Lamenting her love for the 'wrong' man, Juliet muses, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet". She asserts that Romeo's 'essence', his goodness, desirability and character, transcends his name. An Elizabethan botanist in the audience at the Globe theatre might have agreed, not because he (and he surely would have been a man) believed names were of no consequence, but because he too would have relied on defining the essence of things.
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