Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts (review)

Dympna Callaghan's Romeo and Juliet is an excellent addition to the Bedford Shakes-peare Series. Like the other volumes, it situates Shakespeare's work within early modern culture by accompanying the annotated text of the play with a wide-ranging selection of relevant contemporary documents. A thirty-five-page introduction provides an overview of the play and the issues it raises, and the volume includes a bibliography of primary and secondary texts. The Bedford texts are intended primarily for student use, but many of the supporting documents will be of interest to more advanced scholars.

Callaghan's introduction stresses the predominant social discourses surrounding the play. She begins with a good discussion of Petrarchism, pointing out the ways in which desire in early modern literature was conditioned by the popular sonnet genre. As social analysis, her case may be a bit overstated. There were many other discourses of eroticism in England in the 1590s; Ovidian, satirical, and bawdy poetry were popular as well. But Petrarchism powerfully informs Romeo and Juliet, and the play is a powerful critique of Petrarchist assumptions about love and desire.

Callaghan then addresses marriage customs, describing the specific conditions of marriage in early modern England and usefully differentiating them from modern ones. She examines why arranged and enforced marriages were seen as prudent and natural, and she points out the differences between Romeo and Juliet's binding but private marriage ceremony and the public function of most marriages in Elizabethan England. Callaghan rightly demonstrates that marriages were very much between families, as well as between couples, and that they had complex legal and economic consequences in addition to their religious or personal significance. That Juliet stands to inherit Capulet's estate is surely a factor in her father's feelings about her marriage (although not, oddly enough, in Romeo's feelings toward her). Callaghan uses historical examples to demonstrate that Romeo and Juliet's predicament was not an uncommon one for early modern young people, often forced to choose between their own affections and the needs and wishes of their families. More of a stretch is Callaghan's attempt to relate the conflict between Montagues and Capulets to the religious schisms and wars of post-Reformation Europe. Montague may have been the name of a Catholic recusant family in early modern England, but Montecchi is the name given to Romeo's family in most of the Italian source texts, and the play itself never suggests there is any religious element to the feud.

The documents Callaghan provides admirably illustrate the social attitudes and cultural tensions embodied in Romeo and Juliet. They are divided into six sections: Italy, Between Men, Loving and Marrying, Family Life, Friars, and Death and the Stars. Most texts are roughly contemporary with the play, although some are significantly earlier or later. Within sections, the materials are organized thematically rather than chronologically. All the material included will be of interest to serious students of early modern English culture, although some pieces, informative in themselves, have only a tenuous relationship to Romeo and Juliet.

The section on Italy opens with English traveler Fynes Moryson's brief description of Verona, which contrasts with the lack of specific information about the city in Shakespeare's play. However vague Shakespeare's representation of Italy might be, Italian culture figured prominently in sixteenth-century England, and the documents Callaghan includes amply demonstrate the paradoxical place that Italy played in the English imagination. On the one hand, there are anti-Catholic tracts and Roger Ascham's rant against Italian culture from The Schoolmaster. On the other hand, there is an excerpt from William Thomas's generally positive History of Italy. A passage from Thomas Nashe's fictional account of Italy in The Unfortunate Traveler is entertaining in its description of bandits, the plague, and jealous husbands—all clichés of Italy as seen through English eyes, although none prominent in Romeo and Juliet itself. The section ends with a text...