love spring from my only hate,

Too early seen unknown, and known too late

Prodigious birth of love it is to me

That I must love a loathed enemy. (140)

This emotional first meeting is separated from the second by an exuberantly comic and bawdy interlude involving Benvolio and Mercutio; meanwhile Romeo has leaped the orchard wall, into another world of unknown joy.

The moment when Juliet appears at the window is the dawn in a rival world from which the moon is banished:

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!

Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon

The exchange of love statements between the two lead us to a different world, the intensity of their words stands as a proof of their deep feelings for each other, feelings that seems no one have had or heard from the beginning of time. They create a new world of ideal love which has no local habituation and names, time and mutability do not exist; a world that is free.

No one could ever say these intense love words, that sound almost like a sinful covenant, although maybe it is because he addresses to a saint, an angel, an idol. This scene equates to an engagement, to a marriage promise. It is remarkable though that the meeting is much more “pathetic” , missing the symbolic elements: the ring, the portrait, and the previous attempts. And above all this hovers a barely mastered impatience and a barely felt restlessness. Maybe because the lovers feel, as Romeo says, that “all this is but a dream”.

There is a struggle between the self that takes Romeo at his word and says “Ay”, and the self that automatically adopts wordy caution,” form” and “compliment”, because as soon as Juliet realizes that Romeo is actually there, the world’s weight of physical and social laws press in around her: “Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?”

In the world she shares with Romeo, messages travel by thought, at ten times the speed of light. In her imagination, she seizes the slow, round sun, the rotund plodding into one ball and makes it fly at the place of a hotly contended point in a tennis match.

Finally, the marriage takes place in a big hurry and in great secrecy, under the protective wing of Friar Lawrence who settles the human act.

What’s next is like a rolling death. There were signs, feelings that everything is not in good order, that the harmony is only apparent, that the lovers were sitting on a volcano. In form of sonnet, the prologue is told by the chorus and it seems to play the same role of a lucid presence like in the ancient tragedies: he comments the facts but also he foretells them.

Chorus: Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,

And the continuance of their parents' rage,

Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,

Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;

Without knowing the heroes are “star cross’d lovers”, and their love is “death mark’d love”, the unhappiness and death are then submitted in the stars. If at that we add the hate that scold the two families “from an ancient grudge break to new mutiny”, then the temporal component of the destiny, the existence of the heroes appears to us sealed by a great misfortune. But, of course, the two lovers don’t know that for now. They don’t know it but they sense it.

In comedies the destiny is present, both as his cosmic form (the will of Gods) as well as the human one (the ambience opposition or even their own mistake), but the heroes manage to overcome the trials that they are submitted and they reach the bright end of their aspirations. Is it weaker this aspiration to love in Romeo & Juliet? Not at all. Then? Where is the fault? As from the stars we can’t tell much, we have to look this guilt in the social ambience and in the characters inner self, like the third component of destiny. The ambience is definitely hostile. And it’s not just because of their parents. These are two families with all their kin even the friends and servants. All Verona’s breath seems trained in this terminator fight of the Montague and Capulets. It is rather a fight of two big clans rather than one of two families. The whole world seems divided in two camps that fight for life and death. The hate between them is general, all the characters of the play are involved, but also is very old (“ancient grudge”). The reasons remain unknown. The ignorance of causes makes the mysterious hate to be the consequence of the first duality, located in Verona and reactivated by the innocent love of the two teenagers. Love and hate are two tragic strengths, two exacerbations of the human passion. This tragic couple, love and hate, make their entrance in the Shakespearean theater once with Romeo and Juliet.

However, we can’t tell that the heroes don’t realize the obstacle that stays in front of their happiness. Romeo is vaguely aware of this fact right before he knew Juliet, when carries his sadness through the streets of Verona saying: “I have a soul of lead”, and especially when he sneaks in the Capulet’s house, the night of the party:

Benvolio: Supper is done, and we shall come too late. (105)

Romeo: I fear too early, for my mind misgives

Some consequence yet hanging in the stars

Shall bitterly begin his fearful date

With this night’s revels, and expire the term

Of a despisèd life closed in my breast

By some vile forfeit of untimely death.

But he that hath the steerage of my course,

Direct my sail. On, lusty gentlemen .(110)

It could be said that is more than a feeling. And once again the stars are brought in discussion. That seems to be the mainly source of evil, implicitly of the hate between the two families.

Like I said, what is about to happen after the marriage is like a rolling death. The destiny makes its presence felt, brutally, by a sword’s kick right after the play’s most harmonious moment. We are talking about the double duel Mercutio-Tybalt and Tybalt-Romeo which throw the first two to death. The cleavage that is produced now between comedy and tragedy is essential. Death is not a transforming and purifying try anymore, it is a brutal rupture of life, with all the consequences that this rupture brings. What follows in the play after this two deaths is a string of misfortunes well known.

In Romeo and Juliet, love emerges as involved with warfare: the love of the two is set in contrast to brawling and feud, but its poignancy comes from the bitterness of the unexplained vendetta. In their lives the lovers speak for peace and reconciliation and at their death are turned into symbols of the reconciliation. Love and war make their presence felt in this play but they do not and cannot coexist in this play’s world: the one destroys the other. The conjunction of love and death, commonly linked in the metaphors of lyrical traditions, make this play unmistakably non-comic; death is the link between the love-theme and the war-theme, the irreversible piece of action that stamps the play as tragic. The lovers are presented as memorial statues exemplifying a specific lesson to future generations.

After all, maybe neither Romeo, nor Juliet is that guilty for what has happened to them. Guilty is the destiny, guilty is the cyclic moment that forces the withdrawal of the real spirituality, leaving the soul lonely and in pain. This first love, childish, with whom the new cycle begins, is still fragile and therefore more tragic. The ones that will come next will be increasingly impure, and that is why maybe, for us, less scary. Romeo and Juliet relate the memory of a myth. The heroes that will come next no longer have the same juvenile candor.

They all lose their lives, because they didn’t know how to eternalize it.

Love in Shakespeare’s Othello

The peace in the storm

There is a moment, but just one, in the tragedy Othello, in which everything seems to stop, as if, in a harmonious balance: the moment of the arrival of the three ships, bringing Othello, Desdemona and Cassio, after finishing the fight with the Turks. The place of this moment is an island: the Cyprus, a sacred place, protected by the Goddess Venus. This moment and place bound together after a terrible storm which, more than the bravery of the soldiers, had ended the war, dispelling the Turkish fleet. A storm is a rebellion of elements against the sky, but it is also a gift from above which brings with it quiet beginnings, a calm genesis. Also a storm and an island will end the whole Shakespearian play, and along with it, a world. In our play, what ends is a war and what seems to start is the happiness of a couple, Othello and Desdemona.

A storm unites the sky and the earth in a try of which course, to better or to worse, depends on destiny, but also on man.

Montano: Methinks the wind hath spoke aloud at land;

A fuller blast ne'er shook our battlements;

…For do but stand upon the foaming shore,

The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds; 775

The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane,

seems to cast water on the burning bear,

And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole. (II,1)

It could be said that is about a cyclic moment of human decay, since it is affected the pole itself, moment in which the tragedy of Othello enrolls like an individual event, but with value of a symbol. But, after the storm was gone and the Turkish fleet was dispelled, the Venetian ships got reunited after they were separated on a certain point by the storm. Everybody, but mostly Othello, exults with boundless joy. But, in the middle of the harmony, a shrill is heard because once with the mentioned heroes disembark on the island, Iago, Othello’s standard bearer, the one that the moor calls “the honest Iago”, but which in reality will prove exactly the opposite. Because in heaven’s hart the snake is lurking, like in human’s hart is lurking the delusion’s demon. And, if the happiness agreement of the heroes is heard barely in the second act, Iago’s disagreement resounded from the beginning of the play. Like if in the beginning, as a foretell, he would be the opponent.

Othello’s love

The moor Othello, brave warrior in the service of Venice, kidnapped Desdemona, daughter of the noble Brabantio, and they got married. Here is another tragedy whose start is not foreigner of some comedy situation. It seems like Shakespeare would stubborn to put face to face, up to a point, two worlds and two ways of existence. Iago takes advantage of the fact that Brabantio opposes to the marriage and he uses this to infiltrate in the love that seemed to constitute the heroes fulfillment. At this point we can establish a correspondence with The Merchant of Venice: the kidnap of Desdemona here, the kidnap of Jessica there and also, like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice opposes the marriage of his daughter with Lorenzo, so is Brabantio. Why the opponent in The Merchant of Venice doesn’t succeed and why it does in Othello, we will clarify from the start, the facts of the play being well known: while in The Merchant of Venice the love between Lorenzo and Jessica constitutes an unbreakable unit which resists the tries, in our tragedy the fissure that allows the infiltration of evil appears in Othello’s love itself. The man has become vulnerable. It’s not that evil is stronger, but the human is weaker. And the world he lives in has become more permeable to bad.

In a strange way, Othello appears at the beginning like one of the strongest man: courage, heroism, honor, nobility, integrity. The duke of Venice calls him “Valiant Othello” (I, 3). How a man like this can be deceived by Iago’s wiles? It would seem that the virtues, in an ethical sense, are not a guaranty of man’s invulnerability. Because a virtue, no matter how strong it is, is, especially in Othello’s case, a fruit of the fact and the fact is self’s pride, the individuality. An action, like an affective mood, can’t legitimate the indestructible, being subjected to the time. But a principle can. The pride, which is the most powerful pillar of individuality, is in fact the weakest sustainer of perenniality, being without any other fulcrum besides itself, and so it is as changeful and evanescent as him. The facts are contradicted by facts and also by feelings, and nothing permanent can be created on their impermanence. The only guaranty of the indestructible is the spiritual principles. That kind of principle Othello is missing, and Iago knows it, of course in his way.

Indeed, what makes Othello change is not jealousy or is not just jealousy but the fact that he can’t distinguish, he can’t see Iago’s wiles, and he takes them as reality. This fact is the more amazing, the more Iago himself points out:

Iago: Men should be what they seem;

Or those that be not, would they might seem none! (III,3)

Othello’s love for Desdemona, devoid of spiritual cross, is in a way idolatrous and so it surrenders when the idol is attacked by Iago’s slander. So, the handkerchief, which is the supreme trial in Iago’s argumentation, instead of being a symbol of purity and commitment, it becomes a veil on Othello’s dark eyes of passion and phantasms, veil thrown by the inferior power of Maya.

Honest, thoughts, jealousy

We were saying that Othello kidnaps Desdemona and that Iago tries to instigate Roderigo and Brabantio to accuse the moor of murder. Not only that the two of them fall in the trap that Iago was planning, becoming his hate’s instruments, but they do it in a way that confirms the things we said about appearance.

Brabantio: O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow’d my daughter?

Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her;

… Judge me the world, if ‘tis not gross in sense

That thou hast practised on her with foul charms,

Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals

Those weaken motion: I’ll have’t disputed on;

(…) I therefore apprehend and do attach thee

For an abuser of the world, a practiser

Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.

So, even from the beginning of the play at least a part of the characters surrender themselves to the appearances, uncontrolled suggestions, and deceptive phenomena. The attraction of the lower magic seems to be a support of which Iago is counting to get Othello’s conviction.

Othello defends himself in front of these charms of the lower subtle, by opposing in front of the senate, another one:

Othello: …That I have ta'en away this old man’s daughter,

It is most true. True, I have married her;

…Yet, by your gracious patience,

I will a round unvarnished tale deliver

Of my whole course of love. What drugs, what charms,

What conjuration and what mighty magic—

For such proceeding I am charged withal—

I won his daughter.

…Her father loved me, oft invited me,

Still questioned me the story of my life

From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,

That I have

…These things to hear would Desdemona seriously incline…My story being done

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.

She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange,

'Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful.

…She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have used. (I, 3)

So here is the magic of the fact and heroism, the magic of the emotion and compassion, which rules both the duke and the senate, and also Desdemona and finally Brabantio.

The only one who doesn’t obey this magic is Iago. He is the lucid spirit of the play. This is why the means that he appeals of are mental. The craftiness and the virtuosity with which he uses these means make of it another magic, another appearance: that of the reason, of the argumentation apparently logic, of the ability sophistries, of the perfidious shinning of the mind.

Iago: If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost'rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.(…) It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.(…) If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and supersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her. Therefore make money.

It is believed, generally, that hell uses passion and vice to condemn the man. And it is true. But in the most subtle and perfidious way, it stirs such passions in man by his sly wit. Being a fallen angel, the demon uses his most characteristic attribute, the intellect, but perverted by fallen, in dry and clever reason. The great demons are not passionate, but rational, lucid, like Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov, like Iago from our tragedy. Because of his intelligent way of thinking, he makes all the characters in the play his victims, from various reasons but with the same result. And this thing is possible because neither Othello’s virtues, nor Desdemona’s candour are not able to oppose him, lacking the spiritual element, the only truly intellectual, really lucid, able to distinguish appearance from reality. This is the only way in which Iago is able to weave an entire intrigue, and catch everybody in this spider web of his diabolic mind.

Maybe the most common word used in this play is the word “honest”: “honest Othello”, “honest Cassio” and culminating with “honest Iago”. Othello’s world is under the sign of the ethical empire of honesty, of honour. To take appearances as reality is a sign of lack of intellectuality, is a characteristic of the profane world. A world centred on the inner self, individuality, and not on spiritual. A world that acts based on everyone’s fame and not on God’s glory. Only in a world like that, the perverted and perfidious work of the opponent is possible, having tragic consequences even for the best intentioned mans, the most “honest”. Because before the word “jealousy” makes place in this tragedy, the word “honest” rules the consequences. To this word, Iago opposes words like “reason, thought, wit”:

Iago: My noble lord… Othello – What dost thou say, Iago?

Iago: Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, Know of your love?

Othello: He did, from first to last. Why dost thou ask?

Iago: But for a satisfaction of my thought, No further harm.

Othello: Why of thy thought, Iago?

Iago: I did not think he had been acquainted with her.

Othello: Oh, yes, and went between us very oft. Iago: Indeed?

Othello: Indeed? Ay, indeed! Discern’st thou aught in that?

Is he not honest? – Iago: My lord, for aught I know.

Othello: What dost thou think? Iago: Think, my lord?

Othello: Think, my lord?” Alas, thou echo’st me

As if there were some monster in thy thought

Too hideous to be shown.

Maybe the whole understanding of this tragedy depends of the understanding of these three words: honest, thought and jealousy, along with the domains that they keep under their magic: the act, the thought and the passion. These functions consumed to red, constitutes maybe the tragic motifs of Othello and Desdemona’s unhappiness. The happiness falls under their strikes. The heroes of this play escaped alive from the war and the storm that brought them in the Cyprus, but they fall under the storm that Iago rages in their inner self.

Identity in Romeo and Juliet

The tragedy Romeo and Juliet is a narration of the epic love story of the two characters but, at the same time, it seems that this play is meant to heal the wounds of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. The play begins with an innocent Romeo, that believes just to touch his soul mate is a violation, that apologies for the profanity of one physical contact.

The entire process of identity starts with another ironical reversal of Titus. The terrible things that happened to Lavinia (she was raped by Chiron and Demetrius, cut off her hands and cut out her tongue) begin from the denial of her identity – “This was thy daughter”- it is like she was unnamed. On the contrary, in Romeo and Juliet the problems come once with their names. The lovers create a shield to protect their love and they escape in a free imaginary space, in which their identities are not important, and all that matters is the love that they share. Once their names are revealed, they realise that their fate is fraught with disaster. Their names bring their families to the play, is like the whole Verona is divided by these names, breaking into the private world of love that Romeo and Juliet share, and the result is another variation on the idea of relationship as damage.

This problem is discussed on their two meeting, known as the balcony scene, realistic narration of their opposed identities. The orchard where the scene takes place is a social space, enclosed by a high wall, where the lovers are not reunited but separated, Juliet inside and above, and Romeo outside and below.

Romeo is a boundary-breaker, he enters the Capulet’s house, then the Capulet’s orchard and finally he will break into the Capulet’s tomb. When he first sees Juliet at the window he retreats to generalized romantic adoration, that manages to increase the distance between them rather than narrowing it:

Romeo: O, speak again, bright angel! For thou art

As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,

As is a wingèd messenger of heaven

Unto the white, upturnèd, wondering eyes

Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him

When he bestrides the lazy-puffing clouds

And sails upon the bosom of the air. (II, 2)

He sees her as an angel, an idol, something unreachable. On the other hand, Juliet’s speech is meant only for him and it could not be addressed to someone else:

Juliet: O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name.

Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. (II, 2)

She is not aware if he can hear her or not, that proves that the barrier between them still exists, but she addresses to him directly, as if he were there, right in front of her and not some creature from the sky. She is ready to give up her identity, to deny her own name to prove her love for him. When it comes to boundary-breaking she is swifter and more daring than he is because she is aware that what stands between their happiness is their own name and she believes that this annihilation is what will keep them in a private world of love in which they have no social identities, the wood with no names.

Juliet speaks of Romeo’s name as something easy to get rid of, a disposable part easy to remove. But then, along with her question “What man art thou?” she shows a retreat from everything she said, because she realises that like the roses that will smell the same if they were to change their name so it’s Romeo. But she has no other words to call it, because roses are roses and Romeo is Romeo. By calling him not “Romeo” but a “Montague”, “fair Montague”, “sweet Montague” she accepts and embrace everything he is even his name that brings danger and trouble with it.

Names identify family origins, and Juliet soon realises that, like she says, her “only love” is sprung from her “only hate” and that means there is no perfect place for their love to consume, no magic wood, just Verona, where they are part of two rival families, and in this society names and origins are very important.

A question that comes across our minds, is as Juliet points “What’s in a name?” and tries to answer “Nothing” but then reality and of course, society’s beliefs, prove that names and appearances are “Everything”.

Juliet and her family

Juliet, the only daughter of a wealthy, respectable family seeks her identity beyond the boundaries and the limited opportunities that the society which she belongs has to offer. She is presented as “a stranger in the world” meaning that she had led a life that was imposed to her, within the norms of the society, unable to pursue her own dreams and desires. The inevitability of Juliet being a Capulet plays off against the isolation of her within her family. Capulet refers to her as “my child” but he never calls her by name.

Juliet will continue her journey as a stranger in the world and a stranger in her own family in deeper ways than this, because is the ambience where she lives and her family’s behaviour that makes her an isolated soul. Lady Capulet and the nurse discus about her in the third person, as though she was not there. Her father assembles her to a ship in a tempest, unpredictable and incapable of making her own decisions, with no clear plans for live and for future. Capulet’s words for Juliet are even more grotesquely off the mark than that of Marcus speech over the wounded Lavinia; he is using the wrong words to consulate her on the wrong grief. In order to cheer her up, her father plans to marry her with Paris because he wrongly believes that this will help her surpass Tybalt’s death.

Unable to defend herself in front of her family, she becomes isolated in a world of unfairness and misunderstandings: “thankful even for hate that is meant love” (III, 5).

The family elements over her seemingly dead body have some of the futility of the family laments over silenced Lavinia. The difference is that, while Lavinia’s family is trying to grieve a real agony, Juliet’s family is characterized by a grotesque, artificial language that suggest they were feeling sorry about themselves rather than their child’s death. There is no change in the house, the servants continue with their jobs and for the musicians her death is just a professional opportunity “tarry for the mourners, and stay dinner” (IV, 5).

Lavinia’s family is aware of the grief and painful isolation she is going through, while the Capulets just carry on with their superficial life; Juliet herself is the only one isolated. She is articulate, self-assertive and much in command. The first time when her name is spoken in the play is when the nurse calls her “What, lamb. What, ladybird. / God forbid where is this girl”, but she only answers when she is called by name.

When she finds out that Romeo is dead- “I am not I if there be such an ‘I’” (III, 2), her absorption of identity in Romeo’s, so that his death wipes out her life, is her decision, indicated by the repetition of “I”.

Romeo’s name