ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to expose the multifaceted relevance of earliness to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The play’s subjection to belatedness via a manifest, yet greatly overlooked, subtextual dependence on its sources is resisted—in the play’s verbal immanence—through a sustained deployment of Romeo’s inherent earliness as a premature male lover prone to erotically err. This focus on erotic error reveals the importance of a medieval register whose ideological articulation is rooted in St. Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch and Boccaccio. This reading is pitted against recent attempts, like Kottman’s, to repress the play’s investment in contingency and accident.
