Speaker: Prof. Stephen Dobranski, Georgia StateUniversity
Moderator: Prof. Fang Fan, Zhejiang University
Time: 19:00-21:00 pm, Dec. 14, 2025
Venue: 浙江大学紫金港校区东五201
At the end of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s unlucky lovers commit suicide. This is not a spoiler. The opening lines tell us plainly that the couple will die, that “A pair of star-crossed lovers” will “with their death bury their parents’ strife.” This talk will examine Shakespeare’s depiction of the torments of excessive passion that lead to Romeo and Juliet’s double suicide. Beginning with its first scene, the play focuses on various characters who overreact. But the famous young lovers in particular fail to show restraint, tragically pursuing the romantic absolutes popularized in early modern love poetry and later popularized more so by Shakespeare’s own star-crossed pair. Yet even as the couple goes to fatal extremes, Shakespeare finds value in loving too much and implicates himself in the intemperance he depicts.
Stephen B. Dobranski is Regents’ Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta and editor of the journal Milton Studies. He has published several books, including Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2005), Milton’s Visual Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2015), and Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times (Stanford UP, 2022). He has recently edited a new edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (W. W. Norton, 2022) and is currently working on a book about Shakespeare and moderation.
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