Shakespeare’s “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” doesn’t actually make any sense.
(One quick point of confusion: “Wherefore” in Shakespeare’s time means “Why”, not “Where?” In modern terms, it might be translated as “Romeo, Romeo, why you gotta be Romeo, yo?”)
But think a bit more about the context of her lament: Juliet’s upset that her crush, Romeo, comes from an enemy family, the Montagues. But why would she be upset that he’s named Romeo? Juliet’s problem with the “Romeo Montague” name isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the “Romeo” part, it’s clearly the Montague!
I pointed this out before multiple times and as far as I know nobody has proffered a convincing explanation.
If you agree with my analysis, there are several interesting points:
There is a common misconception: the meaning of “wherefore”
Given that, there’s also common knowledge that this is a common misconception
After the misconception is fixed and people knew what Shakespeare was talking about “why”, it STILL doesn’t make sense
Very few people appear to notice that it doesn’t make sense.
I believe points 2-4 are not unrelated to each other! I think a lot of people subconsciously go through this process:
Dumb people think that line in Shakespeare’s dialogue doesn’t make sense
I do not wish to be dumb
Therefore I believe that line in Shakespeake’s dialogue makes sense.
I think the generalization of this phenemenon is a gaping hole in intellectual spaces. At least, if you care about truth-seeking! Just because a position is commonly held by stupid people doesn’t mean it’s false! Further, just because stupid people believe bad reason X for Y doesn’t mean you ought to turn off your brain in independently evaluating whether Y is true!
Put another way, people should have much higher affordance to “dare to be stupid.”
Counter-evidence: I first read and watched the play in Hungarian translation, where there is no confusion about “wherefore” and “why”. It still hasn’t occurred to me that the line doesn’t make sense, and I’ve never heard anyone else in Hungary pointing this out either.
I also think you are too literal-minded in your interpretation of the line, I always understood it to mean “oh Romeo, why are you who you are?” which makes perfect sense.
This is a common response, but I don’t think it makes sense if you read the rest of the soliloquy, much of which is specifically about meditating on the nature of names (“a rose by any other name smells just as sweet”)
I strongly agree with the general sentiment of ‘don’t be afraid to say something you think is true, even if you are worried it might seem stupid’. Having said that:
I don’t agree with your analysis of the line. She’s not upset that he’s named Romeo. She is asking “Why does Romeo (the man I have fallen in love with) have to be the same person as Romeo (the son of Lord Montague with whom my family has a feud)?”. The next line is ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name’ which I think makes this interpretation pretty clear (ie. if only you told me you were not Romeo, the son of Lord Montague, then things would be ok). The line seems like a perfectly fine (albeit poetic and archaic) way to express this.
This works with your modern translation (“Romeo, why you gotta be Romeo?”). Imagine an actor delivering that line and emphasising the ‘you’ (‘Romeo, why do you have to be Romeo?’) and I think it makes sense. Given the context and delivery, it feels clear that it should be interpreted as ‘Romeo (man I’ve just met) why do you have to be Romeo (Montague)?’. It seems unfair to declare that the line taken out of context doesn’t make sense just because she doesn’t explicitly mention that her issue is with his family name. Especially when the very next line (and indeed the whole rest of the play) clarifies that the issue is with his family.
Sure, the line is poetic and archaic and relies on context, which makes it less clear. But these things are to be expected reading Shakespeare!
Juliet thinks that dropping “Capulet” is the same action as Romeo renouncing his name. At the simplest level we can make the inference that when she says “refuse thy name”, she’s taking “Romeo Montague” as a complete package, or in other words saying he should change his whole name in one go, to adopt an entirely new identity. It’s a bit subtle, but the idea of a first name that is “yours” and a last name that is “your family’s” is a fairly modern one. It was not so long ago that your “first name” was your “given name”, a name given to you by your family (probably the patriarch). So it’s quite natural in that sense to see “Romeo Montague” as a whole package identity (“Romeo, the son of the family Montague”), whereas for us “Romeo” the personal identifier is separate from “Montague” the family identifier. For an example of familial name-giving used as a joke, you can look at a novel like Tristram Shandy, although that was published much later.
Note: this is not a universal historical tradition, and actually names are very messy things whose use and form changed a lot even in one country throughout history. For example, you could have a patronymic i.e. “Romeo, son of Leo”, which in English can be seen in last names like “Johnson” or “MacDonald”. Then you have names that correspond to occupations i.e. “Harry Potter”, “John Smith”. You can also have location based names like “John of York” or “Leonardo Da Vinci”. The family last name and given name thing solidifies during the mediaeval period around 1400, according to wikipedia. And of course having the given name system makes a lot of sense in a story about the power of families. For a Shakespeare play where the naming conventions are different, see Timon of Athens or Julius Caesar.
If I had to rationalise what “doffing” his name would imply as a concrete course of action, the implied action here would be to and run away with her, to start a new life somewhere else. You can’t really change your name in Verona and just cut your family off, not when your family is powerful and you yourself are well known as a quasi-public figure.
After Romeo is banished for killing Tybalt, Friar Laurence comes up with the same basic idea of changing their names and running away to start a new life, as circumstances have forced their hand:
And hither shall he come: and he and I
Will watch thy waking, and that very night
Shall Romeo bear thee hence to Mantua.
I don’t have much quarrel with the idea that some of “the classics” can be dumb, this is just my gloss on the closest authorial meaning.
I don’t know how to make progress on this dialectic. I think you’re obviously wrong, and either “Shakespeare wanting to sacrifice reasonableness for a better sound in that line” or “Juliet was supposed to be going a little bit crazy in that scene” are more reasonable hypotheses than a galaxy-brained take that the whole soliloquy actually makes sense on a literal level. You think I’m obviously wrong. I don’t know if there’s enough textual evidence to differentiate our hypotheses given that what I think of as overwhelming evidence for my position you somehow are updating in the opposite direction of, and think I’m being unreasonable for not seeing your side. The question also doesn’t matter.
The only real piece of empirical evidence I can imagine updating people here is historical evidence, actors’ instructions, etc, which I doubt we have access to. I’d love there to be a good answer to this conundrum, but I don’t see it. So I think I’m tapping out.
Hey, I’m not the original commenter that you were replying to, sorry. For what its worth I do think “Romeo” sounds better than “Montague” in that line.
I think that reading the whole soliloquy makes my reading clearer and your reading less plausible. I can maybe see that if you:
Ignored the whole context of the rest of the play
Ignored the lines in the soliloquy which specifically mention the family names
Ignored the fact that there is a convention in English to refer to people by their first names and leave their family name implicit
Then maybe you would come to the conclusion that Juliet has an objection to specifically Romeo’s first name and not the fact that his name more generally links him to his family. But if you don’t ignore those things, it seems clear to me that Juliet is lamenting the fact that the man she loves has a name (‘Romeo Montague’) which links him to a family who she is not allowed to love.
Wait, wherefore is probably better translated as “for what reason” than “why”. But this makes it much more sensible! Romeo Romeo, what makes you Romeo? Not your damn last name, that’s for sure!
I was taught in High School she’s lamenting the suffix “o”. Rome-o, Benvoli-o, Mercuti-o, while her clan all have names that end with “t”. Cuplet, Juliet, Tybalt. As in, “why aren’t you named Romus? Then we could be together”
I don’t buy it personally. But I assume there’s a wealth of Shakespearean scholarship that has investigated this to a deeper level than you or I care to.
In a modern teen drama, if Juliet said “Romeo, let us run away together and change our names. We can be Marco and Bianca, and be happy, just you and I,” would you be confused that they weren’t changing their last names?
Shakespeare’s “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” doesn’t actually make any sense.
(One quick point of confusion: “Wherefore” in Shakespeare’s time means “Why”, not “Where?” In modern terms, it might be translated as “Romeo, Romeo, why you gotta be Romeo, yo?”)
But think a bit more about the context of her lament: Juliet’s upset that her crush, Romeo, comes from an enemy family, the Montagues. But why would she be upset that he’s named Romeo? Juliet’s problem with the “Romeo Montague” name isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the “Romeo” part, it’s clearly the Montague!
I pointed this out before multiple times and as far as I know nobody has proffered a convincing explanation.
If you agree with my analysis, there are several interesting points:
There is a common misconception: the meaning of “wherefore”
Given that, there’s also common knowledge that this is a common misconception
After the misconception is fixed and people knew what Shakespeare was talking about “why”, it STILL doesn’t make sense
Very few people appear to notice that it doesn’t make sense.
I believe points 2-4 are not unrelated to each other! I think a lot of people subconsciously go through this process:
Dumb people think that line in Shakespeare’s dialogue doesn’t make sense
I do not wish to be dumb
Therefore I believe that line in Shakespeake’s dialogue makes sense.
I think the generalization of this phenemenon is a gaping hole in intellectual spaces. At least, if you care about truth-seeking! Just because a position is commonly held by stupid people doesn’t mean it’s false! Further, just because stupid people believe bad reason X for Y doesn’t mean you ought to turn off your brain in independently evaluating whether Y is true!
Put another way, people should have much higher affordance to “dare to be stupid.”
Counter-evidence: I first read and watched the play in Hungarian translation, where there is no confusion about “wherefore” and “why”. It still hasn’t occurred to me that the line doesn’t make sense, and I’ve never heard anyone else in Hungary pointing this out either.
I also think you are too literal-minded in your interpretation of the line, I always understood it to mean “oh Romeo, why are you who you are?” which makes perfect sense.
This is a common response, but I don’t think it makes sense if you read the rest of the soliloquy, much of which is specifically about meditating on the nature of names (“a rose by any other name smells just as sweet”)
I strongly agree with the general sentiment of ‘don’t be afraid to say something you think is true, even if you are worried it might seem stupid’. Having said that:
I don’t agree with your analysis of the line. She’s not upset that he’s named Romeo. She is asking “Why does Romeo (the man I have fallen in love with) have to be the same person as Romeo (the son of Lord Montague with whom my family has a feud)?”. The next line is ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name’ which I think makes this interpretation pretty clear (ie. if only you told me you were not Romeo, the son of Lord Montague, then things would be ok). The line seems like a perfectly fine (albeit poetic and archaic) way to express this.
This works with your modern translation (“Romeo, why you gotta be Romeo?”). Imagine an actor delivering that line and emphasising the ‘you’ (‘Romeo, why do you have to be Romeo?’) and I think it makes sense. Given the context and delivery, it feels clear that it should be interpreted as ‘Romeo (man I’ve just met) why do you have to be Romeo (Montague)?’. It seems unfair to declare that the line taken out of context doesn’t make sense just because she doesn’t explicitly mention that her issue is with his family name. Especially when the very next line (and indeed the whole rest of the play) clarifies that the issue is with his family.
Sure, the line is poetic and archaic and relies on context, which makes it less clear. But these things are to be expected reading Shakespeare!
This is a common response, but implausible in the direct reading of the text I think.
Juliet thinks that dropping “Capulet” is the same action as Romeo renouncing his name. At the simplest level we can make the inference that when she says “refuse thy name”, she’s taking “Romeo Montague” as a complete package, or in other words saying he should change his whole name in one go, to adopt an entirely new identity. It’s a bit subtle, but the idea of a first name that is “yours” and a last name that is “your family’s” is a fairly modern one. It was not so long ago that your “first name” was your “given name”, a name given to you by your family (probably the patriarch). So it’s quite natural in that sense to see “Romeo Montague” as a whole package identity (“Romeo, the son of the family Montague”), whereas for us “Romeo” the personal identifier is separate from “Montague” the family identifier. For an example of familial name-giving used as a joke, you can look at a novel like Tristram Shandy, although that was published much later.
Note: this is not a universal historical tradition, and actually names are very messy things whose use and form changed a lot even in one country throughout history. For example, you could have a patronymic i.e. “Romeo, son of Leo”, which in English can be seen in last names like “Johnson” or “MacDonald”. Then you have names that correspond to occupations i.e. “Harry Potter”, “John Smith”. You can also have location based names like “John of York” or “Leonardo Da Vinci”. The family last name and given name thing solidifies during the mediaeval period around 1400, according to wikipedia. And of course having the given name system makes a lot of sense in a story about the power of families. For a Shakespeare play where the naming conventions are different, see Timon of Athens or Julius Caesar.
If I had to rationalise what “doffing” his name would imply as a concrete course of action, the implied action here would be to and run away with her, to start a new life somewhere else. You can’t really change your name in Verona and just cut your family off, not when your family is powerful and you yourself are well known as a quasi-public figure.
After Romeo is banished for killing Tybalt, Friar Laurence comes up with the same basic idea of changing their names and running away to start a new life, as circumstances have forced their hand:
I don’t have much quarrel with the idea that some of “the classics” can be dumb, this is just my gloss on the closest authorial meaning.
I don’t know how to make progress on this dialectic. I think you’re obviously wrong, and either “Shakespeare wanting to sacrifice reasonableness for a better sound in that line” or “Juliet was supposed to be going a little bit crazy in that scene” are more reasonable hypotheses than a galaxy-brained take that the whole soliloquy actually makes sense on a literal level. You think I’m obviously wrong. I don’t know if there’s enough textual evidence to differentiate our hypotheses given that what I think of as overwhelming evidence for my position you somehow are updating in the opposite direction of, and think I’m being unreasonable for not seeing your side. The question also doesn’t matter.The only real piece of empirical evidence I can imagine updating people here is historical evidence, actors’ instructions, etc, which I doubt we have access to. I’d love there to be a good answer to this conundrum, but I don’t see it. So I think I’m tapping out.Hey, I’m not the original commenter that you were replying to, sorry. For what its worth I do think “Romeo” sounds better than “Montague” in that line.
Wow I’m a moron.
I think that reading the whole soliloquy makes my reading clearer and your reading less plausible. I can maybe see that if you:
Ignored the whole context of the rest of the play
Ignored the lines in the soliloquy which specifically mention the family names
Ignored the fact that there is a convention in English to refer to people by their first names and leave their family name implicit
Then maybe you would come to the conclusion that Juliet has an objection to specifically Romeo’s first name and not the fact that his name more generally links him to his family. But if you don’t ignore those things, it seems clear to me that Juliet is lamenting the fact that the man she loves has a name (‘Romeo Montague’) which links him to a family who she is not allowed to love.
Wait, wherefore is probably better translated as “for what reason” than “why”. But this makes it much more sensible! Romeo Romeo, what makes you Romeo? Not your damn last name, that’s for sure!
Most modern English speakers use “why” to mean both “what was the cause,” and “to what end.”
That’s a good explanation of the distinction
Given the apparent novelty of this interpretation, it doesn’t actually obviate your broader thesis.
I was taught in High School she’s lamenting the suffix “o”. Rome-o, Benvoli-o, Mercuti-o, while her clan all have names that end with “t”. Cuplet, Juliet, Tybalt. As in, “why aren’t you named Romus? Then we could be together”
I don’t buy it personally. But I assume there’s a wealth of Shakespearean scholarship that has investigated this to a deeper level than you or I care to.
In a modern teen drama, if Juliet said “Romeo, let us run away together and change our names. We can be Marco and Bianca, and be happy, just you and I,” would you be confused that they weren’t changing their last names?
This just seems so obviously disanalogous given the context of the rest of her monologue and the play!