Making Room, Affording Hospitality: Environments of Entertainment in Romeo and Juliet

This essay uses the concept of affordances, borrowed from design theory and environmental psychology, in order to map the use of space in act 1, scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet. Hospitality provides a socio-symbolic script for objects and persons in action that crosses theatrical and domestic spaces. Design ultimately concerns the passage between the arts of place-making and acts of thinking in Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry.