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William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a classic verging on a latter-day myth. The story of the star-crossed young lovers, whose purity of feeling and spirit were betrayed by cruel fate and misguided relatives, is seen as an archetype of passion laid low by petty vanity masquerading as kinship honour. This chapter argues that Romeo and Juliet is neither about innocence (betrayed) nor about the romantic absorption and tenderness of young love, as depicted in the Western cultural tradition. Rather, the play has as its theme a singular aspect of erotic union: its savagery when denied. It also shows the violence inherent in the frustrated femininity of men and of their carnivorousness once they taste a woman's beauty and are then prevented from experiencing it again.

This chapter establishes a previously unrecognized allusion to Easter, and the Easter sepulchre, in Romeo and Juliet. It argues that the religious echoes confer sanctity on the young couple and encourages the audience expectation that Juliet will rise from her tomb. The paschal motif strengthens the comedic impulse of the play, created through comic characters and the subject matter of young love, and so increases the powerful shock of the tragic ending.

This chapter considers the juxtaposition of sleeping potions and poisons, and their parallels with the uneasy relationship between comedy and tragedy in two plays by Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, the typically comic devices of the sleeping potion and the false death meet with fatal complications. Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, references to narcotically induced oblivion are identified with the seductive pleasures of Egypt and Cleopatra, yet ultimately lead to the lovers’ deaths rather than the happy ending of comedy. The chapter frames its readings of the plays around contemporary medical debates about narcotic drugs such as opium and mandragora. Looking at complaints from anti-theatrical tracts about the theater’s capacity to lull spectators into sleepy oblivion, it shows how the escapism of the theater was identified with the dangers of pleasurable narcotics.

This chapter addresses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the single literary work that best captures the mortal poetics at the center of this book. In Shakespeare’s sources for the play—Italian stories that circulated widely both on the continent and in England—the characters Romeo and Giulietta anticipated that, following their deaths, their souls would immediately be reunited in heaven. The tragedy in these versions was at least partially softened by the idea that the lovers would share some form of meaningful afterlife. When Shakespeare reworked these materials, he stripped away any expectation that Romeo and Juliet’s love might continue posthumously. The profoundly terminal nature of Romeo and Juliet’s love is not simply understood as a loss, however: it is also their love’s enabling condition. This play is the period’s strongest example of both the poetic and emotional power that comes from denying any form of erotic transcendence. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of Antony and Cleopatra, in which Shakespeare revisits the question of two lovers’ suicides and their prospects for the afterlife within a pagan, not Christian, context.

Romeo and Juliet is the most obvious example of a single play by Shakespeare influencing a myriad of movies, to the extent that we can recognize a ‘romeo-and-juliet’ genre film even when Shakespeare is not referenced. Although the tales of romantic tragedy go much further back than Shakespeare, it is his version which has proved the most durable in its specific conventions and the kind of love represented in it. There have been a series of watershed film adaptations of the play itself, such as those by Cukor, Zeffirelli, and Luhrman, but this chapter takes the occasion to trace the play’s more subtle and indirect influence into films made in a range of countries, the United States, the Czech Republic, Wales, and India.

This chapter moves discussion from the self‐reflections of Narcissus to the self‐destructive action of the suicidal subject. It examines rhetorical figures of repetition in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its source‐texts to show how a dynamic of sympathy, reciprocation, or bandying has dangerous and aggressive potential. The eroticized suicide of the loving couple is understood in relation to its civil war context, blurring distinctions between the martial and erotic.

This chapter argues that Romeo and Juliet stages architecture in the dynamic mode of dramaturgy, using the scripts of hospitality and urban space. In Romeo and Juliet, hospitality plots the gestures of entry, exit, offering, and encounter and orchestrates the local affordances of the objects that erect and maintain the environments of entertainment. Throughout the play, Shakespeare’s poetic imagery cues action and inspires future scenographic invention. Reading dramaturgy in Romeo and Juliet encompasses a range of entries into the play, from concrete moments of staging and their immediate thematization in the text to the more diffuse spatial sensibilities manifested by Romeo, Juliet, Capulet, and the Nurse as they move through their affordance-laden world. The chapter draws on spatial studies by Kevin Lynch and Edward T. Hall.

In Romeo and Juliet (1595-96), weather and humoural determinism play a central role with the background references to the dog days that may, up to a certain extent, be held responsible for both plague and misrule so that, beyond bad luck or misfortune, the influence of the stars turns out to be preponderant in the lovers’ fate. In such a context, the play’s heavenly signs take on an importance almost equal to that of the earthly events, to the point that heat may be considered as a major actor in the tragedy. As an anagram of ‘hate’, ‘heat’ overdetermines the climate of the play. Both words foreshadow the flare up of violence in Verona, leading Romeo and Juliet to be trapped in an overall astronomical, humoural, and climatic pattern giving them virtually no chance to escape the stifling air of Verona. Besides, the chapter suggests that light and lightning, omnipresent in the tragedy, also emphasise the violence of passions and reinforce the inevitability of the lovers’ final death march inscribed in the sonnet prologue.

In early modern religious discourse, the fantasy is often associated with vanity and nothingness. Yet, notions of matter and void would become complicated by sixteenth-century atomism—including the revived materialist philosophy of Lucretius—which posited a universe made up of invisible whirling particles. This chapter notes that phantasms in Renaissance literature are often figured as flies and worms, echoing the language of Lucretius. Accordingly, Romeo and Juliet imagines the particulate texture of dreams and death in terms of webs and fumes; the culmination of this play’s pervasive imagery of thin substances is Mercutio’s portrait of the fairy queen Mab. Only through metaphor, suggests Shakespeare, can we grasp the fundamental, insensible realities of the material universe.

This chapter explores the nature of ‘character’ and its translation and transposition in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In particular, it looks at the translation of the characters' roles from the page to the stage and a reversed translation from stage practice to reading strategy. It discusses methods used by the actor for translating a part from the page into an engaged and engaging individual on the stage. The two versions of Romeo and Juliet, Quarto one (Q1) and Quarto two (Q2), offer different approaches to character as well as differing resources to the actor developing an individual. The chapter argues that, like some readings, many productions founder on the idea of type and stereotype. It then considers how the process of acting and directing can insist on character rather than stereotype.

This chapter examines the film Romeo and Juliet in the context of Gilles Deleuze's concept of sensations, suggesting that at the narrative and ideological level, the film seems to discredit romantic love premised on a self–other relational. It argues that despite the film's exemplification as a post-modern parody of romantic love, it simultaneously valorises love through a neo-aesthetic beyond subjectivity.

Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor all show a similar progression from a shorter, less satisfactory first-published version to a longer, more accomplished version (for Hamlet, two later versions). Editors of the plays still widely disagree with this. But Romeo and Juliet shows changes in the characters of Juliet and Friar Lawrence and in the comic roles of Will Kemp in the play that can hardly be accounted for by cuts. Progressive changes in Hamlet can be followed in the changing explanations for why the actors are travelling and in the role of Fortinbras, highlighting the issue of succession to the throne—critical until James I peacefully succeeded the childless Elizabeth; Merry Wives is beset by myths, notably a dating as early as 1597, but the identification of Henry Brook, Lord Cobham, with Falstaff gives us a more credible chronology and a version adapted for Jacobean court performance.

Chapter 1 discusses the Bolshoi Theater’s first tour of the United States in 1959. While the popular response was rapturous, critics were more cautious. They praised the company’s dancers, particularly the Soviet ballerinas, but disparaged the choreography and music. This split was gendered and allowed critics and audiences to sympathize with the performers while condemning the ostensibly more political works themselves. The chapter focuses on Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Stone Flower. Because Prokofiev’s music was so well known in the West, tour organizers hoped that his music could mediate between American expectations for Russian ballet and newer Soviet models. However, the Soviet performers failed to convince Western critics that their ballet was sufficiently “modern,” a complaint that would permeate American criticisms of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

This chapter shows how belief in the autonomy and depth (or plenitude) of Shakespearean character has been inseparable from an assumption that Shakespeare’s plots are relatively informal, merely following the order of events as given in his source texts. The chapter shows how this belief has lasted from the eighteenth century (Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox) to the present. It has survived the ‘unediting’ deconstruction of ‘Authentic Shakespeare’. The chapter analyses the plot of Romeo and Juliet, showing that Shakespeare does not merely follow his sources (Boaistuau and Arthur Brooke) but rather identifies a key circumstantial topic of argument—the question of Time, of whether the time is ripe for Juliet’s marriage—and goes on to build dialogue, scenes, and action around this question. A circumstantial question thus implies an offstage world and helps create our sense of Juliet’s ‘unconscious’ and of adolescent ‘sexuality’.

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”

Loving includes not only giving tangible goods to those in need, but also paying attention, understanding, communicating. Such love may appear helpless before the forces of greed and domination, but in his plays Shakespeare insists on the potency of love, albeit in other than political dimensions. With a host of concepts of justice engaged in King Lear, he explores the command to love the stranger. And in Romeo and Juliet, he takes on the difficult problem of how to “love the enemy.” How the young lovers heal a community at war is an improbable story, but one that is apparently so compelling that we rewrite it over and again. In this enduring plot, love is given the power to heal social hatred.