What’s in a name? that which we call a rose…

The line comes from the balcony scene, Act II, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo, hidden in the Capulets’ orchard after the feast, hears Juliet at her window. She has just learned that the young man she loves is a Montague, son of her family’s enemy: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”, that is, why must you be Romeo? A name, she reasons, is no part of a man, “nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face”.

The rose follows: a name changes nothing of what a thing is. Romeo would keep his “dear perfection” without his name, and she begs him to “doff” it, offering “all myself” in exchange. Romeo steps out of the darkness: “I take thee at thy word.”

Shakespeare wrote the tragedy in the mid-1590s, adapting a poem by Arthur Brooke. In the first edition, of 1597, the rose smells as sweet “By any other name”; the 1599 edition and the Folio read “By any other word”. The first version is the one everyone remembers.

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene 2 (Juliet), 1597

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work