ABSTRACT
Romeo and Juliet is about an experience that transcends 'a common bound'. The play emphasizes the opposition between the imaginative vision its protagonists bear witness to in love and the truth of a world whose order must be enforced at passion's expense. And though events bring Romeo and Juliet together in this experience, language suggests how radically they share it. When they first meet 'palm to palm' at the Capulet's ball, for instance, their antiphonal responses generate a perfectly formed sonnet. The moment is emblematic of the erotic relationship as the play views it: two exposed, vulnerably embodied selves reaching out tentatively across sexual difference and social opposition, while their imaginations mingle in an intersubjective privacy that weaves its boundaries protectively around them. The imaginative universe generated by Romeo's desire is dominated by eyesight, and remains subject to greater rational control than Juliet's.
