SOURCE: Fitter, Chris. “‘The quarrel is between our masters and us their men’: Romeo and Juliet, Dearth, and the London Riots.” English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 2 (spring 2000): 154-83.

In the following essay, Fitter discusses the violence in Romeo and Juliet within the context of the 1595 London riots.

                    Famine is in thy cheeks, Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes, Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back. The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law; The world affords no law to make thee rich; Then be not poor, but break it 

[5.1.69-74]

“The aesthetic,” as contemporary literary theory has taught us, is “contextually mobile.”¹ Construed within mutating fields of ideological sensitivity and projection, textual “meaning” lives in metamorphosis. Pressed into normative service, as Gary Taylor and Michael Bristol² have shown, by innumerable regimes of hierarchy and sensibility, Shakespeare's plays in particular have become “products to be wrested if...