To leave the conventions of Verona and enter the conventions of love entails many sorts of confusions, reversals, and definitions. Language itself must be reinvented: instead of a language suitable for condemning or challenging, the lovers need a language suitable for kissing. Arthur Brooke made this clear in a charming couplet—perhaps the only charming couplet—in Romeus and Juliet: “A thousand times she kissed, and him unkissed again, / Ne could she speak a word to him, though would she ne’er so fain” (ll. 843–44). But Shakespeare couldn’t think of presenting on stage a wedding night that consisted of a mute pantomime of two boys kissing; instead, he had to find a manner of speech that was the verbal equivalent of a pantomime of kissing—a protracted instantaneity of passion. (This deflection of a physical act into words is the same sort of problem that opera composers were later to face: the deflection of a physical act into music.) Normal language pertains to the world of clock time and yardstick space, but the love code enforces unmeasurabilities and immoderations. Love “is too like the lightning” (2.2.118), as Juliet puts it, to be comfortable in the world of normal speech—it is momentaneous, undiscursive, irrational. Of course Romeo and Juliet must die: they could not sustain such a vertigo of passion, such world-undoing spasms of metaphor, over the course of a month, let alone a lifetime. As Friar Lawrence notes,

Love that proclaims itself “infinite as the sea” (2.2.135) must be infinitesimal in duration: it is all poetry, having nothing to do with the prose of homemaking, taking out the garbage, or arguing about the dog that had an accident on the carpet.

A chief manifestation of love's assault on language is the instability of names: