SOURCE: Farrell, Kirby. “Love, Death, and Patriarchy in Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare's Personality, edited by Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris, pp. 86-102. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Farrell probes the patriarchal subtext of Romeo and Juliet and the play's subversive critique of this social system.

I

Recent criticism has tended to depict patriarchy primarily as an authoritarian institution for the regulation of society. Where Elizabethan theorists praised the system for its order, we now have difficulty seeing beyond its flagrant injustices and limitations, especially its misogyny. Yet repression is not the whole picture. What made patriarchy tolerable, even valuable, to so many Elizabethans? No one in Shakespeare's Verona, for example, openly rebels against patriarchy. Like Romeo, Juliet blames fate that she “must love a loathed enemy” (1.5.141); she desperately tries to placate her father with “chopt-logic” (3.5.149). For all their touchiness...