[Here, Farrell asserts that the intense fear of death among the characters in Romeo and Juliet reflects the breakdown of the patriarchal structure of Verona as well as its ability to inspire fantasies of immortality.]

Recent criticism has tended to depict patriarchy primarily as an authoritarian institution for the regulation of society.¹ Where Elizabethan theorists praised the system for its order, we now have difficulty seeing beyond its flagrant injustices and limitations, especially its misogyny. Yet repression is not the whole picture. What made patriarchy tolerable, even valuable, to so many Elizabethans? No one in Shakespeare's Verona, for example, openly rebels against its patriarchs. Like Romeo, Juliet blames fate that she "must love a loathed enemy" (1.5.141); she desperately tries to placate her father with "chopt-logic" (3.5.149). For all their touchiness about being thought slaves, even the servants identify with—are willing to fight for—their houses. Why would individuals consistently subordinate their own desires to the will of a patriarch?²

The answer I read from the play is that like religion, patriarchy systematized heroic fantasies of immortality. Anxiety about death pervades Romeo and Juliet. The word "death" itself shows up more often here than in any other work in the canon. In the lyrical balcony scene (2.2.53-78) no less than the ominous Prologue, love is "death-mark'd." Even before Romeo's first glimpse of Juliet, as he laments Rosaline's vow of chastity, he plays at being dead: "in that vow / Do I live dead that live to tell it now" (1.1.223-24). Even then he worries that "untimely death" will overtake him (1.4.111). This "Black and portentous" dread, I shall be arguing, dramatizes the breakdown in Verona of patriarchy's ability to control people's anxiety about death, and unconsciously anticipates the dangerous consequences of that breakdown.

Patriarchy evolved from ancient systems of social order based on heroic dominance.³ In Roman law a male child of any age "remained under the authority of his father and did not become a Roman in the full sense of the word, a paterfamilias, until the father's death. More than that, the youth's father was his natural judge and could privately sentence him to death" (Veyne, p. 27). The early Roman paterfamilias not only ruled over the family, but was priest of the family ancestor cult. In various ways this access to superhuman power persisted into the Renaissance.

Like Christianity, whose priestly fathers commonly exercised worldly as well as spiritual influence, patriarchy associated the father with the king and God: he created and validated his child's personality. As Duke Theseus formulates it to a daughter as disobedient in love as Juliet:

To you your father should be as a god;
One that compos'd your beauties; yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax,
By him imprinted, and within his power,
To leave the figure, or disfigure it.

[MND 1.1.47-51]

Ultimately the patriarch guaranteed the psychic life of all who depended upon him. The father may be invested with maternal nurturance: "Where should the frighted child hide his head, but in the bosom of his loving father?"⁴ Tasso reveals the underlying premise when he reports that he confided in his patron "not as we trust in man, but as we trust in God. It appeared to me that, so long as I was under his protection, fortune and death had no power over me" (Bradbrook 1980, p.73).

In early modern England, "in spite of all the subordination, the exploitation and the obliteration of those who were young, or feminine, or in service, everyone belonged in .. . a family group," a circle of affection, but also a likely scene of hatred (Laslett, p. 5). Patriarchal dominance was supposed to stabilize the family.

By subsuming the personalities of those dependent on him, a father or master reconciled or if need be overrode their conflicts. His strength energized the entire family and his purpose gave it meaning. In this perspective patriarchy was a means of consolidating diverse wills into one extraordinary will and generating a communal feeling—in effect, a spell—of immortality.

The potency of that spell derived from dread as well as devotion. A patriarch could annihilate as well as make men. The prince acts to rein in his "Rebellious subjects" by threatening their lives (1.1.97). Old Capulet curses the uncooperative Juliet: "hang, beg, starve, die in the streets" (3.5.192). Servants joke anxiously about the gallows. More than mere discipline is at stake here, since one who can command death may seem to transcend it. Symbolically the patriarch appropriated the role of death himself, subjecting it to human rules. By being perfectly obedient one could hope to placate if not control death. Even unconscious anxiety about a rejection akin to death must have reinforced identification with the father.

In a system such as ancient Rome's, where "famulus" or family also meant "slave" or "servant," only selfeffacement brought a share of the father's power and security. In theory, either one identified with one's master and vicariously shared his glory by lording it over inferiors, or one was dominated. Hating to be thought slaves (1.1.13) but also fearful of the executioner (5), the Capulet servants associate aggression on the master's behalf with escape from the nullity of servitude. Yet their inferiority is the creation of masters and produces volatile ambivalence in them. They summarize their situation with an ambiguity too dangerous to be consciously faced: "The quarrel is between our masters, and us their men" (19-20)—that is, not merely between houses but between masters and servants as well.

In seeking to dominate, the servants act out the submerged values of their masters. Since patriarchy is founded upon the promise of security to dependents such as women, Sampson imagines humiliating his enemy by violating his women. Likewise, he appropriates the patriarch's role as judge when he fantasizes, "I will be civil with the maids—I will cut off their heads" or maidenheads (21-23), equating rape with execution. By contrast, Romeo acts out patriarchy's benevolent generativity when he first approaches Juliet, assigning her an identity (the sun) and commanding her to arise and claim her rightful place in the order of things (2.2.3-9). These examples reflect a paradox that becomes increasingly significant the deeper we look into the play's imaginative world: that even those who seemingly oppose patriarchy internalize patriarchal values.

The marriage Old Capulet would make for his daughter helps to explain the submissiveness of dependents. By meekly wedding the paternally sanctioned Paris, making him a patriarch in his own right, Juliet would fulfill her father's will and transform herself. Lady Capulet fetishizes Paris as a book of spellbinding value that "in many's eyes doth share the glory" (91). Marrying him, Juliet too would be glorified, sharing in "all that he doth possess, / By having him, making [herself] no less" (1.3.93-94). With its connotations of worship, "glory" exactly expresses the religious assumptions underlying the patriarchal system. Compelling admiration from others, Juliet's marriage would exalt her and by extension her parents. For a dependent deference can be a means to vicarious triumph.

In Verona, however, patriarchy is under stress. The prince envisions himself protecting the city's "ancient citizens" from the turmoil of "rebellious subjects" (1.1.82, 97). A servant's spiteful taunts can provoke a full-scale brawl in the streets. At the same time romance has begun to rival patriarchy as an alternative mode of devotion and deliverance. As a result, the father's demand at least for deference, at most for total self-sacrifice, sets off a violent chain of events. Social patterns and preoccupations inherent in the patriarchal system create conflicts that make rebellion inevitable. . . .

For all their lyrical tenderness, Romeo and Juliet create their love out of the tragically conflicting materials of their own culture. In Romeo's shifting passion, for instance, the Chorus implies a struggle to inherit a father's position: "Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie, / And young affection gapes to be his heir" (2.Pro. 1-2). The lovers attempt to evade the world of the feud, yet in making love they unwittingly act out patriarchal and Christian forms. Construing love as worship, substituting the beloved for father and God, they seek apotheosis in each other.

In an imaginative world where children grow up transfixed in the aura of a protective lord or else face nullity, it is understandable that love may reproduce in a beloved the engulfing, life-giving power of godlike parents. Insofar as the polarization of power in Verona requires either continual submission or the devious homicidal assertiveness of the feud, love's mutual worship answers profound needs. For if individuals become disenchanted with absolute security and heroic aggression, as Romeo and Juliet do, they need alternative convictions to sustain them. Love is therefore counterphobic not only as any system of immortality must be, but also as a defence against the anxious demands of an ideology whose spell is no longer wholly efficacious. Mercutio makes the point in a wisecrack about play-death. Having lost Romeo after the Capulets' party, Mercutio jokes that "The ape is dead," and invokes Rosaline's "quivering thigh" to resurrect him (2.1.15-21). The jibe reduces Romeo to a mindless animal who can only "ape" autonomy in sexual arousal.

Romeo envisions Juliet as a supernatural being, a masculine "bright angel" and "winged messenger of heaven" who overmasters awestruck "mortals" so that they "fall back and gaze on him" (2.2.26-32). At the same time, as in the gender of the angel, Romeo's vision expresses the infantile wish to be chosen by, and identified with, a majestic father. His imagination finds fulfillment in the paradox of empowering self-effacement at the heart of patriarchy. The fantasy's completion comes in Romeo's dream that Juliet has awakened him from death and ordained him an emperor, the paramount patriarchal role (5.1.9).

Juliet participates in the same fantasy when she equates orgasm and immortality in her cry,

Give me my Romeo; and when I [Q4: he] shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night.

[3.2.21-24]

Like "all the world," Juliet will be subsumed as a worshipper in Romeo's apotheosis. If his transformation into stars alludes to Caesar's apotheosis as a "goodly shyning starre" in Ovid, as one editor has suggested,⁸ then Juliet is envisioning an analogue to Romeo's dream that sexual love (her kiss) can revive him from death to become an emperor. By "dying" through sexuality "are happy mothers made" (1.2.12). By the same means, reciprocally, may a woman make a youth an immortal lord. In its imagination of power this fantasy is profoundly patriarchal. Like Romeo's vision of the angel, however, this celebration of all the world absorbed in the face of heaven also suggests a worshipful infant's concentration upon the all-important, life-giving face of a parent.

The lovers' mutual worship expresses a generosity, subverted or repressed elsewhere in Verona, that balances their self-destructiveness.⁹ In their lovemaking Romeo and Juliet repeatedly fantasize that death-like self-effacement leads to apotheosis. Repudiating their own names (2.2.34-57), loving in darkness, they try to be invisible in hopes of escaping patriarchal control. They imagine innocent self-nullification that excuses their actual defiance of their fathers even as each casts the beloved in the role of life-giving lord.¹⁰ When Juliet wishes Romeo were her pet bird, a "poor prisoner" (179) whose liberty she would be "loving jealous of (181), Romeo eagerly assents. Yet Juliet declines to dominate him, protesting that "I should kill thee with much cherishing" (183).

Finally, however, the lovers' behavior is equivocal, and that doubleness makes their self-effacement perilous. Confronted by Tybalt after his secret marriage, Romeo tries to play possum, placating him. Yet his passivity allows Tybalt to use him as a screen, thrusting under his arm to kill Mercutio (3.1.103). Immediately guilt and anger overwhelm Romeo. Released, his will now turns against Juliet—"Thy beauty hath made me effeminate," he cries, "And . . . soft'ned valor's steel" (3.1.113-15)—and then, murderously, he turns against Tybalt.

In this crisis actual uncontrollable death breaks the spell of symbolic immortality, and the underlying patriarchal structure asserts itself. Defeated by Tybalt's "triumph" (122), called a "wretched boy" (130), Romeo feels overwhelmed by "black fate" (119). In reaction he tries to reassert heroic control over death by levying a death sentence on Tybalt (129). Rebelling—against the emasculating "angel" Juliet as well as the would-be master Tybalt—Romeo discharges his rage at a rival "son" and alter ego. In the complex of motives that produces the lovers' suicides this process is important. For there the part of the self that identifies with the patriarch and demands mastery finally punishes with death part of the self that for the sake of love would forgive enemies and forego worldly power in hopes of deferred rewards. The internalized father slays the weakening child.

Because the basic patriarchal structure governs even rebellion, desires for autonomy tend to call up opposite roles organized around fantasies of death and omnipotence. This split appears everywhere in Verona. When Gregory and Sampson jest about breaking the law, they promptly fantasize about slavery and execution,¹¹ and then in reaction about their slaughter of enemies. Similarly, the Juliet who would make Romeo outshine Caesar is also the paralyzed child who helplessly hears her parents wish her dead. If she cannot have Romeo, she vows, then "My grave is like to be my wedding-bed" (1.5.135). Protesting the ultimatum to marry Paris, she cries out to the friar:

. . . hide me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow [chapless] skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave,
And hide me with a dead man in his [shroud]—

[4.1.81-85]

Juliet's brave challenge masks a fantasy of punishing her own unconscious rage at her father, and guilt at her lover's murder of her kinsman. Lying with slain males like a child ("hide me .. . in his shroud") and a submissive paramour,¹² she would be magically undoing death with sexual fertility as in patriarchally conceived marriage. The idea of playing dead promises to resolve conflicts on more levels than she or the Friar realizes.

Exposed in his rebellion by the murder of Tybalt, the Romeo who would be an emperor (5.1.6-9) similarly abases himself, feeling himself put to death by the mere word "banishment" with which the friar, like a patriarchal judge, "cut'st my head off (3.3.21-23). Taunted as a slave by Tybalt (1.5.55), Romeo goes to his doom in grandiose defiance of slavery, vowing to "shake [off] the yoke of inauspicious stars / From this world-wearied flesh" (5.3.111). Death and omnipotence are two faces of the same fantasy. Their dissociation contributes to the irrational violence of the feud as well as to the lovers' "mad scenes"—Romeo's tantrum on the floor of the friar's cell and Juliet's near-hallucinatory collapse as she dispatches herself with the sleeping potion.

As it happens, we can glimpse the origins of this polarization of the self in Romeo and Juliet. Headed toward the Capulets' ball, Romeo worries about "some vile forfeit of untimely death" that may overtake him before he can redeem the "despised life clos'd in my breast" through some heroic act (1.4.106-13). His imagery implies that he has mortgaged his life and will lose it since the term will "expire" before he can pay. Punning, he fears an "untimely debt" as well as "death," one that will "forfeit" his "despised life."¹³ A sense of guilty inadequacy makes him expect the punishment of death or foreclosure.

In patriarchy, however, the child owes the godlike father a death inasmuch as he or she holds life at the father's will. In Theseus's summary of the doctrine, the child is "imprinted" by the father and is "within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure if (MND 1.1.50-51). What is more, the child owes a debt of obedience or self-effacement, in which guilty wishes for autonomy are repressed in a symbolic death. Where patriarchy splits into the roles of the father who is a judge and the son who is a warrior, the son additionally owes this conscience figure a debt of heroic glory that may have to be paid by risking his life. Such a debt produces the self-hate in Romeo's "despised life" and helps to explain his desperate reassertion of lost "valor" in the murder of Tybalt.

Juliet's behavior also reveals an underlying psychic debt. The origin of this debt surfaces in the Nurse's account of Juliet's weaning (1.3.16-57). Though physically capable, the child angrily resisted her own independence. On the previous day her first efforts at autonomy had led to a fall that brought not parental support and further self-assertion, but a queasy joke from a surrogate father—the Nurse's husband—that a woman lives to fall. "Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit." Yet Juliet's fall implies a threat of death, especially for a child whose alter ego Susan (the Nurse's daughter) is "with God" (19).

In falling Juliet gave her "brow" "a perilous knock": the same injury she imagines inflicting on herself on waking in the monument. Trapped in the suffocating family tomb—within objectified patriarchy itself—she fears being overcome by guilty rage and dashing out her brain, seat of the self and forbidden autonomy. Moreover, she would punish herself by means of a "great kinsman's bone" (4.3.53), metonymie parental force. As in the weaning anecdote, a venture toward autonomy produces in her mental life a fall toward death, then trauma.

The Nurse's husband's joke proposes a patriarchal solution to the fall toward death. A "fall backwards" into sexually submissive marriage and motherhood will rescue the child from the terrifying "fall" toward autonomy at the cost of being able—in the joke, literally—to stand on her own two feet. Juliet consents to pay a debt/death through a marriage that will at once efface and exalt her. Girls must "fall" sexually to be redeemed by a new lord and win posterity for the family and themselves, even as young males must be willing to fall in battle to win immortalizing glory.

In this imperative of self-sacrifice lies the germ of the idea of a play-death such as Juliet acts out with the friar's potion. Her fall in a death-counterfeiting sleep would appease an outraged parental judge and lead to a resurrection from the family tomb with the banished Romeo. Making Verona new in amity, Juliet would be fulfilling a patriarchal fantasy comparable to Romeo's dream of love's resurrecting him as an emperor (5.1.6-9). The play emphasizes the pervasiveness of this fantasy in Verona. Engineering Juliet's resurrection, the friar takes a god-like role, planning literally to raise her from the grave. Uniting the lovers, aspiring to atone all Verona, he parodies Capulet's marriage plans, implicitly correcting them, as if to prove himself "the best father of Verona's welfare" (Brenner, p. 52)—one more form of patriarchal rivalry.

Reconstituting patriarchal forms to serve their own desires for autonomy, the lovers never openly defy their parents. Yet with the wish for autonomy comes a veiled recognition of the suffocating claims their parents make on them. The parents' will to subsume their children's identities comes unconsciously to seem to the lovers like cannibalism. The monument that embodies her family in Verona becomes to Juliet an imprisoning mouth (4.3.33-34) and to Romeo a devouring "maw," womb, and mouth (5.3.45-47). Just as the mother becomes an expression of the father's will, and the father expresses ideologically the life-giving and potentially life-withholding generativity of the mother, so the tomb conflates the parents into one ravenous orifice.

As in Lear's fantasy of the savage who "makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite" (1.1.116-18), the threat is not merely of parental wrath or incestuous desire, but also of cannibalistic self-aggrandizement, a frantic hunger to incorporate more and more life in order to overcome death. Such aggrandizement is the more terrible for being sharply felt by the child and yet invisible. In effect, the lovers fear an infantile voracity such as a once-subsumed child, having at last come to dominate, might release against its own offspring.¹⁴ Since monuments objectify a claim to transcend annihilating time, the "hungry" tomb expresses patriarchy's deepest and most primitive drive, the drive for survival.

We need to remember that the father's claims to mastery over death are corroborated in his role as judge and even executioner. . . . [The] father is always potentially Death himself. In this respect the prince's struggle to contain the feud is a struggle—echoed in the world outside the Elizabethan theater—to reserve for a supreme patriarch the right to command death.

At its most benign this power thrillingly confirms the lord's generosity. By conspicuously sparing the child's life, the father (or monarch) makes the love between them incalculably valuable. And so in his amorous surrender to Juliet, Romeo exults, "O dear account! my life is in my foe's debt" (1.5.18). At its most terrifying, internalized by the child, such power generates intolerable insecurity, as in Romeo's dread of the hostile stars and his suicidal sense of doom.¹⁵

From this standpoint the lovers' suicides reflect the dynamics of patriarchal control. To master her fate, Juliet would play a lordly role as Cleopatra does to escape Caesar: "myself have power to die" (3.5.242). Yet unconsciously, the introjected imperatives of the parental judge can make suicide a form of execution in which an alienated conscience destroys a rebellious self, as in Juliet's vision of herself dashing out her own brain with an ancestral bone, the reified will of the father. Likewise Romeo's conscience punishes him with suicidal self-hatred. Banished for his defiance, he "[falls] upon the ground . . . / Taking the measure of an unmade grave" (3.3.69-70). Angry at Juliet for his own defiance in slaying Tybalt (3.1.113-15), he turns his anger against himself, fantasizing that his own name has murdered her (102-5). With Juliet he calls down punishment on himself as Elizabethan noblemen routinely did in speeches from the scaffold professing love for the queen: "let me be put to death. / I am content, so thou wilt have it so" (3.5.17-18). And: "Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so" (24). Ambiguously, however, Juliet is also "my soul" (25), so that this execution too is internalized.

As patriarchy's internal conflicts become intolerable, its radical connection with death threatens to surface in consciousness, most insidiously in the personification of death by parent and child. Old Capulet envisions death as a young, rivalrous inheritor who has "lain with" Juliet and usurped his control over her (4.5.36). His description of his adversary of course exactly fits Romeo. In the Capulets' monument, in turn, Romeo also conceives death as a rival: a warrior-king whose "pale flag" has not yet fully "conquered" Juliet (5.3.93-96). Then the rival becomes an "amorous . . . lean abhorred monster" who will make Juliet his "paramour." Romeo imagines Juliet sexually enslaved in the "palace" of a "monster" who is also a warrior-king.¹⁶

This fantasy projects the long-denied dark side of the patriarchal forms in which the lovers have construed each other. Romeo dissociates from himself as Death the part of him that would be made an emperor by Juliet's kiss. In this final moment of tenderness he rejects the devouring triumphalism latent in all patriarchy. He repudiates the Death that "hath suck'd the honey" of Juliet's breath. Otherwise, loving such an emperor-Romeo, Juliet would be submitting to rape like the women Sampson fancies "ever thrust to the wall" (1.1.16). Sampson identifies with patriarchal tyranny the same tyranny that Romeo at last projects upon death and vows to resist to the end of time.

Romeo then kisses his beloved to seal "a dateless bargain to engrossing death" (5.3.115). "Engrossing" readily applies to patriarchal hegemony and competitiveness. In addition, such greedy possession calls to mind not only Romeo's imagery of the self held in forfeit, but also his vision of the tomb as a "detestable maw," a "womb of death" (45). The metaphors place the young in an engulfing parental womb that should grant, not swallow, life. The womb and the sexually enslaving monster express the parents whom the lovers love and fear and also, unknowingly, hate.¹⁷ The spatial arrangement of Verona onstage reinforces this conflation since the monster holds Juliet in a "palace" that is in fact the Capulet monument and also, in the Elizabethan playhouse, the Capulets' house with its fortresslike walls (Gibbons, p. 74). Juliet's balcony and the lovers' first bedchamber are virtually present in Death's stronghold, as Juliet inadvertently warns Romeo: "the place [is] death, considering who thou art" (2.2.64). Just as Juliet has associated her lover with patriarchal stars (3.2.22) and a "gorgeous palace" (85), so she impulsively fantasizes about sexual violation by a patriarchal death such as Romeo imagines: "I'll to my wedding bed, / And death, not Romeo take my maidenhead" (137).¹⁸

Giving his own life with chivalric valor to rescue Juliet from a monster, Romeo finally plays out the warrior's debt of the son to his father. Even as he sacrifices himself in part for patriarchal values, he would "shake the yoke of inauspicious stars" (5.3.111) in a final repudiation of the fathers. It is the fatal paradox at the heart of patriarchy: that rebellion against a myth, insidiously encompassed by that myth, serves the myth. In taking his own life to defend Juliet's sexuality against the rival warrior-king Death, Romeo gives sublime new life—eschatological life—to Verona's feud.

At the close of the play, in the funerary statues the fathers decree, benevolence takes disturbing forms. Still thinking in terms of demands, Capulet vows: "This is my daughter's jointure, for no more / Can I demand." To which Montague replies: "But I can give thee more." Whereupon he boasts that he will make Juliet the golden cynosure of all true lovers: "There shall no figure at such a rate be set / As that of true and faithful Juliet" (296-304). The fathers' economic vocabulary and competition call to mind the psychic debts felt by the children, and the ominous economic term "engrossing" (115) that Romeo associates with death.¹⁹

Now that marriage and the sword have failed, the fathers would reconstitute their conviction of immortality by recreating their children as holy martyrs to love, "Poor sacrifices of our enmity!" (5.3.304). As icons the children will be fabricated into exemplary types. Yet there must be a difference between the golden statues and the poignant individuals we have seen. That difference is of course the basis of the play's critique of patriarchy. And in the end that difference also measures the dramatist's need to honor the structure of power outside the Globe Theater and no doubt in his own upbringing, while also enacting onstage—and in the sympathies the play evokes—a challenge to that power.

Audiences have often interpreted that challenge as a justification of romantic exaltation, even as various critics have taken it to legitimate the lovers' aspirations to autonomy. By contrast, at least one historian maintains that the original Globe audience would have felt obliged to condemn the play's disobedient children (Stone 1977). If we understand patriarchy as a system of beliefs evolved to control poisonous anxiety about death, however, these contradictory responses to the play appear in a new light. Seizing on a limited truth, each tries to protect the illusion of security at stake in the play, either by revaluing the social order (for example, by postulating its reform through love) or, more often, by repudiating patriarchal values on behalf of a substitute system of beliefs. Like the voices onstage, we too need to fortify ourselves against the prospect of annihilation.²⁰

Given the danger of offending an audience, especially an audience of Elizabethan patriarchs, the play does not forcibly disenchant its myths. Instead it creates conditions in which imagination might discover itself as a tissue of beliefs. Such a recognition would momentarily at least turn the imagination against itself, showing the triumphal verities onstage and off to be as compulsive and insubstantial as dreams. In such a moment of alienation the self could begin to appreciate its dependency, even (to echo Sampson and Gregory) its enslavement. In that dizzying moment, that is, lies the possibility of change and perhaps a new ground for heroic values.

Recognition that people live by strategic fictions such as patriarchy opens up everything for negotiation and therefore provides a basis for consensual relationships and, not incidentally, the artist's own creativity. Disconnected from underlying physical forces and appetites, by contrast, a cultural fiction may be a terrifying illusion, a candle lighting fools the way to dusty death. If disenchanted, Shakespeare saw, human behavior may reduce to a fierce appetite for domination and nurture tenuously held in check by ruthless strategy: in Verona a feud, or in the imagery of the history plays a struggle between a king and ravenous wolves.

Hence Shakespeare's equivocation. Like Queen Elizabeth's regime, which revived old forms such as chivalry to disguise its innovations, he survived public life in a world of homicidal religious and political rivalry by honoring venerable cultural forms while recreating them. In one sense his genius lay in devising ways of making disenchantment healthy. His own Romeo and Juliet appears simply to echo Brooke's familiar, lifeless Romeus, although in fact it functions as a sort of pun on Brooke's story, producing a new meaning. Such a quibbling imaginative stance permitted devious self-assertion in the ostensible service of deference.

Although Romeo and Juliet seems to me deeply disenchanted at its core, it dramatizes the imagination's resilience in the face of annihilation. As London and Shakespeare himself survived a devastating plague in the early 1590s (a catastrophe echoed in 5.2.8-12), so the play registers the shock of mortality to a privileged system of belief. The final lines show Verona turning blasted life into art ("never was a story of more woe" [5.3.309]), as Shakespeare himself, having sensed the darkness beyond the bright dreams of culture, would go on generating fictions that engaged that darkness, including the flagrantly dreamlike late romances. In this perspective, like the lovers striving to recreate themselves in the starry gloom, the play probes the origins of belief and creativity, reshaping its anxiously conventionalized source story as that story began to reveal the dread and aspiration which are its hidden motive energy.

Notes

¹ One justly influential study finds that many of Shakespeare's plays "reveal the high cost of patriarchal values; the men who uphold them atrophy, and the women, whether resistant or acquiescent, die." See The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn R. S. Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 5-6. Also see Kahn, Man's Estate, pp. 82-104. Peter Erickson's Patriarchal Structures is also primarily concerned with the representation of gender and its political implications. More disposed to see patriarchy as a comprehensive social system is Marianne L. Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), esp. chap. 3. Debora Shuger ("Reflections of the Father") persuasively complicates the prevailing stereotypes of the coercive patriarch.

² Cf. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, The Woman's Part: "Although women may strive to resist or correct the perversions of patriarchy, they do not succeed in altering that order nor do they withdraw their allegiance from it" (p. 6).

³ "At the beginning of the world," Machiavelli theorized in the Discourses, "the inhabitants were few in number, and lived for a time dispersed like beasts. As the human race increased, the necessity for uniting themselves for defence made itself felt; the better to attain this object, they chose the strongest and most courageous from amongst themselves and placed him at their head, promising to obey him" (Schochet, Patriarchalism, p. 29). Schochet surveys patriarchal political theory in the Tudor period, pp.37-53.

⁴ Richard Hooker, The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. John Keeble, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1888; reprint, New York, 1970), 3: 652 (cited in Shuger, "Reflections of the Father")

⁸ See Brian Gibbon's Arden edition of the play, p. 170n. The allusion to orgasmic dying could be strengthened even further by recalling the Lord's promise to Abraham that his immortality would be in infinite progeny: "Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be" (Gen. 15.5).

⁹ Edward A. Snow discriminates two distinct modes of desire in the lovers, "exquisitely fitted to each other, but rarely meeting in the same phenomenological universe" (p. 178). Where Juliet "experiences genesis and gestation, Romeo is haunted by a sense of emptiness and unreality." His love "remains to some extent an attempt to escape from a reality he finds oppressive." See "Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet," in Erickson and Kahn, Shakespeare's "Rough Magic," p. 179.

¹⁰ Juliet's invocation of Phaeton suggests an unconscious appreciation of the perils of the lovers' usurpation of patriarchal reins (3.2.1-4).

¹¹ Since a slave must at least pretend to replace his own extirpated will with his master's, slavery can be seen as a form of playing dead in order to survive. I examine the servants' behavior in Shakespeare's Creation, pp. 120-21.

¹² Cf. Juliet's "O'ercovered" and "your daughter cover'd with a Barbary horse" in Othello (1.1.111).

¹³ Romeo has mortgaged his life to "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars," and the stars themselves are associated with fathers, as Harold C. Goddard says in The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),1:119. Cf. the indebtedness to a father associated with mourning in, e.g., Twelfth Night and Love's Labors Lost. Erickson notes Prince Hal's sense of guilt toward paternal figures (Patriarchal Structures, p. 46), and directly links Henry V to Hamlet in their common dilemma of indebtedness to fathers (pp. 63-72).

¹⁴ I am assuming that the child has perceived the mother's own identification with the father, although in the earliest years of life the mother must have been experienced as the omnipotent and subsuming force. In an adult's unconscious, in varying ways and degrees, father and mother seem likely to have been fused. In a relevant historical context John Demos provides a useful assessment of infantile fantasies about the mother. See Entertaining Satan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 200-206.

¹⁵ "Romeo tends to hypostatize feelings. . . . When he does imagine himself in the world rather than 'looking on' [1.4.38], it is usually by picturing himself as an object in space that is 'moved' by external forces. . . . [His] favorite metaphor is the sea-journey, with himself more often the ship than the pilot" (Snow, "Language and Sexual Difference," p. 171).

¹⁶ "When Shakespeare makes Romeo wonder whether death keeps Juliet as his paramour .. . his words are a variation on a common notion" (Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 77). The "monster" Death is based on conventional imagery of the skeleton (pp. 72-77). In the play as well as in the social world from which it derives, however, that imagery is also profoundly patriarchal.

¹⁷ A fourteenth-century English poem, "Death and Life," makes Death a devouring woman with "a marvelous mouth full of long tushes, / & the neb of her nose to her navell hanged" (quoted in Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 29). "Tushes" evoke the boaras-death in Venus and Adonis. The condensation of family relationships in Romeo's fantasy about death prefigures the patterns of incest and intimate strife that shadow the major tragedies and the late romances. The Capulets' monument laden with the bodies of slain suitors may anticipate the opening of Pericles, for example, where the palace of the incestuous tyrant Antiochus displays the severed heads of suitors who have failed to release his daughter from his thrall by answering a riddle about a devouring monster.

¹⁸ Cf. also Juliet's vision of lying "o'ercovered" by dead men in a charnel house (4.1.85).

¹⁹ Their own aggression exposed, the fathers behave like patriarchal sons insofar as they compulsively imagine a debt of mourning—cf. Chapters 3 and 4—that their gold statues can pay or expiate.

²⁰ The criticism of Romeo and Juliet readily reveals the compulsion to console for death. In Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981) Marjorie Garber vows that "although Juliet will die young, her experiences with love, sex, pain, and loss are enough for a lifetime of adulthood" (p. 37). Cf. this Tennysonian straw ("it is better to have lived and loved than not to have lived at all") with John Lawlor's wishful encomium .. . : "It is essential . . . that we see [Romeo] grow .. . to a final maturity which outsoars all else in the play" (p. 133). Even Coppélia Kahn tries to give the lovers' force of will a quasireligious vitality: "their love-death is not merely fated; it is willed. It is the lovers' triumphant assertion over the impoverished and destructive world that has kept them apart" (Kahn, Man's Estate, p. 103).