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For freedom is this: to be with oneself in the other.
-G. W. F. Hegel
Is it e'en so? Then I defy you, stars!
-Romeo and Juliet, 5.1.241
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1592) is arguably "the preeminent document of love in the West."2 Like no other work, the play heightens our desire for a tragic love story that we still seek in many forms-in novellas, novels, films, musicals, and operas. There are familiar explanations for Shakespeare's love tragedy. Some regard Shakespeare's lovers as victims of bad timing or accidental misfortune; others maintain that Romeo and Juliet are in the throes of young love and come to ruin because of their intemperance. But because these accounts reduce the action to a particular circumstance, they do not adequately explain the myth's "universal" appeal.
The most common interpretation of the myth is that it exposes a conflict between the lovers' individual desires and the reigning demands of family, civic, and social norms in relation to which those desires are formed. In this sense, Romeo and Juliet is a paradigm of modern tragedy, which in Hegel's definition of Shakespearean drama "takes for its proper subject matter . . . the subjective inner life of the character who is not, as in classical tragedy, a purely individual embodiment of ethical powers."3 Even the familiar interpretation of the lovers' fates as a kind of Liebestod, by which "their deaths celebrate the strength and intensity of their devotion to one another," offers a version of this general conflict. 4 Because the lovers' desires cannot be reconciled to the life of the family or society from which they spring, they must extinguish themselves. Nothing vindicates a society's demands so much as the lovers' self-destruction.5
The contours of this critical paradigm have been tracked in many different ways.6 But the formal structure of this dialectical tension between the lovers' individual desires, on the one hand, and some particular form of social, familial, or civic life, on the other, remains the critical paradigm that frames our understanding of Romeo and Juliet. Feminist scholars Coppélia Kahn and Janet Adelman, as well as their critic Jonathan Goldberg, argue that the idealization of "love" in Shakespeare's play is an ideological construct (patriarchal, heterosexist, homosocial, and so forth) and...