“Refuse thy name”: Some Further Notes on Language, Authority, and Roses

The aim of the article is to add some textual considerations to the famous “What’s in a name?” question, which has been variously debated in literary and linguistic criticism, but which needs to be framed within the context of the fundamental acceptance of variation and the instability of words in early modern English. Modern linguistics mostly operates on the premise of what Saussure defined as the arbitrary nature of the sign (Saussure 2000 [1916]: 27), that is the absence of an intrinsic link between things and words. Such a ‘modern’ view of language has often been linked to Juliet’s indifference to the signifier ‘rose’, which might easily assume any other linguistic shape: in Catherine Belsey’s words, Juliet is “a Saussurian avant la lettre” (Belsey 1993: 133). This view of language, however, was already an accepted one in the English Renaissance, and it was one that stemmed, well before Saussure, directly from the Aristotelian tradition (Hope 2010: 1-3). If read against the backdrop of the historical-linguistic context of early modern English, what appears innovative is not so much the content of Juliet’s proposition, but Shakespeare’s decision to foreground the “What’s in a name?” question, making it an important theme of the play and in this innovating his sources, possibly as a result of his growing “self-consciousness” about language “roughly around 1595” (McDonald 2001: 166). This brief piece outlines a few consequences that follow when one places this crucial question in the context of early modern English attitudes towards language, in an attempt to illuminate the way in which it has taken on its now proverbial status. If it is true that the concern with language that surfaces in Romeo and Juliet at a crucial juncture of the play opens up complicated issues, it does so by reviving familiar arguments that the Elizabethan audience would have been well acquainted with: this creates the foundation for an effective stylistic ‘packaging’ of the famous lines which has helped to give them their proverbial and iconic status, as well as the ability to survive and thrive in our age.