ABSTRACT
In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the play’s immediate political context has been obscured by a long tradition of appropriation of the play’s meaning for an ethos of romantic ‘transcendence’. Yet if aesthetic meaning turns out to be ineluctably conjunctural, then a work’s founding meaning must be retrieved from vanished textual valences local to the circumscribed cultural conditions of initial production.5 To re-embed this play in events and conditions in London between 1594-96-the escalating inter-class youth violence, the dearth of 1594-97, and the sensational London riots of 1595 which the combination precipitated-is to recuperate, I suggest, just such an originary and contingent salience, lost to posterity.
