Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation.

The essays in this volume eschew the theoretical ferment in contemporary Shakespeare criticism - feminism, new historicism, psychoanalysis - in an effort to reinvigorate three types of traditional literary analysis: source, myth and textual criticism. What the essays have in common is that all are steeped - some at the risk of drowning the reader - in the details of the text(s) of Shakespeare and his sources. Four of the seven contributors are professors at universities outside the United States.

Alan C. Dessen argues that the "bad" quarto Q1 "italicizes ideas and images even further developed in Q2" (110). To take one of his many relevant examples of stage directions in Q1 that do not appear in Q2, the Q1 text of 3.3 describes how Romeo "offers to stab himselfe, and Nurse snatches the dagger away," which Dessen inserts into a nexus of other references to Romeo's compromised masculinity. Jay L. Halio provides a devastating critique of the theory of memorial reconstruction as it has been misapplied to Q1, offering instead the rival hypothesis that Q1 is a revision and abridgement of Q2, mostly by the playwright himself, in order to make it short enough for a two-hour performance.

Francois Laroque traces the subversive wordplay and its consequences in the text: the scatological and the grotesque, the oxymoron or "crosse-couple," the sexual innuendo in the Nurse's speech, puns and "low-life linguistic bricolage," the feminization of Romeo, the cross-fire between rival families that leads to a collapse of the distinction between life and death in the star-crossing of the lovers. Laroque has a keen eye for how the comic order in this love tragedy slides over into misfortune and death. Jean-Marie Maguin examines how myths of the rival brothers, Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death), inform the sleep-death that Friar Laurence induces in Juliet with his potion. The foiling of the Friar's ambition makes of Romeo a failed Prince Charming and of Juliet an unrevived Sleeping Beauty. Maguin's essay is useful for tracing the development of the mythic and symbolic valences of sleep over the course of Shakespeare's career: In late plays like Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale the body of a woman (Imogen, Hermione) will again be laid to a sleep mistaken for death, only to be resurrected successfully. In by far the longest essay in this collection, Joan Ozark Holmer analyzes how the play makes original use of source works like Thomas Nashe's The Terrors of the Night. Shakespeare has Mercutio in the Queen Mab speech associate the dreams of mortals not just with small fairies, as in Nashe, but with very diminutive fairies. Holmer treats us to a mass of erudition in her exhaustive discussion of English and Welsh fairy lore, but how these minutiae in the dramatic history of diminution signal that Shakespeare "breaks new dramatic ground" (49) remains open to question, since she makes inadequate connections to the larger thematic import of dream and fairy in the play.

Two essays discuss the history and the literature of dueling in relation to the several dueling scenes in the play. Jill L. Levenson explores the weaknesses in Antonio Saviolo's moralized account, in the Practise (1595), of the difference between the Spanish and the Italian styles of fencing, the former championed by Tybalt. The elaborate code of fencing, which employs rules designed to constrain the combatants, "often mak[es] Saviola sound like Friar Laurence" (87); the code is undercut at every turn by the triumph of violence over the rules of restraint and by the ominous use of martial metaphors to characterize amorous relationships. Jerzy Limon writes in defense of Tybalt that he does not intend to kill Mercutio but instead thrusts awry when making every effort to avoid so much as scratching Romeo's sudden, third-party interposition between the two duelists. Tybalt runs from the scene because he has shamed the honor of his family. Limon rescues Tybalt's honor at the expense of treating a literary character as if he were a real person about whom the analyst is free to speculate hypothetically, but at least he refutes the critical status quo by sifting through the text and the performance history with skeptical attention.

JAMES W. STONE University of California, Berkeley