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Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by DYMPNA CALLAGHAN. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003, Illus. Pp. xviii + 475. $11.95 paper.
Dympna Callaghan's Romeo and Juliet is an excellent addition to the Bedford Shakespeare 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...