"Defiance and Denial: Paradigms of Civic Transgression and Transcendence in Romeo and Juliet"

The essay focuses upon the scapegoating pattern that the play claims to rely upon with the authority of the Prologue’s voice and that of the Prince in the recapitulation scene. Through an investigation of the relational paradigms of behaviour elicited by an intrinsically conflictual community destabilized by household feuding and weak and self-contradicting governance, the essay discusses the ambiguities at the core of the civic system of Verona, providing the actual ground for a reshaping of the tragic experience. Civility turns into its opposite precisely as legality shows its illegal face, while patterns of defiance and denial, transgression and transcendence of the communal system trigger the tragic outcome, prompting an interrogation of the potential and limits of free will in the face of a civic bond donning the guise of coercion. These two paradigms, together with a recasting of the elemental pattern of violence and sacrifice in a new complex civic dimension, define the space of subversion and communal redress of crime, revealing an emerging crisis in the Renaissance conception of the individual and in the blind power of a social system of hierarchy which creaks under the push of bourgeois unrest. The argument foregrounds the social agonism widespread in fair Verona, where strife, tinged with tribal connotations of violence, sexual aggression and legal repression, as well as household coercion push the two lovers to re-define the scope of their freedom to go beyond household and communal rules. Thus, if a sacrifice is eventually enacted, it occurs in a post-sacrificial dimension of civic and ‘commercial’ transaction which seals a radical revision of the scapegoating scheme and its intrinsic relation with the community.