Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet

Summary

Sequences move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued: . . .

if there is to be an articulated patterning of representations, there must be a murmur of analogies rising from things. .

Despite its origins in Aristotle's exposition of tragedy, recent narrative theory neglects drama. Narratologists refer to Oedipus the King and Shakespeare plays for illustrations, assuming artistic mastery of narrative which they rarely demonstrate. In critical literature on Shakespeare and narrative, there are conspicuous gaps between Barbara Hardy's essay on 'Shakespeare's Dramatic Narrative' (1981) and J. Hillis Miller's chapter on Troilus and Cressida, 'Ariachne's Broken Woof (1998). Hardy has done the most to fill out this inquiry, a series of lectures and articles culminating in her book Shakespeare's Storytellers: Dramatic Narration (1997). She makes it clear that Shakespeare's interest in narrative extended throughout his career, from The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus to The Winter's Tale and The Tempest: there are explicit signs of this interest in references to other narrators like Virgil, and implicit signs in passages of exaggeration and parody. This essay will extend Hardy's argument through an analysis of narration in Romeo and Juliet. She has examined discrete narrative forms within the play; I shall consider additional examples of these, as well as the relation of all inner forms to the narrative whole.