A key theme of Romeo and Juliet (and of Shakespeare's work in general, I might argue) is that "binary oppositions"--the ideological construction of two narrowly defined objects as absolute and antithetical alternatives to one another--is too simplistic and confining a framework to encompass the complexity, messiness, and variety of human emotions - of which love is of course among the most varied, messy, and complex. The most obvious "binary" in the play is of course the ancestral feud between the Capulet and Montague families. Shakespeare makes it clear from the beginning that this conflict is pure folly, something false and artificial that starves and hedges in the freedom and mutability of the human spirit. The affection that flowers so briefly between Romeo and Juliet is something that exists outside and beyond such restrictive structures of diametric oppositions. One of Shakespeare's profundities in this play is to understand that the boundaries and polarities erected and observed by elders are often invisible to the naive wisdom of children. Hence Juliet, the play's youngest character, is also (with the explosive Mercutio, whose very name evokes the Roman god of travel, communication, and transition) the one with the most uncontainable verbal imagination. Her words often express a blurring of opposed categories; when Romeo kills Tybalt, she says of him "My only love sprung from my only hate!" In one of my favorite scenes, she playfully muddies the distinction between night and day, in order to bid Romeo (who has heard the cry of the lark, signaling the dawn) to remain by her side: "Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear." In the balcony scene she utters perhaps her most amazing and gorgeous paradox: "And yet I wish but for the thing I have. / My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep. The more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite." The overflowing mystery and sensuousness of human passion transcends the tyrannical certitude of binary distinctions.
Shakespeare also explores this concept on the level of genre. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, but until the death of Mercutio it very closely resembles a Shakespearean comedy; this creates in us an awareness of the fallibility of generic distinctions, the fact that tragedy lurks, as a perpetual possibility, within all comedy. Shakespeare's imagination, like Juliet's, is too mobile, too eloquent, too sensitive to human possibility, to be bounded within such artificial categories as comedy and tragedy, or Montague and Capulet. Shakespeare is always creating and thinking in the open, uncertain spaces between ostensible opposites. Hamlet says "To be or not to be." Iago and Viola both say "I am not what I am."* Macbeth says "Nothing is but what is not." Juliet, in the tragic culmination of this play, comes to embody these epigrammatic formulations, by defying the most inviolate and fundamental of all binary oppositions: when she takes Friar Laurence's sleeping draught to be buried in the Capulet crypt, she blurs the boundary of life and death itself.
But this play is a tragedy, in the end, and such visionary, mystic mobility cannot be allowed to endure in the cruelly binary world of adults--so that Juliet's indeterminate state is ultimately collapsed and reduced; her mimicry of death becomes the real thing, confining her, with the destruction of her love, into the most immutable and definite of all human states. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet isn't just the brief and ill-fated love affair of two very young people, but a vision of how absolutism and binary thinking murder possibility and passion in the world.
*Viola is specifically referring to the fact that she is a woman dressed in a man's clothing; gender-bending is a recurrent theme in Shakespeare, and the word "non-binary" is rapidly gaining currency in contemporary language to refer to gender identities which are not exclusively male or female.
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