On some Passions of the Characters in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (a Semiotic Prospective)

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to analyze specific semantic taxonomies of the main characters in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. The focus is on rendering characters’ actions passionate, through a semiotics of action, as described in Greimas and Fontanille (1993). In my opinion, universal themes such as love, hatred, death, etc. can be subject to a passionate configuration of different characters’ perspectives in action. This is also due to the recent definition of semiotics as a cognitive science of meaning interpretation. In conclusion, characters’ passions resulting as final semantic entities give this study an empirical account for at least two reasons: first, to argue for semiotics’ importance for artistic expressivity and second, to argue for semiotics’ epistemological significance besides its ontological one. “The signs’ way”, as Deely (2009) states, gives us the possibility of treating each character’s perspective separately, thus rendering the signification process for each sign taken as an example separately.