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Although it hasn't always been die case, it is now commonplace to observe that when we idealize Shakespeare's famous lovers Romeo and Juliet by seeing them as transcending their feuding social world and its limits, we "obscure" the "social function" of their corpses in making possible the union of the houses of Montague and Capulet.1 We allow their deaths to stand - like the golden statue proposed by dieir fathers - as a monument symbolizing peace and harmony outside the famous feud that divides Verona. But, in fact, their deaths are in some ways the result or fulfillment of that feud, and we might better understand Romeo and Juliet as citizens of a city that is a "matrix for . . . violence and disorder" and as characters whose lives and identities, like those of all the other inhabitants of Verona, are subsumed and defined by the conflict between the Capulets and Montagues.2 That the lovers seem to stand outside their own social world is perhaps an effect of Shakespeare's exquisite poetry; however, they are called into being - interpellated as subjects - in connection to those discourses of darkness and desire that characterize the social world of Verona. This is a thesis I want to develop, but rather than consider Romeo and Juliet as figures defined by a specific history represented in Shakespeare's play itself, I want to examine how they emerge across the histories of the early modern and modern periods. In particular, I want to explore the languages of darkness and desire that inform the play and the ways they become linked, in our own age, to specific racial and sexual discourses that continue to echo in our apprehension of the sixteenth-century text.
Accordingly, in the first part of this essay I examine the racial and sexual politics of Baz Luhrmann's 1996 filmed version of the play, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes. Luhrmann's film does not interpret Shakespeare in a traditional way, representing his play's historical difference from modern concerns; instead, it focuses on seemingly anachronistic, modern social fantasies about race and sex, interpreting the famous "star-crossed" lovers within the social and sexual divisions of our own society.3 Luhrmann does so primarily, it seems, to...