962 shakespeare, William
something holy enough to become its own religion.
Finally, they commit suicide—the ultimate act of
rebellion against Christian patience and forbearance,
and a descent into a permanent night under cover of
which the lovers can finally escape the constraints of
time, family, and other societal constructs such as the
code of masculine honor, civic law, and the banalities
of courtly love. Death allows the lovers to achieve
a permanent union, symbolized on earth by the
erecting of statues of the lovers in pure gold, a sign
of Romeo and Juliet’s sad victory over their culture.
This is one tale of the enduring struggle between the
private will of individuals and the responsibilities and
constraints demanded by social institutions.
Anthony Perrello
Love in Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet represents the cultural ideal of
heterosexual love that is realized, shared—however
briefly—consummated, and brought to its earthly
end. The story has so shaped our modern notions
of what love should be that it is impossible to oper-
ate outside the conventions it establishes. However,
the play also explores the seriocomic excesses of
erotic love that find their genesis in the work of
the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha,
better known as Petrarch (1304–74). Petrarch is
widely known as the father of the sonnet, the tradi-
tional form for love poetry, and his influence is felt
immediately in Romeo and Juliet as the Chorus uses
a sonnet to introduce a “pair of star-crossed lovers”
(1.1.6). At the play’s outset, however, Romeo is in
love with Rosaline, not Juliet.
Romeo’s love for Rosaline is a parody of Petrar-
chism: She is cold, distant, balanced upon a pedestal,
and Romeo’s love-sick infatuation shows that he is
in love hardly with a real person but with the idea
of love itself:
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create;
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick
health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
(1.1.176–181)These hollow oxymorons (cold fire, heavy lightness)
and antitheses (feather of lead) are the hallmarks
of a trite Petrarchism and of a green lover. The fre-
quent expression “O” signifies Romeo’s pain and the
emptiness of his unfulfilled desire, but also the the-
atricality of his self-involvement. Romeo has been
languid, lovesick, and not himself. As he tells Ben-
volio, “Tut, I have lost myself, I am not here: / This
is not Romeo, he’s some other where” (1.1.197–198).
After falling in love with Juliet, though, he becomes
lively and witty, as Mercutio perceives after being
bested in a verbal battle: “Why, is this not better
now than groaning / for love? Now art thou sociable,
now art thou / Romeo, now art thou what thou art.”
(2.4.87–89). In progressing from his immature love
for Rosaline to his love for Juliet, Romeo is follow-
ing literary models established by both Petrarch and
Dante, who both show love as an artificial construct
and then move beyond that construct. In her world,
Juliet is victimized by an equally inappropriate
pairing. She seems never to have met the bloodless
Paris; she moves toward an arranged marriage and
is prompted to adopt the role of dutiful wife. But
Romeo and Juliet’s would-be lives are shattered
when they catch sight of one another at the Capulet
ball.
The notion of love at first sight is common-
place in Shakespeare, though the idea goes back to
Petrarch, who recorded the exact time, place, and
date when he first laid eyes on his love, Laura. Love
for Petrarch, Shakespeare, and a host of other writers
comes upon the lover from outside the self rather
than by an act of will. When Romeo and Juliet
first meet, they defy the conventional Petrarchan
formula, in which the male is the subject and the
woman a distant, cold, and silent object, by having
Romeo and Juliet touch hands and share a sonnet:If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender
kiss. (1.5.92–95)This love is not unattainable, nor is it an occasion for
introspection. The sonnet is resolved in a kiss. Stale,
14th-century images are here replaced by a fresh