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reached from God to inanimate objects. This hierarchy did not only exist in society as a whole, but it was also characteristic of Juliet's family and her father's dominant role. Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, and that Verona is marked by its patriarchal order results in the female characters of the play being dominated by the male characters. The most important decisions, for example the question of who the daughter is going to marry, are made by the male part of the family. Since social stability was thus based on tradition and convention, both in Verona and Elizabethan England, marriages were arranged according to social status and wealth.² However, with these socio-economic changes and developments outlined above new ideas and views about the important things in life emerged. Love is definitely one of them, and it is the one I am going to focus on in this paper.³ In Shakespeare's time there was an abundance of different concepts of love. Some concepts, which were present at that time, influenced each other and many poets. One of them was the concept of Petrarchan Love. I will also speak briefly about the concept of Bawdy Love, as it possesses an important role in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In this 1 For futher reading: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977 ² cf. Bruce R. Smith:The Cambrige guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare- Shakespeare's World: 1500- 1660, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016 3 cf. Elisabeth Beck- Gernsheim and Ulrich Beck, Das ganz normale Chaos der Liebe, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990 3 paper I will discuss the different concepts in detail, and I will reflect on how they are carried out in the play. In my opinion there is no doubt that Shakespeare's plays address issues that were relevant not only in his time, but also in our time, and that they attracted an immense number of people back in his time as well as in ours, because he was an avid observer of his surroundings. Thus, discussing the juxtaposition of the mentioned concepts of love that Shakespeare implements in his Romeo and Juliet will facilitate our understanding of what has been marked the greatest love-story in literature as well as our belief of love today. The aim of my paper is to find out if Romeo is a Petrarchan lover in the Elizabethan age by discussing the other concept I mentioned above and by analysing the character's behaviour and their use of language. 2 Love concepts in Romeo and Juliet 2.1 Petrarchan Love The Petrarchan love concept is one of the many concepts of love we can find in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It is a concept which predominantly focussed on the unrequited feelings of the male lover for his female beloved. For the male lover, the beloved was an ideal which was both physically and emotionally unattainable.4 Thus, the lover is captivated by melancholy. We can see this pattern in Romeo and Juliet, when Lord Montague and Benvolio talk about Romeo's emotional state before he appears in the play, confirming the fact that he indeed is in deep sorrow and searching for solitude: Away from light steals home my heavy son, And private in his chamber pens himself, Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out And makes himself an artificial night. (1.1.135-138) 5 4 Sasha Roberts, William Shakespeare- Romeo and Juliet, Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1998, 82-83 5 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2012,134 (all further quotations will be used from this edition) Looking at Romeo's first entrance in the play we notice his withdrawn and melancholic behaviour when he answers Benvolio's question of why he is so sad with the phrase: "Not having that which, having, makes them short." (1.1.162). Obviously, here Romeo represents an embodiment of the Petrarchan lover, craving the love of a cruel lady and shunning friends and family. Additionally he uses numerous oxymora, which were stylistic devices typically used in the Petrarchan sonnets, next to witty conceits, wordplays, hyperboles and repetitions": Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create, O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep that is not what it is. (1.1.174-179) Romeo uses these oxymora when he is speaking with Benvolio about his beloved Rosaline, who becomes his unattainable female beloved. The beloved woman in this concept is only mentioned by name. She never possesses any character traits, yet she is, next to the lover, the most important person in Petrarchan love. Francesco Petrarch's beloved Laura only appeared once by name in his rhymes. He is copiously talking about her, yet she does not possess any personal traits. Rosaline's name is also scarcely mentioned, nevertheless Romeo is always referring to her in the beginning of act I, when he is talking to his friends about his feelings for her. Her name only appears a few times in the whole play, for example, when Romeo reads out the guest list for Capulet's ball (1.2.69), when Romeo and Benvolio talk about her after reading out the guest list (1.2.84) and when the Friar scolds Romeo for his sudden shift of affection in the second act (2.3.62, 66). She is the main topic of his conversations, yet we learn very little about her. All we get to know about her is that she is chaste, fair and beautiful: A right good markman, and, and she's fair I love. 6 Sasha Roberts, William Shakespeare- Romeo and Juliet, Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1998, 83 7 Florian Neumann, Francesco Petrarca, Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1998, 42 5