Shakespeare’s “Star-Crossed Lovers”

Youth and Privacy in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>

“…In effect, as Coppélia Kahn has argued, girls in Verona are denied the adolescence that boys are allowed, in that girls have 'no sanctioned period of experiment with adult identities or activities'. 30 Juliet is to be married against her will at the age of thirteen. Juliet's age in Shakespeare's play, however, marks a startling departure from his source material: in Bandello's Giulietta e Romeo (1554) Juliet is eighteen, while in Brooke's Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Shakespeare's immediate source, she is sixteen.…”

“…As Romeo puts it, ''Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here / Where Juliet lives' (29)(30). An attempt at a loosening of the referent from its signifier is part of Romeo and Juliet's development of a youthful subjectivity: their refusal to reify names and words that carry such weight in their community contributes to the play's destabilizing of youthful identity.…”

Love Juliet... and Keep Her away from Palestine. Gendered and Orientalist Representations in Strangers

“…Resuming her notion of "precarious life" (Butler, 2004) Kahn (1977), who examined the gender roles in Shakespeare's work, accused Romeo and Juliet of perpetrating an ideal of feminine docility and subordination by presenting Juliet as a woman who is unwilling to give up to her father's wishes but is too willing to succumb to another man's will. Other critics however valued her as an intelligent, strong-willed and courageous woman who exerts control over her destiny and struggles for her autonomy in a world that is hostile to women (see, for instance, Brown's reading of the play as "Juliet's taming of Romeo", 1996).…”