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“UNSEEMLY WOMAN IN A SEEMING MAN”: UN ESTUDIO DE LA MASCULINIDAD COMO CONFLICTO EN ROMEO Y JULIETA

2024; Issue: 24 Linguagem: Inglês

10.25115/odisea.vi24.9280

2174-1611

Sara Romero-Otero,

Historical and Modern Theater Studies

This article explores the interpretative possibilities offered by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet regarding its manifestations of masculinity within the context of the early modern period through two of its characters: Romeo and Mercutio. The former goes from perceiving romantic love as a perpetuation of the familial order to regarding it, through his love for Juliet, as a way of questioning the very roots of the aforementioned order, whereas Mercutio, whose complexity as a character firmly settles him in an ambiguous standpoint, can be read as “the mask of what may be a repressed homoeroticism” (Bloom, 1998: 96). Their acts of speech — including the increasing simplification of Romeo’s once baroque language and Mercutio’s cartoonish obscenity — can be read as manifestations of a number of anxieties and pressures on masculinity that were inherent to the early modern period and, above anything else, as an act of defiance towards its more normative conceptions.