[In the following essay, Wallace analyzes the theme of family conflict between the feuding Montagues and Capulets of Verona in Romeo and Juliet, concentrating on the process of semiotic revolt in which new cultural metaphors appear to replace the old.]

Shakespeare's Verona in Romeo and Juliet has been perceived as moribund and stylized, and the lovers' relationship has been contrasted to the city's decadence as an uncorrupted preserve.¹ Yet a reassessment of Verona and its celebrated lovers reveals that the city is hardly static and that Romeo and Juliet cannot extricate themselves from the determinations of their culture. This literary Verona, neither cityscape nor actual place but rather a repository of cultural representations, is undergoing a multifaceted transition from feudalism to a stage of civic prosperity and cooperation implied but never fully defined.²

In invoking tropes that have cultural as well as rhetorical applications, the critic can argue that metonymy is being challenged by metaphor, or, to advance a generalization amplified below, that Verona's tendencies toward tradition and continuity have met with indiscriminate impulses toward innovation. In rhetorical terms, the trope of metonymy entails the substitution of words on the basis of contiguity (as part for whole), while metaphor involves exchange according to perceived or possible resemblances.³ Broadly applied, metonymy and metaphor serve to categorize a diverse array of relations and transpositions in a culture or everyday life. In cultural contexts, metonymy is the principle of tradition, of connectedness in all its manifestations, especially as regards the structures that inform and characterize a society, while metaphor is the principle of exchange, of dissolution, and of the replacement of the customary by what is unfamiliar. The generally received view of the drama is partially valid, but only inasmuch as it foreshadows a key distinction: In the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, metonymy is evinced by a multitude of conventional perspectives and patterns of behavior, while metaphor is most clearly revealed by the lovers' assertions of independence, the profusion of tropic invention displayed by several of the characters, and frequent references to commercial and other exchanges.

The semiotic staging in this fictive Verona is one of rebellion against a dominant set of codes rather than a simple transformation from old considered as metonymy into new formulated as metaphor. Also, the confrontation is hardly a matter of a straightforward dichotomy, for example one between feudal and capitalist economies. Although the dramatist does not offer overly abundant evidence of the precise nature of the transition, there are sufficient indications that in his Verona, some segments of society are losing authority while others are acquiring it. Moreover, the existence of two sets of assumptions, corresponding to metonymy and metaphor, is clearly signaled as personages interpret and manage situations proficiently when they work within the cultural framework of which they are most definitely a part, but stumble when they stray into an alien area.

Most plainly metonymic is Friar Laurence as he represents the medieval assumptions that each word denotes one thing, and that each thing has a definite meaning or value. Virtue can indeed turn to vice by being misapplied (2.3.17), but the process by which such inversions occur is comprehensible and subject to prediction. The Friar would live in a world that always conforms to one's expectations, when evolving values and modes of perception, affecting poetry, commerce, marriage, and other spheres of human life, would seem to make the sublunary domain exempt from prediction.⁴

Similarly disadvantaged is Prince Escalus, a petty patrician lord whose authority appears superannuated. In spite of his stern demeanor in 1.1.94-101, his word is as much ignored as heeded; his real power is only gradations more than that of the influential, named families of Verona. His pronouncement that “some shall be pardon'd, and some punished” (5.3.307), does not reveal a convincing restoration of civil order in Verona, nor is there indication that such order has existed for some time. A centralized authority would have done much to locate the feud within a political space. The Prince's inefficacy is comprehensible if he is seen as more reflective of a British than an Italian context. He thus appears hindered by a conflict between manorial and monarchical forms of government. The former has slipped into impotence while the latter has not attained adequate articulation. Like Friar Laurence's, the Prince's foiled attempts to mediate a crisis betray weakened metonymy or dissolving social structures.

The houses of Montague and Capulet, on the other hand, represent and uphold inflexible values. Again, despite Shakespeare's sparing use of cultural detail, some commentary beyond mere conjecture can be offered. Both families are “alike in dignity” (Prol. 1), and their venerable lineage is manifest when Juliet expresses her horror at the prospect of slumbering in a vault “where for this many hundred years the bones / Of all my buried ancestors are packed” (4.3.40-41). Yet old Capulet is frank and business-like, his depiction differing little from that of a merchant.⁵ Also significant is the fact that the two families have “thrice disturb'd” (1.1.89) Verona's civic tranquility and can flaunt the Prince's will with impunity. In the final scene, the surviving patriarchs glibly pledge gold memorial statues, an indication that they can tap no mean reserves of wealth. Romeo has ample money to tempt Rosaline (1.1.212) and to pay a premium price for his fatal dram.⁶ Familial prosperity is also confirmed in Capulet's view of Juliet as “the hopeful lady of my earth” (1.2.15); there is in fact something of import to be inherited. Rather than remnants of a degenerate and declining aristocracy, the families represent a long-standing merchant class that has now gained real affluence and has become nearly indistinguishable from the nobility as a whole.⁷

In Romeo and Juliet, the achievement of prominence through capitalist enterprise is hardly accompanied by a relaxed or enlightened social existence. As Maurice Dobb points out in a still useful interpretation of historical contexts that retains validity when transferred to the fictive world of dramatic conflicts, “while the influence of commerce as a dissolvent of feudal relationships was considerable, merchant capital remained nevertheless in large measure a parasite on the old order, and its conscious rôle, when it had passed its adolescence, was conservative.”⁸ Accordingly, Capulet's discourse is patriarchal. He assumes that his daughter's love is an attribute of his own will (3.4.12-14), and he obtusely misapprehends her sentiments when they are at variance with his own. His eagerness to betroth Juliet to Paris, the Prince's noble kinsman, is not surprising. These families, now that elevated social standing has been attained, wish to secure it by asserting themselves as paragons of decorum and supporters of the prevalent conventions, of metonymy in short.⁹

Revelatory in this regard is the apparently marginal interchange between servants of the Capulet house in Act 1.1. The jests Sampson and Gregory trade about coal and colliers are a reminder that the growth of the coal industry was rapid during the Elizabethan period.¹⁰ An ambiance of transition is thus evoked at the very beginning of the play. And in expressing disapproval of this grimy activity, these remarks exploit the distinction between gentility and vulgarity. Amid general flux, the servants impose as authentic and prestigious the social self that is only metonymically theirs by virtue of their master's status. The allusions to coal-mining also confirm that Shakespeare's frame of cultural reference, however mediated or refracted by the endeavors of his art, is ultimately England rather than Italy.

The energy involved in this process of social leverage cannot be readily stabilized. As money was accumulated during the closing decades of the sixteenth century, traditional models of economic and social circulation, such as the guilds, were disrupted.¹¹ So along with the desire of an ascending middle class to become guardians of values and authority, numerous dislocations were inevitable, with deleterious effects on the individual's sense of security. As Karl J. Weintraub points out in qualifying Burckhardt's assertion that Renaissance man no longer conceived of himself only through social categories, “The more the power of the traditional models weakens (even if only by a growing degree of indifference), the less security a man finds in his cultural context, in his political and economic reality.”¹² Self-fashioning could thus prove an isolating and distressing as well as exhilarating process. As the restrictive yet protective confines of social metonymy receded, the individual discovered a world of uncontrolled metaphor, of unpredicted and perhaps undesirable exchanges.

Émile Durkheim's classic discussion of the causes of suicide is applicable. Durkheim argues that a rapid increase in power and fortune can be just as disorienting as a sudden decrease. If human needs are no longer satisfied in their usual fashion, and social forces are given unaccustomed liberty, the individual can no longer distinguish between what is possible or just and what is not. With greater vitality comes greater irritability, and a state of anomie or unregulated desire results.¹³

The lawlessness and normlessness associated with anomie clearly have a place in Shakespeare's Verona. As a variety of cultural metaphor, anomie is evident in a comic context as Capulet's unlettered servant is unexpectedly asked to read an invitation list (1.2.38-44). In his confusion, he comments on the disturbance of the traditional categories of labor, an event that upsets the usual ordering of needs, desires, and satisfactions.¹⁴ Relevant too is Benvolio, who seems inexplicably melancholic when he declares that he felt “one too many by my weary self” (1.1.126) on an occasion when he saw Romeo, whose emotions he judged, no doubt rightly, by his own. Benvolio's dark humor and Romeo's habit of spending hours in despondent isolation are in keeping with a cultural context in which basic supports of selfhood have disintegrated.

Anomie obviously contributes to the feud as retainers and kinsmen of the two rising families ignore the Prince's interdiction and respond to the disequilibrium of their own desires. Yet the feud involves more than anomie pure and simple and emerges as a metaphor for the discord between competing cultural tropes. In this fictive Verona, evolving values and perspectives have ruptured a social matrix that, even if it was never truly all-embracing, is suggested in the Prince's evocation of “the quiet of our streets” (1.1.89) and is implicit in Capulet's “old accustom'd feast” (1.2.20), during which the traditional harmony of host and guest is disturbed (1.5.60-91). There is in any case no single, comprehensive framework to which the drama's varied actions, characters, and speech-acts can be referred. In the midst of this confusion of signs, desires, and diverse but sharply defined behavioral codes, a new equilibrium is imperative. The unchallenged ascendancy of one of the feuding families would accomplish the self-authorization of a segment of society. The change and competition that have brought the unit to prominence—and could just as well effect its decline—would then reach a conclusion. The peace that Tybalt professes to hate (1.1.67) is ultimately flux as a continuous condition of life in Verona. The rivalry, therefore, expresses the resistance of metonymy, or the impulse toward cultural pattern, to metaphor, or the impulse toward unqualified innovation and play. Amid this transition and within the feud, the unfortunate involvement of Romeo and Juliet occurs.

Once one reads past or beneath the verbal cadenzas and dream-like encounters of the drama, it is apparent that much about the romance is gilded. Because of the enclosures of Veronese metonymy, there would have been little likelihood of the lovers' interest in each other if both had not been members of ascendant families. Social constraint also leads their relationship directly into the confinement of marriage and denies the youthful pair any opportunity for, or indeed thought of, an exploratory involvement. And it is clear that Romeo's tendencies toward melancholy and suicide are among the anomic aspects of the transition and have quite a lot to do with the tragic dénouement. As Romeo declares early in the play, he anticipates a fatal consequence that will

                                                                                                    expire the term
Of a despised life clos'd in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.

(1.4.109-11)

Such words hardly allow for optimism about a love relationship, nor does Romeo's extravagant definition of love as “a madness most discreet, / A choking gall, and a preserving sweet” (1.1.191-92). During the course of the drama, Romeo moves beyond the element of Petrarchan cliché in this definition to vivify its tropes. References to and accusations of Romeo's madness are frequent enough (for instance 1.2.53, 5.1.28-29; 5.3.67) to indicate that his aberrations exceed those of ordinary lovers. Also, his reflections on suicide (5.1.49-53) are combined with an impulsiveness that contributes to the demise of the young couple.¹⁵

Romeo's discourse is primarily that of the Renaissance courtier, and he encounters difficulties when he attempts to move outside of the semiotic world of the Elizabethan sonneteer, as events in the drama quickly require him to do. He is strongly associated with those aspects of the text that suggest that any given thing can become any other thing through metaphor, and that commercial or other transaction can exchange one item of virtually any category for another of the same or different category. A primary source of dramatic terror in the play arises from the capacity for metaphors (as in the above definition) or even casual remarks to be exchanged for reality at some point.¹⁶ Early on, Romeo is said to create “an artificial night” (1.1.138), a figure that attains tragic realization in the suicides of the two lovers. And the radiantly fantastic catalogue of the Queen Mab speech (1.4.53-94), delivered by Mercutio, the drama's most aggressive champion of the metaphoric spirit, is curiously exchanged for the morbid accumulation of dried matter in the shop of the Mantuan apothecary (5.1.42-48).¹⁷ All that now remains of the couple's romance, it seems, is the metaphoric trace subsumed in “old cakes of roses” (5.1.47).

In his quest for love, Romeo often has recourse to the rhetoric of commercial exchange, an inevitable discursive mode of the merchant class that has become a repository of Veronese culture. Rosaline, he complains, will not “ope her lap to saint-seducing gold” (1.1.212). Benvolio later offers to ease Romeo's frustration by having him view women fairer than Rosaline; for Benvolio as for Romeo, it is a question of assessing, of rating feminine beauty. In the celebrated passage (1.5.44-48) in which Juliet is compared to a “rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear” (1.5.45), the evaluative element is again stressed. Young lovers typically find each other attractive, but when does an appreciation of personal qualities begin for Romeo? Certainly not when he declares,

                                                                                                              wert thou as far
As that vast shore wash'd with the farthest sea,
I should adventure for such merchandise.

(2.2.82-84)

The material dimension of Romeo's love is further expressed as he quantifies and anticipates “the exchange of joy / That one short minute gives me in her sight” (2.6.4-5). At this moment, Romeo wants only the completion of the marriage contract: “It is enough I may but call her mine” (2.6.8). Such words depict an acquisitive view of romance, with matrimony a form of property right.

Romeo is, indeed, poorly acclimated to the rich metonymic world of human attachments. Admittedly, he often reveals (as does Juliet) a nostalgia if not an affinity for continuities, especially when he responds to his loved one's call:

It is my soul that calls upon my name.

(2.2.164)

This statement at first appears deeply metonymic, with Juliet conceived of as a crucial portion of the entity Romeo. However, it is in precisely this area of intimate liaisons that Romeo's character is most fully problematized. The conjunction of soul and material self has been unhinged, so that a detached persona is represented as speaking. And the following two lines confirm that Romeo has been scuttled, as it were, between conflicting registers of discourse:

How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears.

(2.2.165-66)

The apparent recourse to the language of emotional bonding immediately recedes into uninvolved observation and tropic play as Romeo comments on rather than participates in a love-relationship.

If the couple's involvement cannot be extricated from Verona's conflict of paradigms, of which the feud is a significant expression, it is also worth considering how the interaction of Romeo and Juliet might exemplify rather than transcend the feud. The romance, despite its idyllic aura, cannot be divorced from persistent conflicts between Montague and Capulet, male and female, father and daughter, lettered and unlettered. Juliet's entreaty to Romeo represents an impossible wish:

Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

(2.2.34-36)

Juliet desires the instant triumph of cultural metaphor over metonymy; she is unaware that within the familial oligarchy of Verona, such easy detachment of the individual self from one's position in the social order is not feasible. Romeo's words are thus broadly meaningful, and not just humorously ironic, when he proclaims, “I am proverb'd with a grandsire phrase” (1.4.37). Also, dissension is signaled by the names of the lovers; in a drama in which discussion of names is a favored pastime, it is useful to recall that “Romeo” suggests the sonorities of “Montague,” just as “Juliet” does those of “Capulet.” This apparently superficial reminder of the feud gains further significance when some key interchanges of the lovers are examined.

The couple is perhaps as united as they ever are in their opening sonnet, when a rhetorical framework provides a gentle contrapuntal movement that later sharpens into expressions of genuine difference. Regrettably, the sonnet as metaphoric exercise has become tinged with social metonymy in the Verona of the drama. It is impossible for Romeo and Juliet to realize the higher metonymy of a freely elected emotional attachment beyond the feud.

Juliet's subdued chiding—“You kiss by th'book” (1.5.109)—foreshadows other disagreements while revealing discontent with the web of formality in which the romance is entangled. Her statement—“I have no joy of this contract tonight” (2.2.117)—marks a disruption in the rather harmonious flow of dialogue between the pair as they barter emotions and promises. Also disclosed is an undertone of despair that, unfortunately, is never eliminated from their relationship. Dissonance continues on a subtle level as the lovers converse in 2.2. An especially problematic interchange takes place in 2.6 as Friar Laurence prepares to perform the sacrament of marriage:

ROMEO.
Ah, Juliet, if the measure of thy joy
Be heap'd like mine, and that thy skill be more
To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbour air, and let rich music's tongue
Unfold the imagin'd happiness that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter.
JULIET.
Conceit more rich in matter than in words
Brags of his substance, not of ornament.
They are but beggars that can count their worth,
But my true love is grown to such excess
I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth.

(2.6.24-34)

This complex passage, sonnet-like in its compression, interweaves several of the themes and conflicts of the drama. On the most obvious level, Juliet counters Romeo's fondness for Petrarchan eloquence and its metaphors with a preference for a direct, unornate discourse. Yet underlying tensions should not be overlooked. Romeo, as a participant in a culture in which repartee and rivalry are ingrained, challenges Juliet to exercise her own talents. She makes a semblance of refusing in poetically adroit language that bluntly rejects Romeo's rhetoric as inflated. Paradoxically, using commercial language as Romeo does elsewhere, Juliet denies quantification and the validity of her companion's aesthetics in pointing toward a world of feeling, of essence, beyond language. Juliet here tends toward ontology, while Romeo prefers the verbal sign and desires from Juliet an impromptu text in a sense written if not to be recorded. Romeo might seem the more thoroughly metaphorical of the two lovers, but it is he who refers to the “happiness that both receive.” At the same time, this metonymic link is deflected, “imagin'd.” In her response, the bond of Juliet's true love is hyperbolized from the outset and can only be conceived of as an “excess.” Within the context of the drama, the interchange is a contest of linguistic skill, parallel to that between Romeo and Mercutio (2.4.37-102), and witnesses a volatile psychological space. Gently or not, Juliet is in any case competing with Romeo.

These lines can be dismissed as lovers' banter only if viewed in isolation from companion passages later in the text. Most of the couple's dialogue betrays disagreement or tension over perceptions and purposes. Especially relevant is 3.5, when Romeo and Juliet conclude their sole night together by debating whether day has arrived or not. Reflecting a general concern with interpretation, Juliet argues,

It was the nightingale and not the lark
That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear.

(3.5.2-3)

Romeo agrees, but only with remarks that foreshadow and, going beyond Petrarchan hyperbole, show resistance, perhaps resentment, with regard to Juliet's “reading”:

          Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death,
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.

(3.5.17-18)

However much Romeo and Juliet may seem to be enraptured with one another, it should not be forgotten that Juliet has found herself sexually involved with her cousin's murderer, who earlier soliloquized, “O sweet Juliet, / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate” (3.1.115-16). Similarly, her anger over this homicide (3.2.73-85) and subsequent retraction (3.2.90-95) testify to real ambivalence.

The various tensions of the romance reach a tragic resolution with the deaths of the youthful pair.¹⁸ Viewed together in the abstract and within the context of the play, their suicides adhere to the paradigm of dueling. Tropologically, the deaths indicate that metonymy has been unsuccessfully challenged by metaphor as represented by the verbal performances and daring actions of the young couple. At the same time, the destruction of the new generation suggests that the traditionalist ideology lodged in the ascendant houses cannot long survive.

While it is more than obvious that one lover is dead before the other takes fatal action, Juliet would have had no motive for killing herself had it not been for Romeo's morbidity and gross misreading. Fascinated as usual with the verbal sign, Romeo made his decision to die on the basis of the news of Juliet's death (5.1.17-21), rather than in response to a verified occurrence.¹⁹ Juliet's suicide, on the other hand, can be viewed as a genuine reply to Romeo's. Even—or especially—in death, their competition continues. Because the emulative dimension of their final, implied encounter is usually overlooked, the conclusion of the drama is of doubtful significance to many readers. Juliet attempts to do Romeo one better but fails. Her clumsy dagger-death cannot match the impressive gesture of Romeo quaffing the poison, nor does her closing soliloquy (5.3.161-69) effectively rival that of her deceased husband. As elsewhere, male discourse is here ascendant. Juliet's dying eloquence ill supports comparison with the rhetorically proficient final statements uttered by Romeo and Mercutio, but she nonetheless manages to convey—“O churl” (5.3.163)—a sense of the ambivalent feelings that haunted her liaison with Romeo.

That the deaths can be regarded as part of the feud is confirmed by old Capulet when he remarks,

This dagger hath mista'en, for lo, his house
Is empty on the back of Montague,
And it mis-sheathed in my daughter's bosom.

(5.3.202-4)

Capulet, informed of the recent violence in the tomb, believes that his daughter, after reviving, has been slain in renewed feuding. Capulet is satisfied that the weapon ought to have killed someone, preferably a Montague, in whose bosom it would have been appropriately sheathed. At the same time, he subsumes Juliet's final metaphor, which is infelicitous in the context of her dying moment, into the world of paternal discourse, where it is in keeping with his own brusqueness.

The proposed gold statues have appeared to a number of readers as an improbable resolution of the feud between the two families.²⁰ Indeed, the Verona of the play has evinced throughout a culture of gentlemanly honor and perfunctory rituals, from the masked ball to Montague's remonstrance to his son's corpse:

          O thou untaught! What manners is in this,
To press before thy father to a grave?

(5.3.213-14)

An ending of feuding is thus implausible. The flippant substitution of gold statues for the lovers, besides demonstrating the donors' wealth, is only a gesture of acceptance of metaphor, a mode of cultural discourse rejected in the couple's deaths. In view of the battle waged between genders, the erection of the statues seems doubly facile:

MONT.
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.
CAP.
As rich shall Romeo's by his lady's lie.

(5.3.300-2)

It is noble of the bereaved fathers-in-law to pledge such memorials, but the competitive spirit of matching verbal or physical thrust for thrust has not been eliminated. Romeo and Juliet will be equals in remembrance as they were not in life, and all evidence of tension between genders and families will be erased. Through a material stratagem, the young pair will become serene and idealized.

The violence of the conclusion thus develops partially out of the feud. Equally meaningful as an underlying condition of the couple's demise is the conjunction of violence and love, especially sexual love, at numerous points in the drama. Such references are problematic and surpass what can be ascribed to Petrarchan clichés (as at 2.3.46-47) of Cupid's wounds. As Friar Laurence observes,

          These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume.

(2.6.9-11)

Sexual love does not emerge as a variety of healthy metonymy in this Verona. In a different society, the marital union the Friar proposes might have proven a valuable response to the intense desire Romeo and Juliet display for one another. Although his maxims often have limited application, the Friar astutely perceives that the lovers' involvement will resemble the destructive union, a kind of failed metonymy, of fire and gunpowder. Thus, the intimate contiguity of Romeo and Juliet consists only of a single encounter rather than the repetitions of a typical marriage.

The Friar's image is perhaps emblematic of the status of sexuality in Verona. The vocabularies of love and violence are tragically intertwined, and erotic intimations (as in the double-entendre, “die”) are often tied to those of bloodshed. The deflowering of a virgin is only one facet of this phenomenon: sexuality becomes almost a category of dueling in Verona. As the Nurse complains of Mercutio,

I'll take him down, and a were lustier than he is, and twenty such jacks.

(2.4.147-49)

And when Romeo says of Juliet,

Thy beauty hath made me effeminate
And in my temper soften'd valour's steel.

(3.1.116-17)

—his words are deeply ambiguous. Even his manifest admiration of Juliet's beauty is not without troubling implications:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

(2.2.15-18)

Beneath Romeo's radiant imagery is a residue of violence. Similarly disturbing is Juliet's declaration, “Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing” (2.2.183). Also, her plea to night—

Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars.

(3.2.21-22)

—envisions a virtual sparagmos for her lover.

The curious conjunction of sex and violence in Verona is a sick metonymy that no doubt arises out of the climate of the feud and is first voiced in Mercutio's prurient recommendation:

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking and you beat love down.

(1.4.27-28)²¹

Both the feud and Mercutio's exhortation of rough love can be seen as consequences of conflicting cultural tropes. As the old order disintegrates, anomie is inevitable, and violence disseminates within a poorly defined social and semiotic space. Yet these two elements, the feud and rough love, cannot be mistaken as synonyms or variants of the same phenomenon. The feud, on the one hand, enunciated most stridently by Tybalt and Paris, concretizes the resistance to change. (Yet even Tybalt does not escape the rise of metaphor as he strives to disrupt Capulet's feast and “convert to bitt'rest gall” (1.5.91) the sweetness of the lovers' initial encounter.) Sexual violence, in contrast, suggests the attack of metaphor, represented most plainly by Mercutio and then by Romeo, on metonymy or connectedness in any form. The corporeal dissolution into little stars that Juliet anticipates is an especially vivid example of the radical assault of the desire for release and innovation on even basic structures.

There is perhaps no “true ground of all these piteous woes” (5.3.179), for the feud is only a nexus of discords. Romeo and Juliet more clearly represents a state of cultural siege than the full nature of either the edifice being challenged or of the new synthesis that might replace it. Progress would certainly have been achieved if the equilibrium toward which the play seems to point should promote intimate personal relationships that reflect volition, stable yet elating sexuality, and predictable processes of exchange. The liaison of Romeo and Juliet has been found deficient, but it could only transpire between a ruptured social matrix and the chaotic play of language and values. Their deaths memorialize the power of their culture to gather and disperse passions, meanings, and allegiances.

Notes

1. Especially relevant are the comments of Harry Levin, “Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 9, and Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 69-70.

   Quotations of the text of Romeo and Juliet are from Brian Gibbons' Arden Shakespeare edition (London: Methuen, 1980).

2. For insightful discussions of sixteenth-century England and the transition from feudal to early modern society, see Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 33-220; J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth: 1558-1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 235-79; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), 37-102; and Richard Halpern, “John Skelton and the Poetics of Primitive Accumulation,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 225-29.

3. Useful commentary on the Jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy is offered by William Kerrigan, “The Ego in the English Renaissance,” in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 272-80, and Alexander Gelley, Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 46-48. Of particular value is Roman Jakobson's essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language by Jakobson and Morris Halle (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 55-82.

   For an Elizabethan view of metaphor and metonymy as pleasant but deceptive rhetorical devices, rather than as intriguing pathways of understanding or analysis, see George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 154-55 and 178-81.

4. The transition implied here echoes that analyzed by Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 32-91.

5. A similar observation is made by Gibbons, 87n.

6. The episode of the apothecary is one of the few in which Shakespeare draws upon economic references in his pretext, Arthur Brooke's narrative poem, “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet.” See ll. 2567-88 in the edition of Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957, 1: 284-363). In general, Shakespeare injects a commercial dimension into Brooke's straightforward, moralistic narrative. An appreciation of the role of financial language in the play is shown by Jill L. Levenson, “The Definition of Love: Shakespeare's Phrasing in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 34n, and Marianne Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 104-5.

7. Black, 258-59, emphasizes the augmented importance of money and financial gain in Elizabethan society. Dobb, 18-20 and 123-24, argues that the closing decades of the sixteenth century represent a key transitional period in the development of capitalism. A middle class composed of prospering merchants and others, as a result of the accumulation of wealth, could now invest in production and was no longer limited to such activities as the mere transfer of goods.

   J. A. Sharpe is deeply sceptical of the notion of a rising bourgeoisie during this period. See his Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550-1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), 176. C. G. A. Clay makes clear that the intensity of this trend is indeed subject to exaggeration, but his carefully presented evidence also reveals that at least in London, the wealth and impact of a merchant vanguard were increasing. See Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), I: 197-210; II: 76-79.

   Clay's cautious assessment indicates that behind the myth of the new Tudor middle class, there was an element of reality that could be incorporated into the muthos of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

8. Dobb, 89.

9. Lawrence Stone argues that “conspicuous consumption” was prevalent during the Elizabethan and Early Stuart eras: “It is new wealth which sets the standard of novelty, of fashion, and of opulent display, simply because wealth is not a sufficient source of honor in itself.” See The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 185.

   Frank Whigham writes of the quandary of the newly prominent individual as well as of others sensitive to the challenges of social mobility: “there arose a basic governing principle of the display of effortlessness, Castiglione's sprezzatura, designed to imply the natural or given status of one's social identity and to deny any earned character, any labor or arrival from a social elsewhere.” See Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 33.

   Both of these comments have bearing on the view that the social staging of Romeo and Juliet involves newly influential families eager to convey the impression of continuity and exemplarity.

10. As J. U. Nef observes, “Wood was the fuel of Thomas More's Utopians. Coal first steals into literature with the great Elizabethans. … Elizabeth's reign marks the beginning of an epoch in the history of British coal mining” (The Rise of the British Coal Industry [London: George Routledge, 1932], I: 14).

11. See Dobb, 124, and Sharpe, 143. Also useful are the observations of A. L. Beier in “Engine of Manufacture: The Trades of London,” in London, 1500-1700, ed. Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), 160-62.

12. “Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1975): 841. A similar point is made by Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 34-35. Also relevant are the comments of Natalie Zemon Davis in the same volume, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France,” 53 and 332n.

13. Émile Durkheim, Le Suicide (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912), 280-81. For a useful survey of perspectives on anomie before and after Durkheim, see Marco Orrù, Anomie: History and Meanings (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987). Of particular interest is the chapter “Anomy and Reason in the English Renaissance,” 64-93.

14. Durkheim, 281. For a brief and useful analysis of Durkheim's emphasis on the socially integrating function of the division of labor, see Joachim Israel, “Alienation and Anomie: A Dialectical Approach,” in Alienation and Anomie Revisited, ed. S. Giora Shoham and Anthony Grahame (Tel Aviv: Sheridan House and Ramot, 1982), 104.

15. For insightful discussion of Romeo's tendency toward self-destruction, see Marilyn Williamson, “Romeo and Death,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 129-37.

    On the relationship in general and its cultural context, Ralph Berry's view is intriguing: “The world of Romeo and Juliet, shared by Benvolio, the Montagues and Capulets, and the Prince, is a world of fixed relationships and closed assumptions. They appear as quotations, and they speak in quotations: the cliché, of which the sonnet is exemplar, is the dominant thought-form of Verona.” See The Shakespearean Metaphor: Studies in Language and Form (London: Macmillan, 1978), 40. It is more accurate, however, to describe Verona as beset by competing modalities of discourse rather than as controlled by the extreme metonymization that Berry indicates.

16. A related perspective, with emphasis on the bringing to life of Petrarchan topoi, is thoughtfully developed by Levenson, 22ff. Capulet's lament on the occasion of Juliet's apparent death (4.5.84-90) offers a perception of the disruptive force of metaphor in its broadest sense: “all things change them to the contrary” (90).

17. Mercutio and Romeo, it is evident, inhabit the same semiotic universe, but Joseph A. Porter disassociates the former from the latter: “Mercutio is essentially active and Romeo reactive or passive.” See Shakespeare's Mercutio: His History and Drama (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 1988), 103. Yet the commitment to metaphor is strong in both characters.

18. A valuable examination of the lovers' relationship, the feud, and the fatal conclusion of the drama is presented by Coppélia Kahn, “Coming of Age in Verona,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. C. R. S. Lenz, C. Greene, and C. T. Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 171-93. Yet Kahn finds the focus of intensity in the play not in opposing tropes or discourses but in “the feud as an extreme and peculiar expression of patriarchal society” (171).

19. Also, the metaphor/metonymy conflict is echoed in Romeo's failure to read correctly the signs of life that he has detected in Juliet's face as she slumbers. He discourses figuratively of her beauty with impressive agility (5.3.92-96), but he is unable to combine these signs, to make the connection that she is still alive. His interpretive powers are weak when emotional attachments are at issue.

    Gibbons' remarks, 53, on this passage are valuable.

20. See, for instance, the comments of William C. Carroll, “‘We were born to die’: Romeo and Juliet,” Comparative Drama 15 (1981): 67-69, and Edward Snow, “Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 189.

21. For a contrasting point of view, see Novy, 99-106. Novy indeed finds, 105, an “identification of sex and violence” in Verona, but she defends the idea, 100, that Romeo and Juliet somehow “establish a role-transcending private world of mutuality in love.”