"Tying the Knot in 'fair verona': the Private and Public Spaces of Marriage in Romeo and Juliet"

The essay focuses the issue of marriage and family constraint. The analysis of this topic, central in the play as it was in Tudor society, reveals the presence of a grey area of interference denoting a challenging friction between individual consent and liberty of choice, on the one hand, and on the other familial as well as social conveniences. If the contemporaries regarded marriage as a farewell to youth and an alteration of status, attributing to it a function of preservation of social and civic harmony, they also debated the role of individual liking and generally showed some hostility towards arranged marriages, especially when conditioned by constraint and duress. In the play, the treatment of this issue exposes a complex intertwining of economic and civic reasons with personal and erotic drives that blur the boundaries between the private and the public. Indeed the two wedding contracts (the one scheduled by Capulet and the one secretly entered by Romeo and Juliet) trigger a dialectics of spaces, equally ambiguous in their duality of private-domestic and public-civic implications, opening up an interesting outlook not only on the (civic) function of marriage at the turn of the sixteenth century, but also on the role an individual might or might not play with respect to it.