"What's in a Name?" Labels and Humanizing the Other

Recently, Patheos’ Scott Eric Alt, who is a Facebook friend and former Catholic Stand colleague, challenged me to post seven book covers over seven days, explain the meaning to me of each book, and get seven other people into the act. One of my choices was William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. I wouldn’t have chosen that particular play ten years ago, although I first encountered it as a high-school freshman. In the last few years, though, I’ve begun to realize just what the Bard of Stratford was trying to teach us.

Romeo & Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s early plays, most likely composed about 1594. Earlier critics bemoaned it as “immoral” because Shakespeare clearly sympathized with his protagonists’ actions and failed to issue the expected Protestant condemnations of meddling papist priests. (Shakespeare and his father may have been Catholic recusants.) Later critics considered it one of his lesser works due to the often stilted quality of the poetry. Yet Romeo & Juliet has been staged more often than any other play of the period, and is one reason why Shakespeare is considered by some to be the “Poet of Love.”

But to call Romeo & Juliet a “love story” is to miss the mark, for the story is as much about hatred and social conventions as it is about erotic love. The feud the Prince dismisses as “bred of an airy word” has already caused several public disturbances before the play opens; by the time he says, “For never was there a tale of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo,” it has taken five young lives. It’s so virulent a thing that even the servants of each family fight those of the other. But rather than bring themselves to settle the feud and reconcile with one another, the two patriarchs — not otherwise compelled by the Prince — opt merely to call a truce and forbid their partisans further swordplay.

The key is the character of Tybalt. Tybalt is a cardboard cutout whose only reason for being is to trigger the catastrophe. Mercutio dismisses him as a shallow fop, one of the “antic, lisping fantasticoes” constantly chasing the latest fashions. All we see of him, however, is his hatred of Capulets and his obsession with family honor. Dramatically, Tybalt is the Capulet-Montague feud: an unreasoning thing that takes outrageous offense at unintended slights, a passion bound by convention yet capable of grave evil. The feud has dehumanized him.

The boundaries of the stage force a quick pace. Barely is the couple wed before they are dead, Romeo having drunk the cup of illicit love to find poison at the bottom, Juliet’s suicide (in an act of pre-Freudian significance) committed with Romeo’s dagger. But in the whirling calamity of their love, they’ve seen beyond the conventions of the feud and have humanized the enemy; Romeo can even say he loves Tybalt. In their deaths, Old Capulet and Old Montague can finally look past their foolish hatred to humanize each other as grieving fathers, their progeny “poor victims of our enmity.”

And the Prince, having “lost a brace of kinsmen,” can finally see his exercises of authority as implicitly authorizing (“winking at”) the feud’s continued existence rather than ending it: “All are punished.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Names are a convenience. They allow us to verbalize ideas, connect them, and construct narratives that explain, entertain, and provoke us. Names can distinguish between essence and accidence, bestowing community and dignifying individuality.

But we also use names as pigeonhole labels, to reduce others to one trait. Having identified one objectionable trait about the person, we suppose the name says everything we need to know about them. Labels aren’t simply a large component of identity politics — they are the essence of identity politics, the reduction of all American society into two sides, good guys versus bad guys, for the sake of acting out a gnostic morality play in the public square.

An article written by an African-American academic and activist a couple years ago brought this home to me. Angry that commentators were searching for some psychological or sociological explanation for convicted mass murderer Dylann Roof’s actions, she argued that Roof was not only a racist and murderer but a terrorist and that we “shouldn’t try to humanize him.”

I sympathize with her anger. I agree that Roof is a racist, a murderer, and a terrorist. But he’s all these horrible things precisely because he is human. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

Other animals kill for food, or to defend themselves, or because they’re driven mad by a disease such as rabies. They don’t kill to make political statements, or to spread an ideology, or to relieve a psychic tension, or just for the pleasure of it. To fail to recognize Roof’s humanity is to lie to ourselves about human nature, especially about our own capacity for evil. For each of us has as much capacity to do evil as to do good. We are all sinners; that’s Christianity 101. But we are also more than the sum of our flaws, more than the evilest thing we’ve ever done, more than the least savory of our affiliations.

Romeo & Juliet reminds us that the content we give a name is often as much a hindrance as a help, that labels can both assist and prevent (or pervert) thought. It also reminds us that the face of Christ can often be found behind the mask of a stranger or an enemy. Finally, Shakespeare reminds us that, when we choose to love — for Christian love is not a feeling or a passion, but a choice and an action — we reach beyond the conventions that blind our sight to recognize the full humanity of the Other. And in doing so, we become more fully human ourselves.