SOURCE: Gray, J. C. “Romeo and Juliet, and Some Renaissance Notions of Love, Time, and Death.” Dalhousie Review 48, no. 1 (spring 1968): 58-69.

In the following essay, Gray discusses Shakespeare's paradoxical treatment of the tragedy's main themes and recommends that readers consider the contradictory nature of love, time, and death in the play.

The literature of Renaissance England is second to none in its rich explorations of all possible manifestations of human love, in both their healthy and their distorted states. Generally speaking, when one loves God and his fellow man as Christ commanded, one loves wisely and well; one loves with entire affection. But for fallen man in a fallen world, maintaining harmonious and temperate balances in love relationships is among the most arduous of human tasks. Indeed, it is often an heroic task. It is not difficult for Spenser to assert in The Faerie Queene that “loue in...