Read on Twitter
1/ With exams looming nearer, I thought I'd do some threads on aspects of the #Literature texts. cc. #TeamEnglish. Here are some thoughts about HANDS 🤝 early on in #RomeoAndJuliet 🧵 
2/ Hands in the Prologue are synecdoche: they’re a stand-in for the dignified persons to whom they belong: Capulet, Montague and Escalus.
3/ With these names, we follow a similar logic: those are both the names of the houses and the men themselves, meaning that the staining of their hands with ‘civil blood’ 🩸 is the responsibility of their ‘houses’, not just them.
4/ But here we hit an interesting problem: by only ever being called as their houses, that’s all these men are, bringing responsibility for the bloodshed back on the heads (and hands) of the individual men. It’s wonderfully circular, and speaks a lot to the chaos that follows.
5/ Who is responsible for whom? The feudal world, in which this has a clear answer, is straining at the seams in R&J. Hands are a metaphor for labour and fealty, but also self-expression.
6/ This is why the biting of the thumb is so significant, because it’s about the agency of those usually forgotten in the feudal system. ‘The quarrel is between our masters and us their men’, Gregory says, a line delicious in its ambiguity.
7/ Is the ‘our’ referring to S&G and their Montague equivalents, or just the senior members of their own house? Are S&G cross with their own ‘masters’? It doubles the feeling of ‘carry[ing] coals’.
8/ The biting of the thumb, then, becomes an act of autonomy: ‘I will’ is as confident as it is reckless’.
9/ That gesture — rather than an ‘airy word’ — is important because of what hands symbolise: Sampson is using his hands not for labour, but for action: action he has chosen, not action he has been ordered to perform at the ‘hands’ of a master.
10/ Next time, I think I'll have a look at hands in the sonnet scene. 🙏🏻
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
