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

Let's outset with 2 correctives to common misconceptions about Romeo and Juliet.

Beginning of all, when Juliet asks her star-cross'd lover, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art grand Romeo?' she isn't, of form, request him where he is. 'Wherefore' means 'why': 'the whys and the wherefores' is a tautological phrase, since whys and wherefores are the aforementioned. (If we wish to be pedantic, 'wherefore' strictly means 'for what' or 'for which', merely this means the same equally 'why' in most contexts.)

2nd, the and so-called 'balcony scene' in Romeo and Juliet was unknown to Shakespeare's original audiences. In the stage directions for Romeo and Juliet and the 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 do and then, 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 balcony in 1611, he drew attention to how foreign and exotic such a thing 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 activity to ancient Rome, retitling the playThe History and Fall of Caius Marius. It was hugely popular, and, although Otway's version is largely forgotten now, it did leave 1 lasting legacy: the idea of the 'balcony' scene.

But permit's return to the get-go of these: the most famous line from the play, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?' The play'south most-quoted line references the feud betwixt the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. Merely Juliet's question is, when we stop and consider information technology, more than than a little baffling. Romeo'south problem isn't his first name, but his family proper 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. Then why does Juliet not say, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Montague?' Or perchance, to make the poetry of the line slightly better, 'O Romeo Montague, wherefore fine art thou Montague?'

Solutions accept been proposed to this conundrum, but none is completely satisfying. As John Sutherland and Cedric Watts put information technology in their hugely enjoyable set of literary essays puzzling out some of the more curious aspects of Shakespeare'southward plays, Oxford World's 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 most illogical line.'

Indeed, putting the line into its immediate context, Act 2 Scene two, scarcely makes things clearer. It makes them worse:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy male parent and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, exist but sworn my beloved,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

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

Juliet goes on to confirm that it is the family proper name rather than the given name that is the trouble:

'Tis just thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor whatsoever other function
Belonging to a man. O, exist some other name!
What's in a name? that which we phone call a rose
Past whatever other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo telephone call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that championship.

'Though not a Montague'; 'What's Montague?' These signal out that Romeo being a Montague is the issue. And still Juliet then immediately turns back to his forename, and sees that as a problem too. After the other earth-famous lines from this scene 'What'due 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: 'So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd …'

Sutherland and Watts attempt to explain this oddity by arguing that Juliet is cartoon attention, even subconsciously, to the arbitrariness of signs or words and their merely conventional relationship with the things they represent.

(When I used to teach language to first-year English language students, the fashion I demonstrated – and got them to remember – the arbitrariness of all signs was past thinking of the English and French words for the affair with branches and leaves out at that place on the campus lawn. We may call it a 'tree', but those four letters only hateful the branchy thing because English speakers follow the convention that 'tree' will denote the branchy affair; in France, they don't recognise that convention, instead using the five messages, 'arbre' to refer to the same object. So the relationship betwixt give-and-take and thing is completely 'arbre-tree' – i.e., arbitrary.)

I have a lot of fourth dimension for Sutherland and Watts'south 'solution' to this puzzle. If we approach Juliet's lines from a purely rational or logical perspective, they don't make much sense: 'wherefore art chiliad Romeo' should read 'wherefore art thou Montague'. Merely she has just met and fallen caput-over-heels in love for the first time, with a male child who is part of the family that is her family's sworn enemy. She isn't being guided by pure logic, only past emotion – conflicted emotion, love vying with regret, passion fighting with sorrow.

Past this, I don't hateful she is so emotionally overwrought that she isn't making any sense, either: we all know what she means when she says, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo'. Instead, she is choosing to vent her sadness over the state of affairs, not by narrowly attacking his surname, but past 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'south interpretation inspired by Saussure and Lacan – refer to the youth who stands outside her window, but she would dear him just as much if he were a male child named something else. Names themselves, and the baggage they bring with them, are the problem: hence 'wherefore fine art thou Romeo'.

Names shouldn't matter: Montague, Romeo, Capulet, Juliet. Just she knows they do. Hence the plaintive complaining in her line 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art chiliad Romeo'. If he wasn't known equally 'Romeo Montague', or 'Romeo' for short, and belonged to some other family, he would still be the youth he is. And their love would non exist doomed.

Oliver Tearle is the author of The Surreptitious Library: A Volume-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History , available now from Michael O'Mara Books, and The Tesserae, a long verse form about the events of 2020.