Everyone knows the famous line from Romeo and Juliet, “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
I always thought Juliet’s famous question asked where Romeo was.
In actuality, Juliet wonders why he is Romeo at all. Why is she falling in love with a member of the Montague family, her own family’s mortal enemy? What does that mean about Romeo and who he is? What pieces of his identity are his family’s and what his own?
This week, I’m at Lawrence University’s Bjorklunden campus, an education center on a beautiful stretch of coast in Door County, Wisconsin. It gathers students during the academic year and folks of all kinds during the summer to take seminars in the morning and spend the afternoons hiking, working, reading, or resting.
I’m taking a course on Romeo and Juliet which is a Shakespearian play I haven’t studied before, hadn’t even seen performed. I read the play in advance of the seminar and, in addition to class discussions, we watched a 1968 film adaption and attended a performance by Door Shakespeare. We really are spending all week talking about one play.
How do we come up with enough to talk about?
It’s a book. You either like it or you don’t, right?
When I studied art history, we learned to use different analytical methods on the same work of art. You could look at a painting and interpret it through formalism (lines, color, shape), look at the iconography (visual symbols), or analyze it with post-colonialism in mind.
These different lenses allow for a variety of interpretations, for art to mean different things, even to the same person.
Here’s a few of the lenses I use to analyze stories:
- Biography. What in the author’s personal life influenced their work? What kind of training did the author have?
- Body of work. How did they grow as an author over the scope of their career?
- Style. What is the voice of the piece? How does the author convey emotion?
- Genre. How does this work align or push against other works within the subgenre? Does it blend genre?
- Cultural. How does it represent the time and place in which it was written?
- Feminist. How does the book portray its women characters? What social norms does the piece convey? How did the author challenge those, or not?
- Publishing. How was the book printed and distributed? Was it a commercial success and why?
For me, this week is about learning from other thoughtful readers, hiking with my husband, and editing while listening to the rain. I’m working closely with a variety of texts, thinking about my own work as a writer.
It’s all to ask: wherefore art thou?
