Mortal Love: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the practice of joint burial

Abstract

This essay considers Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in the context of early modern attitudes toward love after death. It argues that Shakespeare's rejection of the idea that Romeo and Juliet would share a heavenly afterlife-an idea that runs throughout his sources for the play-helped him to shape a new mode of tragic power, one that depended upon insisting that love is mortal. Fall 2012 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 17-38. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintinfo.asp.