Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 33) | Edward Snow (essay date 1985)
Edward Snow (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet," in Shakespeare's "Rough Magic ": Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, University of Delaware Press, 1985, pp. 168-92.
[In the essay below, Snow suggests that the language in Romeo and Juliet is "intricately concerned not with the opposition between passion and the social order but with the difference between the sexes. "]
Romeo and Juliet is about an experience that transcends "a common bound." The play emphasizes the opposition between the imaginative vision its protagonists bear witness to in love and the truth of a world whose order must be enforced at passion's expense. And though events bring Romeo and Juliet together in this experience, language suggests how radically they share it. When they first meet "palm to palm" at the Capulet's ball, for instance, their antiphonal responses generate a perfectly formed...
[The entire page is 12965 words long]
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