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

Let's start with ii correctives to mutual misconceptions nigh Romeo and Juliet.

First of all, when Juliet asks her star-cross'd lover, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fine art yard Romeo?' she isn't, of class, asking 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 exist pedantic, 'wherefore' strictly means 'for what' or 'for which', but this means the aforementioned equally 'why' in most contexts.)

Second, 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 so-called 'balustrade scene' (Human activity 2 Scene ii), Shakespeare writes that Juliet appears at a 'window', but he doesn't mention a balcony. It would take been difficult for him to do so, since – perhaps surprisingly – Elizabethan England didn't know what a 'balcony' was.

Every bit Lois Leveen has noted, when the Jacobean travel-writer Thomas Coryat described a balustrade in 1611, he drew attending to how strange and exotic such a thing was to the English at the time. The balcony scene was almost probably the invention of Thomas Otway in 1679, when the Venice Preserv'd author tookRomeo and Juliet and moved its action to ancient Rome, retitling the playThe History and Fall of Caius Marius. Information technology was hugely popular, and, although Otway's version is largely forgotten at present, information technology did get out one lasting legacy: the idea of the 'balcony' scene.

But let's render to the first of these: the most famous line from the play, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fine art thou Romeo?' The play's well-nigh-quoted line references the feud between the 2 families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. But Juliet's question is, when we stop and consider it, more a piffling baffling. Romeo's problem isn't his first proper name, but his family name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with 'Romeo' as he is – information technology's his family that are the trouble. So why does Juliet not say, 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Montague?' Or perhaps, to make the poetry of the line slightly better, 'O Romeo Montague, wherefore fine art thou Montague?'

Solutions have been proposed to this conundrum, but none is completely satisfying. Equally John Sutherland and Cedric Watts put it in their hugely enjoyable gear up of literary essays puzzling out some of the more curious aspects of Shakespeare'south plays, Oxford Globe's Classics: Henry Five, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles, 'The most famous line in Romeo and Juliet is as well, it appears, the play's most casuistic line.'

Indeed, putting the line into its firsthand context, Act ii Scene ii, scarcely makes things clearer. It makes them worse:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy begetter and pass up thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer exist a Capulet.

Non 'I'll no longer be a Juliet': that wouldn't brand sense. But and then if that doesn't, why does 'wherefore art yard Romeo?'

Juliet goes on to confirm that information technology is the family unit name rather than the given name that is the problem:

'Tis but thy proper noun that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor human foot,
Nor arm, nor confront, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, exist another name!
What's in a proper name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweetness;
So Romeo would, were he non Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.

'Though not a Montague'; 'What's Montague?' These point out that Romeo beingness a Montague is the consequence. And yet Juliet then immediately turns dorsum to his forename, and sees that as a problem as well. After the other earth-famous lines from this scene 'What's in a proper 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 phone call'd …'

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

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

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

By this, I don't mean 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 situation, not past narrowly attacking his surname, merely by attacking the very fact that he is both Romeo the male child she loves and Romeo of the house of Montague. Both of these 'signifiers' – to follow Sutherland and Watts'southward interpretation inspired past Saussure and Lacan – refer to the youth who stands exterior her window, but she would love him just as much if he were a male child named something else. Names themselves, and the luggage they bring with them, are the trouble: hence 'wherefore art chiliad Romeo'.

Names shouldn't thing: Montague, Romeo, Capulet, Juliet. But she knows they do. Hence the plaintive lament in her line 'O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo'. If he wasn't known every bit 'Romeo Montague', or 'Romeo' for short, and belonged to some other family unit, he would nonetheless be the youth he is. And their dear would not be doomed.

Oliver Tearle is the author of The Secret Library: A Volume-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History , available at present from Michael O'Mara Books, and The Tesserae, a long poem almost the events of 2020.