In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare brings together the conflicting political and legal ideologies about the proper operation of the state as a political body that reigned during the Elizabethan Age. Specifically, he applied the motifs of the well-known revenge tragedy to demonstrate the ideological split that was occurring during his time. Ernest William Talbert's analysis of Richard II concludes that Shakespeare fused the disparate emphases in current thought about the body politic during the Elizabethan Age. In the same manner, Shakespeare uses Romeo and Juliet and their relationship to each other and to the operation of Verona to demonstrate the split between the old emphasis on community and the new emphasis on the individual that occurred during the Elizabethan Age. The play also serves as an interpellation of the duties of the ruler and the ruled to maintain peace and order.
In his analysis of Shakespeare's Richard II, Talbert observes that most Elizabethans would have been familiar with the doctrine of the official sermon on obedience. Basically, this doctrine espoused that man's social and political life operated within a framework of harmony and order and ultimate redemption was available only to those who performed their duty in the state of life to which it had pleased God to call them. Talbert notes that within such a framework, which was emphasized by an authoritarian state such as that of England under the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, civil disobedience was considered a formidable sin because of the significance placed on the operation of the state as a political body. Each person had duties necessary for the correct functioning of the state, not simply the ruled, but also the ruler. Through Romeo and Juliet and their relationships to those cloaked with authority in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare questions the ideology on which the functioning of the Elizabethan state is based.
Law and Social Norms...