[In the following essay, Snyder contends that the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet is a metaphor for ideology, arguing that social "norms themselves bring about the tragedy" of the play.]

Romeo and Juliet are very young. They are young to be married, and also young to be protagonists in a tragedy. Shakespeare made a special point of Juliet's extreme youth, first subtracting two years from the already tender age of Arthur Brooke's heroine (instead of sixteen, just under fourteen), and then having the characters disagree more than once over whether she is old enough to marry.¹ Romeo, presumably somewhat older than Juliet, is nevertheless not yet grown up: still in the family home, fussed over by his parents, free to roam about with his friends but apparently not seen as ready for adult responsibility.

Why did Shakespeare insist on his tragic lovers as adolescents? To be sure, their youthfulness accentuates the generational conflict implicit in the story, the tragic disjunction that Franco Zeffirelli exploited so well in his compelling film version. But the extreme youth of Romeo and Juliet opens up a possibility beyond the traditional clashes of young and old. The very embeddedness in family that signals their tender years may itself be the point. It is surely significant that each of the two protagonists is introduced to us first as the object of parental concern. In the opening scene the Montagues worry about Romeo's solitary moping, fearing that some secret sorrow may blight their promising son before he ever arrives at maturity.² In the scene directly following, Capulet is busy providing for his daughter's future by negotiating her marriage with Paris. It is important that each of these parental discussions takes place before we even meet the young person being discussed. Our initial view is of Romeo as a son, Juliet as a daughter.

Juliet as daughter of the house continues a prominent emphasis. Even her love scenes with Romeo are played out inside the Capulet enclave, with one family member or another always threatening to intrude. Romeo is seen in the streets rather than enclosed in Montague domesticity, in the company of his friends rather than his parents. This reflects, of course, the relative freedom accorded to young males as opposed to young females. But the difference in terms of family embeddedness may be more apparent than real. Romeo's peer group is not separate from kinship structure but a kind of extension of it, in that his habitual companions are Montague allies.

All of us are always being shaped into our ways of being and knowing by extensive social processing, but the lives of the young make this process especially visible. Romeo and Juliet do not necessarily have less autonomy than adults who have undergone the full ideological conditioning afforded by society's institutions. Yet their subordinate situation as children, acted on (cajoled, lectured, ordered, modelled) by the parents who in effect own them, makes that lack of autonomy more apparent. And the major constituting force that operates in their society is the feud between Montagues and Capulets.

At first glance this would seem too comprehensive a claim for the feud's reach and impact. The quarrel involves only two families, and it is not always taken seriously even by Montagues and Capulets. H. B. Charlton finds the family feud unsatisfactory as Fate's instrument in Romeo and Juliet, 'unsubstantial', because it is sometimes treated comically and does not consistently inform the feelings and actions of most characters. In any case, thinks Charlton, such barbaric mores are not realistic in the civilized Verona the play depicts.³ (On this last point, one wonders how a study published soon after World War II could ignore such abundant evidence in the recent history of civilized Western Europe of resurgent group hatreds and the barbaric behaviour they generated.) Critics in their own time have less trouble seeing the destructive dimensions in Veronese civility. Marilyn Williamson, for example, points to the violent atmosphere of the play's society.⁴ For Coppélia Kahn, the feud is 'an extreme and peculiar expression of patriarchal society'.⁵ I agree that informing social institutions are the play's major tragic force, though I would quarrel with Kahn's term 'peculiar' if it is meant to characterize the feud as uncommon, individual rather than general. The dramatic expression of dynastic hostility may seem extreme and eccentric, but the feud in its operations acts like any ideology, indeed offers a model of how ideology works.

Like ideology in Althusser's classic formulation, the feud has no obvious genesis that can be discerned, no history. It pervades everything, not as a set of specific ideas but as repeatedpractices. The feud-system is not in fact predicated on any substantive difference between Montagues and Capulets. A Jerusalem production which presented Montagues as Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Capulets as Hebrew-speaking Jews had its own political point to make about the clash of rival cultures.⁶ Shakespeare, though, with his 'two households both alike in dignity', seems to be creating a different sort of division, one that is obviously arbitrary and artificial. The members of his rival houses belong to the same culture, use the same verbal and behavioural languages. When Montagues intrude on the Capulet festivities, only their faces have to be covered; nothing else in their bearing or manners marks them as outsiders. What's in a name? Everything, it would seem. One thinks of Lacan's two identical doors with Ladies over one and Gentlemen over the other.

Shakespeare also emphasizes the artificial nature of the feud by suppressing the account of its origins given in this source. Brooke explains that it was their very equality of station that gave rise to enmity between the two families, breeding envy and hatred which in time became 'Rooted'.⁷ Shakespeare says only that the quarrel is 'ancient'.⁸ The first scene subtly enacts this 'always already' quality of the feud, when a question of origins is raised only to fall short of an answer. The elder Montague asks Benvolio what started the latest round of hostilities—asks, we should note, only after both of them have automatically taken part in the fighting. Benvolio can't give a good explanation because the clash was already under way when he entered. The audience has been on the scene longer than he has, but any answer spectators can give to 'how did this start?' is no more definitive than Benvolio's. We have seen the Capulet servants come on already primed to fight, as if they need contrary Montagues to define their manhood. Or rather, this has been Sampson's stance, while Gregory twits him and plays generally with words. But the feud, like ideology, flattens out personal differences, slotting individuals into predetermined roles; after some actual Montagues arrive on the scene, Gregory quickly falls into line with Sampson's pugnacity—just as Benvolio, whose natural bent is to peacemaking and who a few minutes later tries to stop the servants' scrap, must nevertheless slide into his appointed slot to cross swords with Tybalt. The dominance of an 'assigned form of subjectivity'⁹ over individual temperament or initiative is evident in the exaggerated symmetry of the whole sequence: servants matched by opposing servants, nephew of one house paired off against nephew of the other, Capulet patriarch answered by Montague patriarch, all entering as if on cue and doing the same thing.

The Montague-Capulet feud may be like ideology in having no apparent beginning, but is it not different in coming to a publicly announced end in the last moments of the play? I shall delay addressing this somewhat problematic issue till the end of my essay, and consider here another question that has probably occurred to more than one reader already. Is it legitimate to see the feud as shaped by Shakespeare enacting the workings of ideology as conceived by modern theorists? Where we may accept without difficulty readings that discern in his plays and poems the features of specific ideological systems, explore their contradictions, and trace their transmutations, the assumption in these cases is that Shakespeare need have made no conscious effort to delineate these systems, which rather inscribe themselves through us without our awareness or cooperation. But doesn't taking the feud as a metaphor for ideology in general imply some conscious intent on Shakespeare's part?

Yes, it does, and the assumption is not unwarranted. Without precognizing Althusser, Shakespeare nevertheless displays in Romeo and Juliet a very conscious concern with society's impact on the individual, especially in the characters' meditations on names and their power. Names define us as individuals, announce who we are. Yet no name is unique to one person. It has been attached to others in the society, blood kin in the case of the surname, saints or leaders or forebears in the case of the given name. Names are imposed on infants before they are individuals, by society and its central unit the family. The considerable dynastic and cultural freight they carry begins the child's constitution as a subject. 'Romeo Montague' inscribes the young man who is called that into a particular subject-position. (We tend to see this dimension mainly in the family name, but Juliet laments over the given name as well: 'deny thy father and refuse thy name' is preceded by 'Wherefore art thou Romeo?' And her lover, invited to doff his offending name, responds 'Henceforth I never will be Romeo.')

Juliet's familiar 'What's in a name?' meditation shows up the power of ideology by signally underestimating its force. She and Romeo have met unlabelled, as it were, a faceless youth and an anonymous girl at a party. They have not encountered each other before in the usual contextual way because of the enmity between their families. Each asks for the name of the other, and discovers conflict:

ROMEO Is she a Capulet?
O dear account! My life is my foe's debt . . .
JULIET My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!'¹⁰

In soliloquy later, Juliet convinces herself that seeing, responding to individual looks and attitudes, can blot out knowing, which acknowledges the social context. She tries to separate her lover's name from his essential properties.

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any part
Belonging to a man.

(2.1.80-4)

Name and self are not so easily divisible, though. While Romeo immediately disavows his name, Juliet even here goes on calling him 'Romeo' and 'Montague', and worries about the danger of his staying with her, 'considering who thou art' (2.1.106). A name may not be a body part, but Romeo will soon feel it to be just as intrinsic. Fearing that Juliet hates him for killing her cousin Tybalt, he attributes the act to 'that name's cursed hand'. The contorted phrase makes manifest the social construction of his agency. Contradicting Juliet's earlier optimism, he feels 'Romeo' as something so enmeshed with his being that it needs to be forcibly ripped out of his body (3.3.101-7). What has happened to change his perception from 'Henceforth I never will be Romeo' to 'In what vile part of this anatomy / Doth my name lodge?' is the reactivation of the feud: the need to avenge Mercutio, who died taking Romeo's own place against Tybalt, by killing in turn the enemy Capulet. Romeo's name has turned out to be a part of his self after all, directing his actions and defining his responses.

Juliet's hopeful separation of essence from what seems to her an external label—'Thou art thyself, though not a Montague'—is soon shown to be wrong, then. Even the supporting argument that she uses at the time is suspect. 'That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet' (2.1.85-6) sounds self-evidently true. But would that flower really retain its full sweetness in our subjective judgement if we were not conditioned to think of the rose as the best, the most worthy? The blossom itself retains its natural properties under any name, but our use and valuation of it must alter. The name 'Rose' carries with it considerable cultural baggage, suggesting surpassing beauty combined with difficulty of access (surrounded by thorns), hence something supremely precious, as well as the paragon, the ideal. What Ophelia means when she calls Hamlet 'th' expectancy and rose of the fair state' (Hamlet 3.1.155) would be significantly altered if she talked of 'th' expectancy and lilac', even though lilacs smell sweet too—especially since the 'fair state' of the audience for whom Shakespeare wrote this line had a rose as its familiar symbol.

Shakespeare did not need Althusser's analysis in order to grasp the workings of interpellation or to feel the force of the dual meaning of subject, the 'autonomous' agent who is formed by and in a social formation to which he is subjected. Jonathan Dollimore approaches the same question through parallels between Montaigne's 'custom' and Althusser's 'ideology', concluding that 'the Renaissance possessed a sophisticated concept of ideology if not the word'.¹¹ The preoccupation with names in Romeo and Juliet points directly to the most basic function of ideology, central also to the feud: identifying, hailing or interpellating into predetermined subject-positions. The feud operates in the classic way of language, and of ideology: it creates meaning by differentiating. Terry Eagleton, following Jameson, finds the opposition between self/familiar/good on the one hand and non-self/alien/ bad on the other 'the fundamental gesture of all ideology'.¹² Capulets define who they are against Montagues, Montagues against Capulets. 'This' can only be distinguished when set against 'that', however arbitrary such distinctions are in language and other social constructions.¹³ The feud is not a matter of contrary ideas, not a matter of ideas at all, but of repeated, habitual actions that keep reasserting the defining distinctions between 'us' and 'them'.

Ideology is what constructs our consciousness and makes sense of our world. It is pervasive, working everywhere. Can this be said of the feud? After all, not everyone in Verona is a Montague or a Capulet. We get fleeting glimpses of some nameless citizens, and various members of another family come in for more extended attention as individual characters: Prince Escalus, and especially his two kinsmen Mercutio and Paris. But on scrutiny the Montague-Capulet hostility can be seen to gather in and organize these third parties as well as the two central clans. The feud exemplifies the workings of any ideology, of Ideology itself, but the specifics of its enactment express their historical moment.¹⁴ The Veronese discourse of family division thus embraces some important social imperatives of early modern élite culture in Western Europe: the obligation to maintain one's honour by avenging insults, the obligation to contract a suitable marriage and adapt appropriately to the married state.

To some extent these were gendered. It was men who were bound in this way by the code of honour. Marriage, though expected of both sexes, was more central and defining for women, since a wife took on the loyalties as well as the status of her new family along with its name. In Romeo and Juliet Lady Capulet not only makes the case for marriage to her young daughter but also demonstrates her own thorough conditioning as a wife. Presumably not a Capulet by birth, she nevertheless has committed herself totally and fervently to the family feud. Her husband, born into the anti-Montague faith, can be easygoing about it at times, as when he accepts Romeo's presence at the party. His wife, a typical convert, is possessed by her acquired faith. She is not on hand to comment on this first occasion, but after Romeo has killed Tybalt she fills the air with cries of grief and demands for revenge. Indeed, it is presumably her role as chief mourner for Tybalt in 3.1, as contrasted with her husband's silence, that led Malone and subsequent editors to list Tybalt in the Dramatis Personae as the nephew of Lady Capulet, not Capulet himself.¹⁵ But family titles like nephew and brother routinely included in-laws as well as blood relatives,¹⁶ and Tybalt's own deep investment in Capulet family values, not to speak of his interment in the family tomb, strongly suggests that he is a Capulet born. While a woman's transfer of loyalties to her husband's kin was fitting, a man's proper adherence was to his own clan. Lady Capulet's extreme sorrow for Tybalt, then, and her murderous designs on his slayer convey not special concern for her own family of birth but complete interpellation as a Capulet by marriage.¹⁷ To Juliet as a prospective bride she lays out the same course, inviting her to be the decorative cover to the book that is Paris—in other words, to take her meaning from her husband. 'so shall you share in all he doth possess / By having him, making yourself no less' (1.3.81-96). Paris himself, like Juliet initially, gives docile heed to the imperative of suitable alliance; indeed, this is his sole motive for action in the play. The marriage of Paris and Juliet never takes place, but it is his moves towards that union that involve him fatally in the bloodshed of the feud.

Like his kinsman Paris, Mercutio gets entangled in the feud and dies in consequence. By his intervention in the fight to uphold Romeo's masculine good name when Romeo himself refuses to rise to Tybalt's insulting provocations, Mercutio brings out the other specific historical face of ideology in this play, the masculine code of honour. Mercutio presents himself as a scorner of codes and conventions. He shows no sign of negotiating like Paris for a bride, he delights in recasting Romeo's Petrarchan metaphors of adoration for Rosaline into leering physicality. He mocks standard beliefs like the power of dreams to prognosticate, and standard practices like the formulas of fencing. Yet Mercutio is as deeply implicated in ideology as anyone else. His reduction of woman to a set of sexual parts to be attacked is not really his own, but derives from another ideological strain, as extreme as Petrarchan adoration and even hoarier as a cultural tradition. And for all his disdain of the duello, he hurls himself with no question at all into the duel proposed by Tybalt. His response is as mechanical as any we have witnessed in the opening Montague-Capulet brawl. Mercutio himself attributes his death to the family feud, obsessively repeating through his last moments 'A plague o' both your houses . . . A plague o' both your houses! . .. A plague o' both your houses . . . Your houses!' (3.1.91-108).

When these specific ideological ramifications thus draw in the two chief 'outsiders' in the play, and the third 'outsider' finally reads his own implication in theirs ('And I, for winking at your discords, too / Have lost a brace of kinsmen', 5.3.293-4), the feud does appear all-pervasive. No part of society that we see can escape from its influence.¹⁸ Romeo and Juliet themselves are deeply conditioned by it, although they also, necessarily, transcend the family division. I call this movement beyond the feud necessary not only because it allows their love for each other to begin and develop, but also because their venture outside the circumscribing feud-ideology makes that ideology visible, as it would never be if everyone continued to operate inside its unspoken premises.

Transcendence is perhaps a misleading term for the lovers' attempted isolation of themselves from the feud. Enclosed by Veronese social formations, they do not rise above so much as withdraw inward. Romeo and Juliet have no space of their own. Their love scenes are all played out inside the Capulet establishment, constantly impinged upon by Tybalt, or the Nurse, or Lady Capulet. The closest the lovers come to a shared private space is Friar Laurence's cell, where they met in 2.5 to be married. But that encounter is brief and driven (Friar Laurence feels it necessary to 'make short work' of the marriage ceremony, line 34). Moreover, this respite from the feud is granted not by escape from ideology but by the temporary ascendancy of a rival one, the Friar's Christian agenda of reconciling the two warring houses. Nor does a freer space seem to be imaginable for Romeo and Juliet somewhere else. A milieu less insistently enclosing might make visually possible the option of leaving the city together and finding a new life somewhere else. Instead, the play's physical dimensions only confirm that 'there is no world without Verona walls' (3.3.17). Verona, constituted by the feud, asserts itself like any ideology as the only reality there is.¹⁹ Even as they die, another Capulet enclave surrounds the young pair, the family tomb.

Hemmed in as they are, how can Romeo and Juliet constitute even an inner space in terms different from the all-powerful norm? As is suggested by Friar Laurence's transgression of the feud's dictates to sanction their love, opportunity arises through the presence of rival ideologies coexisting with and sometimes challenging the dominant one. For example, Romeo and Juliet can initially meet and talk as they do not only because they are momentarily free of family-name labels but because Juliet's father is for once tolerating the presence of a Montague. He restrains the angry Tybalt, swayed by imperatives other than the feud:

Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone.
A bears him like a portly gentleman,
And, to say truth, Verona brags of him
To be a virtuous and well-governed youth.
I would not for the wealth of all this town
Here in my house do him disparagement.

(1.5.64-9)

Such indulgence at first glance seems to support Charlton's dismissal of the feud as too light-weight to sustain its role in the tragic structure, let alone to express the central shaping force of any culture. If the family enmity can be so easily set aside by the leader of one faction, how can it nevertheless represent the all-powerful operations of ideology? But one can see in Capulet's attitude not a casual shedding of the feud but an internal disruption in the social ideology, as the dominant discourse is crossed by other, locally influential ones. Montagues are to be spurned, yet good cheer must be fostered at social gatherings, especially by the host. Categorically, a Montague is an enemy, yet a particular young man's good behaviour and reputation make it hard to treat him rudely. For convivial Capulet, whose favourite activity is preparing and presenting feasts, the primary value at this moment of cross-purposes is surely hospitality. 'Here in my house', whatever you do, don't spoil the party.

Normally kept apart by the reigning ideology, Romeo and Juliet can thus come together in a kind of aporia created by ideological contestation, which in turn enables them to find in their sonnet-exchange discourses that they can share, of romantic courtship and religion. Religion will continue as a common discourse embodied in Friar Laurence. The commonality has in fact preceded this first meeting: it is another sign of crossed ideologies that these two young people so firmly separated by the feud can nevertheless share without any special dispensation the same confessor. His cell is another aporia, or a version of the first, the (only) place where hereditary enemies can meet and formally unite.

The discourse of romantic courtship presents a more complicated picture. The first exchange between Romeo and Juliet is in some ways highly conventional, grounded in a familiar cultural master-script. Their dialogue falls neatly into the standard sonnet's three quatrains and a couplet, and in typical sonnet fashion elaborates a conceit, the lover as pilgrim. In showing so clearly the impress of literary tradition, this wooing passage may remind us of Romeo a few scenes before, expounding his hopeless love for Rosaline in Petrarchan clichés. If that earlier love-talk nevertheless feels more artificial, it is partly because the speaker's diligence in piling up the conceits and Oxymora suggests a scholar's zeal rather than a lover's;²⁰ but partly because, with the other party to the courtship not even present, Romeo's one-sided romance acquires the flavour of rhetorical exercise. The passage between Romeo and Juliet at the Capulet party moves more naturally: proposition, response, adjustment and further proposition, new response. Here Romeo's speech has a real purpose, pleading for a kiss. And they do kiss, twice. Juliet breaks off the second sonnet begun by Romeo with 'You kiss by th' book' (1.5.109). While the latter part of her teasing complaint underlines how the impersonal discourse of literary love has written itself through their exchange, the first part nevertheless acknowledges real physical contact between them. The later love-speech of Romeo and Juliet uses rhyme much less and highly wrought forni not at all. Their language cannot of course completely escape tradition—no language can. But in subsequent dialogue between the lovers convention is not prominent as such, and familiar materials are reworked to flow, with the verse, more freely.²¹

This often-noted evolution, from romantic discourse shaped by convention to a more direct lyricism that seems to override form, enacts through language the withdrawal of Romeo and Juliet from the defining difference imposed on them by the feud, into immediate, fervent engagement with each other. Perhaps their very youthfulness, which on the one hand highlights the social processing they are undergoing, on the other hand makes that withdrawal more possible in that the processing is not complete. They are less fixed by constant conditioning than their elders, less habituated to their social roles as Montague and Capulet. Even so, the grip of ideology is tenacious, and apt to tighten in moments of emotional crisis. Both lovers offer examples of this tenacity, and both temporary re-conformings are accentuated by a lapse into 'speaking by the book'. Trying to deal with Tybalt's rage right after his marriage to Juliet, Romeo has been unconventional in both action and speech: 'I do protest I never injured thee, / But love thee better than thou canst devise . . . good Capulet—which name I tender / As dearly as mine own—be satisfied' (3.1.67-71). But when Mercutio takes up Tybalt's challenge on Romeo's behalf and is mortally wounded as a result, conventional reactions and conventional language suddenly reclaim Romeo. Now, not before, he worries about his 'Reputation stained / With Tybalt's slander' (lines 111-12). The news that Mercutio is dead completes Romeo's total absorption into the avenger-role prescribed for him in the code of honour, the role from which he had earlier distanced himself so carefully.

He gad in triumph, and Mercutio slain?
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now.
Now, Tybalt, take the 'villain' back again
That late thou gav'st me.

(lines 122-6)

The style of his speech as well as its substance belongs to revenge tragedy. In the scene following, Juliet in her turn is repossessed by ideology. She has begun this sequence in soliloquy, wishing impatiently for night and her bridegroom, her speech hastening along with her desire and overflowing the artificial pentameter bounds. Now the Nurse tells her that Tybalt her cousin is dead by the hand of that same bridegroom.

O serpent heart, hid with a flow'Ring face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despisèd substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st—
A damnèd saint, an honourable villain.

(3.2.73-9)

When Juliet lapses into her feud-assigned form of subjectivity as outraged Capulet, her speech changes. All at once, she is speaking in hackneyed images and formally balanced end-stopped lines. Her shock at suddenly having to superimpose Romeo the murderer on Romeo the lover is certainly real, but its articulation through neat oxymora (reminiscent of Romeo's own conventional language of emotion before his meeting with Juliet) makes clear that she is speaking as a generic Capulet.²² As Orwell might say, feudthink generates bookspeak.

Yet if the language of Romeo and Juliet, apart from these lapses, hints at a journey beyond the prevailing ideology, the constraints implicit in the play's action leave them with nowhere to go, nothing to do except die. For individuals who try to advance beyond their ideology but cannot undo its constitutive influence, there is no feasible way to live. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet can be seen as the final expression of a process of excommunication that was adumbrated earlier when Romeo was banished from Verona. Exclusion, as Goran Therborn reminds us, is the main form of sanction invoked by ideology against those who transgress its barriers and definitions.²³ The crime that cut Romeo off from his social existence came about through acts of ideological rebellion: crossing over the feud-barrier to love an 'Enemy', refusing (as a result) a challenge in violation of the code of honour. The lovers' deaths look avoidable on the plot level, a matter of misunderstanding and bad timing, but from this perspective that tragic finale inside the family tomb (a setting that visibly manifests the weight of past practices) is all too inevitable. Laurence Stone thinks that an Elizabethan audience would have understood the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet as self-inflicted: their destruction came about because, by placing personal passion before obedience to family imperatives, they violated the norms of their society.²⁴ I have been arguing that, on the contrary, the norms themselves bring about the tragedy. One could go further and propose that the tragic predicament—possibilities for human development narrowed down and cut off—is built into the operations of ideology. That which is necessary to give us a stable identity and a consistent view of the world is by the same token what limits and distorts us. The suicides of Romeo and Juliet represent one version of ideology's destructive power. An alternative outcome to the action, less dramatic but just as tragic in its own way, would portray the two young people as recaptured for good by their social conditioning. Romeo would become the Tybalt of the Montagues, challenging Capulets on cue and advancing his manly reputation. Juliet would have an elaborate church wedding and afterward live comfortably in her different sphere as the rich and decorative cover to Paris's book.

Does the destruction of this young pair do anything to transform the feud and ideological force it represents? Certainly Capulet and Montague join hands in their mutual grief at the very end of the play, initiating what the Prince calls 'a glooming peace'. Taking the hopeful view, we might conclude that the union of Romeo and Juliet, born in the contradictions of ideology that open up possibilities for change and development, signals even in their death the end of the old system and the beginning of a new phase. But the hopeful view has to ignore or discount the ironies that hedge that reconciliation of the patriarchs. The fathers propose to seal their peace by erecting gold statues to their children, an image that not only suggests vulgar show but also resonates disturbingly with Romeo's recent diatribe against gold as a poison, a murderer (5.1.81-5). Memorializing the feud's victims in a medium that is synonymous with corruption and death makes at best an inauspicious beginning for a new era of peace. What is more, as many readers have observed, the proposals of Montague and Capulet suggest in their form renewed competition rather than cooperation.

CAPULET O brother Montague, give me thy hand.
This is my daughter's jointure, for no more
Can I demand.
MONTAGUE But 1 can give thee more,
For I will raise her statue in pure gold,
That whiles Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.
CAPULET As rich shall Romeo's by his lady lie . . .

(5.3.295-302)

Both fathers speak the language of commercial rivalry as they strive not to be outdone in conspicuous display. If mercantile competition played a part in their feud, it has never been so noticeable as in this moment of supposed reconciliation.²⁵

Traditional productions of Romeo and Juliet, while often cutting or omitting entirely Friar Laurence's lengthy explanations in the last scene, usually present the reconciliation to be taken at face value. Directors more inclined to social criticism interrogate it. Viewers of Michael Bogdanov's 1986-7 RSC production, for example, could have little assurance of a brave new world in Verona when they witnessed the actual unveiling of those golden statues, staged as an empty public relations event with the Prince speaking from cue cards and papparazzi photographing all the surviving principals in appropriate poses. The handshake of Capulet and Montague became a photo op.²⁶ In any case, even the most optimistic reading or staging of the final exchange between Capulet and Montague as marking a definitive social change leaves unaltered the larger tragic script of ideology. If this particular instrument of forming subjectivities becomes outmoded, a new system of distinctions and codes will replace it as the 'ancient' order of things that divides and excludes in order to define.

Notes

¹ Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), fol. G4. Her mother says that most of the girl's friends are already married. In Painter's version Juliet is almost eighteen: The Palace of Pleasure (1567), Nnn2r.

² Montague likens him to 'the bud bit with an envious worm / Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air / Or dedicate his beauty to the sun' (I.I. 148-50).

³ H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 59-60.

⁴ Marilyn Williamson, 'Romeo and Death', Shakespeare Studies, 14 (New York, 1981), 129-37; pp. 135-6. Her main point is Romeo's bent to self-destruction, which she sees as expressing his society's pervasive violence.

⁵ Copp élia Kahn, 'Coming of Age in Verona', Modern Language Studies, 8 (1978), repr. 'Romeo and Juliet': Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews, Garland Shakespearean Criticism Series, 10 (New York, 1993), 337-58; p. 337.

⁶ Reported on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 27 July 1994.

⁷Romeus and Juliet, A2r.

⁸ Prol. 3; I.I.101. G. K. Hunter points to the lack of content in the enmity between Capulets and Montagues when he observes that the feud has 'little political reality' and exists to put pressure on the love of Romeo and Juliet: 'shakespeare's Earliest Tragedies: Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet', Shakespeare Survey 27 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 1-9; p. 5.

⁹ This term, preferred by Goran Therborn over role (The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology [London, 1981]), better emphasizes inward conditioning along with the behaviour it generates.

¹⁰ 1.5.116-38. For the formality of the lovers' rhymed couplets here as an expression of the feud mentality, see below, pp. 94-5.

¹¹ Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Durham, N.C., 1993), pp. 17-18; the idea is developed in ch. 10.

¹² Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York, 1991), p. 126; cf. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), pp. 114-15. Althusser came close, in his essays on Freud and Lenin and in Lenin and Philosophy, to equating language and the symbolic order with ideology as agents constructing the subject. Catherine Belsey completes the connection in Critical Practice (London and New York, 1980), ch. 3.

¹³ The lack of real difference between Montagues and Capulets (see above, p. 88) illustrates Saussure's central dictum that language is a system of differences with no positive terms, a system which creates meaning rather than discovers a pre-existing one. For the inextricable relation of language and ideology, see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London, 1977). Erik Erikson in Identity and the Youth Cycle (New York, 1980) discusses (pp. 97-8) the function of group identification and exclusion in the adolescent years, the founding of identity on difference.

¹⁴ 'Existential ideologies always exist in concrete historical forms, but are never reducible to them': Therborn, The Ideology of Power, p. 44.

¹⁵ Eighteenth-century editions before Malone's of 1790 list Tybalt as Capulet's kinsman.

¹⁶ Both Capulet and Lady Capulet refer to Tybalt as the son of 'my brother' (3.5.127; 3.1.146).

¹⁷ Lady Capulet demonstrates that one of Juliet's propositions about names is not naive wish but fact. Her assertion that in union with Romeo she would 'no longer be a Capulet' (2.1.78) has the whole weight of contemporary theory and practice of marriage to support it.

¹⁸ The feud is an example of Althusser's ideology of the ruling class, as that class is embodied in the three élite clans on view. The potentially opposing interests of the lower classes are not thematized: Capulet and Montague servants are instead shown as interpellated by their masters' feud, identified with the interests of the houses they serve. Althusser's formulation is not completely appropriate here, however, since the cui bono question—whose interests are served by the constituting force?—is not relevant to the feud as presented by Shakespeare. Ideology in Romeo and Juliet is not analysed structurally but experienced from the subject's point of view; its origins and purposes are riot visible.

¹⁹ Here again Shakespeare departs significantly from earlier versions of the story, in which Juliet begs to accompany her lover into exile, either openly as his wife or in disguise. Brooke has Romeus refuse for fear that Capulet will pursue and harm them, but in the world Shakespeare has created, to leave the city together is not even conceived as possible.

²⁰

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! . . .
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes,
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.

(1.1.177-89)

²¹ Several critical studies chart the lovers' shift out of conventional speech: perhaps the best known of these is Harry Levin, 'Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet', Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960), 3-11. Kiernan Ryan applies Romeo's line 'Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books' (2.1.201) to this movement beyond the 'prescribed texts': 'Romeo and Juliet: The Language of Tragedy', The Taming of the Text: Explorations in Language, Literature, and Culture, ed. Willie van Peer (London and New York, 1988), pp. 106-21; p. 116.

²² W. H. Auden notes the radical disparity between this conventional speech and the one that opened the scene, without suggesting any function for the difference: 'Commentary on the Poetry and Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet', Romeo and Juliet, Laurel edn (New York, 1988), p. 26.

²³ The victim of this process 'is excluded from further meaningful discourse as being insane, depraved, traitorous, alien, and so on. The excommunicated person is condemned, temporarily or forever, to ideological nonexistence . . . Usually ideological excommunication is connected with the material sanctions of expulsion, confinement, or death' (Therborn, The Ideology of Power, p. 83).

²⁴ Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), p. 87.

²⁵ Among critics who have found irony in the final rapprochement of Capulet and Montague, see Clifford Leech, 'The Moral Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet', English Renaissance Drama, ed. Standish Henning et al. (Carbondale, I11., 1976), pp. 59-75, p. 70; on the competitive nature of their speeches, Nathaniel Wallace, 'Cultural Tropology in Romeo and Juliet', Studies in Philology, 88 (1991), 329-44; p. 342; Thomas Moisan, "'O Any Thing, of Nothing First Create!": Gender and Patriarchy in the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet', In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, N.J., and London, 1991), pp. 113-36; p. 125; Greg Bentley, 'Poetics of Power: Money as Sign and Substance in Romeo and Juliet', Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 17 (1991), 145-66; pp. 163-4.

²⁶ For an account of several stagings of the final scene, see Barbara Hodgdon, 'Absent Bodies, Present Voices: Performance Work and the Close of Romeo and Juliet's Golden Story', Theatre Journal, 41.3 (October, 1989), repr. Andrews, pp. 243-65. Bogdanov's is discussed pp. 252-4.