romeo and juliet balcony scene play script

Oliver Tearle is the author of The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, available now from Michael O’Mara Books, and The Tesserae, a long poem about the events of 2020. ROMEO O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do They pray. If he wasn’t known as ‘Romeo Montague’, or ‘Romeo’ for short, and belonged to some other family, he would still be the youth he is. ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too JULIET Ay, lips that they must use in prayer. Hence the plaintive lament in her line ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo’.

Names shouldn’t matter: Montague, Romeo, Capulet, Juliet. Names themselves, and the baggage they bring with them, are the problem: hence ‘wherefore art thou Romeo’.

Instead, she is choosing to vent her sadness over the situation, not by narrowly attacking his surname, but by attacking the very fact that he is both Romeo the boy she loves and Romeo of the house of Montague.īoth of these ‘signifiers’ – to follow Sutherland and Watts’s interpretation inspired by Saussure and Lacan – refer to the youth who stands outside her window, but she would love him just as much if he were a boy named something else. She isn’t being guided by pure logic, but by emotion – conflicted emotion, love vying with regret, passion fighting with sorrow.īy this, I don’t mean she is so emotionally overwrought that she isn’t making any sense, either: we all know what she means when she says, ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo’. If we approach Juliet’s lines from a purely rational or logical perspective, they don’t make much sense: ‘wherefore art thou Romeo’ should read ‘wherefore art thou Montague’.īut she has just met and fallen head-over-heels in love for the first time, with a boy who is part of the family that is her family’s sworn enemy. I have a lot of time for Sutherland and Watts’s ‘solution’ to this puzzle.

Romeo and juliet balcony scene play script