Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 51) | Barbara L. Estrin (essay date 1981)
Barbara L. Estrin (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "Romeo and Juliet and the Art of Naming Love," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2, April, 1981, pp. 31-49.
[In the following essay, Estrin probes Romeo and Juliet's vision of love and their efforts to realize this vision.]
In Act II of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio defines the successful man, incorrectly assuming that Romeo's recovered wit signals the decline of his infatuation for Rosaline:
Why is this better now than groaning for love? now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature: For this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.1
To be Romeo at his best is to have acquired distance from the amorous situation and to have "separate[d]" himself, as Pyrocles admonishes Musidorus in the...
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