What Scene and Act Is the Quote Wherefore Art Thou Romeo
In this week'due south Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the pregnant of a strange Shakespearean quotation
Let'southward start with two correctives to common misconceptions about Romeo and Juliet.
Offset of all, when Juliet asks her star-cross'd lover, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thousand Romeo?' she isn't, of course, asking him where he is. 'Wherefore' means 'why': 'the whys and the wherefores' is a tautological phrase, since whys and wherefores are the same. (If we wish to be pedantic, 'wherefore' strictly means 'for what' or 'for which', but this means the same as 'why' in about contexts.)
Second, the and then-called 'balcony scene' in Romeo and Juliet was unknown to Shakespeare's original audiences. In the stage directions for Romeo and Juliet and the so-called 'balcony scene' (Act 2 Scene two), Shakespeare writes that Juliet appears at a 'window', but he doesn't mention a balcony. It would accept been hard for him to do so, since – perhaps surprisingly – Elizabethan England didn't know what a 'balustrade' was.
As Lois Leveen has noted, when the Jacobean travel-writer Thomas Coryat described a balcony in 1611, he drew attending to how foreign and exotic such a thing was to the English at the time. The balcony scene was nigh probably the invention of Thomas Otway in 1679, when the Venice Preserv'd author tookRomeo and Juliet and moved its activity to ancient Rome, retitling the playThe History and Fall of Caius Marius. It was hugely popular, and, although Otway'southward version is largely forgotten now, it did leave ane lasting legacy: the thought of the 'balustrade' scene.
Just allow'south render to the start of these: the nigh famous line from the play, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fine art chiliad Romeo?' The play's well-nigh-quoted line references the feud between the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. But Juliet's question is, when we stop and consider it, more than a piffling baffling. Romeo'due south problem isn't his outset name, but his family unit proper name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with 'Romeo' as he is – it's his family that are the problem. So why does Juliet not say, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fine art thou Montague?' Or perchance, to make the poesy of the line slightly better, 'O Romeo Montague, wherefore art thou Montague?'
Solutions have been proposed to this conundrum, but none is completely satisfying. As John Sutherland and Cedric Watts put it in their hugely enjoyable set of literary essays puzzling out some of the more curious aspects of Shakespeare's plays, Oxford World's Classics: Henry 5, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles, 'The most famous line in Romeo and Juliet is also, it appears, the play's most illogical line.'
Indeed, putting the line into its immediate context, Human action 2 Scene ii, scarcely makes things clearer. Information technology makes them worse:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art 1000 Romeo?
Deny thy male parent and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer exist a Capulet.
Not 'I'll no longer be a Juliet': that wouldn't make sense. Merely then if that doesn't, why does 'wherefore fine art thou Romeo?'
Juliet goes on to ostend that it is the family proper noun rather than the given name that is the problem:
'Tis but thy proper noun that is my enemy;
K art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor manus, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor confront, nor any other function
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What'south in a name? that which nosotros telephone call a rose
By any other proper noun would scent as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo telephone call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that championship.
'Though not a Montague'; 'What'due south Montague?' These point out that Romeo being a Montague is the issue. And notwithstanding Juliet and so immediately turns back to his forename, and sees that as a problem too. Afterward the other world-famous lines from this scene 'What's in a proper noun? that which we call a rose / By any other proper name would smell as sweet'), Juliet goes on the offensive where 'Romeo' is concerned: 'So Romeo would, were he non Romeo call'd …'
Sutherland and Watts attempt to explain this oddity by arguing that Juliet is drawing attending, even subconsciously, to the arbitrariness of signs or words and their just conventional human relationship with the things they represent.
(When I used to teach language to first-twelvemonth English students, the way I demonstrated – and got them to remember – the arbitrariness of all signs was by thinking of the English language and French words for the thing with branches and leaves out there on the campus lawn. We may call it a 'tree', merely those 4 letters merely mean the branchy thing considering English speakers follow the convention that 'tree' will announce the branchy thing; in France, they don't recognise that convention, instead using the five letters, 'arbre' to refer to the same object. So the relationship between word and thing is completely 'arbre-tree' – i.e., capricious.)
I have a lot of fourth dimension for Sutherland and Watts's 'solution' to this puzzle. If we arroyo Juliet's lines from a purely rational or logical perspective, they don't make much sense: 'wherefore art thou Romeo' should read 'wherefore art g Montague'. Just she has just met and fallen head-over-heels in beloved for the first time, with a boy who is role of the family that is her family'southward sworn enemy. She isn't being guided by pure logic, simply past emotion – conflicted emotion, love vying with regret, passion fighting with sorrow.
Past this, I don't mean she is so emotionally overwrought that she isn't making whatever sense, either: we all know what she means when she says, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fine art yard Romeo'. Instead, she is choosing to vent her sadness over the situation, not past narrowly attacking his surname, just past attacking the very fact that he is both Romeo the boy she loves and Romeo of the house of Montague. Both of these 'signifiers' – to follow Sutherland and Watts's interpretation inspired by Saussure and Lacan – refer to the youth who stands exterior her window, but she would love him only as much if he were a boy named something else. Names themselves, and the baggage they bring with them, are the problem: hence 'wherefore fine art thou Romeo'.
Names shouldn't thing: Montague, Romeo, Capulet, Juliet. Merely she knows they do. Hence the plaintive lament in her line 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art m Romeo'. If he wasn't known as 'Romeo Montague', or 'Romeo' for short, and belonged to some other family, he would nonetheless exist the youth he is. And their love would not be doomed.
Oliver Tearle is the writer of The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History 
mitchelltherstion.blogspot.com
Source: https://interestingliterature.com/2021/05/romeo-wherefore-art-thou-romeo-quotation-meaning-analysis/
Post a Comment for "What Scene and Act Is the Quote Wherefore Art Thou Romeo"