SOURCE: Heyworth, G. G. “Missing and Mending: Romeo and Juliet at Play in the Romance Chronotope.” The Yearbook of English Studies: Time and Narrative 30 (2000): 5-20.

In the following essay, Heyworth concentrates on the Ovidian spatio-temporal dynamics of Romeo and Juliet, and the drama's paradoxical juxtaposition of tragic and romantic time.

Assume for a moment that Romeo and Juliet is not about star-crossed lovers or feuding families, but more profoundly about the generic insufficiency of time that afflicts everyone and everything to do with romance, author as well as characters. Poetically and emotionally, temporal insufficiency is necessary for romance as a genre, a quality that brings it into close relationship with tragedy.

Romeo and Juliet succeeds as a romance because it confirms the besetting, archetypal anxiety of all lovers, that they will not be able to transform the accident of a single meeting into the necessity of a life...