"What is IT Else?" Love's (Con-)Text in Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

Reading Romeo and Juliet from Jacques Derrida's perspective provides us with new insight to Shakespeare's portrayal of love. As an early tragedy, Romeo and Juliet is a study of the nature of love. Many believe that the play still follows the lead of the comedies in presenting its major theme. However, drawing upon Derrida's deconstruction of the play, we have shown that love as an idea, a word, or a nomenclature, follows the same aporetic law of the proper name in that it is split, not unified, contradictory, not lucidly meaningful. We have demonstrated the multiplicity of love's identity despite the universally unifying attributes attached to it by the individual characters inside the play. In short, this reading reveals that identity in general, and the identity of love in particular, is not fixed, that they are products of textuality.