The performance of this moment would have worried anti-theatrical writers such as John Rainolds, who questioned whether or not the dramatization of love and amorous exchanges could deeply touch or infect the actor with the emotion being played: ‘That an effeminate stage player, while he feigneth love, imprinteth wounds of love?’ Whether or not the actors are infected with love when performing this play, the capacity of the play to touch the spectator and provoke emotion is its enduring quality to this day. Touch, in this play, is elevated as simultaneously spiritual and corporeal, as is evident from the allusions to a religious tradition that provokes ecstatic feelings of devotion. Imagining hands as saints or religious relics was indeed an Elizabethan poetic and dramatic practice, but the palm touches between Romeo and Juliet have an added significance in that they express a depth of feeling also associated with the extremity of devotional worship and they occur spontaneously, triggering, at an instant, the feeling of love. No longer practised in England by the time Shakespeare was writing plays, votive offerings were re-imagined into secular and theatrical contexts and playhouses abounded with the imagery and props that gestured back to some of the religious practices that had been outlawed, as we will see in Chapter 6. The votive tradition required, at times, body parts, particularly hands fashioned out of wax, alabaster or gold, to be delivered to shrines and left as offerings. In this moment, however, Shakespeare invokes the ritualistic practices of the medieval cult of saints: the hands of saints that were routinely kissed, decorated and worshipped in the shrines of Europe. The ‘internal sonnet’ in this scene invokes the mistress-as-saint motif typical of Elizabethan love poetry but a motif that Shakespeare has been known to mock in his romantic comedies. The parallels he makes between the position of and emphasis upon hands in Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting and the way in which particular religious rituals compelled hands into active devotion are difficult to dismiss.
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Shakespeare’s use of religious imagery in this play is not accidental. The efficacy of touch was at the core of pre-Reformation religious worship. Stages of life Christ was made present objects sanctified Īnd people healed and protected by relics, sacramentals,Īnd by the crosses they signed themselves with. Through it Christians were made and passed through the Ouch was the fulcrum of traditional sacramentality. Matthew Milner observes of pre-Reformation England that: The metaphor takes on greater significance when we think about the role of hands and the sense of touch in medieval and Renaissance practices of worship. After the Reformation in England, the focus upon saints’ hands in medieval worship and iconography transferred to that of the mistress’s hand in poetry and treatises on beauty.
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Hands are objectified in religious worship as they perform their own fantasies of touch in the name of God.
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Laurence Perrine noted in 1966 that the internal sonnet Romeo and Juliet compose upon their first meeting is a ‘self-contained episode’ and ‘metaphorically unified by a single extended metaphor, one in which a pilgrim, or palmer, is worshipping at the shrine of a saint’.