SOURCE: "Romeo and Juliet and the Art of Naming Love," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2, April, 1981, pp. 31-49.

In the following essay, Estrin probes Romeo and Juliet's vision of love and their efforts to realize this vision.

In Act II of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio defines the successful man, incorrectly assuming that Romeo's recovered wit signals the decline of his infatuation for Rosaline:

Why is this better now than groaning for love? now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature: For this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.¹

To be Romeo at his best is to have acquired distance from the amorous situation and to have "separate[d]" himself, as Pyrocles admonishes Musidorus in the Arcadia...