This, of course, would be a reductive way of describing what Romeo does in secretly marrying a Capulet daughter. The feud not only establishes a structure of relations between men based on competition and sexual aggression, but it seems to involve a particularly debased attitude toward women. Feuding, then, is the form that male bonding takes in Verona, a bonding which seems linked to the derogation of woman.
But Romeo, from the very opening of the play, is distanced both physically and emotionally from the feud, not appearing until the combatants and his parents are leaving the stage. He is alienated not only from the feud itself, one feels, but more importantly from the idea of sexuality that underlies it.
Romeo subscribes to a different, indeed a competing view of woman—the idealizing view of the Petrarchan lover. In his melancholy, his desire for solitude, and his paradox-strewn language, Romeo identifies himself with the style of feeling and address that Renaissance culture named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, most famous for his sonnets to Laura.
By identifying his beloved as perfect and perfectly chaste, the Petrarchan lover opposes the indiscriminate erotic appetite of a Gregory or Sampson. He uses the frustrating experience of intense, unfulfilled, and usually unrequited passion to refine his modes of feeling and to enlarge his experience of self.
I am not here. His physical isolation from his parents—with whom he exchanges no words in the course of the play—further suggests his shift from traditional, clan identity to the romantic individualism prefigured by Petrarch. A more cutting irony is that the Petrarchan lover and his sensual opponent Sampson or Gregory have more in common than is first apparent. The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial.
The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display.
Even when Paris and old Capulet, discussing Juliet as prospective bride, vary the discourse to include a conception of woman as wife and mother, she remains an object of verbal and actual exchange.
In lyric poetry, the Petrarchan mistress remains a function of language alone, unheard, seen only as a collection of ideal parts, a center whose very absence promotes desire. Drama is a material medium, however. In drama, the mistress may come surrounded by relatives and an inconveniently insistent social milieu. As was noted above, Shakespeare distinguishes sharply between the social circumstances of adolescent males and females. Unlike Romeo, whose deepest emotional ties are to his gang of friends, and unlike the more mobile daughters of Shakespearean comedy who often come in pairs, Juliet lives isolated and confined, emotionally as well as physically, by her status as daughter.
Juliet, in contrast, is invited to look only where her parents tell her:. Juliet herself asks Romeo the serious questions that Elizabethan society wanted only fathers to ask.
Caught between feuding families, Romeo and Juliet desperately struggle to build a world insulated from the violence and hate, but their love is thwarted and forced toward a final confrontation with their tragic destiny. This production of "Romeo and Juliet" marks the first time in the program's 27 years that director Ron Parker has set a play in a time period other than the Renaissance. He chose the mids due to the era's social and ideological tensions and constrictions, which highlight the themes of rivalry and hatred in the story.
Removing the play from its original setting allows the audience to experience the timelessness of Shakespeare's work and to reexamine the characters in a new light. The production features original music by London composer Jay Chakravorty and a "studio theater" set that divides the audience on two sides of the stage — simulating the rivalry between the two houses. As said by Juliet in Adventures of Reading Browse all BookRags Study Guides.
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