Received wisdom is a tricky thing. It’s a commonly held view that Romeo and Juliet, the classic tale of star-cross’d lovers, is the ultimate lyrical representation of love and romance. In reality, if you’ve actually read it, you’ll know that it’s a horrifying story of a doomed relationship that lasts for three days and results in the deaths of six people. What we know and what we think we know are often two very different things.
There’s a key element of this tale that we can draw upon here, however, and that’s the age-old question: ‘What’s in a name?’. Posed by Juliet, she goes on to postulate that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ and there’s an inarguable logic to that.
