Self-Interpreting Texts

Marjorie Garber argues that our view of Romeo and Juliet has been altered by contemporary trends and events.   Romeo has become the standard American high school Shakespeare play, and some of its themes and sensibility were taken up by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a result, the play ends up being part of the framework for our interpretation of the play: Romeo affected our conceptions of love, especially young love, and our conceptions of generational differences, and we now read the play in the light of those conceptions.

Do all influential texts become self-interpreting in this fashion?