UC Irvine

We thought we knew what Romeo and Juliet was all about: the conflict between the individual and society, between young love and old hate, between subjective experience and external norms. Yet these conflicts, Paul A. Kottman argues in this iconoclastic new reading of the play, have already been pushed into the background by the time the two lovers compose their first sonnet. Yes, the families are feuding, but a certain civic or constitutional order has already rendered this vendetta archaic and inconsequential, no longer able to satisfy the need for virile recognition on the part of either the older or the younger men. Yes, family feuds and social expectations divide the lovers, but these “stony limits” (2.2.67) can be overleaped, though not without cost, by any ingenious and self-directed teen equipped with a rope ladder or a smart phone. Yes, Romeo’s murder of Tybalt exiles him from Verona, but it does not condemn him to death, and the banishment invites all manner of solutions, many of them tested in other plays by Shakespeare. And yes, the death of Romeo and Juliet will ultimately reconcile the families, ratifying the choral constitutionalism already on offer in Act 1—but this communal achievement jars with our investment in the acts of the two lovers. It computes formally and generically, but not affectively; no civic gain can be worth these private losses, in part because these losses are not fully felt as such.