Emily Collins, in her Splendid Isolation in the Lost Domaine, has done us the honour of sharing her course materials on Romeo & Juliet. These are fragmentary and incomplete, as are all things.
She mentions this, in particular:
“Remember, Shakespeare did not say: “A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet”; Juliet did. She is fourteen years old, and has just met the love of her life. For her, his name is not his essence. We know different. Nomen ist omen. If the Rose were not called a Rose, we would smell it differently. If I were to offer you a blooming Stinkflower, you would not smell the same thing. If I were to offer you the perfume of an as-yet unnamed and undiscovered Flower of the Desert or the Mountain, you would not smell a Rose. For a Rose is not a Rose (pace Gertrude Stein). A Rose is a Sign, a Symbol, and a Universe Entire. Who picks a Rose, who smells a Rose, who offers a Rose; she plucks a Page from the Hidden Library, and she invokes a World of Woven Dances.
The Name of the Rose. Sub Rosa. The Secret Rose. The Rosey-Cross. The Rosamunde. La Rose des vents. The Compass Rose. Ring a ring a’ Roses. Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may. The Rotten Rose was rippt from the Wall.
Snow White and Rose Red. Briar Rose and Aurora.
Rambling Rose. Gypsy Rose Lee. The Great Dragon Rose from the Sea.I shall a-rose and go now … Everything that Roses must Converge.
Bread and Roses.
Wine and Roses.
The Trellis where the Vine and the Rose are Allied.
The White Rose and the Red. The War of the Roses. The White Dragon and the Red.
The Sun Rose, having No Alternative, on the Nothing, and the New.
– Malachas Ivernus, “The Omninomicon: The Book of All Names, and the Onomastics of Fate”
Emily Collins
Romantic Pantheist Ecocritic Faery Doctor Masochist
PhD Candidate at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes
