Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 33) | E. Pearlman (essay date 1994)
E. Pearlman (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare at Work: Romeo and Juliet" in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 315-42.
[In the excerpt below, Pearlman examines the nature and extent of the revision Shakespeare made to the language of Romeo and Juliet, contending that he "revised in order to clarify mood, character, or metaphor. "]
By the time Shakespeare began to compose Romeo and Juliet, he had already established the practice of striking second and subsequent heats upon the muses' anvil. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare appears to have restructured two scenes (I.I and 4.3) during the process of composition and added the "fly" scene (3.2), with its striking anticipations of King Lear, after the play was drafted.1 He changed localities, reassigned speeches, and even introduced a new character (Launce) while rewriting The Two Gentlemen of...
[The entire page is 2826 words long]
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