[In the following essay, Moisan examines gender issues in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.]

That gender has a good deal to do with the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, that Romeo and Juliet derives its tragedy in no small measure from the relation between the love of the eponymous protagonists and what is expected of them, or what they expect of themselves, as a male and female in Verona, has been a thesis often and in various forms compellingly rehearsed in recent criticism of the play. To heed such criticism and teach Romeo and Juliet with an ear for what gender can tell us about the nature of its tragedy has, as Joan Ozark Holmer notes, enriched the possibilities of the play for students (“Practices” 191-92). For one thing, to do so helps students parse the tragedy in social terms, inviting them, for example, to view Romeo and Juliet not simply as male and female but as male and female in—or, to recall the pointedly anthropological title of Coppélia Kahn's influential piece, “coming of age in”—Verona. Nor is this identification of sexual identity with social prescription a mere imposition of late-twentieth-century psychosocial theory on an early modern text. Indeed, we hear this identification articulated in a celebrated instance within the play by one of Verona's two foremost social-psychological theorists, Mercutio: momentarily pleased with Romeo for acting like one of the guys, Mercutio intones in holistic and mystificatory benediction, “Now art thou sociable, now art thou / Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as / by nature” (2.4.89-91). And, of course, we hear it in an equally notorious malediction by the other, less secularly humanist social-psychological theorist, Friar Lawrence: momentarily displeased with Romeo for his reluctance to patiently accept the dilemma that Friar Lawrence himself has had a significant hand in creating, the Friar hits, as it were, below the belt, taking Romeo's behavior as evidence of not acting like one of the guys and, thus, of acting unnaturally:

Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art;
Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts [denote]
The unreasonable fury of a beast.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both […].

(3.3.109-13, bracketed word in original)

In turn, in the degree to which the action of the play seems to draw notions of identity (including sexual identity) and social expectation into a combustibly conflictual nexus, rendering it impossible, for example, for Romeo both to do what Verona expects of a man and to love Juliet in Verona, the consideration of gender offers students an interpretative alternative to the classic, Aristotelian decorums for tragic action and character against which the play had long been rather invidiously measured. To allot gender a role in what makes this tragedy tragic is to liberate our teaching of Romeo and Juliet from such narrowly generic questions as whether the play's tragic instrumentality is overly dependent on the aleatory; whether the play's protagonists are not so much tragic as pathetic victims of Fortune and poor timing, dramatic scions of—if less tragically mirthful than—Pyramus and Thisbe; and ultimately whether this play is less mature and, by implication, less satisfactory than those we associate with Shakespeare's tragic maturity, Hamlet, for example, and Shakespeare's Jacobean tragedies.

Still, though the consideration of gender provides students with a social calculus with which to delineate the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, this approach is not unproblematic. For it could be asked whether, in deposing Fortune or bad luck as the primum mobile of the tragedy, the attention to gender that has marked recent criticism of the play runs the risk of enshrining a mystificatory and reductive determinism of its own. If we accept, for example, Susan Snyder's powerful account of the powerful control of ideology and the feud over gender roles in Verona (“Ideology” 88-92) or concur with Jonathan Goldberg's argument that “what the ending of the play secures is a homosocial order” (“Open Rs” 219), are we not being asked to see Romeo and Juliet once again as victims of a controlling social order that has no place for their love or for their subjectivity as lovers and characters? In rejecting what Verona and its feud ordain for its male and female children, have Romeo and Juliet been given no choice but to die, not Fortune's fools, to paraphrase Romeo, but society's pawns?

That the answers to these questions are not uncomplicated testifies to the fact that Romeo and Juliet has long been perceived in the theater and in the classroom to have a power that transcends a paraphrase of the play's pathetic premises, a power derived at least in part, I would contend, from audiences' and students' recognition in the play of the force of desire: immanent, ineluctable, nonnegotiable, and—as the recurrent ability of the play to evoke current events and the most powerfully self-destructive impulses of adolescence demonstrates—subversive and dangerous.¹ In what follows I argue that in Romeo and Juliet gender and desire are integrally, but intricately, related and that to examine the inscriptions and prescriptions of gender in teaching Romeo and Juliet is inevitably to bring gender and desire into a tangency that highlights the irruptive force of desire and the repressive function of gender. Indeed, even as we are led to see gender as a socially constructed and ordained decorum, as a set of expectations that, to recall the mystificatory rhetoric of Mercutio's and Friar Lawrence's formulations, elides sexual identity and social behavior, placing what we are by art in apposition to what we are by nature, we are simultaneously made aware of, to recall Goldberg's word “energies” (“Open Rs” 226), forces erotic and libidinal that resist the prescriptions of gender. In fact, what may get lost in deterministic readings of the play, in the Althusserian sense of ideology as omnipresent and inescapable, is the possibility that Romeo and Juliet's love is not only a casualty of the way things are in Verona but also a danger to it.

To look at Romeo and Juliet through the lens gender provides is ultimately to invite students to consider the ambivalent relation of the play to the very structures and ideology the play would seem to represent. Exposing gender as a powerful but vulnerable patriarchal construction designed to repress or contain volatile realities, over which the structures and strictures of gender and patriarchy are ultimately powerless, the play simultaneously mystifies its own inability to explain those forces that would undermine the patriarchal order. The play persistently retreats, like Romeo in his Petrarchan oxymorons, into a discourse of conundrums: witness the paradox of civil blood making civil hands unclean with which the prologue describes life in Verona (4) and the paradoxical cohabitations and contiguities Friar Lawrence ponders in his garden—poisons and medicines in herbs, grace and rude will in humankind (2.3.23-28). Indeed, departing a bit from readings that take Romeo and Juliet's love as something opposed to, stolen from, and a casualty of the patriarchal, masculine violence metonymized in the Capulets and Montagues' feud (Gohlke; Kahn; Novy), I offer students the alternative that if we see both Romeo and Juliet's love and the violence of the feud as phenomena that, like death, are impervious to patriarchal control, then the love and the feud, though circumstantially opposed, become uncannily parallel symptoms of the imponderables at the heart of human experience from which the play derives its sense of tragedy.

For evidence of how gender is implicated in the social structure of Shakespeare's Verona, we do not, of course, have long to wait. Initiating the rich social cacophony that constitutes the opening scene of the play, the exchange between the Capulets' loyal retainers Sampson and Gregory turns the question of what it means to be “civil” in Verona into a seminar on what Robert Appelbaum has called the “ambivalent prosthetics of masculinity” (252), namely, to stand or to stir? How richly this passage serves as a paradigm for the semiotics of gender and sociability in the play! Adumbrating other exchanges between young men who seem not to have much to do with their time, the dialogue affords an inventory of all the things likely to happen when young men get together in unspecified outdoor sites in Verona, or what Benvolio later calls “the public haunt of men” (3.1.50): they pun, distinguishing themselves as males by differentiating themselves from females, and their puns veer allusively toward sexuality and violence; they play, and their play merges seamlessly with actions freighted with heavy consequences. A linguistic economy unites their sexual and martial selves into one masculine identity, making them what they are, by art as well as by nature, and enabling them at once to keep their “tool” and “naked weapon” “out” (1.1.31, 33) and to elide the boundary between sexual fantasy and “naked aggression.” Ludic and trivial, Sampson and Gregory impart some of their triviality to their masters and social superiors who follow them directly onstage in that, as Kahn has noted, the latter parody their inferiors by taking up the brawl Sampson and Gregory have helped to reignite (174 [Lenz, Greene, and Neely]). And inasmuch as the lethal feud is sustained by such lightweights as these, the feud itself, to anticipate one of Romeo's phrases, assumes a “heavy lightness” (1.1.178) and becomes one more of the oxymorons that make life in Verona what it is.

Still, one other truth about gender, or, rather, the genders, in Verona that students can hear heralded in this opening exchange—and it is a point so obvious as generally to go unnoted in criticism—is how rigidly and profoundly the sexes in Verona are segregated. Here, of course, we might say that Shakespeare takes his cue from his putative source, Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, a poetic narrative in which the protagonists exist for long stretches in relative isolation, attenuated mainly by the confessions each shares with a confidante, and surrogate parent, of the same sex—Romeo's “ghostly sire” (line 559, Munro ed.), Friar Laurence, and Juliet's Nurse (341-47, 557-60, 565-86, 619-30). Yet in translating Brooke's verse narrative into the scenic divisions of the stage, Shakespeare creates units of dramatic action that, in giving us a far more vivid sense of Verona as a living, breathing—if somewhat dysfunctional—social organism, divide that organism as much by gender as by hierarchies of rank and status. Indeed, rather like the “[t]wo households, both alike in dignity,” whose feud is the donnée of the play (prologue 1), males and females in Romeo and Juliet do not mingle much in public and, not coincidentally, when they do mingle it is in moments of chaos or some other form of social disorder. Both sexes appear, for example, in the terminal stages of the riots in acts 1 and 3 and in the turmoil that attends the carnage in the Capulets' tomb in act 5. The sexes also mingle, of course, at Capulet's masked ball, an event that, by Capulet's own description, is very much about a setting aside of rules. At the ball, such social niceties as those governing who may have a special claim to whom are suspended in favor of a more open invitational and empirical wooing process (1.2.20-33), the disruptive consequences of which need no recapitulation. And when, in quest of Romeo, Juliet's Nurse happens on a group of males hanging out, her appearance is greeted by Romeo as well as by his friends with hilarity and verbal abuse and insinuation about her likely profession (2.4.101-44). Nor is it only when a female enters a male domain that the play reaffirms this segregation by gender. When in a paroxysm of domesticity and micromanagement Capulet concerns himself with culinary details for the upcoming nuptials of his daughter and Paris, the Nurse, with a freedom of address she nowhere else displays toward Capulet, conflates slurs on his gender and social status in a single epithet of social derision, dubbing him “cot-quean” (4.4.3-8).²

And, indeed, to remind students that in contemporary performance the two sexes would have been represented onstage by actors of the same sex only sharpens their sense of the social taxonomies dividing Verona's physical space into gender-coded, homosocial realms, realms that acquire definition only when their boundaries are violated. In turn, students are quick to speculate on what else these divisions may tell us about the relations of the sexes in the play. Though students are not particularly interested in gender as an abstract concept, they are interested in the roles played by gender and desire in shaping those relations—or, rather, those nonrelations. After all, apart from Romeo and Juliet, men and women in this play seem not to have relations, at least not intimate relations; on the contrary, they glance at and away from one another along a frontier of emotional sublimation and rhetorical double-dealing. To be sure, as we saw in Sampson and Gregory's dialogue, men talk about women and sex a fair amount, though, of course, they do so punningly, as if allowing the drift of language to carry them to topics they are not supposed to discuss. And when references to women arise, one may question whether they do so from the force of desire or from the desire for argumentative force. The exchange between Gregory and Sampson unfolds less as a dialogue than as a verbal joust, in which contra Gertrude, there is less matter and more art. Their exchange is a forerunner (for duller wits) to the virtuoso competition in paronomasia we will hear later in the wild-goose chase staged by Mercutio and Romeo, their verbal jousting a part of the rhetorical educational tradition that located masculinity, as Walter Ong has argued, in verbal prowess (129-39), or what John Donne calls his “masculine perswasive force” (Elegies, “On His Mistris,” line 4). One may well cite the misogyny in the crude and sexually violent verbiage about women that segues into the crude and violent clash with employees of the Montagues. The abuse of women in this patter lies not in any emotional vehemence Sampson and Gregory display but in their detachment. The rape they envision is matched by the rhetorical rape they perpetrate in seizing on women as tropes and translating women into general categories (“weaker vessels [who] are ever thrust to the wall”), into accessories by alliteration to the Montague clan (“any man or maid of Montague's”), and lastly into metonyms for the violence Sampson will visit on the Montagues: “'Tis all one” (1.1.16, 12, 21).

This opening exchange offers but a snapshot of the emotional ethos in which Romeo and Juliet live, move, and have their being and in and against which they take their love. The exchange represents Verona as a world in which men evince their masculinity in their proclivity for divorcing sexual reference and emotion and for sublimating feelings of desire through an array of rhetorical devices. The Verona of Romeo and Juliet is a world students can savor for its remarkable emotional dishonesty, a world where efforts at displacement tend to be most successful at revealing their own strenuousness, marginalizing desire while simultaneously keeping it visible on the margins of discourse, never fully dispelling its emotional residue. Exemplary is the frequent use of puns or double meanings, which, in imbedding sexual valences among the competing possibilities, keeps these valences diffused and unacknowledged but ever present. “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! / Thou talk'st of nothing” (1.4.95-96): in halting Mercutio's revery on Queen Mab just as Mercutio has made reference to sexual copulation, Romeo's characteristically repressive intervention undoes itself with its own cleverness. Though the allusion to female genitals conveyed in the secondary sense of “nothing”—a pun into which Romeo strayed earlier in the play (1.1.182)—indicates precisely what Romeo seeks, as it were, to abort in Mercutio's monologue, the very secondary-ness of the allusion has the effect of keeping open by suggestion, indeed, italicizing, a subject Romeo wants to change. Like other instances of men's erected wit in the play, this one keeps repression and suggestions of desire in a liminal embrace.

In his rhetorical virtuosity, no one in the play is more masculine—or more liminal—than Mercutio; that is, no one invokes with greater urgency the powers of “masculine perswasive force” at once to exorcise desire, only, then, to make us feel more keenly its encroachment. We feel the repressive force of Mercutio's wit in the verbal foreplay to his lethal exchange with Tybalt. Here Mercutio deflects the sexual potential in Tybalt's remark, “Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo,” by purposefully mis-taking “consort” in its musical sense, thus turning Tybalt's derision of Mercutio and Romeo's relationship into a slur on their social standing: “Consort! what, dost thou make us minstrels?” (3.1.45, 46). In the fullest discussion to date of Mercutio and the implications of his masculinity, Joseph Porter maintains that “Mercutio's essential subtextual address is to Romeo, and it is a Mercurian summoning away from love to the fellowship of men, guarded with warnings of the consequences of not heeding” (Shakespeare's Mercutio 114). In Porter's reading, the Queen Mab speech is aimed by Mercutio at “changing the subject away from Romeo's woes” but gets “carried away” by its “oracular” self-absorption (105), careening, in the process, into that territory which, we have seen, Romeo peremptorily declares to be “nothing.” Actually, Mercutio, with Romeo's help, does a better job of changing the subject several scenes later (2.4.37-101). On the morning after the fateful night of the ball, a conversation that begins with Mercutio's taxing Romeo for his effeminizing enthrallment to love finds the two friends engaging each other in a wittier version of the sort of contestation we encountered between Gregory and Sampson. One would expect students to find this wild-goose chase of an exchange easy to resist, so dependent is its wit on the secondary and tertiary meanings of words unfamiliar in their primary sense; still, students find pleasure in the pleasure Mercutio and Romeo derive from each other and in the game of contorting each other's words to create a deconstructionist's delight, a metadiscourse that calls attention to the power of words to forge their own connections while making reference to, well, nothing—in its primary sense:

MERCUTIO.
Sure wit! Follow me this jest now, till thou hast worn out thy pump, that when the single sole of it is worn, the jest may remain, after the wearing, soly singular.
ROMEO.
O single-sol'd jest, soly singular for the singleness!

(2.4.61-66)

In an act that opened with Romeo deserting his male companions and urging his “dull earth” to “find thy centre out” in the person of Juliet (2.1.2.), the flight of the wild-goose chase is spectacularly centrifugal. And yet it is Mercutio who brings the chase back to its point of origin; having reprimanded Romeo at the outset about love, Mercutio cannot refrain from homilizing on the subject at the end, even as he seals Romeo, as we have seen, in the tribe of the sociable (2.4.88-93).

Still, is there no space in the aggressively masculine world of Verona for feminine discourse? When women are with other women what do they have to talk about, and does their discourse show the same anxieties about desire that we have heard among the males? Showing his penchant for controlling all discourse, Mercutio, of course, presumes to answer for women, or, at least, for “maids” (2.1.36). He suggests, rather parenthetically and with a touch of uncharacteristic faux delicacy, that “when they laugh alone” the thoughts, or at least the language, of maids evince the same preoccupations and inflections we have by now come to associate with males in general and with Mercutio in particular. Fantasizing about Romeo fantasizing about his beloved, Mercutio imagines Romeo sitting “under a medlar tree” (2.1.34), wishing

          his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
O, Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open[-arse], thou a pop'rin pear!

(2.1.35-38)

Now, how Mercutio would know what maids call medlars when they laugh alone we cannot say; nothing in his references to love and sexuality would suggest that he enjoys intimacy with the opposite sex. Still, and acknowledging the sexual and textual vagaries of the anal reference to which Goldberg has called attention recently (“Opens Rs” 229-30), I find no less interesting in this moment the implications of its virtuosic indirection, its blend of a double ventriloquism and preterition that gives Mercutio license to vocalize what he puts into the mouths of maids and what he has taken from and put into the mind and mouth of Romeo. This is one of the crossover moments, like the Queen Mab speech, that, at least in twentieth-century representations, have given Mercutio hints of the histrionic flamboyance and gender bending of the shaman or performance artist—witness Mercutio's over-the-top drag performance at the Capulets' ball in Baz Luhrmann's recent film.³ And yet, as we listen to Mercutio, avatar of masculinity, pretend to negotiate the private recesses of what maids say when they laugh alone and what Romeo wishes for under a medlar tree, we are also reminded at once of the frail partitions on which distinctions between genders in the play depend and of how sexuality and repression interact uneasily to maintain those partitions.

Earlier in the play, of course, we have already witnessed this unease in women's discourse with one another, in the scene in which Lady Capulet, with the Nurse at hand, conveys to Juliet Paris's proffer of matrimony (1.3). This is a scene remarkable for its centrifugal stresses and for the discomfort and fissions the proffer either reveals or causes. Least uncomfortable, it would seem, is the Nurse. While not, and not having been for some time, a maid, the Nurse is not reluctant here to refer to sexuality with an earthiness consistent with the vocabulary Mercutio attributes to maids “when they laugh alone.” But even in telling and retelling the joke about Juliet's early discourse, the Nurse can claim, modulo the addition of some anatomical embellishment from the barnyard, only to be reporting the (conveniently unverifiable) discourse of others—her deceased husband and the almost but not quite infantine Juliet:

And yet I warrant it had upon it brow
A bump as big as a young cock'rel's stone—
A perilous knock—and it cried bitterly.
‘Yea,’ quoth my husband, ‘fall'st upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest to age,
Wilt thou not, Jule?’ It stinted and said, ‘Ay.’

(1.3.52-57)

While Juliet peremptorily checks the Nurse's own efforts to insinuate sexual desire by ventriloquism—“And stint thou, too, I pray thee, Nurse, say I” (1.3.58)—Lady Capulet would rather talk about books. That is, faced with the task of saying why Juliet should be thrilled to accept Paris's offer (an offer Lady Capulet has seemed uncomfortable in delivering and Juliet uncomfortable in receiving), Lady Capulet textualizes desire, rendering passion as something akin to bookbinding, with Juliet playing the part of a book cover (87-94).

In textualizing Juliet's sexual self and repressing the vision of female sexuality the Nurse has so generously evoked, Lady Capulet writes Juliet into the Petrarchan discourse in which Romeo is so snugly encased and which, students quickly recognize, is as much about keeping lovers apart as it is about bringing them together, turning even kissing, as Juliet acutely observes in her critique of the kisses Romeo has bestowed on her at their first encounter, into something to be done “by th' book” (1.5.110). In this poetic ethos, Romeo and Juliet encounter each other initially through gendered decorums of words and movements and are retailed as disembodied collections of a limited number of body parts, their interaction an intricate exercise in metonymy and synecdoche. Indeed, noting that there is no stage direction that has Romeo remove his mask in approaching Juliet, Ronald Knowles has quipped that “if Romeo remains masked until the kiss, it means that Juliet has instantly fallen in love with a visor and a quatrain” (75).

“‘But ah,’ Desire still cries,” Philip Sidney's Astrophil ruefully observes, “‘give me some food’” (71.14). As we know, desire not only articulates its appetite but also sets about to satisfy it rather quickly in Romeo and Juliet, yielding Romeo twice the number of kisses, students find it instructive to learn, in little more than a sonnet's worth of dialogue than Sidney's Astrophil achieves in almost a thousand lines of Stella-gazing and wheedling. As Gayle Whittier has demonstrated, Romeo and Juliet, which writes itself and its protagonists into the lexicon and decorums of the Petrarchan sonnet, collapses the stasis of that poetic world into the onrushing events and “uncomfortable time” of the play's dramatic action (32-33). And even as dramatic action vies to displace poetic control, so desire threatens the decorums of gender and the social grammar of the play, voicing itself, in Juliet's plaintive apostrophes in the balcony scene, as an instrument of social disintegration: “'Tis but thy name that is my enemy; / Thou art thyself, though not a Montague” (2.2.38-39). Here students can recognize the socially disruptive force of passion in the inversion of the Petrarchan norm, as Juliet turns the conventional enumeration and idealization of the lady's parts into an exercise in material dismemberment, isolating the name Montague as an abstraction by divorcing the name from all the parts of Romeo's body with which being a Montague has nothing to do, the sexual suggestiveness of Juliet's inventory rendered audible by its abrupt detour into unspecificity: “What's Montague? It is nor hand nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, [nor any other part] / Belonging to a man” (2.2.40-42, brackets in original).

François Laroque has commented on the ways in which the language and respective positioning of Romeo and Juliet in this scene reverse and, thus, subvert gender roles in the play; with Juliet literally “on top,” Romeo “is thus spatially dominated by Juliet and this places him in an inferior, passive position” (29-30). And, indeed, this image of Romeo rendered passive by love is only amplified by the erotic violence of Juliet's prothalamic hymn to night in 3.2; here Juliet's vision of the stellification through dissection she would like Romeo to undergo “when I die,” suggests that, whatever delights may await Romeo in the stars, consummation might not be beneficial to his sublunary health (21-25).

Still, what are we asking our students to see in such images? In part, of course, these images associate desire with female desire, drawing on deep veins of contemporary misogyny to suggest that desire is dangerous because it subjects one to the voraciousness of female sexuality. Thus it could be said that in the very process of representing the subversion of gender roles, images of desire in this play bear a recuperative force and reinforce the assumptions of difference on which the notion of gender depends. In this way, the play evokes, and might seem to affiliate itself with, the social moralism and misogyny of its likely source, Brooke's poem, which in its prose epistle, “To the Reader,” offers the narrative to follow as a cautionary fable depicting “unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire [and] neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends” (lxvi) but which, in subsequently characterizing Juliet as a “wily wench” and “jennet” (717, 723), relies on the pre-fitted epithets of literary misogyny.

At the same time, however, in calling our attention to gender roles as roles, as constructions that reveal one to be what one is as much by art as by nature, the play bears an obviously subversive potential. For a reminder of that potential we can point to a recent off-Broadway production in which a quartet of male actors play male students who put on Romeo and Juliet as a diversion, in the process eliding, or exposing as fragile, the boundaries between male and female and between reality and make-believe (Marks). It is not, of course, only through such examples of late-twentieth-century gender-bending theatrical practice that students can grasp the subversively rhetorical representation of gender in Shakespeare's text. For gender repeatedly assumes a reactionary function in the play, becoming less something that one always is than something to be invoked at moments that threaten patriarchal discipline and discourse. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that ideology of gender is especially conspicuous, and figures like Capulet and Friar Lawrence are particularly paternalist and “masculinist” in their prescriptions, at those moments when rude feelings and inexorable realities irrupt to elude those prescriptions and challenge that ideology (Moisan, “‘O Any Thing’” 131-32). And, indeed, we never feel more keenly the improvisatory character of gender than when gender is applied to something that is neither male nor female, especially to the ultimate inexorable reality in the play, death. If sometimes death is accepted as something, albeit sad, that happens (3.4.4), at other times, when death frustrates patriarchal or male prerogatives, it gets personified as a male, and an obnoxious and sexually predatory one at that, and, thus, is rendered recognizable, if not manageable, by being engendered. So it is that in the remarkable “lamentations” scene we encounter death as the rapist and importunate son-in-law who has deprived Capulet of his daughter and of his right to bestow her in marriage (4.5.35-39); as the “detestable” figure who displaces Paris and leaves him feeling, among other things, “beguiled” (4.5.55-56); and later as the conquering antihero and amatory rival Romeo apostrophizes in the Capulets' tomb (5.3.87-105).

Ultimately, however, to consider the representation of gender in Romeo and Juliet and the play's tendency to invoke gender as a means of rationalizing the inexplicable and uncontrollable is to sense the difficulty the play has in explaining itself. We sense this all the more at those moments at which the play draws our attention to the conflict—so often noticed in recent criticism—between Romeo and Juliet's love, on the one hand, and what it means to be masculine in Verona, on the other. “O sweet Juliet,” Romeo declares at, perhaps, the most conspicuous of these moments (3.1.113), when Mercutio has been mortally wounded, “hurt under [Romeo's] arm” (3.1.103), “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate, / And in my temper soft'ned valor's steel” (114-15). Responding to this passage, students cannily hear in it the inflections of self-exculpation and ask whether one trait essential to being masculine in Verona is an instinct for shifting the blame to women when one's masculinity has failed one. Even more cannily, they wonder how much weight we are to assign gender as a source of tragedy in the play when, only twenty lines or so later, Romeo has come up with a more numinous, if more nebulous, entity to blame, self-pityingly declaring, “O, I am fortune's fool!” (136). Gender, that is, becomes one of a number of discourses auditioned in the search for an interpretative paradigm.

Here again, to be sure, the play could be said to absorb and put in Romeo's mouth some of the excuse mongering and finger-pointing of Shakespeare's source in Brooke, who, as if not fully sure of the generic demands of his story or of whether he is obliged to make someone or no one responsible for its “tragical matter,” has his narrator distribute blame widely to take no chances. Part moralistic censurer of wickedness and “unhonest desire,” carping at “drunken gossips,” “superstitious friars” (“To the Reader” lxvi), delusional, lustful lovers (429-32), and, as we have seen, wily wenches (717) and jennets (723), part sentimentalist and Boethian fatalist, decrying the cruel spins of Fortune's Wheel (935-46), Brooke indulges his craving for accountability in the detailed recitation of penalties Escalus metes out at the end of the poem (2985-3004).

In Shakespeare, however, the retributive desire of Escalus to affix responsibility through an assignment of penalties and pardons gets deferred, the deferral at once an indication of the play's need to explain itself and an acknowledgment that any explanation will have managed to elude the bounds of the play. Even as the play defers and diverts attention from the kind of sentencing tribunal that preoccupies Brooke, however, we must ask what it is that Shakespeare leaves onstage instead. The critic Nicholas Brooke once termed Romeo and Juliet a “spectacle of human experience” (256); what we see onstage before the Prince calls everyone off could as easily be called a spectacle of recuperation, in which the surviving patriarchs vie with each other in one last attempt to circumscribe Romeo and Juliet in death within the social decorums the lovers transgressed in life. In addition to noting the implications for Verona's future in the competitive edge to the patriarchs' rapprochement here, students find in the patriarchs' “civil” public-works plans a disquieting and repressive materialism that would transform the passionate, flesh-and-blood lovers into his-and-her statues, equally “rich” and the best of their kind in town (5.3.298-304)! Here the social order, having failed to control the passion of the lovers, would control the representation of that passion and in this way mirror the mimetic activity of the play itself. At the same time, the diversionary effect of the patriarchs' lurch toward social reconciliation offers a simulacrum of the role the social prescriptions of gender perform throughout the play. Indeed, as Escalus declares victory and withdraws, pulling everyone offstage to have “more talk of these sad things” (5.3.307), he only frames the silent space onstage as the site of the destructive “extremities” of desire, the power of which the prescriptions of gender in Romeo and Juliet serve both to conceal and to reveal.

Notes

1. See Holmer (“Practices” 192-93) and Barbara Hodgdon (“Absent Bodies” 341-45) for comments on the relation of the study and performance of Romeo and Juliet in recent years and heightened concerns over the social implications of the play.

2. In notes on this passage, both G. Blakemore Evans in the New Cambridge edition of the play and Brian Gibbons in the second Arden edition cite the doubt raised by one commentator that this line could be the Nurse's, given its insubordination. But both Evans and Gibbons defend the ascription: for Evans the remark merely bespeaks the Nurse's “privileged” and, thus, protected position in the household (167); for Gibbons the Nurse's comment is of a piece with the normal “vulgarity” of her language, while her exchange with Capulet is “wholly consistent with the presentation of the domestic affairs and manners of the Capulet household” (207).

3. Though clearly more adherent to the boundaries of gender than in Luhrmann's film, associations of Mercutio's theatrical flamboyance with complexities in his sexual representation are not inaudible in older film versions of the play. Porter cites the blending of “effeminacy” and “phallic zaniness” in the earringed John Barrymore's Mercutio in the George Cukor version (189), while both Porter (Shakespeare's Mercutio 191-92) and Jack Jorgens discern in what Jorgens calls the “mercurial showmanship” (84) of John McEnery's Mercutio in Franco Zeffirelli's film a deep and suggestively sexual attachment to Romeo.

Works Cited

Books and Articles

Appelbaum, Robert. “‘Standing to the Wall’: The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 251-72.

Brooke, Arthur. Romeus and Juliet. Ed. P. A. Daniel. London: New Shakespeare Soc., 1875.

———. Romeus and Juliet: Being the Original of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Ed. J. J. Munro, 1908. New York: AMS, 1970.

———. The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. Bullough 284-363.

Brooke, Nicholas. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies. London: Methuen, 1968.

Donne, John. The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets. Ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965.

Gohlke [Sprengnether], Madelon. “‘I Wooed Thee with My Sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms.” Lenz, Greene, and Neely 150-70.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Romeo and Juliet's Open Rs.” Queering the Renaissance. Ed. Goldberg. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 218-35.

Greene, Robert. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Ed. J. A. Lavin. London: Benn, 1969.

Hodgdon, Barbara. “Absent Bodies, Present Voices: Performance Work and the Close of Romeo and Juliet's Golden Story.” Theatre Journal 41 (1989): 341-59.

Holmer, Joan Ozark. “‘O, What Learning Is!’ Some Pedagogical Practices for Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 187-94.

Jorgens, Jack J. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977.

Kahn, Coppélia. “Coming of Age in Verona.” Modern Language Studies 8 (1977-78): 5-22. Rev. and rpt. in Lenz, Greene, and Neely 171-93; and in Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. 83-103.

Knowles, Ronald. “Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet: A Bakhtinian Reading.” Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996): 69-85.

Laroque, François. “Tradition and Subversion in Romeo and Juliet.” Halio, Romeo and Juliet: Texts 18-36.

Lenz, Carolyn Ruth Swift, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Marks, Peter. “What Light? It Is the East, and Juliet Is a Son.” Rev. of Romeo and Juliet, dir. Joe Calarco. New York Times 23 Jan. 1998: B3.

Moisan, Thomas. “‘O Any Thing, of Nothing First Create!’: Gender and Patriarchy and the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.” In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama. Ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991. 113-36.

Novy, Marianne. Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Porter, Joseph A. Shakespeare's Mercutio: His History and Drama. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

———. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Brian Gibbons. Arden Shakespeare, 2nd ser. London: Methuen, 1980.

Snyder, Susan. “Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996): 87-96.

Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet's Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 27-41.

Audiovisual Materials

Cukor, George, dir. Romeo and Juliet. Film. With Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer, and John Barrymore. MGM, 1936. Videocassette. 126 min. Available for purchase only on 1/2″ videocasette from Filmic Archives, The Cinema Center, Botsford, CT 06404-0386.

Luhrmann, Baz, dir. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Film. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, and Brian Dennehy. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1996. Col. 120 min. Available for rental and purchase on 1/2″ videocassette from local video-rental stores.

Zeffirelli, Franco, dir. Romeo and Juliet. Film. With Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, and Laurence Olivier. BHE Verona Productions/Paramount Pictures, 1968. Col. 139 min. Available for purchase only on 1/2″ videocassette from Filmic Archives, The Cinema Center, Botsford, CT 06404-0386. Possibly available for rental on 1/2″ videocassette from local video-rental stores.