Randomness In Romeo

If Romeo were not a Montague, he would still be himself: his name is not a physical part of him like his hand or foot. A rose would smell the same if we used a different term for it ‐ and Romeo would still be as perfect if he had a different name. The alternative to this arbitrary view of meaning was associated with Plato, and its crucial difference was in the rejection of the notion of randomness in language. The Platonic view posited a deep, divine or occult, connection between the form of words (their sounds or spelling) and their meanings. This is, to some extent, a consequence of the allegorical method which dominated intellectual life in the period. Rhetorical teaching tended to put more emphasis on the arrangement and treatment of …show more content…
There is an example of a clause which matches this in the first line quoted above: Subject [you] Verb [see] Object [them]
Normally in English, the subject is a highly animate noun or pronoun, and the object is often less animated. Here, the human, highly animate pronoun ‘you’ does something (‘see’) to the non‐human, less animate, horses (‘them’). This is, bluntly speaking, how the world works: more animate things typically do things to less animate things. Now let’s look again at Shakespeare’s lines, with subjects, objects, and verbs marked: Think, when S(we) V(talk) of O(horses), that S(you) V(see) O(them)V(Printing) O(their proud hoofs) i’th’ receiving earth ‘them’, as we have already seen, is the object of ‘see’. But notice what happens: as soon as the horses are introduced in the role of object (‘them’), they are distorted in to the subject of ‘Printing’. It is the horses (them) who are seen by us, but it is also the horses (they) that do the printing. By a sleight of grammatical hand, the horses are concurrently the inactive object of ‘see’ and the active subject of …show more content…
It will become even more interesting however, if future research confirms Houston’s claim, that Shakespeare uses SOV word order far more frequently than his contemporaries ‐ and that the rate at which he uses it increases over his career. Recent linguistic work on other syntactic features has confirmed the frequent literary‐critical observation that Shakespeare’s late style is more complex syntactically than his early one: perhaps Houston has identified a key characteristic of Shakespeare’s language ‐ one that really does set him out from his