Abstract
The ring that Juliet sends to Romeo in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595) is a small object that literary criticism has largely overlooked. This single ring, however, is an actant in the Latourean sense: its presence makes a difference. Drawing upon Michel Serres’ notions of polychronicity and multitemporality, this essay first examines the temporalities of Juliet’s ring in the cultural contexts of early modern marriage ceremonies and then memento mori tokens before contending that the ring’s evocations of the divergent temporalities of comedy and tragedy contribute to the play’s famed generic hodgepodge. The genre of a play (or “enacted genre”) cannot be determined by plot and narrative alone, for enacted genre is comprised of the network of the various material actants that constitute theatrical performance, stage props (no matter how small) included. [J.S.]
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