Body Language: Making Love in Lyric in Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

With a particular focus on an intensive close reading of the scenes between the lovers and their portrayal of desire and intimacy, this essay discusses how Shakespeare transforms lyric poetry, especially its formal features, not simply into dramatic poetry but into theatre, demonstrating how Shakespeare creates the lovers’ world and the passionate intimacy of their relationship through the embodiment of lyric forms, especially the sonnet, the epithalamium, and the aubade. Explicitly thinking about bodies (and bodies on stage) rather than ‘the body’, it draws on a number of Shakespeare’s sources, especially Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, as well as Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, exploring in precise detail how Shakespeare works with them, the particularity of his transformations, and their effects.1