SOURCE: James, Max H. “Chastened Children: Family as Metaphor in Romeo and Juliet.” In ‘Our House Is Hell’: Shakespeare's Troubled Families, pp. 1-19. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

In the following essay, James interprets Shakespeare's demonstration of family conflict in Romeo and Juliet as a metaphorical study of disobedience and strife among young and old.

Shakespeare's families are deeply troubled, with scarcely a single whole and healthy family to be found in the entire corpus of his plays. The swelling tide of historical and sociological studies of family life in earlier ages, including the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, forbids the simpleminded conclusion that the “crisis of the family” is only a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Although their natures certainly vary from age to age, family problems are profound and pervasive in every age. In her poignant declaration, “Our house is hell,” Shylock's daughter, Jessica, speaks painfully but appropriately for almost...