ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates Shakespeare's great tragedy of youthful love, Romeo and Juliet. The key to the connection between poem and drama lies in the stylistic, Petrarchan device of oxymoron. Notwithstanding, Petrarch can be seen as the great imaginative enabler of Shakespeare's expression of the despairing love of Romeo and Juliet, as more than one critic has recently made apparent. Juliet remonstrates with the dead Romeo for having died before her, but it is a loving rebuke despite her using a term of opprobrium—'churl.' Romeo is very precise in his recognition that his only rival for Juliet is mortality. Juliet's deep sense of outrage fits the character of Lucrece following the rape—Lucrece, a wife who also feels that she has mangled her husband's name, and whose predicament is strongly marked by antithesis. Juliet's denunciation of Romeo reflect quite closely the maid's accusation of the young man, though at a much sharper pitch as befits that play's dramatic register.
