What does Juliet mean when she says Deny thy father and refuse they name?

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Millions of people all around the world know how powerful of a theme love is when dealing with these two young heart throbs. The poem focuses on an intense romantic love between Romeo and Juliet. Their love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. At one-point Juliet asks: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, or if thou wilt not, be a Capulet.” At times their love is defined by magic: “Alike bewitched by the charm of looks.” Sometimes as we all mention what love is (we just can’t define it) Juliet says: “But my true love is grown to such excess/ I cannot sum up some of half my…show more content…
There is not a better line that conveys this sentiment then when Juliet asks: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn by love,/ And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.” Juliet is willing to give up her whole life as she knows it to be with a man that she knows is not wanted or even liked by her family. We must understand have grave of a decision that is for a woman in those times; woman were mere objects and were by culture and nurture supposed to adhere to the demands of the father and the hierarchy of the family. To shame one’s family was equal to social suicide, yet for a young woman to stand bold and make these sorts of claims just explains to us how emotionally involved she must be to this…show more content…
At times love is described in terms of religion, faith or magic as Juliet states “Alike bewitched by the charm of looks.” Without magic in love we could not extricate ourselves from the reality of war, or man’s inhumanity to each other; the magic in love is a fantasy that saves us from sinking into devastation and despair. We are born to bond, wired for love, that is the reason the unexplainable feelings are so welcome as magical when one feels and unmentionable feeling towards another. The fortunate people to find love will no doubt have the illusion and fantasize a dream partner so when love walks in the door they will be emotionally open and available.
Sometimes as we all mention what love is (we just can’t define it) Juliet says: “But my true love is grown to such excess/ I cannot sum up some of half my wealth.” Love resists any single metaphor because it is not easily understood and too magnificent to define. Many show love in the ways we hope to receive love but that assumes your partner defines love the same way you do. Like music, love’s essence isn’t captured by focusing on what it is but on what it does to people. Love has no labels; there may be different kinds of it, but they don’t have titles and they aren’t

Act 2, scene 1: Romeo in the Balcony Scene

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. . . .
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eye in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.

See the translation

Romeo speaks these lines in the so-called balcony scene, when, hiding in the Capulet orchard after the feast, he sees Juliet leaning out of a high window (2.1.44–64). Though it is late at night, Juliet’s surpassing beauty makes Romeo imagine that she is the sun, transforming the darkness into daylight. Romeo likewise personifies the moon, calling it “sick and pale with grief” at the fact that Juliet, the sun, is far brighter and more beautiful. Romeo then compares Juliet to the stars, claiming that she eclipses the stars as daylight overpowers a lamp—her eyes alone shine so bright that they will convince the birds to sing at night as if it were day.

This quote is important because, in addition to initiating one of the play’s most beautiful and famous sequences of poetry, it is a prime example of the light/dark motif that runs throughout the play. Many scenes in Romeo and Juliet are set either late at night or early in the morning, and Shakespeare often uses the contrast between night and day to explore opposing alternatives in a given situation. Here, Romeo imagines Juliet transforming darkness into light; later, after their wedding night, Juliet convinces Romeo momentarily that the daylight is actually night (so that he doesn’t yet have to leave her room).

Act 2, scene 1: "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?"

O Romeo, Romeo,
wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

See the translation

Juliet speaks these lines, perhaps the most famous in the play, in the balcony scene (2.1.74–78). Leaning out of her upstairs window, unaware that Romeo is below in the orchard, she asks why Romeo must be Romeo—why he must be a Montague, the son of her family’s greatest enemy (“wherefore” means “why,” not “where”; Juliet is not, as is often assumed, asking where Romeo is). Still unaware of Romeo’s presence, she asks him to deny his family for her love. She adds, however, that if he will not, she will deny her family in order to be with him if he merely tells her that he loves her.

A major theme in Romeo and Juliet is the tension between social and family identity (represented by one’s name) and one’s inner identity. Juliet believes that love stems from one’s inner identity, and that the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets is a product of the outer identity, based only on names. She thinks of Romeo in individual terms, and thus her love for him overrides her family’s hatred for the Montague name. She says that if Romeo were not called “Romeo” or “Montague,” he would still be the person she loves. “What’s in a name?” she asks. “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (2.1.85–86).

Act 1, scene 4: The Queen Mab Speech

O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. . . .
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.

See the translation

Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech is important for the stunning quality of its poetry and for what it reveals about Mercutio’s character, but it also has some interesting thematic implications (1.4.53–59). Mercutio is trying to convince Romeo to set aside his lovesick melancholy over Rosaline and come along to the Capulet feast. When Romeo says that he is depressed because of a dream, Mercutio launches on a lengthy, playful description of Queen Mab, the fairy who supposedly brings dreams to sleeping humans. The main point of the passage is that the dreams Queen Mab brings are directly related to the person who dreams them—lovers dream of love, soldiers of war, etc. But in the process of making this rather prosaic point Mercutio falls into a sort of wild bitterness in which he seems to see dreams as destructive and delusional.

Prologue, Act 3, and Act 5: Fate and Fortune

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. . . .

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O, I am fortune’s fool! . . .

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Then I defy you, stars.

See the translation

This trio of quotes advances the theme of fate as it plays out through the story: the first is spoken by the Chorus (Prologue.5–8), the second by Romeo after he kills Tybalt (3.1.131), and the third by Romeo upon learning of Juliet’s death (5.1.24). The Chorus’s remark that Romeo and Juliet are “star-crossed” and fated to “take their li[ves]” informs the audience that the lovers are destined to die tragically. Romeo’s remark “O, I am fortune’s fool!” illustrates the fact that Romeo sees himself as subject to the whims of fate. When he cries out “Then I defy you, stars,” after learning of Juliet’s death, he declares himself openly opposed to the destiny that so grieves him. Sadly, in “defying” fate he actually brings it about. Romeo’s suicide prompts Juliet to kill herself, thereby ironically fulfilling the lovers’ tragic destiny.

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