SOURCE: Knowles, Ronald. “Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, edited by Ronald Knowles, pp. 36-60. London: Macmillan, 1998.
In the following excerpt, Knowles applies Mikhail Bakhtin's cultural theory of the carnivalesque to Romeo and Juliet, particularly in regard to the drama's themes of love and death.
