Comparing The Business Of Love In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

In The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, Russ McDonald explains the “business” of love in Elizabethan times. He writes: “Marriage was part of a system of inheritance and economics so ingrained and pervasive that the emotional affections or physical desires of a man and woman diminished in importance” (266). However, this does not seem to be the case in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet where instead of worrying about economics, the lovelorn Romeo is ruled by his affections. In the essay Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, Dollimore writes of theater’s ability to instruct society, but what could the relationship of Romeo and Rosaline be “instructing” readers/viewers? Textual evidence from multiple metaphors suggests that the