Inside Shakespeare's Monomaniac Closet: Romeo and Tybalt's Homosexual Panic

Abstract

Reading Romeo and Juliet against the heteronormative grain, I examine the internalized homophobia of Romeo and Tybalt in relation to other characters within the play. Romeo’s self-prescribed voided identity and Tybalt’s lust for violence and quarreling both reveal unstable masculinities. The agonizing love Romeo has for Rosalind is quickly replaced by a burning passion for Juliet, but why is this monetarily privileged man so obsessed with falling in love with love? His “love” grows exponentially when he finds out she is a Capulet because such love would be forbidden much like his own repressed and unexpressed desires. Likewise, Tybalt seeks violence with the Montagues and shows no interest in romantic love. Both Romeo and Tybalt rashly stab and slay other men due to their own self-destructive anxieties. They live in this place of emotional and physical unrest, paralyzed by their internalized homophobia. Using psychoanalytic and queer theory approaches, I analyze the anxious and self-destructive actions of these two men through the repression of their un-manifested desires. Drawing queer theory interpretation from Eve Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” among other texts that inquire about homoerotic and homosocial repression in the English Renaissance, I also incorporate New Historicism into the analysis.