In this week'due south Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of a foreign Shakespearean quotation

Let'south start with two correctives to common misconceptions most Romeo and Juliet.

First of all, when Juliet asks her star-cross'd lover, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou 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 aforementioned as 'why' in near contexts.)

Second, the so-called 'balcony scene' in Romeo and Juliet was unknown to Shakespeare'southward original audiences. In the stage directions for Romeo and Juliet and the and then-chosen 'balcony scene' (Deed 2 Scene two), Shakespeare writes that Juliet appears at a 'window', but he doesn't mention a balcony. It would have been difficult for him to exercise so, since – perhaps surprisingly – Elizabethan England didn't know what a 'balcony' was.

As Lois Leveen has noted, when the Jacobean travel-writer Thomas Coryat described a balustrade in 1611, he drew attending to how foreign and exotic such a affair was to the English at the time. The balcony scene was most probably the invention of Thomas Otway in 1679, when the Venice Preserv'd author tookRomeo and Juliet and moved its activeness to aboriginal Rome, retitling the playThe History and Fall of Caius Marius. Information technology was hugely popular, and, although Otway's version is largely forgotten now, it did leave 1 lasting legacy: the idea of the 'balustrade' scene.

But allow'due south return to the offset of these: the most famous line from the play, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art chiliad Romeo?' The play'south virtually-quoted line references the feud between the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot exist together. Only Juliet's question is, when we stop and consider it, more than a footling baffling. Romeo'southward problem isn't his commencement name, only his family name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with 'Romeo' every bit he is – it's his family that are the problem. So why does Juliet non say, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art k Montague?' Or peradventure, to make the poetry of the line slightly better, 'O Romeo Montague, wherefore art thou Montague?'

Solutions take been proposed to this conundrum, just none is completely satisfying. Every bit 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'southward Classics: Henry V, State of war Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles, 'The most famous line in Romeo and Juliet is besides, it appears, the play's almost illogical line.'

Indeed, putting the line into its immediate context, Human action ii Scene ii, scarcely makes things clearer. It makes them worse:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art m Romeo?
Deny thy father and turn down thy name;
Or, if one thousand wilt not, be but sworn my dear,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

Not 'I'll no longer be a Juliet': that wouldn't brand sense. But and so if that doesn't, why does 'wherefore art thou Romeo?'

Juliet goes on to confirm that information technology is the family name rather than the given proper name that is the problem:

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thousand art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor paw, nor human foot,
Nor arm, nor face up, nor any other role
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By whatever other name would odour as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dearest perfection which he owes
Without that title.

'Though not a Montague'; 'What'south Montague?' These signal out that Romeo being a Montague is the issue. And nevertheless Juliet then immediately turns back to his forename, and sees that every bit a problem likewise. Subsequently the other world-famous lines from this scene 'What'south in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet'), Juliet goes on the offensive where 'Romeo' is concerned: 'And so Romeo would, were he non Romeo call'd …'

Sutherland and Watts attempt to explicate this oddity by arguing that Juliet is drawing attention, fifty-fifty subconsciously, to the arbitrariness of signs or words and their just conventional relationship with the things they represent.

(When I used to teach linguistic communication to first-year English students, the manner I demonstrated – and got them to remember – the arbitrariness of all signs was past thinking of the English and French words for the thing with branches and leaves out in that location on the campus lawn. We may phone call it a 'tree', merely those iv letters only hateful the branchy thing considering English speakers follow the convention that 'tree' will denote the branchy affair; in France, they don't recognise that convention, instead using the v letters, 'arbre' to refer to the aforementioned object. So the human relationship between word and thing is completely 'arbre-tree' – i.e., arbitrary.)

I have a lot of time for Sutherland and Watts's 'solution' to this puzzle. If we arroyo Juliet'southward lines from a purely rational or logical perspective, they don't make much sense: 'wherefore art thou Romeo' should read 'wherefore art 1000 Montague'. Just she has just met and fallen head-over-heels in dear for the outset time, with a boy who is part of the family that is her family's sworn enemy. She isn't being guided past pure logic, but by emotion – conflicted emotion, love vying with regret, passion fighting with sorrow.

By this, I don't mean she is so emotionally overwrought that she isn't making any sense, either: nosotros all know what she means when she says, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thousand Romeo'. Instead, she is choosing to vent her sadness over the situation, not by narrowly attacking his surname, just by 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'due south interpretation inspired by Saussure and Lacan – refer to the youth who stands outside her window, but she would love him only as much if he were a boy named something else. Names themselves, and the luggage they bring with them, are the problem: hence 'wherefore 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 thou Romeo'. If he wasn't known every bit 'Romeo Montague', or 'Romeo' for curt, and belonged to some other family, he would still be the youth he is. And their honey would non be doomed.

Oliver Tearle is the author of The Hugger-mugger Library: A Book-Lovers' Journeying Through Curiosities of History , bachelor at present from Michael O'Mara Books, and The Tesserae, a long poem near the events of 2020.