Echolocation,figuration and tellings: rhetorical strategies in Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

Romeo and Juliet has often been considered one of Shakespeare’s most self-conscious explorations into language and how it signifies. This article explores what three specific rhetorical strategies imply about how language communicates. First, it looks at the logical power of figuration and how it breaks down language into ambivalence, ambiguity and double-meaning. Second, it introduces the term ‘echolocation’ to allow for a study of the way patterns of repetition of identical or similar sounds and words within different figures can convey argument, and follows the indications of crisis, balance and stasis in the language of the text, and third it examines tellings, retellings and foretellings, as they expose language attempting to determine and simultaneously destabilize significance. While the focus of the study is on the action of language, some consideration is made of the way that identity and language are open to analogous patterns of construction and limitation, and how the reader, audience and theatre practitioner may use those patterns in building a sense of character-part.